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+Project Gutenberg's Confessions and Criticisms, by Julian Hawthorne
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+Title: Confessions and Criticisms
+
+Author: Julian Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7431]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 29, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONFESSIONS AND CRITICISMS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, John R. Bilderback
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS AND CRITICISMS
+
+BY
+JULIAN HAWTHORNE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+CHAPTER
+
+   I. A PRELIMINARY CONFESSION
+  II. NOVELS AND AGNOSTICISM
+ III. AMERICANISM IN FICTION
+  IV. LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN
+   V. THE MORAL AIM IN FICTION
+  VI. THE MAKER OF MANY BOOKS
+ VII. MR. MALLOCK'S MISSING SCIENCE
+VIII. THEODORE WINTHROP'S WRITINGS
+  IX. EMERSON AS AN AMERICAN
+   X. MODERN MAGIC
+  XI. AMERICAN WILD ANIMALS IN ART
+
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS AND CRITICISMS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+A PRELIMINARY CONFESSION.
+
+
+In 1869, when I was about twenty-three years old, I sent a couple of
+sonnets to the revived _Putnam's Magazine_. At that period I had no
+intention of becoming a professional writer: I was studying civil
+engineering at the Polytechnic School in Dresden, Saxony. Years before, I
+had received parental warnings--unnecessary, as I thought--against writing
+for a living. During the next two years, however, when I was acting as
+hydrographic engineer in the New York Dock Department, I amused myself by
+writing a short story, called "Love and Counter-Love," which was published
+in _Harper's Weekly_, and for which I was paid fifty dollars. "If fifty
+dollars can be so easily earned," I thought, "why not go on adding to my
+income in this way from time to time?" I was aided and abetted in the idea
+by the late Robert Carter, editor of _Appletons' Journal_; and the latter
+periodical and _Harper's Magazine_ had the burden, and I the benefit, of
+the result. When, in 1872, I was abruptly relieved from my duties in the
+Dock Department, I had the alternative of either taking my family down to
+Central America to watch me dig a canal, or of attempting to live by my
+pen. I bought twelve reams of large letter-paper, and began my first
+work,--"Bressant." I finished it in three weeks; but prudent counsellors
+advised me that it was too immoral to publish, except in French: so I
+recast it, as the phrase is, and, in its chastened state, sent it through
+the post to a Boston publisher. It was lost on the way, and has not yet
+been found. I was rather pleased than otherwise at this catastrophe; for I
+had in those days a strange delight in rewriting my productions: it was,
+perhaps, a more sensible practice than to print them. Accordingly, I
+rewrote and enlarged "Bressant" in Dresden (whither I returned with my
+family in 1872); but--immorality aside--I think the first version was the
+best of the three. On my way to Germany I passed through London, and there
+made the acquaintance of Henry S. King, the publisher, a charming but
+imprudent man, for he paid me one hundred pounds for the English copyright
+of my novel: and the moderate edition he printed is, I believe, still
+unexhausted. The book was received in a kindly manner by the press; but
+both in this country and in England some surprise and indignation were
+expressed that the son of his father should presume to be a novelist. This
+sentiment, whatever its bearing upon me, has undoubtedly been of service
+to my critics: it gives them something to write about. A disquisition upon
+the mantle of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and an analysis of the differences and
+similarities between him and his successor, generally fill so much of a
+notice as to enable the reviewer to dismiss the book itself very briefly.
+I often used to wish, when, years afterwards, I was myself a reviewer for
+the London _Spectator_, that I could light upon some son of his father who
+might similarly lighten my labors. Meanwhile, I was agreeably astonished
+at what I chose to consider the success of "Bressant," and set to work to
+surpass it in another romance, called (for some reason I have forgotten)
+"Idolatry." This unknown book was actually rewritten, in whole or in part,
+no less than seven times. _Non sum qualis eram_. For seven or eight years
+past I have seldom rewritten one of the many pages which circumstances
+have compelled me to inflict upon the world. But the discipline of
+"Idolatry" probably taught me how to clothe an idea in words.
+
+By the time "Idolatry" was published, the year 1874 had come, and I was
+living in London. From my note-books and recollections I compiled a series
+of papers on life in Dresden, under the general title of "Saxon Studies."
+Alexander Strahan, then editor of the _Contemporary Review_, printed them
+in that periodical as fast as I wrote them, and they were reproduced in
+certain eclectic magazines in this country,--until I asserted my American
+copyright. Their publication in book form was followed by the collapse of
+both the English and the American firm engaging in that enterprise. I draw
+no deductions from that fact: I simply state it. The circulation of the
+"Studies" was naturally small; but one copy fell into the hands of a
+Dresden critic, and the manner in which he wrote of it and its author
+repaid me for the labor of composition and satisfied me that I had not
+done amiss.
+
+After "Saxon Studies" I began another novel, "Garth," instalments of which
+appeared from month to month in _Harper's Magazine_. When it had run for a
+year or more, with no signs of abatement, the publishers felt obliged to
+intimate that unless I put an end to their misery they would. Accordingly,
+I promptly gave Garth his quietus. The truth is, I was tired of him
+myself. With all his qualities and virtues, he could not help being a
+prig. He found some friends, however, and still shows signs of vitality. I
+wrote no other novel for nearly two years, but contributed some sketches
+of English life to _Appletons' Journal_, and produced a couple of
+novelettes,--"Mrs. Gainsborough's Diamonds" and "Archibald Malmaison,"--
+which, by reason of their light draught, went rather farther than usual.
+Other short tales, which I hardly care to recall, belong to this period. I
+had already ceased to take pleasure in writing for its own sake,--partly,
+no doubt, because I was obliged to write for the sake of something else.
+Only those who have no reverence for literature should venture to meddle
+with the making of it,--unless, at all events, they can supply the demands
+of the butcher and baker from an independent source.
+
+In 1879, "Sebastian Strome" was published as a serial in _All the Year
+Round_. Charley Dickens, the son of the great novelist, and editor of the
+magazine, used to say to me while the story was in progress, "Keep that
+red-haired girl up to the mark, and the story will do." I took a fancy to
+Mary Dene myself. But I uniformly prefer my heroines to my heroes; perhaps
+because I invent the former out of whole cloth, whereas the latter are
+often formed of shreds and patches of men I have met. And I never raised a
+character to the position of hero without recognizing in him, before I had
+done with him, an egregious ass. Differ as they may in other respects,
+they are all brethren in that; and yet I am by no means disposed to take a
+Carlylese view of my actual fellow-creatures.
+
+I did some hard work at this time: I remember once writing for twenty-six
+consecutive hours without pausing or rising from my chair; and when,
+lately, I re-read the story then produced, it seemed quite as good as the
+average of my work in that kind. I hasten to add that it has never been
+printed in this country: for that matter, not more than half my short
+tales have found an American publisher. "Archibald Malmaison" was offered
+seven years ago to all the leading publishers in New York and Boston, and
+was promptly refused by all. Since its recent appearance here, however, it
+has had a circulation larger perhaps than that of all my other stories
+combined. But that is one of the accidents that neither author nor
+publisher can foresee. It was the horror of "Archibald Malmaison," not any
+literary merit, that gave it vogue,--its horror, its strangeness, and its
+brevity.
+
+On Guy Fawkes's day, 1880, I began "Fortune's Fool,"--or "Luck," as it was
+first called,--and wrote the first ten of the twelve numbers in three
+months. I used to sit down to my table at eight o'clock in the evening and
+write till sunrise. But the two remaining instalments were not written and
+published until 1883, and this delay and its circumstances spoiled the
+book. In the interval between beginning and finishing it another long
+novel--"Dust"--was written and published. I returned to America in 1882,
+after an absence in Europe far longer than I had anticipated or desired. I
+trust I may never leave my native land again for any other on this planet.
+
+"Beatrix Randolph," "Noble Blood," and "Love--or a Name," are the novels
+which I have written since my return; and I also published a biography,
+"Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife." I cannot conscientiously say that I
+have found the literary profession--in and for itself--entirely agreeable.
+Almost everything that I have written has been written from necessity; and
+there is very little of it that I shall not be glad to see forgotten. The
+true rewards of literature, for men of limited calibre, are the incidental
+ones,--the valuable friendships and the charming associations which it
+brings about. For the sake of these I would willingly endure again many
+passages of a life that has not been all roses; not that I would appear to
+belittle my own work: it does not need it. But the present generation (in
+America at least) does not strike me as containing much literary genius.
+The number of undersized persons is large and active, and we hardly
+believe in the possibility of heroic stature. I cannot sufficiently admire
+the pains we are at to make our work--embodying the aims it does--
+immaculate in form. Form without idea is nothing, and we have no ideas. If
+one of us were to get an idea, it would create its own form, as easily as
+does a flower or a planet. I think we take ourselves too seriously: our
+posterity will not be nearly so grave over us. For my part, I do not write
+better than I do, because I have no ideas worth better clothes than they
+can pick up for themselves. "Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing
+with your best pains," is a saying which has injured our literature more
+than any other single thing. How many a lumber-closet since the world
+began has been filled by the results of this purblind and delusive theory!
+But this is not autobiographical,--save that to have written it shows how
+little prudence my life has taught me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember wondering, in 1871, how anybody could write novels. I had
+produced two or three short stories; but to expand such a thing until it
+should cover two or three hundred pages seemed an enterprise far beyond my
+capacity. Since then, I have accomplished the feat only too often; but I
+doubt whether I have a much clearer idea than before of the way it is
+done; and I am certain of never having done it twice in the same way. The
+manner in which the plant arrives at maturity varies according to the
+circumstances in which the seed is planted and cultivated; and the
+cultivator, in this instance at least, is content to adapt his action to
+whatever conditions happen to exist.
+
+While, therefore, it might be easy to formulate a cut-and-dried method of
+procedure, which should be calculated to produce the best results by the
+most efficient means, no such formula would truly represent the present
+writer's actual practice. If I ever attempted to map out my successive
+steps beforehand, I never adhered to the forecast or reached the
+anticipated goal. The characters develop unexpected traits, and these
+traits become the parents of incidents that had not been contemplated. The
+characters themselves, on the other hand, cannot be kept to any
+preconceived characteristics; they are, in their turn, modified by the
+exigencies of the plot.
+
+In two or three cases I have tried to make portraits of real persons whom
+I have known; but these persons have always been more lifeless than the
+others, and most lifeless in precisely those features that most nearly
+reproduced life. The best results in this direction are realized by those
+characters that come to their birth simultaneously with the general scheme
+of the proposed events; though I remember that one of the most lifelike of
+my personages (Madge, in the novel "Garth") was not even thought of until
+the story of which she is the heroine had been for some time under
+consideration.
+
+Speaking generally, I should suppose that the best novels are apt to be
+those that have been longest in the novelist's mind before being committed
+to paper; and the best materials to use, in the way of character and
+scenery, are those that were studied not less than seven or eight years
+previous to their reproduction. Thereby is attained that quality in a
+story known as atmosphere or tone, perhaps the most valuable and telling
+quality of all. Occasionally, however, in the rare case of a story that
+suddenly seizes upon the writer's imagination and despotically "possesses"
+him, the atmosphere is created by the very strength of the "possession."
+In the former instance, the writer is thoroughly master of his subject; in
+the latter, the subject thoroughly masters him; and both amount
+essentially to the same thing, harmony between subject and writer.
+
+With respect to style, there is little to be said. Without a good style,
+no writer can do much; but it is impossible really to create a good style.
+A writer's style was born at the same time and under the same conditions
+that he himself was. The only rule that can be given him is, to say what
+he has to say in the clearest and most direct way, using the most fitting
+and expressive words. But often, of course, this advice is like that of
+the doctor who counsels his patient to free his mind from all care and
+worry, to live luxuriously on the fat of the land, and to make a voyage
+round the world in a private yacht. The patient has not the means of
+following the prescription. A writer may improve a native talent for
+style; but the talent itself he must either have by nature, or forever go
+without. And the style that rises to the height of genius is like the
+Phoenix; there is hardly ever more than one example of it in an age.
+
+Upon the whole, I conceive that the best way of telling how a novel may be
+written will be to trace the steps by which some one novel of mine came
+into existence, and let the reader draw his own conclusions from the
+record. For this purpose I will select one of the longest of my
+productions, "Fortune's Fool."
+
+It is so long that, rather than be compelled to read it over again, I
+would write another of equal length; though I hasten to add that neither
+contingency is in the least probable. In very few men is found the power
+of sustained conception necessary to the successful composition of so
+prolix a tale; and certainly I have never betrayed the ownership of such a
+qualification. The tale, nevertheless, is an irrevocable fact; and my
+present business it is to be its biographer.
+
+When, in the winter of 1879, the opportunity came to write it, the central
+idea of it had been for over a year cooking in my mind. It was originally
+derived from a dream. I saw a man who, upon some occasion, caught a
+glimpse of a woman's face. This face was, in his memory, the ideal of
+beauty, purity, and goodness. Through many years and vicissitudes he
+sought it; it was his religion, a human incarnation of divine qualities.
+
+At certain momentous epochs of his career, he had glimpses of it again;
+and the effect was always to turn him away from the wrong path and into
+the right. At last, near the end of his life, he has, for the first time,
+an opportunity of speaking to this mortal angel and knowing her; and then
+he discovers that she is mortal indeed, and chargeable with the worst
+frailties of mortality. The moral was that any substitute for a purely
+spiritual religion is fatal, and, sooner or later, reveals its rottenness.
+
+This seemed good enough for a beginning; but, when I woke up, I was not
+long in perceiving that it would require various modifications before
+being suitable for a novel; and the first modifications must be in the way
+of rendering the plot plausible. What sort of a man, for example, must the
+hero be to fall into and remain in such an error regarding the character
+of the heroine? He must, I concluded, be a person of great simplicity and
+honesty of character, with a strong tinge of ideality and imagination, and
+with little or no education.
+
+These considerations indicated a person destitute of known parentage, and
+growing up more or less apart from civilization, but possessing by nature
+an artistic or poetic temperament. Fore-glimpses of the further
+development of the story led me to make him the child of a wealthy English
+nobleman, but born in a remote New England village. His artistic
+proclivities must be inherited from his father, who was, therefore,
+endowed with a talent for amateur sketching in oils; which talent, again,
+led him, during his minority, to travel on the continent for purposes of
+artistic study. While in Paris, this man, Floyd Vivian, meets a young
+Frenchwoman, whom he secretly marries, and with whom he elopes to America.
+Then Vivian receives news of his father's death, compelling him to return
+to England; and he leaves his wife behind him.
+
+A child (Jack, the hero of the story) is born during his absence, and the
+mother dies. Vivian, now Lord Castleman, finds reason to believe that his
+wife is dead, but knows nothing of the boy; and he marries again. The boy,
+therefore, is left to grow up in the Maine woods, ignorant of his
+parentage, but with one or two chances of finding it out hereafter. So
+far, so good.
+
+But now it was necessary to invent a heroine for this hero. In order to
+make the construction compact, I made her Jack's cousin, the daughter, of
+Lord Vivian's younger brother, who came into being for that purpose. This
+brother (Murdock) was a black sheep; and his daughter, Madeleine, was
+adopted by Lord Vivian, because I now perceived that Lord Vivian's
+conscience was going to trouble him with regard to his dead wife and her
+possible child, and that he would make a pilgrimage to New England to
+settle his doubts, taking Madeleine with him; intending, if no child by
+the first marriage were forthcoming, to make Madeleine his heir; for he
+had no issue by his second marriage. This journey would enable Jack and
+Madeleine to meet as children. But it was necessary that they should have
+no suspicion of their cousinship. Consequently, Lord Vivian, who alone
+could acquaint them with this fact, must die in the very act of learning
+it himself. And what should be the manner of his death?
+
+At first, I thought he should be murdered by his younger brother; but I
+afterwards hit upon another plan, that seemed less hackneyed and provided
+more interesting issues. Murdock should arrive at the Maine village at the
+same time as Lord Vivian, and upon the same errand, to get hold of Lord
+Vivian's son, of whose existence he had heard, and whom he wished to get
+out of the way, in order that his own daughter, Madeleine, might inherit
+the property. Murdock should find Jack, and Jack, a mere boy, should kill
+him, though not, of course, intentionally, or even consciously (for which
+purpose the machinery of the Witch's Head was introduced).
+
+With Murdock's death, the papers that he carried, proving Jack's
+parentage, should disappear, to be recovered long afterward, when they
+were needed. Lord Vivian should quietly expire at the same time, of heart
+disease (to which he was forthwith made subject), and Madeleine should be
+left temporarily to her own devices. Thus was brought about her meeting
+with Jack in the cave. It was their first meeting; and Jack must remember
+her face, so as to recognize her when they meet, years later, in England.
+But, as it was beyond belief that the girl's face should resemble the
+woman's enough to make such a recognition possible, I devised the
+miniature portrait of her mother, which Madeleine gave to Jack for a
+keepsake, and which was the image of what Madeleine herself should
+afterward become.
+
+Something more was needed, however, to complete the situation; and to meet
+this exigency, I created M. Jacques Malgre, the grandfather of Jack, who
+had followed his daughter to America, in the belief that she had been
+seduced by Vivian; who had brought up Jack, hating him for his father's
+sake, and loving him for his mother's sake; and who dwelt year after year
+in the Maine village, hoping some day to wreak his vengeance upon the
+seducer. But when M. Malgre and Vivian at last meet, this revenge is
+balked by the removal of its supposed motive; Vivian having actually
+married Malgre's daughter, and being prepared to make Jack heir of
+Castlemere. Moral: "'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, 'I will repay.'"
+
+The groundwork of the story was now sufficiently denned. Madeleine and
+Jack were born and accounted for. They had met and made friends with each
+other without either knowing who the other was; they were rival claimants
+for the same property, and would hereafter contend for it; still, without
+identifying each other as the little boy and girl that had met by chance
+in the cave so long ago. In the meanwhile, there might be personal
+meetings, in which they should recognize each other as persons though not
+by name; and should thus be cementing their friendship as man and woman,
+while, as Jack Vivian and Madeleine, they were at open war in the courts
+of law.
+
+This arrangement would need careful handling to render it plausible; but
+it could be done. I am now of opinion, however, that I should have done
+well to have given up the whole fundamental idea of the story, as
+suggested by the dream. The dream had done its office when it had provided
+me with characters and materials for a more probable and less abstruse and
+difficult plot. All further dependence upon it should then have been
+relinquished, and the story allowed to work out its own natural and
+unforced conclusion. But it is easy to be wise after the event; and the
+event, at this time, was still in the future.
+
+As Madeleine was to be the opposite of the sinless, ideal woman that Jack
+was to imagine her to be, it was necessary to subject her to some evil
+influence; and this influence was embodied in the form of Bryan Sinclair,
+who, though an afterthought, came to be the most powerful figure in the
+story. But, before he would bring himself to bear upon her, she must have
+reached womanhood; and I also perceived that Jack must become a man before
+the action of the story, as between him and Madeleine, could continue. An
+interval of ten or fifteen years must therefore occur; and this was
+arranged by sending Jack into the western wilderness of California, and
+fixing the period as just preceding the date of the California gold fever
+of '49.
+
+Jack and Bryan were to be rivals for Madeleine; but artistic
+considerations seemed to require that they should first meet and become
+friends much in the same way that Jack and Madeleine had done. So I sent
+Bryan to California, and made him the original discoverer of the precious
+metal there; brought him and Jack together; and finally sent them to
+England in each other's company. Jack, of course, as yet knows nothing of
+his origin, and appears in London society merely as a natural genius and a
+sculptor of wild animals.
+
+By this time, I had begun to make Madeleine's acquaintance, and, in
+consequence, to doubt the possibility of her becoming wholly evil, even
+under the influence of Bryan Sinclair. There would be a constant struggle
+between them; she would love him, but would not yield to him, though her
+life and happiness would be compromised by his means. He, on the other
+hand, would love her, and he would make some effort to be worthy of her;
+but his other crimes would weigh him down, until, at the moment when the
+battle cost her her life, he should be destroyed by the incarnation of his
+own wickedness, in the shape of Tom Berne.
+
+This was not the issue that I had originally designed, and, whether better
+or worse than that, did not harmonize with what had gone before. The story
+lacked wholeness and continuous vitality. As a work of art, it was a
+failure. But I did not realize this fact until it was too late, and
+probably should not have known how to mend matters had it been otherwise.
+One of the dangers against which a writer has especially to guard is that
+of losing his sense of proportion in the conduct of a story. An episode
+that has little relative importance may be allowed undue weight, because
+it seems interesting intrinsically, or because he has expended special
+pains upon it. It is only long afterward, when he has become cool and
+impartial, if not indifferent or disgusted, that he can see clearly where
+the faults of construction lie.
+
+I need not go further into the details of the story. Enough has been said
+to give a clew to what might remain to say. I began to write it in the
+winter of 1879-80, in London; and, in order to avoid noise and
+interruption, it was my custom to begin writing at eight in the evening,
+and continue at work until six or seven o'clock the next morning. In three
+months I had written as far as the 393d page, in the American edition. The
+remaining seventy pages were not completed, in their published form, until
+about three years later, an extraordinary delay, which did not escape
+censure at the time, and into the causes of which I will not enter here.
+
+The title of the story also underwent various vicissitudes. The one first
+chosen was "Happy Jack"; but that was objected to as suggesting, to an
+English ear at least, a species of cheap Jack or rambling peddler. The
+next title fixed upon was "Luck"; but before this could be copyrighted,
+somebody published a story called "Luck, and What Came of It," and thereby
+invalidated my briefer version. For several weeks, I was at a loss what to
+call it; but one evening, at a representation of "Romeo and Juliet," I
+heard the exclamation of _Romeo_, "Oh, I am fortune's fool!" and
+immediately appropriated it to my own needs. It suited the book well
+enough, in more ways than one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+NOVELS AND AGNOSTICISM.
+
+
+The novel of our times is susceptible of many definitions. The American
+publishers of Railway libraries think that it is forty or fifty double-
+column pages of pirated English fiction. Readers of the "New York Ledger"
+suppose it to be a romance of angelic virtue at last triumphant over
+satanic villany. The aristocracy of culture describe it as a philosophic
+analysis of human character and motives, with an agnostic bias on the
+analyst's part. Schoolboys are under the impression that it is a tale of
+Western chivalry and Indian outrage--price, ten cents. Most of us agree in
+the belief that it should contain a brace or two of lovers, a suspense,
+and a solution.
+
+To investigate the nature of the novel in the abstract would involve going
+back to the very origin of things. It would imply the recognition of a
+certain faculty of the mind, known as imagination; and of a certain fact
+in history, called art. Art and imagination are correlatives,--one implies
+the other. Together, they may be said to constitute the characteristic
+badge and vindication of human nature; imagination is the badge, and art
+is the vindication. Reason, which gets so much vulgar glorification, is,
+after all, a secondary quality. It is posterior to imagination,--it is one
+of the means by which imagination seeks to realize its ends. Some animals
+reason, or seem to do so: but the most cultivated ape or donkey has not
+yet composed a sonnet, or a symphony, or "an arrangement in green and
+yellow." Man still retains a few prerogatives, although, like Aesop's
+stag, which despised the legs that bore it away from the hounds, and
+extolled the antlers that entangled it in the thicket,--so man often
+magnifies those elements of his nature that least deserve it.
+
+But, before celebrating art and imagination, we should have a clear idea
+what those handsome terms mean. In the broadest sense, imagination is the
+cause of the effect we call progress. It marks all forms of human effort
+towards a better state of things. It embraces a perception of existing
+shortcomings, and an aspiration towards a loftier ideal. It is, in fact, a
+truly divine force in man, reminding him of his heavenly origin, and
+stimulating him to rise again to the level whence he fell. For it has
+glimpses of the divine Image within or behind the material veil; and its
+constant impulse is to tear aside the veil and grasp the image. The world,
+let us say, is a gross and finite translation of an infinite and perfect
+Word; and imagination is the intuition of that perfection, born in the
+human heart, and destined forever to draw mankind into closer harmony with
+it.
+
+In common speech, however, imagination is deprived of this broader
+significance, and is restricted to its relations with art. Art is not
+progress, though progress implies art. It differs from progress chiefly in
+disclaiming the practical element. You cannot apply a poem, a picture, or
+a strain of music, to material necessities; they are not food, clothing,
+or shelter. Only after these physical wants are assuaged, does art
+supervene. Its sphere is exclusively mental and moral. But this definition
+is not adequate; a further distinction is needed. For such things as
+mathematics, moral philosophy, and political economy also belong to the
+mental sphere, and yet they are not art. But these, though not actually
+existing on the plane of material necessities, yet do exist solely in
+order to relieve such necessities. Unlike beauty, they are not their own
+excuse for being. Their embodiment is utilitarian, that of art is
+aesthetic. Political economy, for example, shows me how to buy two drinks
+for the same price I used to pay for one; while art inspires me to
+transmute a pewter mug into a Cellini goblet. My physical nature, perhaps,
+prefers two drinks to one; but, if my taste be educated, and I be not too
+thirsty, I would rather drink once from the Cellini goblet than twice from
+the mug. Political economy gravitates towards the material level; art
+seeks incarnation only in order to stimulate anew the same spiritual
+faculties that generated it. Art is the production, by means of
+appearances, of the illusion of a loftier reality; and imagination is the
+faculty which holds that loftier reality up for imitation.
+
+The disposition of these preliminaries brings us once more in sight of the
+goal of our pilgrimage. The novel, despite its name, is no new thing, but
+an old friend in a modern dress. Ever since the time of Cadmus,--ever
+since language began to express thought as well as emotion,--men have
+betrayed the impulse to utter in forms of literary art,--in poetry and
+story,--their conceptions of the world around them. According to many
+philologists, poetry was the original form of human speech. Be that as it
+may, whatever flows into the mind, from the spectacle of nature and of
+mankind, that influx the mind tends instinctively to reproduce, in a shape
+accordant with its peculiar bias and genius. And those minds in which
+imagination is predominant, impart to their reproductions a balance and
+beauty which stamp them as art. Art--and literary art especially--is the
+only evidence we have that this universal frame of things has relation to
+our minds, and is a universe and not a poliverse. Outside revelation, it
+is our best assurance of an intelligent purpose in creation.
+
+Novels, then, instead of being (as some persons have supposed) a wilful
+and corrupt conspiracy on the part of the evilly disposed, against the
+peace and prosperity of the realm, may claim a most ancient and
+indefeasible right to existence. They, with their ancestors and near
+relatives, constitute Literature,--without which the human race would be
+little better than savages. For the effect of pure literature upon a
+receptive mind is something more than can be definitely stated. Like
+sunshine upon a landscape, it is a kind of miracle. It demands from its
+disciple almost as much as it gives him, and is never revealed save to the
+disinterested and loving eye. In our best moments, it touches us most
+deeply; and when the sentiment of human brotherhood kindles most warmly
+within us, we discover in literature an exquisite answering ardor. When
+everything that can be, has been said about a true work of art, its finest
+charm remains,--the charm derived from a source beyond the conscious reach
+even of the artist.
+
+The novel, then, must be pure literature; as much so as the poem. But
+poetry--now that the day of the broad Homeric epic is past, or temporarily
+eclipsed--appeals to a taste too exclusive and abstracted for the demands
+of modern readers. Its most accommodating metre fails to house our endless
+variety of mood and movement; it exacts from the student an exaltation
+above the customary level of thought and sentiment greater than he can
+readily afford. The poet of old used to clothe in the garb of verse his
+every observation on life and nature; but to-day he reserves for it only
+his most ideal and abstract conceptions. The merit of Cervantes is not so
+much that he laughed Spain's chivalry away, as that he heralded the modern
+novel of character and manners. It is the latest, most pliable, most
+catholic solution of the old problem,--how to unfold man to himself. It
+improves on the old methods, while missing little of their excellence. No
+one can read a great novel without feeling that, from its outwardly
+prosaic pages, strains of genuine poetry have ever and anon reached his
+ears. It does not obtrude itself; it is not there for him who has not
+skill to listen for it: but for him who has ears, it is like the music of
+a bird, denning itself amidst the innumerable murmurs of the forest.
+
+So, the ideal novel, conforming in every part to the behests of the
+imagination, should produce, by means of literary art, the illusion of a
+loftier reality. This excludes the photographic method of novel-writing.
+"That is a false effort in art," says Goethe, towards the close of his
+long and splendid career, "which, in giving reality to the appearance,
+goes so far as to leave in it nothing but the common, every-day actual."
+It is neither the actual, nor Chinese copies of the actual, that we demand
+of art. Were art merely the purveyor of such things, she might yield her
+crown to the camera and the stenographer; and divine imagination would
+degenerate into vulgar inventiveness. Imagination is incompatible with
+inventiveness, or imitation. Imitation is death, imagination is life.
+Imitation is servitude, imagination is royalty. He who claims the name of
+artist must rise to that vision of a loftier reality--a more true because
+a more beautiful world--which only imagination can reveal. A truer world,
+--for the world of facts is not and cannot be true. It is barren,
+incoherent, misleading. But behind every fact there is a truth: and these
+truths are enlightening, unifying, creative. Fasten your hold upon them,
+and facts will become your servants instead of your tyrants. No charm of
+detail will be lost, no homely picturesque circumstance, no touch of human
+pathos or humor; but all hardness, rigidity, and finality will disappear,
+and your story will be not yours alone, but that of every one who feels
+and thinks. Spirit gives universality and meaning; but alas! for this new
+gospel of the auctioneer's catalogue, and the crackling of thorns under a
+pot. He who deals with facts only, deprives his work of gradation and
+distinction. One fact, considered in itself, has no less importance than
+any other; a lump of charcoal is as valuable as a diamond. But that is the
+philosophy of brute beasts and Digger Indians. A child, digging on the
+beach, may shape a heap of sand into a similitude of Vesuvius; but is it
+nothing that Vesuvius towers above the clouds, and overwhelms Pompeii?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In proceeding from the general to the particular,--to the novel as it
+actually exists in England and America,--attention will be confined
+strictly to the contemporary outlook. The new generation of novelists (by
+which is intended not those merely living in this age, but those who
+actively belong to it) differ in at least one fundamental respect from the
+later representatives of the generation preceding them. Thackeray and
+Dickens did not deliberately concern themselves about a philosophy of
+life. With more or less complacency, more or less cynicism, they accepted
+the religious and social canons which had grown to be the commonplace of
+the first half of this century. They pictured men and women, not as
+affected by questions, but as affected by one another. The morality and
+immorality of their personages were of the old familiar Church-of-England
+sort; there was no speculation as to whether what had been supposed to be
+wrong was really right, and _vice versa_. Such speculations, in various
+forms and degrees of energy, appear in the world periodically; but the
+public conscience during the last thirty or forty years had been gradually
+making itself comfortable after the disturbances consequent upon the
+French Revolution; the theoretical rights of man had been settled for the
+moment; and interest was directed no longer to the assertion and support
+of these rights, but to the social condition and character which were
+their outcome. Good people were those who climbed through reverses and
+sorrows towards the conventional heaven; bad people were those who, in
+spite of worldly and temporary successes and triumphs, gravitated towards
+the conventional hell. Novels designed on this basis in so far filled the
+bill, as the phrase is: their greater or less excellence depended solely
+on the veracity with which the aspect, the temperament, and the conduct of
+the _dramatis personae_ were reported, and upon the amount of ingenuity
+wherewith the web of events and circumstances was woven, and the
+conclusion reached. Nothing more was expected, and, in general, little or
+nothing more was attempted. Little more, certainly, will be found in the
+writings of Thackeray or of Balzac, who, it is commonly admitted, approach
+nearest to perfection of any novelists of their time. There was nothing
+genuine or commanding in the metaphysical dilettanteism of Bulwer: the
+philosophical speculations of Georges Sand are the least permanently
+interesting feature of her writings; and the same might in some measure be
+affirmed of George Eliot, whose gloomy wisdom finally confesses its
+inability to do more than advise us rather to bear those ills we have than
+fly to others that we know not of. As to Nathaniel Hawthorne, he cannot
+properly be instanced in this connection; for he analyzed chiefly those
+parts of human nature which remain substantially unaltered in the face of
+whatever changes of opinion, civilization, and religion. The truth that he
+brings to light is not the sensational fact of a fashion or a period, but
+a verity of the human heart, which may foretell, but can never be affected
+by, anything which that heart may conceive. In other words, Hawthorne
+belonged neither to this nor to any other generation of writers further
+than that his productions may be used as a test of the inner veracity of
+all the rest.
+
+But of late years a new order of things has been coming into vogue, and
+the new novelists have been among the first to reflect it; and of these
+the Americans have shown themselves among the most susceptible. Science,
+or the investigation of the phenomena of existence (in opposition to
+philosophy, the investigation of the phenomena of being), has proved
+nature to be so orderly and self-sufficient, and inquiry as to the origin
+of the primordial atom so unproductive and quixotic, as to make it
+convenient and indeed reasonable to accept nature as a self-existing fact,
+and to let all the rest--if rest there be--go. From this point of view,
+God and a future life retire into the background; not as finally
+disproved,--because denial, like affirmation, must, in order to be final,
+be logically supported; and spirit is, if not illogical, at any rate
+outside the domain of logic,--but as being a hopelessly vague and
+untrustworthy hypothesis. The Bible is a human book; Christ was a
+gentleman, related to the Buddha and Plato families; Joseph was an ill-
+used man; death, so far as we have any reason to believe, is annihilation
+of personal existence; life is--the predicament of the body previous to
+death; morality is the enlightened selfishness of the greatest number;
+civilization is the compromises men make with one another in order to get
+the most they can out of the world; wisdom is acknowledgment of these
+propositions; folly is to hanker after what may lie beyond the sphere of
+sense. The supporter of these doctrines by no means permits himself to be
+regarded as a rampant and dogmatic atheist; he is simply the modest and
+humble doubter of what he cannot prove. He even recognizes the persistence
+of the religious instinct in man, and caters to it by a new religion
+suited to the times--the Religion of Humanity. Thus he is secure at all
+points: for if the religion of the Bible turn out to be true, his
+disappointment will be an agreeable one; and if it turns out false, he
+will not be disappointed at all. He is an agnostic--a person bound to be
+complacent whatever happens. He may indulge a gentle regret, a musing
+sadness, a smiling pensiveness; but he will never refuse a comfortable
+dinner, and always wear something soft next his skin, nor can he
+altogether avoid the consciousness of his intellectual superiority.
+
+Agnosticism, which reaches forward into nihilism on one side, and extends
+back into liberal Christianity on the other, marks, at all events, a
+definite turning-point from what has been to what is to come. The human
+mind, in the course of its long journey, is passing through a dark place,
+and is, as it were, whistling to keep up its courage. It is a period of
+doubt: what it will result in remains to be seen; but analogy leads us to
+infer that this doubt, like all others, will be succeeded by a
+comparatively definite belief in something--no matter what. It is a
+transient state--the interval between one creed and another. The agnostic
+no longer holds to what is behind him, nor knows what lies before, so he
+contents himself with feeling the ground beneath his feet. That, at least,
+though the heavens fall, is likely to remain; meanwhile, let the heavens
+take care of themselves. It may be the part of valor to champion divine
+revelation, but the better part of valor is discretion, and if divine
+revelation prove true, discretion will be none the worse off. On the other
+hand, to champion a myth is to make one's self ridiculous, and of being
+ridiculous the agnostic has a consuming fear. From the superhuman
+disinterestedness of the theory of the Religion of Humanity, before which
+angels might quail, he flinches not, but when it comes to the risk of
+being laughed at by certain sagacious persons he confesses that bravery
+has its limits. He dares do all that may become an agnostic,--who dares do
+more is none.
+
+But, however open to criticism this phase of thought may be, it is a
+genuine phase, and the proof is the alarm and the shifts that it has
+brought about in the opposite camp. "Established" religion finds the
+foundation of her establishment undermined, and, like the lady in Hamlet's
+play, she doth protest too much. In another place, all manner of odd
+superstitions and quasi-miracles are cropping up and gaining credence, as
+if, since the immortality of the soul cannot be proved by logic, it should
+be smuggled into belief by fraud and violence--that is, by the testimony
+of the bodily senses themselves. Taking a comprehensive view of the whole
+field, therefore, it seems to be divided between discreet and supercilious
+skepticism on one side, and, on the other, the clamorous jugglery of
+charlatanism. The case is not really so bad as that: nihilists are not
+discreet and even the Bishop of Rome is not necessarily a charlatan.
+Nevertheless, the outlook may fairly be described as confused and the
+issue uncertain. And--to come without further preface to the subject of
+this paper--it is with this material that the modern novelist, so far as
+he is a modern and not a future novelist, or a novelist _temporis acti_,
+has to work. Unless a man have the gift to forecast the years, or, at
+least, to catch the first ray of the coming light, he can hardly do better
+than attend to what is under his nose. He may hesitate to identify himself
+with agnosticism, but he can scarcely avoid discussing it, either in
+itself or in its effects. He must entertain its problems; and the
+personages of his story, if they do not directly advocate or oppose
+agnostic views, must show in their lives either confirmation or disproof
+of agnostic principles. It is impossible, save at the cost of affectation
+or of ignorance, to escape from the spirit of the age. It is in the air we
+breathe, and, whether we are fully conscious thereof or not, our lives and
+thoughts must needs be tinctured by it.
+
+Now, art is creative; but Mephistopheles, the spirit that denies, is
+destructive. A negative attitude of mind is not favorable for the
+production of works of art. The best periods of art have also been periods
+of spiritual or philosophical convictions. The more a man doubts, the more
+he disintegrates and the less he constructs. He has in him no central
+initial certainty round which all other matters of knowledge or
+investigation may group themselves in symmetrical relation. He may analyze
+to his heart's content, but must be wary of organizing. If creation is not
+of God, if nature is not the expression of the contact between an infinite
+and a finite being, then the universe and everything in it are accidents,
+which might have been otherwise or might have not been at all; there is no
+design in them nor purpose, no divine and eternal significance. This being
+conceded, what meaning would there be in designing works of art? If art
+has not its prototype in creation, if all that we see and do is chance,
+uninspired by a controlling and forming intelligence behind or within it,
+then to construct a work of art would be to make something arbitrary and
+grotesque, something unreal and fugitive, something out of accord with the
+general sense (or nonsense) of things, something with no further basis or
+warrant than is supplied by the maker's idle and irresponsible fancy. But
+since no man cares to expend the trained energies of his mind upon the
+manufacture of toys, it will come to pass (upon the accidental hypothesis
+of creation) that artists will become shy of justifying their own title.
+They will adopt the scientific method of merely collecting and describing
+phenomena; but the phenomena will no longer be arranged as parts or
+developments of a central controlling idea, because such an arrangement
+would no longer seem to be founded on the truth: the gratification which
+it gives to the mind would be deemed illusory, the result of tradition and
+prejudice; or, in other words, what is true being found no longer
+consistent with what we have been accustomed to call beauty, the latter
+would cease to be an object of desire, though something widely alien to it
+might usurp its name. If beauty be devoid of independent right to be, and
+definable only as an attribute of truth, then undoubtedly the cynosure to-
+day may be the scarecrow of to-morrow, and _vice versa_, according to our
+varying conception of what truth is.
+
+And, as a matter of fact, art already shows the effects of the agnostic
+influence. Artists have begun to doubt whether their old conceptions of
+beauty be not fanciful and silly. They betray a tendency to eschew the
+loftier flights of the imagination, and confine themselves to what they
+call facts. Critics deprecate idealism as something fit only for children,
+and extol the courage of seeing and representing things as they are.
+Sculpture is either a stern student of modern trousers and coat-tails or a
+vapid imitator of classic prototypes. Painters try all manner of
+experiments, and shrink from painting beneath the surface of their canvas.
+Much of recent effort in the different branches of art comes to us in the
+form of "studies," but the complete work still delays to be born. We would
+not so much mind having our old idols and criterions done away with were
+something new and better, or as good, substituted for them. But apparently
+nothing definite has yet been decided on. Doubt still reigns, and, once
+more, doubt is not creative. One of two things must presently happen. The
+time will come when we must stop saying that we do not know whether or not
+God, and all that God implies, exists, and affirm definitely and finally
+either that he does not exist or that he does. That settled, we shall soon
+see what will become of art. If there is a God, he will be understood and
+worshipped, not superstitiously and literally as heretofore, but in a new
+and enlightened spirit; and an art will arise commensurate with this new
+and loftier revelation. If there is no God, it is difficult to see how art
+can have the face to show herself any more. There is no place for her in
+the Religion of Humanity; to be true and living she can be nothing which
+it has thus far entered into the heart of man to call beautiful; and she
+could only serve to remind us of certain vague longings and aspirations
+now proved to be as false as they were vain. Art is not an orchid: it
+cannot grow in the air. Unless its root can be traced as deep down as
+Yggdrasil, it will wither and vanish, and be forgotten as it ought to be;
+and as for the cowslip by the river's brim, a yellow cowslip it shall be,
+and nothing more; and the light that never was on sea or land shall be
+permanently extinguished, in the interests of common sense and economy,
+and (what is least inviting of all to the unregenerate mind) we shall
+speedily get rid of the notion that we have lost anything worth
+preserving.
+
+This, however, is only what may be, and our concern at present is with
+things as they are. It has been observed that American writers have shown
+themselves more susceptible of the new influences than most others, partly
+no doubt from a natural sensitiveness of organization, but in some measure
+also because there are with us no ruts and fetters of old tradition from
+which we must emancipate ourselves before adopting anything new. We have
+no past, in the European sense, and so are ready for whatever the present
+or the future may have to suggest. Nevertheless, the novelist who, in a
+larger degree than any other, seems to be the literary parent of our own
+best men of fiction, is himself not an American, nor even an Englishman,
+but a Russian--Turguenieff. His series of extraordinary novels, translated
+into English and French, is altogether the most important fact in the
+literature of fiction of the last twelve years. To read his books you
+would scarcely imagine that their author could have had any knowledge of
+the work of his predecessors in the same field. Originality is a term
+indiscriminately applied, and generally of trifling significance, but so
+far as any writer may be original, Turguenieff is so. He is no less
+original in the general scheme and treatment of his stories than in their
+details. Whatever he produces has the air of being the outcome of his
+personal experience and observation. He even describes his characters,
+their aspect, features, and ruling traits, in a novel and memorable
+manner. He seizes on them from a new point of vantage, and uses scarcely
+any of the hackneyed and conventional devices for bringing his portraits
+before our minds; yet no writer, not even Carlyle, has been more vivid,
+graphic, and illuminating than he. Here are eyes that owe nothing to other
+eyes, but examine and record for themselves. Having once taken up a
+character he never loses his grasp on it: on the contrary, he masters it
+more and more, and only lets go of it when the last recesses of its
+organism have been explored. In the quality and conduct of his plots he is
+equally unprecedented. His scenes are modern, and embody characteristic
+events and problems in the recent history of Russia. There is in their
+arrangement no attempt at symmetry, nor poetic justice. Temperament and
+circumstances are made to rule, and against their merciless fiat no appeal
+is allowed. Evil does evil to the end; weakness never gathers strength;
+even goodness never varies from its level: it suffers, but is not
+corrupted; it is the goodness of instinct, not of struggle and aspiration;
+it happens to belong to this or that person, just as his hair happens to
+be black or brown. Everything in the surroundings and the action is to the
+last degree matter-of-fact, commonplace, inevitable; there are no
+picturesque coincidences, no providential interferences, no desperate
+victories over fate; the tale, like the world of the materialist, moves
+onward from a predetermined beginning to a helpless and tragic close. And
+yet few books have been written of deeper and more permanent fascination
+than these. Their grim veracity; the creative sympathy and steady
+dispassionateness of their portrayal of mankind; their constancy of
+motive, and their sombre earnestness, have been surpassed by none. This
+earnestness is worth dwelling upon for a moment. It bears no likeness to
+the dogmatism of the bigot or the fanaticism of the enthusiast. It is the
+concentration of a broadly gifted masculine mind, devoting its unstinted
+energies to depicting certain aspects of society and civilization, which
+are powerfully representative of the tendencies of the day. "Here is the
+unvarnished fact--give heed to it!" is the unwritten motto. The author
+avoids betraying, either explicitly or implicitly, the tendency of his own
+sympathies; not because he fears to have them known, but because he holds
+it to be his office simply to portray, and to leave judgment thereupon
+where, in any case, it must ultimately rest--with the world of his
+readers. He tells us what is; it is for us to consider whether it also
+must be and shall be. Turguenieff is an artist by nature, yet his books
+are not intentionally works of art; they are fragments of history,
+differing from real life only in presenting such persons and events as are
+commandingly and exhaustively typical, and excluding all others. This
+faculty of selection is one of the highest artistic faculties, and it
+appears as much in the minor as in the major features of the narrative. It
+indicates that Turguenieff might, if he chose, produce a story as
+faultlessly symmetrical as was ever framed. Why, then, does he not so
+choose? The reason can only be that he deems the truth-seeming of his
+narrative would thereby be impaired. "He is only telling a story," the
+reader would say, "and he shapes the events and persons so as to fit the
+plot." But is this reason reasonable? To those who believe that God has no
+hand in the ordering of human affairs, it undoubtedly is reasonable. To
+those who believe the contrary, however, it appears as if the story of no
+human life or complex of lives could be otherwise than a rounded and
+perfect work of art--provided only that the spectator takes note, not
+merely of the superficial accidents and appearances, but also of the
+underlying divine purpose and significance. The absence of this
+recognition in Turguenieff's novels is the explanation of them: holding
+the creed their author does, he could not have written them otherwise;
+and, on the other hand, had his creed been different, he very likely would
+not have written novels at all.
+
+The pioneer, in whatever field of thought or activity, is apt to be also
+the most distinguished figure therein. The consciousness of being the
+first augments the keenness of his impressions, and a mind that can see
+and report in advance of others a new order of things may claim a finer
+organization than the ordinary. The vitality of nature animates him who
+has insight to discern her at first hand, whereas his followers miss the
+freshness of the morning, because, instead of discovering, they must be
+content to illustrate and refine. Those of our writers who betray
+Turguenieff's influence are possibly his superiors in finish and culture,
+but their faculty of convincing and presenting is less. Their interest in
+their own work seems less serious than his; they may entertain us more,
+but they do not move and magnetize so much. The persons and events of
+their stories are conscientiously studied, and are nothing if not natural;
+but they lack distinction. In an epitome of life so concise as the longest
+novel must needs be, to use any but types is waste of time and space. A
+typical character is one who combines the traits or beliefs of a certain
+class to which he is affiliated--who is, practically, all of them and
+himself besides; and, when we know him, there is nothing left worth
+knowing about the others. In Shakespeare's Hamlet and Enobarbus, in
+Fielding's Squire Western, in Walter Scott's Edie Ochiltree and Meg
+Merrilies, in Balzac's Pere Goriot and Madame Marneff, in Thackeray's
+Colonel Newcome and Becky Sharp, in Turguenieff's Bazarof and Dimitri
+Roudine, we meet persons who exhaust for us the groups to which they
+severally belong. Bazarof, the nihilist, for instance, reveals to us the
+motives and influences that have made nihilism, so that we feel that
+nothing essential on that score remains to be learnt.
+
+The ability to recognize and select types is a test of a novelist's talent
+and experience. It implies energy to rise above the blind walls of one's
+private circle of acquaintance; the power to perceive what phases of
+thought and existence are to be represented as well as who represents
+them; the sagacity to analyze the age or the moment and reproduce its
+dominant features. The feat is difficult, and, when done, by no means
+blows its own trumpet. On the contrary, the reader must open his eyes to
+be aware of it. He finds the story clear and easy of comprehension; the
+characters come home to him familiarly and remain distinctly in his
+memory; he understands something which was, till now, vague to him: but he
+is as likely to ascribe this to an exceptional lucidity in his own mental
+condition as to any special merit in the author. Indeed, it often happens
+that the author who puts out-of-the-way personages into his stories--
+characters that represent nothing but themselves, or possibly some
+eccentricity of invention on their author's part, will gain the latter a
+reputation for cleverness higher than his fellow's who portrays mankind in
+its masses as well as in its details. But the finest imagination is not
+that which evolves strange images, but that which explains seeming
+contradictions, and reveals the unity within the difference and the
+harmony beneath the discord.
+
+Were we to compare our fictitious literature, as a whole, with that of
+England, the balance must be immeasurably on the English side. Even
+confining ourselves to to-day, and to the prospect of to-morrow, it must
+be conceded that, in settled method, in guiding tradition, in training and
+associations both personal and inherited, the average English novelist is
+better circumstanced than the American. Nevertheless, the English novelist
+is not at present writing better novels than the American. The reason
+seems to be that he uses no material which has not been in use for
+hundreds of years; and to say that such material begins to lose its
+freshness is not putting the case too strongly. He has not been able to
+detach himself from the paralyzing background of English conventionality.
+The vein was rich, but it is worn out; and the half-dozen pioneers had all
+the luck.
+
+There is no commanding individual imagination in England--nor, to say the
+truth, does there seem to be any in America. But we have what they have
+not--a national imaginative tendency. There are no fetters upon our fancy;
+and, however deeply our real estate may be mortgaged, there is freedom for
+our ideas. England has not yet appreciated the true inwardness of a
+favorite phrase of ours,--a new deal. And yet she is tired to death of her
+own stale stories; and when, by chance, any one of her writers happens to
+chirp out a note a shade different from the prevailing key, the whole
+nation pounces down upon him, with a shriek of half-incredulous joy, and
+buys him up, at the rate of a million copies a year. Our own best writers
+are more read in England, or, at any rate, more talked about, than their
+native crop; not so much, perhaps, because they are different as because
+their difference is felt to be of a significant and typical kind. It has
+in it a gleam of the new day. They are realistic; but realism, so far as
+it involves a faithful study of nature, is useful. The illusion of a
+loftier reality, at which we should aim, must be evolved from adequate
+knowledge of reality itself. The spontaneous and assured faith, which is
+the mainspring of sane imagination, must be preceded by the doubt and
+rejection of what is lifeless and insincere. We desire no resurrection of
+the Ann Radclyffe type of romance: but the true alternative to this is not
+such a mixture of the police gazette and the medical reporter as Emile
+Zola offers us. So far as Zola is conscientious, let him live; but, in so
+far as he is revolting, let him die. Many things in the world seem ugly
+and purposeless; but to a deeper intelligence than ours, they are a part
+of beauty and design. What is ugly and irrelevant, can never enter, as
+such, into a work of art; because the artist is bound, by a sacred
+obligation, to show us the complete curve only,--never the undeveloped
+fragments.
+
+But were the firmament of England still illuminated with her Dickenses,
+her Thackerays, and her Brontes, I should still hold our state to be
+fuller of promise than hers. It may be admitted that almost everything was
+against our producing anything good in literature. Our men, in the first
+place, had to write for nothing; because the publisher, who can steal a
+readable English novel, will not pay for an American novel, for the mere
+patriotic gratification of enabling its American author to write it. In
+the second place, they had nothing to write about, for the national life
+was too crude and heterogeneous for ordinary artistic purposes. Thirdly,
+they had no one to write for: because, although, in one sense, there might
+be readers enough, in a higher sense there were scarcely any,--that is to
+say, there was no organized critical body of literary opinion, from which
+an author could confidently look to receive his just meed of encouragement
+and praise. Yet, in spite of all this, and not to mention honored names
+that have ceased or are ceasing to cast their living weight into the
+scale, we are contributing much that is fresh and original, and something,
+it may be, that is of permanent value, to literature. We have accepted the
+situation; and, since no straw has been vouchsafed us to make our bricks
+with, we are trying manfully to make them without.
+
+It will not be necessary, however, to call the roll of all the able and
+popular gentlemen who are contending in the forlorn hope against
+disheartening odds; and as for the ladies who have honored our literature
+by their contributions, it will perhaps be well to adopt regarding them a
+course analogous to that which Napoleon is said to have pursued with the
+letters sent to him while in Italy. He left them unread until a certain
+time had elapsed, and then found that most of them no longer needed
+attention. We are thus brought face to face with the two men with whom
+every critic of American novelists has to reckon; who represent what is
+carefullest and newest in American fiction; and it remains to inquire how
+far their work has been moulded by the skeptical or radical spirit of
+which Turguenieff is the chief exemplar.
+
+The author of "Daisy Miller" had been writing for several years before the
+bearings of his course could be confidently calculated. Some of his
+earlier tales,--as, for example, "The Madonna of the Future,"--while
+keeping near reality on one side, are on the other eminently fanciful and
+ideal. He seemed to feel the attraction of fairyland, but to lack
+resolution to swallow it whole; so, instead of idealizing both persons and
+plot, as Hawthorne had ventured to do, he tried to persuade real persons
+to work out an ideal destiny. But the tact, delicacy, and reticence with
+which these attempts were made did not blind him to the essential
+incongruity; either realism or idealism had to go, and step by step he
+dismissed the latter, until at length Turguenieff's current caught him. By
+this time, however, his culture had become too wide, and his independent
+views too confirmed, to admit of his yielding unconditionally to the great
+Russian. Especially his critical familiarity with French literature
+operated to broaden, if at the same time to render less trenchant, his
+method and expression. His characters are drawn with fastidious care, and
+closely follow the tones and fashions of real life. Each utterance is so
+exactly like what it ought to be that the reader feels the same sort of
+pleased surprise as is afforded by a phonograph which repeats, with all
+the accidental pauses and inflections, the speech spoken into it. Yet the
+words come through a medium; they are not quite spontaneous; these figures
+have not the sad, human inevitableness of Turguenieff's people. The reason
+seems to be (leaving the difference between the genius of the two writers
+out of account) that the American, unlike the Russian, recognizes no
+tragic importance in the situation. To the latter, the vision of life is
+so ominous that his voice waxes sonorous and terrible; his eyes, made keen
+by foreboding, see the leading elements of the conflict, and them only; he
+is no idle singer of an empty day, but he speaks because speech springs
+out of him. To his mind, the foundations of human welfare are in jeopardy,
+and it is full time to decide what means may avert the danger. But the
+American does not think any cataclysm is impending, or if any there be,
+nobody can help it. The subjects that best repay attention are the minor
+ones of civilization, culture, behavior; how to avoid certain vulgarities
+and follies, how to inculcate certain principles: and to illustrate these
+points heroic types are not needed. In other words, the situation being
+unheroic, so must the actors be; for, apart from the inspirations of
+circumstances, Napoleon no more than John Smith is recognizable as a hero.
+
+Now, in adopting this view, a writer places himself under several manifest
+disadvantages. If you are to be an agnostic, it is better (for novel-
+writing purposes) not to be a complacent or resigned one. Otherwise your
+characters will find it difficult to show what is in them. A man reveals
+and classifies himself in proportion to the severity of the condition or
+action required of him, hence the American novelist's people are in
+considerable straits to make themselves adequately known to us. They
+cannot lay bare their inmost soul over a cup of tea or a picture by Corot;
+so, in order to explain themselves, they must not only submit to
+dissection at the author's hands, but must also devote no little time and
+ingenuity to dissecting themselves and one another. But dissection is one
+thing, and the living word rank from the heart and absolutely reeking of
+the human creature that uttered it--the word that Turguenieff's people are
+constantly uttering--is another. Moreover, in the dearth of commanding
+traits and stirring events, there is a continual temptation to magnify
+those which are petty and insignificant. Instead of a telescope to sweep
+the heavens, we are furnished with a microscope to detect infusoria. We
+want a description of a mountain; and, instead of receiving an outline,
+naked and severe, perhaps, but true and impressive, we are introduced to a
+tiny field on its immeasurable side, and we go botanizing and insect-
+hunting there. This is realism; but it is the realism of texture, not of
+form and relation. It encourages our glance to be near-sighted instead of
+comprehensive. Above all, there is a misgiving that we do not touch the
+writer's true quality, and that these scenes of his, so elaborately and
+conscientiously prepared, have cost him much thought and pains, but not
+one throb of the heart or throe of the spirit. The experiences that he
+depicts have not, one fancies, marked wrinkles on his forehead or turned
+his hair gray. There are two kinds of reserve--the reserve which feels
+that its message is too mighty for it, and the reserve which feels that it
+is too mighty for its message. Our new school of writers is reserved, but
+its reserve does not strike one as being of the former kind. It cannot be
+said of any one of Mr. James's stories, "This is his best," or "This is
+his worst," because no one of them is all one way. They have their phases
+of strength and veracity, and, also, phases that are neither veracious nor
+strong. The cause may either lie in a lack of experience in a certain
+direction on the writer's part; or else in his reluctance to write up to
+the experience he has. The experience in question is not of the ways of
+the world,--concerning which Mr. James has every sign of being politely
+familiar,--nor of men and women in their every-day aspect; still less of
+literary ways and means, for of these, in his own line, he is a master.
+The experience referred to is experience of passion. If Mr. James be not
+incapable of describing passion, at all events he has still to show that
+he is capable of it. He has introduced us to many characters that seem to
+have in them capacity for the highest passion,--as witness Christina
+Light,--and yet he has never allowed them an opportunity to develop it. He
+seems to evade the situation; but the evasion is managed with so much
+plausibility that, although we may be disappointed, or even irritated, and
+feel, more or less vaguely, that we have been unfairly dealt with, we are
+unable to show exactly where or how the unfairness comes in. Thus his
+novels might be compared to a beautiful face, full of culture and good
+breeding, but lacking that fire of the eye and fashion of the lip that
+betray a living human soul.
+
+The other one of the two writers whose names are so often mentioned
+together, seems to have taken up the subject of our domestic and social
+pathology; and the minute care and conscientious veracity which he has
+brought to bear upon his work has not been surpassed, even by Shakespeare.
+But, if I could venture a criticism upon his productions, it would be to
+the effect that there is not enough fiction in them. They are elaborate
+and amiable reports of what we see around us. They are not exactly
+imaginative,--in the sense in which I have attempted to define the word.
+There are two ways of warning a man against unwholesome life--one is, to
+show him a picture of disease; the other is, to show him a picture of
+health. The former is the negative, the latter the positive treatment.
+Both have their merits; but the latter is, perhaps, the better adapted to
+novels, the former to essays. A novelist should not only know what he has
+got; he should also know what he wants. His mind should have an active, or
+theorizing, as well as a passive, or contemplative, side. He should have
+energy to discount the people he personally knows; the power to perceive
+what phases of thought are to be represented, as well as to describe the
+persons who happen to be their least inadequate representatives; the
+sagacity to analyze the age or the moment, and to reveal its tendency and
+meaning. Mr. Howells has produced a great deal of finely wrought tapestry;
+but does not seem, as yet, to have found a hall fit to adorn it with.
+
+And yet Mr. James and Mr. Howells have done more than all the rest of us
+to make our literature respectable during the last ten years. If texture
+be the object, they have brought texture to a fineness never surpassed
+anywhere. They have discovered charm and grace in much that was only blank
+before. They have detected and described points of human nature hitherto
+unnoticed, which, if not intrinsically important, will one day be made
+auxiliary to the production of pictures of broader as well as minuter
+veracity than have heretofore been produced. All that seems wanting thus
+far is a direction, an aim, a belief. Agnosticism has brought about a
+pause for a while, and no doubt a pause is preferable to some kinds of
+activity. It may enable us, when the time comes to set forward again, to
+do so with better equipment and more intelligent purpose. It will not do
+to be always at a prophetic heat of enthusiasm, sympathy, denunciation:
+the coolly critical mood is also useful to prune extravagance and promote
+a sense of responsibility. The novels of Mr. James and of Mr. Howells have
+taught us that men and women are creatures of infinitely complicated
+structure, and that even the least of these complications, if it is
+portrayed at all, is worth portraying truthfully. But we cannot forget, on
+the other hand, that honest emotion and hearty action are necessary to the
+wholesomeness of society, because in their absence society is afflicted
+with a lamentable sameness and triviality; the old primitive impulses
+remain, but the food on which they are compelled to feed is insipid and
+unsustaining; our eyes are turned inward instead of outward, and each one
+of us becomes himself the Rome towards which all his roads lead. Such
+books as these authors have written are not the Great American Novel,
+because they take life and humanity not in their loftier, but in their
+lesser manifestations. They are the side scenes and the background of a
+story that has yet to be written. That story will have the interest not
+only of the collision of private passions and efforts, but of the great
+ideas and principles which characterize and animate a nation. It will
+discriminate between what is accidental and what is permanent, between
+what is realistic and what is real, between what is sentimental and what
+is sentiment. It will show us not only what we are, but what we are to be;
+not only what to avoid, but what to do. It will rest neither in the tragic
+gloom of Turguenieff, nor in the critical composure of James, nor in the
+gentle deprecation of Howells, but will demonstrate that the weakness of
+man is the motive and condition of his strength. It will not shrink from
+romance, nor from ideality, nor from artistic completeness, because it
+will know at what depths and heights of life these elements are truly
+operative. It will be American, not because its scene is laid or its
+characters born in the United States, but because its burden will be
+reaction against old tyrannies and exposure of new hypocrisies; a
+refutation of respectable falsehoods, and a proclamation of
+unsophisticated truths. Indeed, let us take heed and diligently improve
+our native talent, lest a day come when the Great American Novel make its
+appearance, but written in a foreign language, and by some author who--
+however purely American at heart--never set foot on the shores of the
+Republic.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+AMERICANISM IN FICTION.
+
+
+Contemporary criticism will have it that, in order to create an American
+Literature, we must use American materials. The term "Literature" has, no
+doubt, come to be employed in a loose sense. The London _Saturday Review_
+has (or used to have until lately) a monthly two-column article devoted to
+what it called "American Literature," three-fourths of which were devoted
+to an examination of volumes of State Histories, Statistical Digests,
+Records of the Census, and other such works as were never, before or
+since, suspected of being literature; while the remaining fourth mentioned
+the titles (occasionally with a line of comment) of whatever productions
+were at hand in the way of essays, novels, and poetry. This would seem to
+indicate that we may have--nay, are already possessed of--an American
+Literature, composed of American materials, provided only that we consent
+to adopt the _Saturday Review's_ conception of what literature is.
+
+Many of us believe, however, that the essays, the novels, and the poetry,
+as well as the statistical digests, ought to go to the making up of a
+national literature. It has been discovered, however, that the existence
+of the former does not depend, to the same extent as that of the latter,
+upon the employment of exclusively American material. A book about the
+census, if it be not American, is nothing; but a poem or a romance, though
+written by a native-born American, who, perhaps, has never crossed the
+Atlantic, not only may, but frequently does, have nothing in it that can
+be called essentially American, except its English and, occasionally, its
+ideas. And the question arises whether such productions can justly be held
+to form component parts of what shall hereafter be recognized as the
+literature of America.
+
+How was it with the makers of English literature? Beginning with Chaucer,
+his "Canterbury Pilgrims" is English, both in scene and character; it is
+even mentioned of the Abbess that "Frenche of Paris was to her unknowe";
+but his "Legende of Goode Women" might, so far as its subject-matter is
+concerned, have been written by a French, a Spanish, or an Italian
+Chaucer, just as well as by the British Daniel. Spenser's "Faerie Queene"
+numbers St. George and King Arthur among its heroes; but its scene is laid
+in Faerie Lande, if it be laid anywhere, and it is a barefaced moral
+allegory throughout. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, the elimination
+of which from English literature would undeniably be a serious loss to it;
+yet, of these plays twenty-three have entirely foreign scenes and
+characters. Milton, as a political writer, was English; but his "Paradise
+Lost and Regained," his "Samson," his "Ode on the Nativity," his "Comus,"
+bear no reference to the land of his birth. Dryden's best-known work to-
+day is his "Alexander's Feast." Pope has come down to us as the translator
+of Homer. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are the great quartet
+of English novelists of the last century; but Smollett, in his preface to
+"Roderick Random," after an admiring allusion to the "Gil Blas" of Le
+Sage, goes on to say: "The following sheets I have modelled on his plan";
+and Sterne was always talking and thinking about Cervantes, and comparing
+himself to the great Spaniard: "I think there is more laughable humor,
+with an equal degree of Cervantic satire, if not more, than in the last,"
+he writes of one of his chapters, to "my witty widow, Mrs. F." Many even
+of Walter Scott's romances are un-English in their elements; and the fame
+of Shelley, Keats, and Byron rests entirely upon their "foreign" work.
+Coleridge's poetry and philosophy bear no technical stamp of nationality;
+and, to come down to later times, Carlyle was profoundly imbued with
+Germanism, while the "Romola" of George Eliot and the "Cloister and the
+Hearth" of Charles Reade are by many considered to be the best of their
+works. In the above enumeration innumerable instances in point are, of
+course, omitted; but enough have been given, perhaps, to show that
+imaginative writers have not generally been disowned by their country on
+the ground that they have availed themselves, in their writings, of other
+scenes and characters than those of their own immediate neighborhoods.
+
+The statistics of the work of the foremost American writers could easily
+be shown to be much more strongly imbued with the specific flavor of their
+environment. Benjamin Franklin, though he was an author before the United
+States existed, was American to the marrow. The "Leather-Stocking Tales"
+of Cooper are the American epic. Irving's "Knickerbocker" and his
+"Woolfert's Roost" will long outlast his other productions. Poe's most
+popular tale, "The Gold-Bug," is American in its scene, and so is "The
+Mystery of Marie Roget," in spite of its French nomenclature; and all that
+he wrote is strongly tinged with the native hue of his strange genius.
+Longfellow's "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" and "Miles Standish," and such
+poems as "The Skeleton in Armor" and "The Building of the Ship," crowd out
+of sight his graceful translations and adaptations. Emerson is the
+veritable American eagle of our literature, so that to be Emersonian is to
+be American. Whittier and Holmes have never looked beyond their native
+boundaries, and Hawthorne has brought the stern gloom of the Puritan
+period and the uneasy theorizings of the present day into harmony with the
+universal and permanent elements of human nature. There was certainly
+nothing European visible in the crude but vigorous stories of Theodore
+Winthrop; and Bret Harte, the most brilliant figure among our later men,
+is not only American, but Californian,--as is, likewise, the Poet of the
+Sierras. It is not necessary to go any further. Mr. Henry James, having
+enjoyed early and singular opportunities of studying the effects of the
+recent annual influx of Americans, cultured and otherwise, into England
+and the Continent, has very sensibly and effectively, and with exquisite
+grace of style and pleasantness of thought, made the phenomenon the theme
+of a remarkable series of stories. Hereupon the cry of an "International
+School" has been raised, and critics profess to be seriously alarmed lest
+we should ignore the signal advantages for _mise-en-scene_ presented by
+this Western half of the planet, and should enter into vain and
+unpatriotic competition with foreign writers on their own ground. The
+truth is, meanwhile, that it would have been a much surer sign of
+affectation in us to have abstained from literary comment upon the patent
+and notable fact of this international _rapprochement_,--which is just as
+characteristic an American trait as the episode of the Argonauts of 1849,
+--and we have every reason to be grateful to Mr. Henry James, and to his
+school, if he has any, for having rescued us from the opprobrium of so
+foolish a piece of know-nothingism. The phase is, of course, merely
+temporary; its interest and significance will presently be exhausted; but,
+because we are American, are we to import no French cakes and English ale?
+As a matter of fact, we are too timid and self-conscious; and these
+infirmities imply a much more serious obstacle to the formation of a
+characteristic literature than does any amount of gadding abroad.
+
+That must be a very shallow literature which depends for its national
+flavor and character upon its topography and its dialect; and the
+criticism which can conceive of no deeper Americanism than this is
+shallower still. What is an American book? It is a book written by an
+American, and by one who writes as an American; that is, unaffectedly. So
+an English book is a book written by an unaffected Englishman. What
+difference can it make what the subject of the writing is? Mr. Henry James
+lately brought out a volume of essays on "French Poets and Novelists." Mr.
+E. C. Stedman recently published a series of monographs on "The Victorian
+Poets." Are these books French and English, or are they nondescript, or
+are they American? Not only are they American, but they are more
+essentially American than if they had been disquisitions upon American
+literature. And the reason is, of course, that they subject the things of
+the old world to the tests of the new, and thereby vindicate and
+illustrate the characteristic mission of America to mankind. We are here
+to hold up European conventionalisms and prejudices in the light of the
+new day, and thus afford everybody the opportunity, never heretofore
+enjoyed, of judging them by other standards, and in other surroundings
+than those amidst which they came into existence. In the same way,
+Emerson's "English Traits" is an American thing, and it gives categorical
+reasons why American things should be. And what is an American novel
+except a novel treating of persons, places, and ideas from an American
+point of view? The point of view is _the_ point, not the thing seen from
+it.
+
+But it is said that "the great American novel," in order fully to deserve
+its name, ought to have American scenery. Some thousands of years ago, the
+Greeks had a novelist--Homer--who evolved the great novel of that epoch;
+but the scenery of that novel was Trojan, not Greek. The story is a
+criticism, from a Greek standpoint, of foreign affairs, illustrated with
+practical examples; and, as regards treatment, quite as much care is
+bestowed upon the delineation of Hector, Priam, and Paris, as upon
+Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Achilles. The same story, told by a Trojan Homer,
+would doubtless have been very different; but it is by no means certain
+that it would have been any better told. It embodies, whether symbolically
+or literally matters not, the triumph of Greek ideas and civilization.
+But, even so, the sympathies of the reader are not always, or perhaps
+uniformly, on the conquering side. Homer was doubtless a patriot, but he
+shows no signs of having been a bigot. He described that great
+international episode with singular impartiality; what chiefly interested
+him was the play of human nature. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that
+the Greeks were backward in admitting his claims as their national poet;
+and we may legitimately conclude that were an American Homer--whether in
+prose or poetry--to appear among us, he might pitch his scene where he
+liked--in Patagonia, or on the banks of the Zambezi--and we should accept
+the situation with perfect equanimity. Only let him be a native of New
+York, or Boston, or San Francisco, or Mullenville, and be inspired with
+the American idea, and we ask no more. Whatever he writes will belong to
+our literature, and add lustre to it.
+
+One hears many complaints about the snobbishness of running after things
+European. Go West, young man, these moralists say, or go down Fifth
+Avenue, and investigate Chatham Street, and learn that all the elements of
+romance, to him who has the seeing eye, lie around your own front doorstep
+and back yard. But let not these persons forget that he who fears Europe
+is a less respectable snob than he who studies it. Let us welcome Europe
+in our books as freely as we do at Castle Garden; we may do so safely. If
+our digestion be not strong enough to assimilate her, and work up whatever
+is valuable in her into our own bone and sinew, then America is not the
+thing we took her for. For what is America? Is it simply a reproduction of
+one of these Eastern nationalities, which we are so fond of alluding to as
+effete? Surely not. It is a new departure in history; it is a new door
+opened to the development of the human race, or, as I should prefer to
+say, of humanity. We are misled by the chatter of politicians and the
+bombast of Congress. In the course of ages, the time has at last arrived
+when man, all over this planet, is entering upon a new career of moral,
+intellectual, and political emancipation; and America is the concrete
+expression and theatre of that great fact, as all spiritual truths find
+their fitting and representative physical incarnation. But what would this
+huge western continent be, if America--the real America of the mind--had
+no existence? It would be a body without a soul, and would better,
+therefore, not be at all. If America is to be a repetition of Europe on a
+larger scale, it is not worth the pain of governing it. Europe has shown
+what European ideas can accomplish; and whatever fresh thought or impulse
+comes to birth in it can be nothing else than an American thought and
+impulse, and must sooner or later find its way here, and become
+naturalized with its brethren. Buds and blossoms of America are sprouting
+forth all over the Old World, and we gather in the fruit. They do not find
+themselves at home there, but they know where their home is. The old
+country feels them like thorns in her old flesh, and is gladly rid of
+them; but such prickings are the only wholesome and hopeful symptoms she
+presents; if they ceased to trouble her, she would be dead indeed. She has
+an uneasy experience before her, for a time; but the time will come when
+she, too, will understand that her ease is her disease, and then Castle
+Garden may close its doors, for America will be everywhere.
+
+If, then, America is something vastly more than has hitherto been
+understood by the word nation, it is proper that we attach to that other
+word, patriotism, a significance broader and loftier than has been
+conceived till now. By so much as the idea that we represent is great, by
+so much are we, in comparison with it, inevitably chargeable with
+littleness and short-comings. For we are of the same flesh and blood as
+our neighbors; it is only our opportunities and our responsibilities that
+are fairer and weightier than theirs. Circumstances afford every excuse to
+them, but none to us. "_E Pluribus Unum_" is a frivolous motto; our true
+one should be, "_Noblesse oblige_." But, with a strange perversity, in all
+matters of comparison between ourselves and others, we display what we are
+pleased to call our patriotism by an absurd touchiness as to points
+wherein Europe, with its settled and polished civilization, must needs be
+our superior; and are quite indifferent about those things by which our
+real strength is constituted. Can we not be content to learn from Europe
+the graces, the refinements, the amenities of life, so long as we are able
+to teach her life itself? For my part, I never saw in England any
+appurtenance of civilization, calculated to add to the convenience and
+commodiousness of existence, that did not seem to me to surpass anything
+of the kind that we have in this country. Notwithstanding which--and I am
+far, indeed, from having any pretensions to asceticism--I would have been
+fairly stifled at the idea of having to spend my life there. No American
+can live in Europe, unless he means to return home, or unless, at any
+rate, he returns here in mind, in hope, in belief. For an American to
+accept England, or any other country, as both a mental and physical
+finality, would, it seems to me, be tantamount to renouncing his very
+life. To enjoy English comforts at the cost of adopting English opinions,
+would be about as pleasant as to have the privilege of retaining one's
+body on condition of surrendering one's soul, and would, indeed, amount to
+just about the same thing.
+
+I fail, therefore, to feel any apprehension as to our literature becoming
+Europeanized, because whatever is American in it must lie deeper than
+anything European can penetrate. More than that, I believe and hope that
+our novelists will deal with Europe a great deal more, and a great deal
+more intelligently, than they have done yet. It is a true and healthy
+artistic instinct that leads them to do so. Hawthorne--and no American
+writer had a better right than he to contradict his own argument--says, in
+the preface to the "Marble Faun," in a passage that has been often quoted,
+but will bear repetition:--
+
+    "Italy, as the site of a romance, was chiefly valuable to him as <
+    affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would
+    not be so terribly insisted on as they are, and must needs be, in
+    America. No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of
+    writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no
+    antiquity, n mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything
+    but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is
+    happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I
+    trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled
+    themes, either in the annals of our stalwart Republic, or in any
+    characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance
+    and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them
+    grow."
+
+Now, what is to be understood from this passage? It assumes, in the first
+place, that a work of art, in order to be effective, must contain profound
+contrasts of light and shadow; and then it points out that the shadow, at
+least, is found ready to the hand in Europe. There is no hint of patriotic
+scruples as to availing one's self of such a "picturesque and gloomy"
+background; if it is to be had, then let it be taken; the main object to
+be considered is the work of art. Europe, in short, afforded an excellent
+quarry, from which, in Hawthorne's opinion, the American novelist might
+obtain materials which are conspicuously deficient in his own country, and
+which that country is all the better for not possessing. In the "Marble
+Faun" the author had conceived a certain idea, and he considered that he
+had been not unsuccessful in realizing it. The subject was new, and full
+of especial attractions to his genius, and it would manifestly have been
+impossible to adapt it to an American setting. There was one drawback
+connected with it, and this Hawthorne did not fail to recognize. He
+remarks in the preface that he had "lived too long abroad not to be aware
+that a foreigner seldom acquires that knowledge of a country at once
+flexible and profound, which may justify him in endeavoring to idealize
+its traits." But he was careful not to attempt "a portraiture of Italian
+manners and character." He made use of the Italian scenery and atmosphere
+just so far as was essential to the development of his idea, and
+consistent with the extent of his Italian knowledge; and, for the rest,
+fell back upon American characters and principles. The result has been
+long enough before the world to have met with a proper appreciation. I
+have heard regret expressed that the power employed by the author in
+working out this story had not been applied to a romance dealing with a
+purely American subject. But to analyze this objection is to dispose of
+it. A man of genius is not, commonly, enfeebled by his own productions;
+and, physical accidents aside, Hawthorne was just as capable of writing
+another "Scarlet Letter" after the "Marble Faun" was published, as he had
+been before. Meanwhile, few will deny that our literature would be a loser
+had the "Marble Faun" never been written.
+
+The drawback above alluded to is, however, not to be underrated. It may
+operate in two ways. In the first place, the American's European
+observations may be inaccurate. As a child, looking at a sphere, might
+suppose it to be a flat disc, shaded at one side and lighted at the other,
+so a sightseer in Europe may ascribe to what he beholds qualities and a
+character quite at variance with what a more fundamental knowledge would
+have enabled him to perceive. In the second place, the stranger in a
+strange land, be he as accurate as he may, will always tend to look at
+what is around him objectively, instead of allowing it subjectively--or,
+as it were, unconsciously--to color his narrative. He will be more apt
+directly to describe what he sees, than to convey the feeling or aroma of
+it without description. It would doubtless, for instance, be possible for
+Mr. Henry James to write an "English" or even a "French" novel without
+falling into a single technical error; but it is no less certain that a
+native writer, of equal ability, would treat the same subject in a very
+different manner. Mr. James's version might contain a great deal more of
+definite information; but the native work would insinuate an impression
+which both comes from and goes to a greater depth of apprehension.
+
+But, on the other hand, it is not contended that any American should write
+an "English" or anything but an "American" novel. The contention is,
+simply, that he should not refrain from using foreign material, when it
+happens to suit his exigencies, merely because it is foreign. Objective
+writing may be quite as good reading as subjective writing, in its proper
+place and function. In fiction, no more than elsewhere, may a writer
+pretend to be what he is not, or to know what he knows not. When he finds
+himself abroad, he must frankly admit his situation; and more will not
+then be required of him than he is fairly competent to afford. It will
+seldom happen, as Hawthorne intimates, that he can successfully reproduce
+the inner workings and philosophy of European social and political customs
+and peculiarities; but he can give a picture of the scenery as vivid as
+can the aborigine, or more so; he can make an accurate study of personal
+native character; and, finally, and most important of all, he can make use
+of the conditions of European civilization in events, incidents, and
+situations which would be impossible on this side of the water. The
+restrictions, the traditions, the law, and the license of those old
+countries are full of suggestions to the student of character and
+circumstances, and supply him with colors and effects that he would else
+search for in vain. For the truth may as well be admitted; we are at a
+distinct disadvantage, in America, in respect of the materials of romance.
+Not that vigorous, pathetic, striking stories may not be constructed here;
+and there is humor enough, the humor of dialect, of incongruity of
+character; but, so far as the story depends for its effect, not upon
+psychical and personal, but upon physical and general events and
+situations, we soon feel the limit of our resources. An analysis of the
+human soul, such as may be found in the "House of the Seven Gables," for
+instance, is absolute in its interest, apart from outward conditions. But
+such an analysis cannot be carried on, so to say, _in vacuo_. You must
+have solid ground to stand on; you must have fitting circumstances,
+background, and perspective. The ruin of a soul, the tragedy of a heart,
+demand, as a necessity of harmony and picturesque effect, a corresponding
+and conspiring environment and stage--just as, in music, the air in the
+treble is supported and reverberated by the bass accompaniment. The
+immediate, contemporary act or predicament loses more than half its
+meaning and impressiveness if it be re-echoed from no sounding-board in
+the past--its notes, however sweetly and truly touched, fall flatly on the
+ear. The deeper we attempt to pitch the key of an American story,
+therefore, the more difficulty shall we find in providing a congruous
+setting for it; and it is interesting to note how the masters of the craft
+have met the difficulty. In the "Seven Gables"--and I take leave to say
+that if I draw illustrations from this particular writer, it is for no
+other reason than that he presents, more forcibly than most, a method of
+dealing with the special problem we are considering--Hawthorne, with the
+intuitive skill of genius, evolves a background, and produces a
+reverberation, from materials which he may be said to have created almost
+as much as discovered. The idea of a house, founded two hundred years ago
+upon a crime, remaining ever since in possession of its original owners,
+and becoming the theatre, at last, of the judgment upon that crime, is a
+thoroughly picturesque idea, but it is thoroughly un-American. Such a
+thing might conceivably occur, but nothing in this country could well be
+more unlikely. No one before Hawthorne had ever thought of attempting such
+a thing; at all events, no one else, before or since, has accomplished it.
+The preface to the romance in question reveals the principle upon which
+its author worked, and incidentally gives a new definition of the term
+"romance,"--a definition of which, thus far, no one but its propounder has
+known how to avail himself. It amounts, in fact, to an acknowledgment that
+it is impossible to write a "novel" of American life that shall be at once
+artistic, realistic, and profound. A novel, he says, aims at a "very
+minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and
+ordinary course of man's experience." A romance, on the other hand,
+"while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and
+while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of
+the human heart, has fairly a right to present that truth under
+circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or
+creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium
+as to bring out and mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows,
+of the picture." This is good advice, no doubt, but not easy to follow. We
+can all understand, however, that the difficulties would be greatly
+lessened could we but command backgrounds of the European order.
+Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, and others have written great
+stories, which did not have to be romances, because the literal conditions
+of life in England have a picturesqueness and a depth which correspond
+well enough with whatever moral and mental scenery we may project upon
+them. Hawthorne was forced to use the scenery and capabilities of his
+native town of Salem. He saw that he could not present these in a
+realistic light, and his artistic instinct showed him that he must modify
+or veil the realism of his figures in the same degree and manner as that
+of his accessories. No doubt, his peculiar genius and temperament
+eminently qualified him to produce this magical change; it was a
+remarkable instance of the spontaneous marriage, so to speak, of the means
+to the end; and even when, in Italy, he had an opportunity to write a
+story which should be accurate in fact, as well as faithful to "the truth
+of the human heart," he still preferred a subject which bore to the
+Italian environment the same relation that the "House of the Seven Gables"
+and the "Scarlet Letter" do to the American one; in other words, the
+conception of Donatello is removed as much further than Clifford or Hester
+Prynne from literal realism as the inherent romance of the Italian setting
+is above that of New England. The whole thing is advanced a step further
+towards pure idealism, the relative proportions being maintained.
+
+"The Blithedale Romance" is only another instance in point, and here, as
+before, we find the principle admirably stated in the preface. "In the old
+countries," says Hawthorne, "a novelist's work is not put exactly side by
+side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to everyday
+probability, in view of the improved effects he is bound to produce
+thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no Faery Land,
+so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, we cannot well tell
+the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld
+through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This
+atmosphere is what the American romancer needs. In its absence, the beings
+of his imagination are compelled to show themselves in the same category
+as actually living mortals; a necessity that renders the paint and
+pasteboard of their composition but too painfully discernible."
+Accordingly, Hawthorne selects the Brook Farm episode (or a reflection of
+it) as affording his drama "a theatre, a little removed from the highway
+of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their
+phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison
+with the actual events of real lives." In this case, therefore, an
+exceptional circumstance is made to answer the same purpose that was
+attained by different means in the other romances.
+
+But in what manner have our other writers of fiction treated the
+difficulties that were thus dealt with by Hawthorne?--Herman Melville
+cannot be instanced here; for his only novel or romance, whichever it be,
+was also the most impossible of all his books, and really a terrible
+example of the enormities which a man of genius may perpetrate when
+working in a direction unsuited to him. I refer, of course, to "Pierre, or
+the Ambiguities." Oliver Wendell Holmes's two delightful stories are as
+favorable examples of what can be done, in the way of an American novel,
+by a wise, witty, and learned gentleman, as we are likely to see.
+Nevertheless, one cannot avoid the feeling that they are the work of a man
+who has achieved success and found recognition in other ways than by
+stories, or even poems and essays. The interest, in either book, centres
+round one of those physiological phenomena which impinge so strangely upon
+the domain of the soul; for the rest, they are simply accurate and
+humorous portraitures of local dialects and peculiarities, and thus afford
+little assistance in the search for a universally applicable rule of
+guidance. Doctor Holmes, I believe, objects to having the term "medicated"
+applied to his tales; but surely the adjective is not reproachful; it
+indicates one of the most charming and also, alas! inimitable features of
+his work.
+
+Bret Harte is probably as valuable a witness as could be summoned in this
+case. His touch is realistic, and yet his imagination is poetic and
+romantic. He has discovered something. He has done something both new and
+good. Within the space of some fifty pages, he has painted a series of
+pictures which will last as long as anything in the fifty thousand pages
+of Dickens. Taking "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" as perhaps the most nearly
+perfect of the tales, as well as the most truly representative of the
+writer's powers, let us try to guess its secret. In the first place, it is
+very short,--a single episode, succinctly and eloquently told. The
+descriptions of scenery and persons are masterly and memorable. The
+characters of these persons, their actions, and the circumstances of their
+lives, are as rugged, as grotesque, as terrible, and also as beautiful, as
+the scenery. Thus an artistic harmony is established,--the thing which is
+lacking in so much of our literature. The story moves swiftly on, through
+humor, pathos, and tragedy, to its dramatic close. It is given with
+perfect literary taste, and naught in its phases of human nature is either
+extenuated or set down in malice. The little narrative can be read in a
+few minutes, and can never be forgotten. But it is only an episode; and it
+is an episode of an episode,--that of the Californian gold-fever. The
+story of the Argonauts is only one story, after all, and these tales of
+Harte's are but so many facets of the same gem. They are not, however,
+like chapters in a romance; there is no such vital connection between them
+as develops a cumulative force. We are no more impressed after reading
+half a dozen of them than after the first; they are variations of the same
+theme. They discover to us no new truth about human nature; they only show
+us certain human beings so placed as to act out their naked selves,--to be
+neither influenced nor protected by the rewards and screens of
+conventional civilization. The affectation and insincerity of our daily
+life make such a spectacle fresh and pleasing to us. But we enjoy it
+because of its unexpectedness, its separateness, its unlikeness to the
+ordinary course of existence. It is like a huge, strange, gorgeous flower,
+an exaggeration and intensification of such flowers as we know; but a
+flower without roots, unique, never to be reproduced. It is fitting that
+its portrait should be painted; but, once done, it is done with; we cannot
+fill our picture-gallery with it. Carlyle wrote the History of the French
+Revolution, and Bret Harte has written the History of the Argonauts; but
+it is absurd to suppose that a national literature could be founded on
+either episode.
+
+But though Mr. Harte has not left his fellow-craftsmen anything to gather
+from the lode which he opened and exhausted, we may still learn something
+from his method. He took things as he found them, and he found them
+disinclined to weave themselves into an elaborate and balanced narrative.
+He recognized the deficiency of historical perspective, but he saw that
+what was lost in slowly growing, culminating power was gained in vivid,
+instant force. The deeds of his character could not be represented as the
+final result of long-inherited proclivities; but they could appear between
+their motive and their consequence, like the draw--aim--fire! of the
+Western desperado,--as short, sharp, and conclusive. In other words, the
+conditions of American life, as he saw it, justified a short story, or any
+number of them, but not a novel; and the fact that he did afterwards
+attempt a novel only served to confirm his original position. I think that
+the limitation that he discovered is of much wider application than we are
+prone to realize. American life has been, as yet, nothing but a series of
+episodes, of experiments. There has been no such thing as a fixed and
+settled condition of society, not subject to change itself, and therefore
+affording a foundation and contrast to minor or individual vicissitudes.
+We cannot write American-grown novels, because a novel is not an episode,
+nor an aggregation of episodes; we cannot write romances in the Hawthorne
+sense, because, as yet, we do not seem to be clever enough. Several
+courses are, however, open to us, and we are pursuing them all. First, we
+are writing "short stories," accounts of episodes needing no historical
+perspective, and not caring for any; and, so far as one may judge, we
+write the best short stories in the world. Secondly, we may spin out our
+short stories into long-short stories, just as we may imagine a baby six
+feet high; it takes up more room, but is just as much a baby as one of
+twelve inches. Thirdly, we may graft our flower of romance on a European
+stem, and enjoy ourselves as much as the European novelists do, and with
+as clear a conscience. We are stealing that which enriches us and does not
+impoverish them. It is silly and childish to make the boundaries of the
+America of the mind coincide with those of the United States. We need not
+dispute about free trade and protection here; literature is not commerce,
+nor is it politics. America is not a petty nationality, like France,
+England, and Germany; but whatever in such nationalities tends toward
+enlightenment and freedom is American. Let us not, therefore, confirm
+ourselves in a false and ignoble conception of our meaning and mission in
+the world. Let us not carry into the temple of the Muse the jealousies,
+the prejudice, the ignorance, the selfishness of our "Senate" and
+"Representatives," strangely so called! Let us not refuse to breathe the
+air of Heaven, lest there be something European or Asian in it. If we
+cannot have a national literature in the narrow, geographical sense of the
+phrase, it is because our inheritance transcends all geographical
+definitions. The great American novel may not be written this year, or
+even in this century. Meanwhile, let us not fear to ride, and ride to
+death, whatever species of Pegasus we can catch. It can do us no harm, and
+it may help us to acquire a firmer seat against the time when our own, our
+very own winged steed makes his appearance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN.
+
+
+Literature is that quality in books which affords delight and nourishment
+to the soul. But this is a scientific and skeptical age, insomuch that one
+hardly ventures to take for granted that every reader will know what his
+soul is. It is not the intellect, though it gives the intellect light; nor
+the emotions, though they receive their warmth from it. It is the most
+catholic and constant element of human nature, yet it bears no direct part
+in the practical affairs of life; it does not struggle, it does not even
+suffer; but merely emerges or retires, glows or congeals, according to the
+company in which it finds itself. We might say that the soul is a name for
+man's innate sympathy with goodness and truth in the abstract; for no man
+can have a bad soul, though his heart may be evil, or his mind depraved,
+because the soul's access to the mind or heart has been so obstructed as
+to leave the moral consciousness cold and dark. The soul, in other words,
+is the only conservative and peacemaker; it affords the only unalterable
+ground upon which all men can always meet; it unselfishly identifies or
+unites us with our fellows, in contradistinction to the selfish intellect,
+which individualizes us and sets each man against every other. Doubtless,
+then, the soul is an amiable and desirable possession, and it would be a
+pity to deprive it of so much encouragement as may be compatible with due
+attention to the serious business of life. For there are moments, even in
+the most active careers, when it seems agreeable to forget competition,
+rivalry, jealousy; when it is a rest to think of one's self as a man
+rather than a person;--moments when time and place appear impertinent, and
+that most profitable which affords least palpable profit. At such seasons,
+a man looks inward, or, as the American poet puts it, he loafs and invites
+his soul, and then he is at a disadvantage if his soul, in consequence of
+too persistent previous neglect, declines to respond to the invitation,
+and remains immured in that secret place which, as years pass by, becomes
+less and less accessible to so many of us.
+
+When I say that literature nourishes the soul, I implicitly refuse the
+title of literature to anything in books that either directly or
+indirectly promotes any worldly or practical use. Of course, what is
+literature to one man may be anything but literature to another, or to the
+same man under different circumstances; Virgil to the schoolboy, for
+instance, is a very different thing from the Virgil of the scholar. But
+whatever you read with the design of improving yourself in some
+profession, or of acquiring information likely to be of advantage to you
+in any pursuit or contingency, or of enabling yourself to hold your own
+with other readers, or even of rendering yourself that enviable
+nondescript, a person of culture,--whatever, in short, is read with any
+assignable purpose whatever, is in so far not literature. The Bible may be
+literature to Mr. Matthew Arnold, because he reads it for fun; but to
+Luther, Calvin, or the pupils of a Sunday-school, it is essentially
+something else. Literature is the written communications of the soul of
+mankind with itself; it is liable to appear in the most unexpected places,
+and in the oddest company; it vanishes when we would grasp it, and appears
+when we look not for it. Chairs of literature are established in the great
+universities, and it is literature, no doubt, that the professor
+discourses; but it ceases to be literature before it reaches the student's
+ear; though, again, when the same students stumble across it in the
+recesses of their memory ten or twenty years later, it may have become
+literature once more. Finally, literature may, upon occasion, avail a man
+more than the most thorough technical information; but it will not be
+because it supplements or supplants that information, but because it has
+so tempered and exalted his general faculty that whatever he may do is
+done more clearly and comprehensively than might otherwise be the case.
+
+Having thus, in some measure, considered what is literature and what the
+soul, let us note, further, that the literature proper to manhood is not
+proper to childhood, though the reverse is not--or, at least, never ought
+to be--true. In childhood, the soul and the mind act in harmony; the mind
+has not become preoccupied or sophisticated by so-called useful knowledge;
+it responds obediently to the soul's impulses and intuitions. Children
+have no morality; they have not yet descended to the level where morality
+suggests itself to them. For morality is the outcome of spiritual pride,
+the most stubborn and insidious of all sins; the pride which prompts each
+of us to declare himself holier than his fellows, and to support that
+claim by parading his docility to the Decalogue. Docility to any set of
+rules, no matter of how divine authority, so long as it is inspired by
+hope of future good or present advantage, is rather worse than useless:
+except our righteousness exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees,--that
+is, except it be spontaneous righteousness or morality, and, therefore,
+not morality, but unconscious goodness,--we shall in no wise have
+benefited either ourselves or others. Children, when left to themselves,
+artlessly and innocently act out the nature that is common to saint and
+sinner alike; they are selfish, angry, and foolish, because their state is
+human; and they are loving, truthful, and sincere, because their origin is
+divine. All that pleases or agrees with them is good; all that opposes or
+offends them is evil, and this, without any reference whatever to the
+moral code in vogue among their elders. But, on the other hand, children
+cannot be tempted as we are, because they suppose that everything is free
+and possible, and because they are as yet uncontaminated by the artificial
+cravings which the artificial prohibitions incident to our civilization
+create. Life is to them a constantly widening circle of things to be had
+and enjoyed; nor does it ever occur to them that their desires can
+conflict with those of others, or with the laws of the universe. They
+cannot consciously do wrong, nor understand that any one else can do so;
+untoward accidents may happen, but inanimate nature is just as liable to
+be objectionable in this respect as human beings: the stone that trips
+them up, the thorn that scratches them, the snow that makes their flesh
+tingle, is an object of their resentment in just the same kind and degree
+as are the men and women who thwart or injure them. But of duty--that
+dreary device to secure future reward by present suffering; of
+conscientiousness--that fear of present good for the sake of future
+punishment; of remorse--that disavowal of past pleasure for fear of the
+sting in its tail; of ambition--that begrudging of all honorable results
+that are not effected by one's self; of these, and all similar politic and
+arbitrary masks of self-love and pusillanimity, these poor children know
+and suspect nothing. Yet their eyes are much keener than ours, for they
+see through the surface of nature and perceive its symbolism; they see the
+living reality, of which nature is the veil, and are continually at fault
+because this veil is not, after all, the reality,--because it is fixed and
+unplastic. The "deep mind of dauntless infancy" is, in fact, the only
+revelation we have, except divine revelation itself, of that pure and
+natural life of man which we dream of, and liken to heaven; but we,
+nevertheless, in our penny-wise, pound-foolish way, insist upon regarding
+it as ignorance, and do our best, from the earliest possible moment, to
+disenchant and dispel it. We call the outrage education, understanding
+thereby the process of exterminating in the child the higher order of
+faculties and the intuitions, and substituting for them the external
+memory, timidity, self-esteem, and all that armament of petty weapons and
+defences which may enable us to get the better of our fellow-creatures in
+this world, and receive the reward of our sagacity in the next. The
+success of our efforts is pitiably complete; for though the child, if
+fairly engaged in single combat, might make a formidable resistance
+against the infliction of "lessons," it cannot long withstand our crafty
+device of sending it to a place where it sees a score or a hundred of
+little victims like itself, all being driven to the same Siberia. The
+spirit of emulation is aroused, and lo! away they all scamper, each
+straining its utmost to reach the barren goal ahead of all competitors. So
+do we make the most ignoble passions of our children our allies in the
+unholy task of divesting them of their childhood. And yet, who is not
+aware that the best men the world has seen have been those who, throughout
+their lives, retained the aroma of childlike simplicity which they brought
+with them into existence? Learning--the acquisition of specific facts--is
+not wisdom; it is almost incompatible with wisdom; indeed, unless the mind
+be powerful enough not only to fuse its facts, but to vaporize them,--to
+sublimate them into an impalpable atmosphere,--they will stand in wisdom's
+way. Wisdom comes from the pondering and the application to life of
+certain truths quite above the sphere of facts, and of infinitely more
+moment and less complexity,--truths which are often found to be in
+accordance with the spiritual instinct called intuition, which children
+possess more fully than grown persons. The wisdom of our children would
+often astonish us, if we would only forbear the attempt to make them
+knowing, and submissively accept instruction from them. Through all the
+imperfection of their inherited infirmity, we shall ever and anon be
+conscious of the radiance of a beautiful, unconscious intelligence, worth
+more than the smartness of schools and the cleverness of colleges. But no;
+we abhor the very notion of it, and generally succeed in extinguishing it
+long before the Three R's are done with.
+
+And yet, by wisely directing the child's use of the first of the Three,
+much of the ill effects of the trio and their offspring might be
+counteracted. If we believed--if the great mass of people known as the
+civilized world did actually and livingly believe--that there was really
+anything beyond or above the physical order of nature, our children's
+literature, wrongly so called, would not be what it is. We believe what we
+can see and touch; we teach them to believe the same, and, not satisfied
+with that, we sedulously warn them not to believe anything else. The
+child, let us suppose, has heard from some unauthorized person that there
+are fairies--little magical creatures an inch high, up to all manner of
+delightful feats. He comprehends the whole matter at half a word, feels
+that he had known it already, and half thinks that he sees one or two on
+his way home. He runs up to his mother and tells her about it; and has she
+ever seen fairies? Alas! His mother tells him that the existence of such a
+being as a fairy is impossible. In old times, when the world was very
+ignorant and superstitious, they used to ascribe everything that happened
+to supernatural agency; even the trifling daily accidents of one's life,
+such as tumbling down stairs, or putting the right shoe on the left foot,
+were thought or fancied to be the work of some mysterious power; and since
+ignorant people are very apt to imagine they see what they believe
+[proceeds this mother] instead of only believing what they see; and since,
+furthermore, ignorance disposes to exaggeration and thus to untruth, these
+people ended by asserting that they saw fairies. "Now, my child,"
+continues the parent, "it would grieve me to see you the victim of such
+folly. Do not read fairy stories. They are not true to life; they fill
+your mind with idle notions; they cannot form your understanding, or aid
+you to do your work in the world. If you should happen to fall in with
+such fables, be careful as you read to bear in mind that they are pure
+inventions--pretty, sometimes, perhaps, but essentially frivolous, if not
+immoral. You have, however, thanks to the enlightened enterprise of
+writers and publishers, an endless assortment of juvenile books and
+periodicals which combine legitimate amusement with sound and trustworthy
+instruction. Here are stories about little children, just like yourself,
+who talk and act just as you do, and to whom nothing supernatural or
+outlandish ever happens; and whose adventures, when you have read them,
+convey to you some salutary moral lesson. What more can you want? Yes,
+very likely 'Grimm's Tales' and 'The Arabian Nights' may seem more
+attractive; but in this world many harmful things put on an inviting
+guise, which deceives the inexperienced eye. May my child remember that
+all is not gold that glitters, and desire, not what is diverting merely,
+but what is useful and ... and conventional!"
+
+Let us admit that, things being as they are, it is necessary to develop
+the practical side of the child's nature, to ground him in moral
+principles, and to make him comprehend and fear--nominally God, but
+really--society. But why, in addition to doing this, should we strangle
+the unpractical side of his nature,--the ideal, imaginative, spiritual
+side,--the side which alone can determine his value or worthlessness in
+eternity? If our minds were visible as our bodies are, we should behold on
+every side of us, and in our own private looking-glasses, such abortions,
+cripples, and monstrosities as all the slums of Europe and the East could
+not parallel. We pretend to make little men and women out of our children,
+and we make little dwarfs and hobgoblins out of them. Moreover, we should
+not diminish even the practical efficiency of the coming generation by
+rejecting their unpractical side. Whether this boy's worldly destination
+be to clean a stable or to represent his country at a foreign court, he
+will do his work all the better, instead of worse, for having been allowed
+freedom of expansion on the ideal plane. He will do it comprehensively, or
+as from above downward, instead of blindly, or as from below upward. To a
+certain extent, this position is very generally admitted by instructors
+nowadays; but the admission bears little or no fruit. The ideality and
+imagination which they have in mind are but a partial and feeble imitation
+of what is really signified by those terms. Ideality and imagination are
+themselves merely the symptom or expression of the faculty and habit of
+spiritual or subjective intuition--a faculty of paramount value in life,
+though of late years, in the rush of rational knowledge and discovery, it
+has fallen into neglect. But it is by means of this faculty alone that the
+great religion of India was constructed--the most elaborate and seductive
+of all systems; and although as a faith Buddhism is also the most
+treacherous and dangerous attack ever made upon the immortal welfare of
+mankind, that circumstance certainly does not discredit or invalidate the
+claim to importance of spiritual intuition itself. It may be objected that
+spiritual intuition is a vague term. It undoubtedly belongs to an abstruse
+region of psychology; but its meaning for our present purpose is simply
+the act of testing questions of the moral consciousness by an inward
+touchstone of truth, instead of by external experience or information.
+That the existence of such a touchstone should be ridiculed by those who
+are accustomed to depend for their belief upon palpable or logical
+evidence, goes without saying; but, on the other hand, there need be no
+collision or argument on the point, since no question with which intuition
+is concerned can ever present itself to persons who pin their faith to the
+other sort of demonstration. The reverse of this statement is by no means
+true; but it would lead us out of our present path to discuss the matter.
+
+Assuming, however, that intuition is possible, it is evident that it
+should exist in children in an extremely pure, if not in its most potent
+state; and to deny it opportunity of development might fairly be called a
+barbarity. It will hardly be disputed that children are an important
+element in society. Without them we should lose the memory of our youth,
+and all opportunity for the exercise of unselfish and disinterested
+affection. Life would become arid and mechanical to a degree now scarcely
+conceivable; chastity and all the human virtues would cease to exist;
+marriage would be an aimless and absurd transaction; and the brotherhood
+of man, even in the nominal sense that it now exists, would speedily be
+abjured. Political economy and sociology neglect to make children an
+element in their arguments and deductions, and no small part of their
+error is attributable to that circumstance. But although children still
+are born, and all the world acknowledges their paramount moral and social
+value, the general tendency of what we are forced to call education at the
+present day is to shorten as much as possible the period of childhood. In
+America and Germany especially--but more in America than in Germany--
+children are urged and stimulated to "grow up" almost before they have
+been short-coated. That conceptions of order and discipline should be
+early instilled into them is proper enough; but no other order and
+discipline seems to be contemplated by educators than the forcing them to
+stand and be stuffed full of indigestible and incongruous knowledge, than
+which proceeding nothing more disorderly could be devised. It looks as if
+we felt the innocence and naturalness of our children to be a rebuke to
+us, and wished to do away with it in short order. There is something in
+the New Testament about offending the little ones, and the preferred
+alternative thereto; and really we are outraging not only the objective
+child, but the subjective one also--that in ourselves, namely, which is
+innocent and pure, and without which we had better not be at all. Now I do
+not mean to say that the only medicine that can cure this malady is
+legitimate children's literature; wise parents are also very useful,
+though not perhaps so generally available. My present contention is that
+the right sort of literature is an agent of great efficiency, and may be
+very easily come by. Children derive more genuine enjoyment and profit
+from a good book than most grown people are susceptible of: they see what
+is described, and themselves enact and perfect the characters of the story
+as it goes along.
+
+Nor is it indispensable that literature of the kind required should
+forthwith be produced; a great deal, of admirable quality, is already on
+hand. There are a few great poems----Spenser's "Faerie Queene" is one--
+which no well regulated child should be without; but poetry in general is
+not exactly what we want. Children--healthy children--never have the
+poetic genius; but they are born mystics, and they have the sense of
+humor. The best way to speak to them is in prose, and the best kind of
+prose is the symbolic. The hermetic philosophers of the Middle Ages are
+probably the authors of some of the best children's stories extant. In
+these tales, disguised beneath what is apparently the simplest and most
+artless flow of narrative, profound truths are discussed and explained.
+The child reads the narrative, and certainly cannot be accused of
+comprehending the hidden philosophical problem; yet that also has its
+share in charming him. The reason is partly that true symbolic or
+figurative writing is the simplest form known to literature. The simplest,
+that is to say, in outward form,--it may be indefinitely abstruse as to
+its inward contents. Indeed, the very cause of its formal simplicity is
+its interior profundity. The principle of hermetic writing was, as we
+know, to disguise philosophical propositions and results under a form of
+words which should ostensibly signify some very ordinary and trivial
+thing. It was a secret language, in the vocabulary of which material facts
+are used to represent spiritual truths. But it differed from ordinary
+secret language in this, that not only were the truths represented in the
+symbols, but the philosophical development of the truth, in its
+ramifications, was completely evolved under the cover of a logically
+consistent tale. This, evidently, is a far higher achievement of ingenuity
+than merely to string together a series of unrelated parts of speech,
+which, on being tested by the "key," shall discover the message or
+information really intended. It is, in fact, a practical application of
+the philosophical discovery, made by or communicated to the hermetic
+philosophers, that every material object in nature answers to or
+corresponds with a certain one or group of philosophical truths. Viewed in
+this light, the science of symbols or of correspondences ceases to be an
+arbitrary device, susceptible of alteration according to fancy, and
+avouches itself an essential and consistent relation between the things of
+the mind and the things of the senses. There is a complete mental
+creation, answering to the material creation, not continuously evolved
+from it, but on a different or detached plane. The sun,--to take an
+example,--the source of light and heat, and thereby of physical nature, is
+in these fables always the symbol of God, of love and wisdom, by which the
+spirit of man is created. Light, then, answers to wisdom, and heat to
+love. And since all physical substances are the result of the combined
+action of light and heat, we may easily perceive how these hermetic sages
+were enabled to use every physical object as a cloak of its corresponding
+philosophical truth,--with no other liability to error than might result
+from the imperfect condition of their knowledge of physical laws.
+
+To return, however, to the children, I need scarcely remark that the cause
+of children's taking so kindly to hermetic writing is that it is actually
+a living writing; it is alive in precisely the same way that nature, or
+man himself, is alive. Matter is dead; life organizes and animates it. And
+all writing is essentially dead which is a mere transcript of fact, and is
+not inwardly organized and vivified by a spiritual significance. Children
+do not know what it is that makes a human being smile, move, and talk; but
+they know that such a phenomenon is infinitely more interesting than a
+doll; and they prove it by themselves supplying the doll with speech and
+motions out of their own minds, so as to make it as much like a real
+person as possible. In the same way, they do not perceive the
+philosophical truth which is the cause of existence of the hermetic fable;
+but they find that fable far more juicy and substantial than the ordinary
+narrative of every-day facts, because, however fine the surface of the
+latter may be, it has, after all, nothing but its surface to recommend it.
+It has no soul; it is not alive; and, though they cannot explain why, they
+feel the difference between that thin, fixed grimace and the changing
+smile of the living countenance.
+
+It would scarcely be practicable, however, to confine the children's
+reading to hermetic literature; for not much of it is extant in its pure
+state. But it is hardly too much to say that all fairy stories, and
+derivations from these, trace their descent from an hermetic ancestry.
+They are often unaware of their genealogy; but the sparks of that primal
+vitality are in them. The fairy is itself a symbol for the expression of a
+more complex and abstract idea; but, once having come into existence, and
+being, not a pure symbol, but a hybrid between the symbol and that for
+which it stands, it presently began an independent career of its own. The
+mediaeval imagination went to work with it, found it singularly and
+delightfully plastic to its touch and requirements, and soon made it the
+centre of a new and charming world, in which a whole army of graceful and
+romantic fancies, which are always in quest of an arena in which to
+disport themselves before the mind, found abundant accommodation and
+nourishment. The fairy land of mediaeval Christianity seems to us the most
+satisfactory of all fairy lands, probably because it is more in accord
+with our genius and prejudices than those of the East; and it fitted in so
+aptly with the popular mediaeval ignorance on the subject of natural
+phenomena, that it became actually an article of belief with the mass of
+men, who trembled at it while they invented it, in the most delicious
+imaginable state of enchanted alarm. All this is prime reading for
+children; because, though it does not carry an orderly spiritual meaning
+within it, it is more spiritual than material, and is constructed entirely
+according to the dictates of an exuberant and richly colored, but,
+nevertheless, in its own sphere, legitimate imagination. Indeed, fairy
+land, though as it were accidentally created, has the same permanent right
+to be that Beauty has; it agrees with a genuine aspect of human nature,
+albeit one much discountenanced just at present. The sequel to it, in
+which romantic human personages are accredited with fairy-like attributes,
+as in the "Faerie Queene," already alluded to, is a step in the wrong
+direction, but not a step long enough to carry us altogether outside of
+the charmed circle. The child's instinct of selection being vast and
+cordial,--he will make a grain of true imagination suffuse and glorify a
+whole acre of twaddle,---we may with security leave him in that fantastic
+society. Moreover, some children being less imaginative than others, and
+all children being less imaginative in some moods and conditions than at
+other seasons, the elaborate compositions of Tasso, Cervantes, and the
+others, though on the boundary line between what is meat for babes and the
+other sort of meat, have also their abiding use.
+
+The "Arabian Nights" introduced us to the domain of the Oriental
+imagination, and has done more than all the books of travel in the East to
+make us acquainted with the Asiatic character and its differences from our
+own. From what has already been said on the subject of spiritual intuition
+in relation to these races, one is prepared to find that all the Eastern
+literature that has any value is hermetic writing, and therefore, in so
+far, proper for children. But the incorrigible subtlety of the Oriental
+intellect has vitiated much of their symbology, and the sentiment of sheer
+wonder is stimulated rather than that of orderly imagination. To read the
+"Arabian Nights" or the "Bhagavad-Gita" is a sort of dissipation; upon the
+unhackneyed mind of the child it leaves a reactionary sense of depression.
+The life which it embodies is distorted, over-colored, and exciting; it
+has not the serene and balanced power of the Western productions.
+Moreover, these books were not written with the grave philosophic purpose
+that animated our own hermetic school; it is rather a sort of jugglery
+practised with the subject---an exercise of ingenuity and invention for
+their own sake. It indicates a lack of the feeling of responsibility on
+the writers' part,--a result, doubtless, of the prevailing fatalism that
+underlies all their thought. It is not essentially wholesome, in short;
+but it is immeasurably superior to the best of the productions called
+forth by our modern notions of what should be given to children to read.
+
+But I can do no more than touch upon this branch of the subject; nor will
+it be possible to linger long over the department of our own literature
+which came into being with "Robinson Crusoe." No theory as to children's
+books would be worth much attention which found itself obliged to exclude
+that memorable work. Although it submits in a certain measure to
+classification, it is almost _sui generis_; no book of its kind,
+approaching it in merit, has ever been written. In what, then, does its
+fascination consist? There is certainly nothing hermetic about it; it is
+the simplest and most studiously matter-of-fact narrative of events,
+comprehensible without the slightest effort, and having no meaning that is
+not apparent on the face of it. And yet children, and grown people also,
+read it again and again, and cannot find it uninteresting. I think the
+phenomenon may largely be due to the nature of the subject, which is
+really of primary and universal interest to mankind. It is the story of
+the struggle of man with wild and hostile nature,--in the larger sense an
+elementary theme,--his shifts, his failures, his perils, his fears, his
+hopes, his successes. The character of Robinson is so artfully generalized
+or universalized, and sympathy for him is so powerfully aroused and
+maintained, that the reader, especially the child reader, inevitably
+identifies himself with him, and feels his emotions and struggles as his
+own. The ingredient of suspense is never absent from the story, and the
+absence of any plot prevents us from perceiving its artificiality. It is,
+in fact, a type of the history of the human race, not on the higher plane,
+but on the physical one; the history of man's contest with and final
+victory over physical nature. The very simplicity and obviousness of the
+details give them grandeur and comprehensiveness: no part of man's
+character which his contact with nature can affect or develop is left
+untried in Robinson. He manifests in little all historical earthly
+experiences of the race; such is the scheme of the book; and its
+permanence in literature is due to the sobriety and veracity with which
+that scheme is carried out. To speak succinctly, it does for the body what
+the hermetic and cognate literature does for the soul; and for the healthy
+man, the body is not less important than the soul in its own place and
+degree. It is not the work of the Creator, but it is contingent upon
+creation.
+
+But poor Robinson has been most unfortunate in his progeny, which at this
+day overrun the whole earth, and render it a worse wilderness than ever
+was the immortal Crusoe Island. Miss Edgeworth, indeed, might fairly pose
+as the most persistently malignant of all sources of error in the design
+of children's literature; but it is to be feared that it was Defoe who
+first made her aware of the availability of her own venom. She foisted her
+prim and narrow moral code upon the commonplace adventures of a priggish
+little boy and his companions; and straightway the whole dreary and
+disastrous army of sectarians and dogmatists took up the cry, and have
+been ringing the lugubrious changes on it ever since. There is really no
+estimating the mortal wrong that has been done to childhood by Maria
+Edgeworth's "Frank" and "The Parent's Assistant"; and, for my part, I
+derive a melancholy joy in availing myself of this opportunity to express
+my sense of my personal share in the injury. I believe that my affection
+for the human race is as genuine as the average; but I am sure it would
+have been greater had Miss Edgeworth never been born; and were I to come
+across any philosophical system whereby I could persuade myself that she
+belonged to some other order of beings than the human, I should be
+strongly tempted to embrace that system on that ground alone.
+
+After what has been advanced in the preceding pages, it does not need that
+I should state how earnestly I deprecate the kind of literary food which
+we are now furnishing to the coming generation in such sinister abundance.
+I am sure it is written and published with good and honorable motives; but
+at the very best it can only do no harm. Moreover, however well
+intentioned, it is bad as literature; it is poorly conceived and written,
+and, what is worse, it is saturated with affectation. For an impression
+prevails that one needs to talk down to children;--to keep them constantly
+reminded that they are innocent, ignorant little things, whose consuming
+wish it is to be good and go to Sunday-school, and who will be all
+gratitude and docility to whomsoever provides them with the latest fashion
+of moral sugarplums; whereas, so far as my experience and information
+goes, children are the most formidable literary critics in the world.
+Matthew Arnold himself has not so sure an instinct for what is sound and
+good in a book as any intelligent little boy or girl of eight years old.
+They judge absolutely; they are hampered by no comparisons or relative
+considerations. They cannot give chapter and verse for their opinion; but
+about the opinion itself there is no doubt. They have no theories; they
+judge in a white light. They have no prejudices nor traditions; they come
+straight from the simple source of life. But, on the other hand, they are
+readily hocussed and made morbid by improper drugs, and presently, no
+doubt, lose their appetite for what is wholesome. Now, we cannot hope that
+an army of hermetic philosophers or Mother-Gooses will arise at need and
+remedy all abuses; but at least we might refrain from moralizing and
+instruction, and, if we can do nothing more, confine ourselves to plain
+stories of adventure, say, with no ulterior object whatever. There still
+remains the genuine literature of the past to draw upon; but let us
+beware, as we would of forgery and perjury, of serving it up, as has been
+done too often, medicated and modified to suit the foolish dogmatism of
+the moment. Hans Christian Andersen was the last writer of children's
+stories, properly so called; though, considering how well married to his
+muse he was, it is a wonder as well as a calamity that he left no
+descendants.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE MORAL AIM IN FICTION.
+
+
+The producers of modern fiction, who have acquiesced more or less
+completely in the theory of art for art's sake, are not, perhaps, aware
+that a large class of persons still exist who hold fiction to be
+unjustifiable, save in so far as the author has it at heart not only (or
+chiefly) to adorn the tale, but also (and first of all) to point the
+moral. The novelist, in other words, should so mould the characters and
+shape the plot of his imaginary drama as to vindicate the wisdom and
+integrity of the Decalogue: if he fail to do this, or if he do the
+opposite of this, he deserves not the countenance of virtuous and God-
+fearing persons.
+
+Doubtless it should be evident to every sane and impartial mind, whether
+orthodox or agnostic, that an art which runs counter to the designs of God
+toward the human race, or to the growth of the sentiment of universal
+human brotherhood, must sooner or later topple down from its fantastic and
+hollow foundation. "Hitch your wagon to a star," says Emerson; "do not lie
+and steal: no god will help." And although, for the sake of his own
+private interests of the moment, a man will occasionally violate the moral
+law, yet, with mankind at large, the necessity of vindicating the superior
+advantages of right over wrong is acknowledged not only in the interests
+of civilized society, but because we feel that, however hostile "goodness"
+may seem to be to my or your personal and temporary aims, it still remains
+the only wholesome and handsome choice for the race at large: and
+therefore do we, as a race, refuse to tolerate--on no matter how plausible
+an artistic plea--any view of human life which either professes
+indifference to this universal sentiment, or perversely challenges it.
+
+The true ground of dispute, then, does not lie here. The art which can
+stoop to be "procuress to the lords of hell," is art no longer. But, on
+the other hand, it would be difficult to point to any great work of art,
+generally acknowledged to be such, which explicitly concerns itself with
+the vindication of any specific moral doctrine. The story in which the
+virtuous are rewarded for their virtue, and the evil punished for their
+wickedness, fails, somehow, to enlist our full sympathy; it falls flatly
+on the ear of the mind; it does not stimulate thought. It does not
+satisfy; we fancy that something still remains to be said, or, if this be
+all, then it was hardly worth saying. The real record of life--its terror,
+its beauty, its pathos, its depth--seems to have been missed. We may admit
+that the tale is in harmony with what we have been taught ought to happen;
+but the lessons of our private experience have not authenticated our moral
+formulas; we have seen the evil exalted and the good brought low; and we
+inevitably desire that our "fiction" shall tell us, not what ought to
+happen, but what, as a matter of fact, does happen. To put this a little
+differently: we feel that the God of the orthodox moralist is not the God
+of human nature. He is nothing but the moralist himself in a highly
+sublimated state, but betraying, in spite of that sublimation, a fatal
+savor of human personality. The conviction that any man--George
+Washington, let us say--is a morally unexceptionable man, does not in the
+least reconcile us to the idea of God being an indefinitely exalted
+counterpart of Washington. Such a God would be "most tolerable, and not to
+be endured"; and the more exalted he was, the less endurable would he be.
+In short, man instinctively refuses to regard the literal inculcation of
+the Decalogue as the final word of God to the human race, and much less to
+the individuals of that race; and when he finds a story-teller proceeding
+upon the contrary assumption, he is apt to put that story-teller down as
+either an ass or a humbug.
+
+As for art--if the reader happen to be competent to form an opinion on
+that phase of the matter--he will generally find that the art dwindles in
+direct proportion as the moralized deity expatiates; in fact, that they
+are incompatible. And he will also confess (if he have the courage of his
+opinions) that, as between moralized deity and true art, his choice is
+heartily and unreservedly for the latter.
+
+I do not apprehend that the above remarks, fairly interpreted, will
+encounter serious opposition from either party to the discussion; and yet,
+so far as I am aware, neither party has as yet availed himself of the
+light which the conclusion throws upon the nature of art itself. It should
+be obvious, however, that upon a true definition of art the whole argument
+must ultimately hinge: for we can neither deny that art exists, nor affirm
+that it can exist inconsistently with a recognition of a divinely
+beneficent purpose in creation. It must, therefore, in some way be an
+expression or reflection of that purpose. But in what does the purpose in
+question essentially consist?
+
+Broadly speaking--for it would be impossible within the present limits to
+attempt a full analysis of the subject--it may be considered as a gradual
+and progressive Purification, not of this or that particular individual in
+contradistinction to his fellows, but of human nature as an entirety. The
+evil into which all men are born, and of which the Decalogue, or
+conscience, makes us aware, is not an evil voluntarily contracted on our
+part, but is inevitable to us as the creation of a truly infinite love and
+wisdom. It is, in fact, our characteristic nature as animals: and it is
+only because we are not only animal, but also and above all human, that we
+are enabled to recognize it as evil instead of good. We absolve the cat,
+the dog, the wolf, and the lion from any moral responsibility for their
+deeds, because we feel them to be deficient in conscience, which, is our
+own divinely bestowed gift and privilege, and which has been defined as
+the spirit of God in the created nature, seeking to become the creature's
+own spirit. Now, the power to correct this evil does not abide in us as
+individuals, nor will a literal adherence to the moral law avail to purify
+any mother's son of us. Conscience always says "Do not,"--never "Do"; and
+obedience to it neither can give us a personal claim on God's favor nor
+was it intended to do so: its true function is to keep us innocent, so
+that we may not individually obstruct the accomplishment of the divine
+ends toward us as a race. Our nature not being the private possession of
+any one of us, but the impersonal substratum of us all, it follows that it
+cannot be redeemed piecemeal, but only as a whole; and, manifestly, the
+only Being capable of effecting such redemption is not Peter, or Paul, or
+George Washington, or any other atomic exponent of that nature, be he who
+he may; but He alone whose infinitude is the complement of our finiteness,
+and whose gradual descent into human nature (figured in Scripture under
+the symbol of the Incarnation) is even now being accomplished--as any one
+may perceive who reads aright the progressive enlightenment of conscience
+and intellect which history, through many vicissitudes, displays. We find,
+therefore, that art is, essentially, the imaginative expression of a
+divine life in man. Art depends for its worth and veracity, not upon its
+adherence to literal fact, but upon its perception and portrayal of the
+underlying truth, of which fact is but the phenomenal and imperfect
+shadow. And it can have nothing to do with personal vice or virtue, in the
+way either of condemning the one or vindicating the other; it can only
+treat them as elements in its picture--as factors in human destiny. For
+the notion commonly entertained that the practice of virtue gives us a
+claim upon the Divine Exchequer (so to speak), and the habit of acting
+virtuously for the sake of maintaining our credit in society, and ensuring
+our prosperity in the next world,--in so thinking and acting we
+misapprehend the true inwardness of the matter. To cultivate virtue
+because its pays, no matter what the sort of coin in which payment is
+looked for, is to be the victims of a lamentable delusion. For such virtue
+makes each man jealous of his neighbor; whereas the aim of Providence is
+to bring about the broadest human fellowship. A man's physical body
+separates him from other men; and this fact disposes him to the error that
+his nature is also a separate possession, and that he can only be "good"
+by denying himself. But the only goodness that is really good is a
+spontaneous and impersonal evolution, and this occurs, not where self-
+denial has been practised, but only where a man feels himself to be
+absolutely on the same level of desert or non-desert as are the mass of
+his fellow-creatures. There is no use in obeying the commandments, unless
+it be done, not to make one's self more deserving than another of God's
+approbation, but out of love for goodness and truth in themselves, apart
+from any personal considerations. The difference between true religion and
+formal religion is that the first leads us to abandon all personal claims
+to salvation, and to care only for the salvation of humanity as a whole;
+whereas the latter stimulates is to practise outward self-denial, in order
+that our real self may be exalted. Such self-denial results not in
+humility, but in spiritual pride.
+
+In no other way than this, it seems to me, can art and morality be brought
+into harmony. Art bears witness to the presence in us of something purer
+and loftier than anything of which we can be individually conscious. Its
+complete expression we call inspiration; and he who is the subject of the
+inspiration can account no better than any one else for the result which
+art accomplishes through him. The perfect poem is found, not made; the
+mind which utters it did not invent it. Art takes all nature and all
+knowledge for her province; but she does not leave it as she found it; by
+the divine necessity that is upon her, she breathes a soul into her
+materials, and organizes chaos into form. But never, under any
+circumstances, does she deign to minister to our selfish personal hope or
+greed. She shows us how to love our neighbor, never ourselves. Shakspeare,
+Homer, Phidias, Raphael, were no Pharisees--at least in so far as they
+were artists; nor did any one ever find in their works any countenance for
+that inhuman assumption--"I am holier than thou!" In the world's darkest
+hours, art has sometimes stood as the sole witness of the nobler life that
+was in eclipse. Civilizations arise and vanish; forms of religion hold
+sway and are forgotten; learning and science advance and gather strength;
+but true art was as great and as beautiful three thousand years ago as it
+is to-day. We are prone to confound the man with the artist, and to
+suppose that he is artistic by possession and inheritance, instead of
+exclusively by dint of what he does. No artist worthy the name ever dreams
+of putting himself into his work, but only what is infinitely distinct
+from and other than himself. It is not the poet who brings forth the poem,
+but the poem that begets the poet; it makes him, educates him, creates in
+him the poetic faculty. Those whom we call great men, the heroes of
+history, are but the organs of great crises and opportunities: as Emerson
+has said, they are the most indebted men. In themselves they are not
+great; there is no ratio between their achievements and them. Our judgment
+is misled; we do not discriminate between the divine purpose and the human
+instrument. When we listen to Napoleon fretting his soul away at Elba, or
+to Carlyle wrangling with his wife at Chelsea, we are shocked at the
+discrepancy between the lofty public performance and the petty domestic
+shortcoming. Yet we do wrong to blame them; the nature of which they are
+examples is the same nature that is shared also by the publican and the
+sinner.
+
+Instead, therefore, of saying that art should be moral, we should rather
+say that all true morality is art--that art is the test of morality. To
+attempt to make this heavenly Pegasus draw the sordid plough of our
+selfish moralistic prejudices is a grotesque subversion of true order. Why
+should the novelist make believe that the wicked are punished and the good
+are rewarded in this world? Does he not know, on the contrary, that
+whatsoever is basest in our common life tends irresistibly to the highest
+places, and that the selfish element in our nature is on the side of
+public order? Evil is at present a more efficient instrument of order
+(because an interested one) than good; and the novelist who makes this
+appear will do a far greater and more lasting benefit to humanity than he
+who follows the cut-and-dried artificial programme of bestowing crowns on
+the saint and whips of scorpions on the sinner.
+
+As a matter of fact, I repeat, the best influences of the best literature
+have never been didactic, and there is no reason to believe they ever will
+be. The only semblance of didacticism which can enter into literature is
+that which conveys such lessons as may be learned from sea and sky,
+mountain and valley, wood and stream, bird and beast; and from the broad
+human life of races, nations, and firesides; a lesson that is not obvious
+and superficial, but so profoundly hidden in the creative depths as to
+emerge only to an apprehension equally profound. For the chatter and
+affectation of sense disturb and offend that inward spiritual ear which,
+in the silent recesses of meditation, hears the prophetic murmur of the
+vast ocean of human nature that flows within us and around us all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE MAKER OF MANY BOOKS.
+
+
+During the winter of 1879, when I was in London, it was my fortune to
+attend, a social meeting of literary men at the rooms of a certain eminent
+publisher. The rooms were full of tobacco-smoke and talk, amid which were
+discernible, on all sides, the figures and faces of men more or less
+renowned in the world of books. Most noticeable among these personages was
+a broad-shouldered, sturdy man, of middle height, with a ruddy
+countenance, and snow-white tempestuous beard and hair. He wore large,
+gold-rimmed spectacles, but his eyes were black and brilliant, and looked
+at his interlocutor with a certain genial fury of inspection. He seemed to
+be in a state of some excitement; he spoke volubly and almost
+boisterously, and his voice was full-toned and powerful, though pleasant
+to the ear. He turned himself, as he spoke, with a burly briskness, from
+one side to another, addressing himself first to this auditor and then to
+that, his words bursting forth from beneath his white moustache with such
+an impetus of hearty breath that it seemed as if all opposing arguments
+must be blown quite away. Meanwhile he flourished in the air an ebony
+walking-stick, with much vigor of gesticulation, and narrowly missing, as
+it appeared, the pates of his listeners. He was clad in evening dress,
+though the rest of the company was, for the most part, in mufti; and he
+was an exceedingly fine-looking old gentleman. At the first glance, you
+would have taken him to be some civilized and modernized Squire Western,
+nourished with beef and ale, and roughly hewn out of the most robust and
+least refined variety of human clay. Looking at him more narrowly,
+however, you would have reconsidered this judgment. Though his general
+contour and aspect were massive and sturdy, the lines of his features were
+delicately cut; his complexion was remarkably pure and fine, and his face
+was susceptible of very subtle and sensitive changes of expression. Here
+was a man of abundant physical strength and vigor, no doubt, but carrying
+within him a nature more than commonly alert and impressible. His
+organization, though thoroughly healthy, was both complex and high-
+wrought; his character was simple and straightforward to a fault, but he
+was abnormally conscientious, and keenly alive to others' opinion
+concerning him. It might be thought that he was overburdened with self-
+esteem, and unduly opinionated; but, in fact, he was but overanxious to
+secure the good-will and agreement of all with whom he came in contact.
+There was some peculiarity in him--some element or bias in his composition
+that made him different from other men; but, on the other hand, there was
+an ardent solicitude to annul or reconcile this difference, and to prove
+himself to be, in fact, of absolutely the same cut and quality as all the
+rest of the world. Hence he was in a demonstrative, expository, or
+argumentative mood; he could not sit quiet in the face of a divergence
+between himself and his associates; he was incorrigibly strenuous to
+obliterate or harmonize the irreconcilable points between him and others;
+and since these points remained irreconcilable, he remained in a constant
+state of storm and stress on the subject.
+
+It was impossible to help liking such a man at first sight; and I believe
+that no man in London society was more generally liked than Anthony
+Trollope. There was something pathetic in his attitude as above indicated;
+and a fresh and boyish quality always invested him. His artlessness was
+boyish, and so were his acuteness and his transparent but somewhat belated
+good-sense. He was one of those rare persons who not only have no
+reserves, but who can afford to dispense with them. After he had shown you
+all he had in him, you would have seen nothing that was not gentlemanly,
+honest, and clean. He was a quick-tempered man, and the ardor and hurry of
+his temperament made him seem more so than he really was; but he was never
+more angry than he was forgiving and generous. He was hurt by little
+things, and little things pleased him; he was suspicious and perverse, but
+in a manner that rather endeared him to you than otherwise. Altogether, to
+a casual acquaintance, who knew nothing of his personal history, he was
+something of a paradox--an entertaining contradiction. The publication of
+his autobiography explained many things in his character that were open to
+speculation; and, indeed, the book is not only the most interesting and
+amusing that its author has ever written, but it places its subject before
+the reader more completely and comprehensively than most autobiographies
+do. This, however, is due much less to any direct effort or intention on
+the writer's part, than to the unconscious self-revelation which meets the
+reader on every page. No narrative could be simpler, less artificial; and
+yet, everywhere, we read between the lines, and, so to speak, discover
+Anthony Trollope in spite of his efforts to discover himself to us.
+
+The truth appears to be that the youthful Trollope, like a more famous
+fellow-novelist, began the world with more kicks than half-pence. His
+boyhood, he affirms, was as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could
+well be, owing to a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on his father's
+part, and, on his own, to "an utter lack of juvenile manhood"--whatever
+that may be. His father was a lawyer, who frightened away all his clients
+by his outrageous temper, and who encountered one mischance after another
+until he landed himself and his family in open bankruptcy; from which they
+were rescued, partly by death, which carried away four of them (including
+the old gentleman), and partly by Mrs. Trollope, who, at fifty years of
+age, brought out her famous book on America, and continued to make a fair
+income by literature (as she called it) until 1856, when, being seventy-
+six years old, and having produced one hundred and fourteen volumes, she
+permitted herself to retire. This extraordinary lady, in her youth,
+cherished what her son calls "an emotional dislike to tyrants"; but when
+her American experience had made her acquainted with some of the seamy
+aspects of democracy, and especially after the aristocracy of her own
+country had begun to patronize her, she confessed the error of her early
+way, "and thought that archduchesses were sweet." But she was certainly a
+valiant and indefatigable woman,--"of all the people I have ever known,"
+says her son, "the most joyous, or, at any rate, the most capable of joy";
+and he adds that her best novels were written in 1834-35, when her husband
+and four of her six children were dying upstairs of consumption, and she
+had to divide her time between nursing them and writing. Assuredly, no son
+of hers need apprehend the reproach--"_Tydides melior matre_"; though
+Anthony, and his brother Thomas Adolphus, must, together, have run her
+pretty hard. The former remarks, with that terrible complacency in an
+awful fact which is one of his most noticeable and astounding traits, that
+the three of them "wrote more books than were probably ever before
+produced by a single family." The existence of a few more such families
+could be consistent only with a generous enlargement of the British
+Museum.
+
+The elder Trollope was a scholar, and to make scholars of his sons was one
+of his ruling ideas. Poor little Anthony endured no less than twelve
+mortal years of schooling--from the time he was seven until he was
+nineteen--and declares that, in all that time, he does not remember that
+he ever knew a lesson. "I have been flogged," he says, "oftener than any
+other human being." Nay, his troubles began before his school-days; for
+his father used to make him recite his infantile tasks to him while he was
+shaving, and obliged him to sit with his head inclined in such a manner
+"that he could pull my hair without stopping his razor or dropping his
+shaving-brush." This is a depressing picture; and there are plenty more
+like it. Dr. Butler, the master of Harrow, meeting the poor little
+draggletail urchin in the yard, desired to know, in awful accents, how so
+dirty a boy dared to show himself near the school! "He must have known me,
+had he seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of
+flogging me constantly. Perhaps," adds his victim, "he did not recognize
+me by my face!" But it is comforting to learn, in another place, that
+justice overtook the oppressor. "Dr. Butler only lived to be Dean of
+Peterborough; but his successor (Dr. Longley) became Archbishop of
+Canterbury." There is a great deal of Trollopian morality in the fate of
+these two men, the latter of whom "could not have said anything ill-
+natured if he had tried."
+
+Black care, however, continued to sit behind the horseman with harrowing
+persistence. A certain Dr. Drury (another schoolmaster) punished him on
+suspicion of "some nameless horror," of which the unfortunate youngster
+happened to be innocent. When, afterward, the latter fact began to be
+obvious, "he whispered to me half a word that perhaps he had been wrong.
+But, with a boy's stupid slowness, I said nothing, and he had not the
+courage to carry reparation farther." The poverty of Anthony's father
+deprived the boy of all the external advantages that might have enabled
+him to take rank with his fellows: and his native awkwardness and
+sensitiveness widened the breach. "I had no friend to whom I could pour
+out my sorrows. I was big, awkward and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked
+about in a most unattractive manner. Something of the disgrace of my
+school-days has clung to me all through life. When I have been claimed as
+school-fellow by some of those many hundreds who were with me either at
+Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that I had no right to talk of things
+from most of which I was kept in estrangement. I was never a coward, but
+to make a stand against three hundred tyrants required a moral courage
+which I did not possess." Once, however, they pushed him too far, and he
+was driven to rebellion. "And then came a great fight--at the end of which
+my opponent had to be taken home to be cured." And then he utters the
+characteristic wish that some one, of the many who witnessed this combat,
+may still be left alive "who will be able to say that, in claiming this
+solitary glory of my school-days, I am making no false boast." The lonely,
+lugubrious little champion! One would almost have been willing to have
+received from him a black eye and a bloody nose, only to comfort his sad
+heart. It is delightful to imagine the terrific earnestness of that
+solitary victory: and I would like to know what boy it was (if any) who
+lent the unpopular warrior a knee and wiped his face.
+
+After he got through his school-days, his family being then abroad, he had
+an offer of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment; and he might
+have been a major-general or field-marshal at this day had his schooling
+made him acquainted with the French and German languages. Being, however,
+entirely ignorant of these, he was obliged to study them in order to his
+admission; and while he was thus employed, he received news of a vacant
+clerkship in the General Post-Office, with the dazzling salary of L90 a
+year. Needless to say that he jumped at such an opening, seeing before him
+a vision of a splendid civil and social career, at something over twenty
+pounds a quarter. But London, even fifty years ago, was a more expensive
+place than Anthony imagined. Moreover, the boy was alone in the wilderness
+of the city, with no one to advise or guide him. The consequence was that
+these latter days of his youth were as bad or worse than the beginning. In
+reviewing his plight at this period, he observes: "I had passed my life
+where I had seen gay things, but had never enjoyed them. There was no
+house in which I could habitually see a lady's face or hear a lady's
+voice. At the Post-Office I got credit for nothing, and was reckless. I
+hated my work, and, more than all, I hated my idleness. Borrowings of
+money, sometimes absolute want, and almost constant misery, followed as a
+matter of course. I Had a full conviction that my life was taking me down
+to the lowest pits--a feeling that I had been looked upon as an evil, an
+encumbrance, a useless thing, a creature of whom those connected with me
+had to be ashamed. Even my few friends were half-ashamed of me. I
+acknowledge the weakness of a great desire to be loved--a strong wish to
+be popular. No one had ever been less so." Under these circumstances, he
+remarks that, although, no doubt, if the mind be strong enough, the
+temptation will not prevail, yet he is fain to admit that the temptation
+prevailed with him. He did not sit at home, after his return from the
+office, in the evening, to drink tea and read, but tramped out in the
+streets, and tried to see life and be jolly on L90 a year. He borrowed
+four pounds of a money-lender, to augment his resources, and found, after
+a few years, that he had paid him two hundred pounds for the
+accommodation. He met with every variety of absurd and disastrous
+adventure. The mother of a young woman with whom he had had an innocent
+flirtation in the country appeared one day at his desk in the office, and
+called out before all the clerks, "Anthony Trollope, when are you going to
+marry my daughter?" On another occasion a sum of money was missing from
+the table of the director. Anthony was summoned. The director informed him
+of the loss--"and, by G--!" he continued, thundering his fist down on the
+table, "no one has been in the room but you and I." "Then, by G--!" cried
+Anthony, thundering _his_ fist down upon something, "you have taken it!"
+This was very well; but the thing which Anthony had thumped happened to
+be, not a table, but a movable desk with an inkstand on it, and the ink
+flew up and deluged the face and shirt-front of the enraged director.
+Still another adventure was that of the Queen of Saxony and the Half-
+Crown; but the reader must investigate these matters for himself.
+
+So far there has been nothing looking toward the novel-writer. But now we
+learn that from the age of fifteen to twenty-six Anthony kept a journal,
+which, he says, "convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness,
+and conceit, but habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught
+me how to express myself with facility." In addition to this, and more to
+the purpose, he had formed an odd habit. Living, as he was forced to do,
+so much to himself, if not by himself, he had to play, not with other
+boys, but with himself; and his favorite play was to conceive a tale, or
+series of fictitious events, and to carry it on, day after day, for months
+together, in his mind. "Nothing impossible was ever introduced, or
+violently improbable. I was my own hero, but I never became a king or a
+duke, still less an Antinous, or six feet high. But I was a very clever
+person, and beautiful young women used to be very fond of me. I learned in
+this way to live in a world outside the world of my own material life."
+This is pointedly, even touchingly, characteristic. Never, to the day of
+his death, did Mr. Trollope either see or imagine anything impossible, or
+violently improbable, in the world. This mortal plane of things never
+dissolved before his gaze and revealed the mysteries of absolute Being;
+his heavens were never rolled up as a scroll, and his earth had no bubbles
+as the water hath. He took things as he found them; and he never found
+them out. But if the light that never was on sea or land does not
+illuminate the writings of Mr. Trollope, there is generally plenty of that
+other kind of light with which, after all, the average reader is more
+familiar, and which not a few, perhaps, prefer to the transcendental
+lustre. There is no modern novelist who has more clearly than Trollope
+defined to his own apprehension his own literary capabilities and
+limitations. He is thoroughly acquainted with both his fortes and his
+foibles; and so sound is his good sense, that he is seldom beguiled into
+toiling with futile ambition after effects that are beyond him. His proper
+domain is a sufficiently wide one; he is inimitably at home here; and when
+he invites us there to visit him, we may be sure of getting good and
+wholesome entertainment. The writer's familiarity with his characters
+communicates itself imperceptibly to the reader; there are no difficult or
+awkward introductions; the toning of the picture (to use the painter's
+phrase) is unexceptionable; and if it be rather tinted than colored, the
+tints are handled in a workmanlike manner. Again, few English novelists
+seem to possess so sane a comprehension of the modes of life and thought
+of the British aristocracy as Trollope. He has not only made a study of
+them from the observer's point of view, but he has reasoned them out
+intellectually. The figures are not vividly defined; the realism is
+applied to events rather than to personages: we have the scene described
+for us but we do not look upon it. We should not recognize his characters
+if we saw them; but if we were told who they were, we should know, from
+their author's testimony, what were their characteristic traits and how
+they would act under given circumstances. The logical sequence of events
+is carefully maintained; nothing happens, either for good or for evil,
+other than might befall under the dispensations of a Providence no more
+unjust, and no more far-sighted, than Trollope himself. There is a good
+deal of the _a priori_ principle in his method; he has made up his mind as
+to certain fundamental data, and thence develops or explains whatever
+complication comes up for settlement. But to range about unhampered by any
+theories, concerned only to examine all phenomena, and to report
+thereupon, careless of any considerations save those of artistic
+propriety, would have been vanity and striving after wind to Trollope, and
+derivatively so, doubtless, to his readers.
+
+Considered in the abstract, it is a curious question what makes his novels
+interesting. The reader knows, in a sense, just what is in store for him,
+--or, rather, what is not. There will be no astonishment, no curdling
+horror, no consuming suspense. There may be, perhaps, as many murders,
+forgeries, foundlings, abductions, and missing wills, in Trollope's novels
+as in any others; but they are not told about in a manner to alarm us; we
+accept them philosophically; there are paragraphs in our morning paper
+that excite us more. And yet they are narrated with art, and with dramatic
+effect. They are interesting, but not uncourteously--not exasperatingly
+so; and the strangest part of it is that the introductory and intermediate
+passages are no less interesting, under Trollope's treatment, than are the
+murders and forgeries. Not only does he never offend the modesty of
+nature,--he encourages her to be prudish, and trains her to such evenness
+and severity of demeanor that we never know when we have had enough of
+her. His touch is eminently civilizing; everything, from the episodes to
+the sentences, moves without hitch or creak: we never have to read a
+paragraph twice, and we are seldom sorry to have read it once.
+
+Amusingly characteristic of Trollope is his treatment of his villains. His
+attitude toward them betrays no personal uncharitableness or animosity,
+but the villain has a bad time of it just the same. Trollope places upon
+him a large, benevolent, but unyielding forefinger, and says to us:
+"Remark, if you please, how this inferior reptile squirms when pressure is
+applied to him. I will now augment the pressure. You observe that the
+squirmings increase in energy and complexity. Now, if you please, I will
+bear down yet a little harder. Do not be alarmed, madam; the reptile
+undoubtedly suffers, but the spectacle may do us some good, and you may
+trust me not to let him do you any harm. There!--Yes, evisceration by
+means of pressure is beyond question painful; but every one must have
+observed the benevolence of my forefinger during the operation; and I
+fancy even the subject of the experiment (were he in a condition to
+express his sentiments) would have admitted as much. Thank you, ladies and
+gentlemen. I shall have the pleasure of meeting you again very shortly.
+John, another reptile, please!" Upon the whole, it is much to Trollope's
+credit that he wrote somewhere about fifty long novels; and to the credit
+of the English people that they paid him three hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars for these novels--and read them!
+
+But his success as a man of letters was still many years in the future.
+After seven years in the London office, he went to Ireland as assistant
+surveyor, and thenceforward he began to enjoy his business, and to get on
+in it. He was paid sixpence a mile, and he would ride forty miles a day.
+He rode to hounds, incidentally, whenever he got a chance, and he kept up
+the practice, with enthusiasm, to within a few years of his death. "It
+will, I think, be accorded to me," he says, "that I have ridden hard. I
+know very little about hunting; I am blind, very heavy, and I am now old;
+but I ride with a boy's energy, hating the roads, and despising young men
+who ride them; and I feel that life cannot give me anything better than
+when I have gone through a long run to the finish, keeping a place, not of
+glory, but of credit, among my juniors." Riding, working, having a jolly
+time, and gradually increasing his income, he lived until 1842, when he
+became engaged; and he was married on June 11, 1844. "I ought to name that
+happy day," he declares, "as the commencement of my better life." It was
+at about this date, also, that he began and finished, not without delay
+and procrastination, his first novel. Curiously enough, he affirms that he
+did not doubt his own intellectual sufficiency to write a readable novel:
+"What I did doubt was my own industry, and the chances of a market."
+Never, surely, was self-distrust more unfounded. As for the first novel,
+he sent it to his mother, to dispose of as best she could; and it never
+brought him anything, except a perception that it was considered by his
+friends to be "an unfortunate aggravation of the family disease." During
+the ensuing ten years, this view seemed to be not unreasonable, for, in
+all that time, though he worked hard, he earned by literature no more than
+L55. But, between 1857 and 1860, he received for various novels, from L100
+to L1000 each; and thereafter, L3000 or more was his regular price for a
+story in three volumes. As he maintained his connection with the post-
+office until 1867, he was in receipt of an income of L4500, "of which I
+spent two-thirds and put by one." We should be doing an injustice to Mr.
+Trollope to omit these details, which he gives so frankly; for, as he
+early informs us, "my first object in taking to literature was to make an
+income on which I and those belonging to me might live in comfort." Nor
+will he let us forget that novel-writing, to him, was not so much an art,
+or even a profession, as a trade, in which all that can be asked of a man
+is that he shall be honest and punctual, turning out good average work,
+and the more the better. "The great secret consists in"--in what?--why,
+"in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labor similar to those
+which an artisan or mechanic is forced to obey." There may be, however,
+other incidental considerations. "I have ever thought of myself as a
+preacher of sermons, and my pulpit as one I could make both salutary and
+agreeable to my audience"; and he tells us that he has used some of his
+novels for the expression of his political and social convictions. Again--
+"The novelist must please, and he must teach; a good novel should be both
+realistic and sensational in the highest degree." He says that he sees no
+reason why two or three good novels should not be written at the same
+time; and that, for his own part, he was accustomed to write two hundred
+and fifty words every fifteen minutes, by the watch, during his working
+hours. Nor does he mind letting us know that when he sits down to write a
+novel, he neither knows nor cares how it is to end. And finally, one is a
+little startled to hear him say, epigrammatically, that a writer should
+not have to tell a story, but should have a story to tell. Beyond a doubt,
+Anthony Trollope is something of a paradox.
+
+The world has long ago passed its judgment on his stories, but it is
+interesting, all the same, to note his own opinion of them; and though
+never arrogant, he is generally tolerant, if not genial. "A novel should
+be a picture of common life, enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos. I
+have never fancied myself to be a man of genius," he says; but again, with
+strange imperviousness, "A small daily task, if it be daily, will beat the
+labors of a spasmodic Hercules." Beat them, how? Why, in quantity. But how
+about quality? Is the travail of a work of art the same thing as the
+making of a pair of shoes? Emerson tells us that--
+
+  "Ever the words of the gods resound,
+    But the porches of man's ear
+  Seldom, in this low life's round,
+    Are unsealed, that he may hear."
+
+No one disputes, however, that you may hear the tapping of the cobbler's
+hammer at any time.
+
+To the view of the present writer, how much good soever Mr. Trollope may
+have done as a preacher and moralist, he has done great harm to English
+fictitious literature by his novels; and it need only be added, in this
+connection, that his methods and results in novel-writing seem best to be
+explained by that peculiar mixture of separateness and commonplaceness
+which we began by remarking in him. The separateness has given him the
+standpoint whence he has been able to observe and describe the
+commonplaceness with which (in spite of his separateness) he is in vital
+sympathy.
+
+But Trollope the man is the abundant and consoling compensation for
+Trollope the novelist; and one wishes that his books might have died, and
+he lived on indefinitely. It is charming to read of his life in London
+after his success in the _Cornhill Magazine_. "Up to that time I had lived
+very little among men. It was a festival to me to dine at the 'Garrick.' I
+think I became popular among those with whom I associated. I have ever
+wished to be liked by those around me--a wish that during the first half
+of my life was never gratified." And, again, in summing up his life, he
+says: "I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought to me no sorrow. It has
+been the companionship, rather than the habit of smoking that I loved. I
+have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the
+excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill-effects--to
+have the sweet, and to leave the bitter untasted--that has been my study.
+I will not say that I have never scorched a finger; but I carry no ugly
+wounds."
+
+A man who, at the end of his career, could make such a profession as this
+--who felt the need of no further self-vindication than this--such a man,
+whatever may have been his accountability to the muse of Fiction, is a
+credit to England and to human nature, and deserves to be numbered among
+the darlings of mankind. It was an honor to be called his friend; and what
+his idea of friendship was, may be learned from the passage in which he
+speaks of his friend Millais--with the quotation of which this paper may
+fitly be concluded:--
+
+"To see him has always been a pleasure; his voice has always been a sweet
+sound in my ears. Behind his back I have never heard him praised without
+joining the eulogist; I have never heard a word spoken against him without
+opposing the censurer. These words, should he ever see them, will come to
+him from the grave, and will tell him of my regard--as one living man
+never tells another."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+MR. MALLOCK'S MISSING SCIENCE.
+
+
+Before criticising Mr. Mallock's little essay, let us summarize its
+contents. The author begins with an analysis of the aims, the principles,
+and the "pseudo-science" of modern Democracy. Having established the evil
+and destructive character of these things, he sets himself to show by
+logical argument that the present state of social inequality, which
+Democrats wish to disturb, is a natural and wholesome state; that the
+continuance of civilization is dependent upon it; and that it could only
+be overturned by effecting a radical change--not in human institutions,
+but in human character. The desire for inequality is inherent in the human
+character; and in order to prove this statement, Mr. Mallock proceeds to
+affirm that there is such a thing as a science of human character; that of
+this science he is the discoverer; and that the application of this
+science to the question at issue will demonstrate the integrity of Mr.
+Mallock's views, and the infirmity of all others. In the ensuing chapters
+the application is made, and at the end the truth of the proposition is
+declared established.
+
+This is the outline; but let us note some of the details. Mr. Mallock
+asserts (Chap. I.) that the aim of modern Democracy is to overturn "all
+that has hitherto been connected with high-breeding or with personal
+culture"; and that "to call the Democrats a set of thieves and
+confiscators is merely to apply names to them which they have no wish to
+repudiate." He maintains (Chap. II.) that the first and foremost of the
+Democratic principles is "that the perfection of society involves social
+equality"; and that "the luxury of one man means the deprivation of
+another." He credits the Democrats with arguing that "the means of
+producing equality are a series of changes in existing institutions"; that
+"by changing the institutions of a society we are able to change its
+structure"; that "the cause of the distribution of wealth" is "laws and
+forms of government"; and that "the wealthy classes, as such, are
+connected with wealth in no other way but as the accidental appropriators
+of it." In his third chapter he tells us that "the entire theory of modern
+Democracy ... depends on the doctrine that the cause of wealth is labor";
+that Democrats believe we "may count on a man to labor, just as surely as
+we may count on a man to eat"; that "the man who does not labor is
+supported by the man who does"; and that the pseudo-science of modern
+Democracy "starts with the conception of man as containing in himself a
+natural tendency to labor." And here Mr. Mallock's statement of his
+opponent's position ends.
+
+In the fourth chapter we are brought within sight of "The Missing
+Substitute." "A man's character," we are told, "divides into his desires
+on the one hand, and his capacities on the other"; and it is observed that
+"various as are men's desires and capacities, yet if talent and ambition
+commanded no more than idleness and stupidity, all men practically would
+be idle and stupid." "Men's capacities," we are reminded, "are practically
+unequal, because they develop their own potential inequalities; they do
+this because they desire to place themselves in unequal external
+circumstances,--which result the condition of society renders possible."
+
+Coming now to the Science of Human Character itself, we find that it
+"asserts a permanent relationship to exist between human character and
+social inequality"; and the author then proceeds at some length to show
+how near Herbert Spencer, Buckle, and other social and economic
+philosophers, came to stumbling over his missing science, and yet avoided
+doing so. Nevertheless, argues Mr. Mallock, "if there be such a thing as a
+social science, or a science of history, there must be also a science of
+biography"; and this science, though it "cannot show us how any special
+man will act in the future," yet, if "any special action be given us, it
+can show us that it was produced by a special motive; and conversely, that
+if the special motive be wanting, the special action is sure to be wanting
+also." As an example how to distinguish between those traits of human
+character which are available for scientific purposes, and those which are
+not, Mr. Mallock instances a mob, which temporarily acts together for some
+given purpose: the individual differences of character then "cancel out,"
+and only points of agreement are left. Proceeding to the sixth chapter, he
+applies himself to setting to rest the scruples of those who find
+something cynical in the idea that the desire for Inequality is compatible
+with a respectable form of human character. It is true, he says, that man
+does not live by bread alone; but he denies that he means to say "that all
+human activity is motived by the desire for inequality"; he would assert
+that only "of all productive labor, except the lowest." The only actions
+independent of the desire for inequality, however, are those performed in
+the name of art, science, philanthropy, and religion; and even in these
+cases, so far as the actions are not motived by a desire for inequality,
+they are not of productive use; and _vice versa_. In the remaining
+chapters, which we must dismiss briefly, we meet with such statements as
+"labor has been produced by an artificial creation of want of food, and by
+then supplying the want on certain conditions"; that "civilization has
+always been begun by an oppressive minority"; that "progress depends on
+certain gifted individuals," and therefore social equality would destroy
+progress; that inequality influences production by existing as an object
+of desire and as a means of pressure; that the evils of poverty are caused
+by want, not by inequality; and that, finally, equality is not the goal of
+progress, but of retrogression; that inequality is not an accidental evil
+of civilization, but the cause of its development; the distance of the
+poor from the rich is not the cause of the former's poverty as distinct
+from riches, but of their civilized competence as distinct from barbarism;
+and that the apparent changes in the direction of equality recorded in
+history, have been, in reality, none other than "a more efficient
+arrangement of inequalities."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, let us inquire what all this ingenious prattle about Inequality and
+the Science of Human Character amounts to. What does Mr. Mallock expect?
+His book has been out six months, and still Democracy exists. But does any
+such Democracy as he combats exist, or could it conceivably exist? Have
+his investigations of the human character failed to inform him that one of
+the strongest natural instincts of man's nature is immovably opposed to
+anything like an equal distribution of existing wealth?--because whoever
+owns anything, if it be only a coat, wishes to keep it; and that wish
+makes him aware that his fellow-man will wish to keep, and will keep at
+all hazards, whatever things belong to him. What Democrats really desire
+is to enable all men to have an equal chance to obtain wealth, instead of
+being, as is largely the case now, hampered and kept down by all manner of
+legal and arbitrary restrictions. As for the "desire for Inequality," it
+seems to exist chiefly in Mr. Mallock's imagination. Who does desire it?
+Does the man who "strikes" for higher wages desire it? Let us see. A
+strike, to be successful, must be not an individual act, but the act of a
+large body of men, all demanding the same thing--an increase in wages. If
+they gain their end, no difference has taken place in their mutual
+position; and their position in regard to their employers is altered only
+in that an approach has been made toward greater equality with the latter.
+And so in other departments of human effort: the aim, which the man who
+wishes to better his position sets before himself, is not to rise head and
+shoulders above his equals, but to equal his superiors. And as to the
+Socialist schemes for the reorganization of society, they imply, at most,
+a wish to see all men start fair in the race of life, the only advantages
+allowed being not those of rank or station, but solely of innate capacity.
+And the reason the Socialist desires this is, because he believes, rightly
+or wrongly, that many inefficient men are, at present, only artificially
+protected from betraying their inefficiency; and that many efficient men
+are only artificially prevented from showing their efficiency; and that
+the fair start he proposes would not result in keeping all men on a dead
+level, but would simply put those in command who had a genuine right to be
+there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But this is taxing Mr. Mallock too seriously: he has not written in
+earnest. But, as his uncle, Mr. Froude, said, when reading "The New
+Republic,"--"The rogue is clever!" He has read a good deal, he has an
+active mind, a smooth redundancy of expression, a talent for caricature, a
+fondness for epigram and paradox, a useful shallowness, and an amusing
+impudence. He has no practical knowledge of mankind, no experience of
+life, no commanding point of view, and no depth of insight. He has no
+conception of the meaning and quality of the problems with whose exterior
+aspects he so prettily trifles. He has constructed a Science of Human
+Character without for one moment being aware that, for instance, human
+character and human nature are two distinct things; and that, furthermore,
+the one is everything that the other is not. As little is he conscious of
+the significance of the words "society" and "civilization"; nor can he
+explain whether, or why, either of them is desirable or undesirable, good
+or bad. He has never done, and (judging from his published works) we do
+not believe him capable of doing, any analytical or constructive thinking;
+at most, as in the present volume, he turns a few familiar objects upside
+down, and airily invites his audience to believe that he has thereby
+earned the name of Discoverer, if not of Creator.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THEODORE WINTHROP'S WRITINGS.
+
+
+On an accessible book-shelf in my library, stand side by side four volumes
+whose contents I once knew by heart, and which, after the lapse of twenty
+years, are yet tolerably distinct in my memory. These are stoutly bound in
+purple muslin, with a stamp, of Persian design apparently, on the centre
+of each cover. They are stained and worn, and the backs have faded to a
+brownish hue, from exposure to the light, and a leaf in one of the volumes
+has been torn across; but the paper and the sewing and the clear bold type
+are still as serviceable as ever. The books seem to have been made to
+last,--to stand a great deal of reading. Contrasted with the aesthetically
+designed covers one sees nowadays, they would be considered inexcusably
+ugly, and the least popular novelist of our time would protest against
+having his lucubrations presented to the public in such plain attire.
+Nevertheless, on turning to the title-pages, you may see imprinted, on the
+first, "Fourteenth Edition"; on the second, "Twelfth Edition"; and on the
+others, indications somewhat less magnificent, but still evidence of very
+exceptional circulation. The date they bear is that of the first years of
+our civil war; and the first published of them is prefaced by a
+biographical memoir of the author, written by his friend George William
+Curtis. This memoir was originally printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_, two
+or three months after the death of its subject, Theodore Winthrop.
+
+For these books,--three novels, and one volume of records of travel,--came
+from his hand, though they did not see the light until after he had passed
+beyond the sphere of authors and publishers. At that time, the country was
+in an exalted and heroic mood, and the men who went to fight its battles
+were regarded with a personal affection by no means restricted to their
+personal acquaintances. Their names were on all lips, and those of them
+who fell were mourned by multitudes instead of by individuals. Winthrop's
+historic name, and the influential position of some of his nearest
+friends, would have sufficed to bring into unusual prominence his brief
+career and his fate as a soldier, even had his intrinsic qualities and
+character been less honorable and winning than they were. But he was a
+type of a young American such as America is proud to own. He was high-
+minded, refined, gifted, handsome. I recollect a portrait of him published
+soon after his death,--a photograph, I think, from a crayon drawing; an
+eloquent, sensitive, rather melancholy, but manly and courageous face,
+with grave eyes, the mouth veiled by a long moustache. It was the kind of
+countenance one would wish our young heroes to have. When, after the
+catastrophe at Great Bethel, it became known that Winthrop had left
+writings behind him, it would have been strange indeed had not every one
+felt a desire to read them.
+
+Moreover, he had already begun to be known as a writer. It was during
+1860, I believe, that a story of his, in two instalments, entitled "Love
+on Skates," appeared in the "Atlantic." It was a brilliant and graphic
+celebration of the art of skating, engrafted on a love-tale as full of
+romance and movement as could be desired. Admirably told it was, as I
+recollect it; crisp with the healthy vigor of American wintry atmosphere,
+with bright touches of humor, and, here and there, passages of sentiment,
+half tender, half playful. It was something new in our literature, and
+gave promise of valuable work to come. But the writer was not destined to
+fulfil the promise. In the next year, from the camp of his regiment, he
+wrote one or two admirable descriptive sketches, touching upon the
+characteristic points of the campaigning life which had just begun; but,
+before the last of these had become familiar to the "Atlantic's" readers,
+it was known that it would be the last. Theodore Winthrop had been killed.
+
+He was only in his thirty-third year. He was born in New Haven, and had
+entered Yale College with the class of '48. The Delta Kappa Epsilon
+Fraternity was, I believe, founded in the year of his admission, and he
+must, therefore, have been among its earliest members. He was
+distinguished as a scholar, and the traces of his classic and
+philosophical acquirements are everywhere visible in his books. During the
+five or six years following his graduation, he travelled abroad, and in
+the South and West; a wild frontier life had great attractions for him, as
+he who reads "John Brent" and "The Canoe and the Saddle" need not be told.
+He tried his hand at various things, but could settle himself to no
+profession,--an inability which would have excited no remark in England,
+which has had time to recognize the value of men of leisure, as such; but
+which seems to have perplexed some of his friends in this country. Be that
+as it may, no one had reason to complain of lack of energy and promptness
+on his part when patriotism revealed a path to Winthrop. He knew that the
+time for him had come; but he had also known that the world is not yet so
+large that all men, at all times, can lay their hands upon the work that
+is suitable for them to do.
+
+Let us, however, return to the novels. They appear to have been written
+about 1856 and 1857, when their author was twenty-eight or nine years old.
+Of the order in which they were composed I have no record; but, judging
+from internal evidence, I should say that "Edwin Brothertoft" came first,
+then "Cecil Dreeme," and then "John Brent." The style, and the quality of
+thought, in the latter is more mature than in the others, and its tone is
+more fresh and wholesome. In the order of publication, "Cecil Dreeme" was
+first, and seems also to have been most widely read; then "John Brent,"
+and then "Edwin Brothertoft," the scene of which was laid in the last
+century. I remember seeing, at the house of James T. Fields, their
+publisher, the manuscripts of these books, carefully bound and preserved.
+They were written on large ruled letter-paper, and the handwriting was
+very large, and had a considerable slope. There were scarcely any
+corrections or erasures; but it is possible that Winthrop made clean
+copies of his stories after composing them. Much of the dialogue,
+especially, bears evidence of having been revised, and of the author's
+having perhaps sacrificed ease and naturalness, here and there, to the
+craving for conciseness which has been one of the chief stumbling-blocks
+in the way of our young writers. He wished to avoid heaviness and
+"padding," and went to the other extreme. He wanted to cut loose from the
+old, stale traditions of composition, and to produce something which
+should be new, not only in character and significance, but in manner of
+presentation. He had the ambition of the young Hafiz, who professed a
+longing to "tear down this tiresome old sky." But the old sky has good
+reasons for being what and where it is, and young radicals finally come to
+perceive that, regarded from the proper point of view, and in the right
+spirit, it is not so tiresome after all. Divine Revelation itself can be
+expressed in very moderate and commonplace language; and if one's thoughts
+are worth thinking, they are worth clothing in adequate and serene attire.
+
+But "culture," and literature with it, have made such surprising advances
+of late, that we are apt to forget how really primitive and unenlightened
+the generation was in which Winthrop wrote. Imagine a time when Mr. Henry
+James, Jr., and Mr. W. D. Howells had not been heard of; when Bret Harte
+was still hidden below the horizon of the far West; when no one suspected
+that a poet named Aldrich would ever write a story called "Marjorie Daw";
+when, in England, "Adam Bede" and his successors were unborn;--a time of
+antiquity so remote, in short, that the mere possibility of a discussion
+upon the relative merit of the ideal and the realistic methods of fiction
+was undreamt of! What had an unfortunate novelist of those days to fall
+back upon? Unless he wished to expatriate himself, and follow submissively
+in the well worn steps of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, the only
+models he could look to were Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Foe, James
+Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Elsie Venner" had scarcely made
+its appearance at that date. Irving and Cooper were, on the other hand,
+somewhat antiquated. Poe and Hawthorne were men of very peculiar genius,
+and, however deep the impression they have produced on our literature,
+they have never had, because they never can have, imitators. As for the
+author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," she was a woman in the first place, and, in
+the second place, she sufficiently filled the field she had selected. A
+would-be novelist, therefore, possessed of ambition, and conscious of not
+being his own father or grandfather, saw an untrodden space before him,
+into which he must plunge without support and without guide. No wonder if,
+at the outset, he was a trifle awkward and ill-at-ease, and, like a raw
+recruit under fire, appeared affected from the very desire he felt to look
+unconcerned. It is much to his credit that he essayed the venture at all;
+and it is plain to be seen that, with each forward step he took, his self-
+possession and simplicity increased. If time had been given him, there is
+no reason to doubt that he might have been standing at the head of our
+champions of fiction to-day.
+
+But time was not given him, and his work, like all other work, if it is to
+be judged at all, must be judged on its merits. He excelled most in
+passages descriptive of action; and the more vigorous and momentous the
+action, the better, invariably, was the description; he rose to the
+occasion, and was not defeated by it. Partly for this reason, "Cecil
+Dreeme," the most popular of his books, seems to me the least meritorious
+of them all. The story has little movement; it stagnates round Chrysalis
+College. The love intrigue is morbid and unwholesome, and the characters
+(which are seldom Winthrop's strong point) are more than usually
+artificial and unnatural. The _dramatis personae_ are, indeed, little more
+than moral or immoral principles incarnate. There is no growth in them, no
+human variableness or complexity; it is "Every Man in his Humor" over
+again, with the humor left out. Densdeth is an impossible rascal; Churm, a
+scarcely more possible Rhadamanthine saint. Cecil Dreeme herself never
+fully recovers from the ambiguity forced upon her by her masculine attire;
+and Emma Denman could never have been both what we are told she was, and
+what she is described as being. As for Robert Byng, the supposed narrator
+of the tale, his name seems to have been given him in order wantonly to
+increase the confusion caused by the contradictory traits with which he is
+accredited. The whole atmosphere of the story is unreal, fantastic,
+obscure. An attempt is made to endow our poor, raw New York with something
+of the stormy and ominous mystery of the immemorial cities of Europe. The
+best feature of the book (morbidness aside) is the construction of the
+plot, which shows ingenuity and an artistic perception of the value of
+mystery and moral compensation. It recalls, in some respects, the design
+of Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance,"--that is, had the latter never been
+written, the former would probably have been written differently. In spite
+of its faults, it is an interesting book, and, to the critical eye, there
+are in almost every chapter signs that indicate the possession of no
+ordinary gifts on the author's part. But it may be doubted whether the
+special circumstances under which it was published had not something to do
+with its wide popularity. I imagine "John Brent" to have been really much
+more popular, in the better sense; it was read and liked by a higher class
+of readers. It is young ladies and school-girls who swell the numbers of
+an "edition," and hence the difficulty in arguing from this as to the
+literary merit of the book itself.
+
+"Edwin Brothertoft," though somewhat disjointed in construction, and jerky
+in style, is yet a picturesque and striking story; and the gallop of the
+hero across country and through the night to rescue from the burning house
+the woman who had been false to him, is vigorously described, and gives us
+some foretaste of the thrill of suspense and excitement we feel in reading
+the story of the famous "Gallop of three" in "John Brent." The writer's
+acquaintance with the history of the period is adequate, and a romantic
+and chivalrous tone is preserved throughout the volume. It is worth noting
+that, in all three of Winthrop's novels, a horse bears a part in the
+crisis of the tale. In "Cecil Dreeme" it is Churm's pair of trotters that
+convey the party of rescuers to the private Insane Asylum in which
+Densdeth had confined the heroine. In "Edwin Brothertoft," it is one of
+Edwin's renowned breed of white horses that carries him through almost
+insuperable obstacles to his goal. In "John Brent," the black stallion,
+Don Fulano, who is throughout the chief figure in the book, reaches his
+apogee in the tremendous race across the plains and down the rocky gorge
+of the mountains, to where the abductors of the heroine are just about to
+pitch their camp at the end of their day's journey. The motive is fine and
+artistic, and, in each of the books, these incidents are as good as, or
+better then, anything else in the narrative.
+
+"John Brent" is, in fact, full enough of merit to more than redeem its
+defects. The self-consciousness of the writer is less noticeable than in
+the other works, and the effort to be epigrammatic, short, sharp, and
+"telling" in style, is considerably modified. The interest is lively,
+continuous, and cumulative; and there is just enough tragedy in the story
+to make the happy ending all the happier. It was a novel and adventurous
+idea to make a horse the hero of a tale, and the manner in which the idea
+is carried out more than justifies the hazard. Winthrop, as we know, was
+an ideal horseman, and knows what he is writing about. He contrives to
+realize Don Fulano for us, in spite of the almost supernatural powers and
+intelligence that he ascribes to the gallant animal. One is willing to
+stretch a point of probability when such a dashing and inspiring end is in
+view. In the present day we are getting a little tired of being brought to
+account, at every turn, by Old Prob., who tyrannizes over literature quite
+as much as over the weather. Theodore Winthrop's inspiration, in this
+instance at least, was strong and genuine enough to enable him to feel
+what he was telling as the truth, and therefore it produces an effect of
+truth upon the reader. How distinctly every incident of that ride remains
+stamped on the memory, even after so long an interval as has elapsed since
+it was written! And I recollect that one of the youthful devourers of this
+book, who was of an artistic turn, was moved to paint three little water-
+color pictures of the Gallop; the first showing the three horses,--the
+White, the Gray, and the Black, scouring across the prairie, towards the
+barrier of mountains behind which the sun was setting; the second
+depicting Don Fulano, with Dick Wade and John Brent on his back, plunging
+down the gorge upon the abductors, one of whom had just pulled the trigger
+of his rifle; while the third gives the scene in which the heroic horse
+receives his death-wound in carrying the fugitive across the creek away
+from his pursuers. At this distance of time, I am unable to bear any
+testimony as to the technical value of the little pictures; I am inclined
+to fancy that they would have to be taken _cum grano amoris_, as they
+certainly were executed _con amore_. But, however that may be, the
+instance (which was doubtless only one of many analogous to it) shows that
+Winthrop possessed the faculty of stimulating and electrifying the
+imagination of his readers, which all our recent improvements in the art
+and artifice of composition have not made too common, and for which, if
+for nothing else, we might well feel indebted to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+EMERSON AS AN AMERICAN.
+
+
+It is not with Americans as with other peoples. Our position is more vague
+and difficult, because it is not primarily related to the senses. I can
+easily find out where England or Prussia is, and recognize an Englishman
+or German when we meet; but we Americans are not, to the same extent as
+these, limited by geographical and physical boundaries. The origin of
+America was not like that of the European nations; the latter were born
+after the flesh, but we after the spirit. It is of the first consequence
+to them that their frontiers should be defended, and their nationality
+kept distinct. But, though I esteem highly all our innumerable square
+miles of East and West, North and South, and our Pacific and Atlantic
+coasts, I cannot help deeming them quite a secondary consideration. If
+America is not a great deal more than these United States, then the United
+States are no better than a penal colony. It is convenient, no doubt, for
+a great idea to find a great embodiment--a suitable incarnation and stage;
+but the idea does not depend upon these things. It is an accidental--or, I
+would rather say, a Providential--matter that the Puritans came to New
+England, or that Columbus discovered the continent in time for them; but
+it has always happened that when a soul is born it finds a body ready
+fitted to it. The body, however, is an instrument merely; it enables the
+spirit to take hold of its mortal life, just as the hilt enables us to
+grasp the sword. If the Puritans had not come to New England, still the
+spirit that animated them would have lived, and made itself a place
+somehow. And, in fact, how many Puritans, for how many ages previous, had
+been trying to find standing-room in the world, and failed! They called
+themselves by many names; their voices were heard in many countries; the
+time had not yet come for them to be born--to touch their earthly
+inheritance; but, meantime, the latent impetus was accumulating, and the
+Mayflower was driven across the Atlantic by it at last. Nor is this all--
+the Mayflower is sailing still between the old world and the new. Every
+day it brings new settlers, if not to our material harbors--to our Boston
+Bay, our Castle Garden, our Golden Gate--at any rate, to our mental ports
+and wharves. We cannot take up a European newspaper without finding an
+American idea in it. It is said that a great many of our countrymen take
+the steamer to England every summer. But they come back again; and they
+bring with them many who come to stay. I do not refer specially to the
+occupants of the steerage--the literal emigrants. One cannot say much
+about them--they may be Americans or not, as it turns out. But England and
+the continent are full of Americans who were born there, and many of whom
+will die there. Sometimes they are better Americans than the New Yorker or
+the Bostonian who lives in Beacon Street or the Bowery and votes in the
+elections. They may be born and reside where they please, but they belong
+to us, and, in the better sense, they are among us. Broadway and
+Washington Street, Vermont and Colorado extend all over Europe. Russia is
+covered with them; she tries to shove them away to Siberia, but in vain.
+We call mountains and prairies solid facts; but the geography of the mind
+is infinitely more stubborn. I dare say there are a great many oblique-
+eyed, pig-tailed New Englanders in the Celestial Empire. They may never
+have visited these shores, or even heard of them; but what of that? They
+think our thought--they have apprehended our idea, and, by and by, they or
+their heirs will cause it to prevail.
+
+It is useless for us to hide our heads in the grass and refuse to rise to
+the height of our occasion. We are here as the realization of a truth--the
+fulfilment of a prophecy; we must attest a new departure in the moral and
+intellectual development of the human race; for whichever of us does not,
+must suffer annihilation. If I deny my birthright as an American, I shall
+disappear and not be missed, for an American will take my place. It is not
+altogether a luxurious position to find yourself in. You cannot sit still
+and hold your hands. All manner of hard and unpleasant things are expected
+of you, which you neglect at your peril. It is like the old fable of the
+mermaid. She loved a mortal youth, and, in order that she might win his
+affection, she prayed that she might have the limbs and feet of a human
+maiden. Her prayer was answered, and she met her prince; but every step
+she took was as if she trod on razors. It is a fine thing to sit in your
+chair and reflect on being an American; but when you have to rise up and
+do an American's duty before the world--how sharp the razors are!
+
+Of course, we do not always endure the test; the flesh and blood on this
+side of the planet is not, so far as I have observed, of a quality
+essentially different from that on the other. Possibly our population is
+too many for us. Out of fifty million people it would be strange if here
+and there one appeared who was not at all points a hero. Indeed, I am
+sometimes tempted to think that that little band of original Mayflower
+Pilgrims has not greatly multiplied since their disembarkation. However it
+may be with their bodily offspring, their spiritual progeny are not
+invariably found in the chair of the Governor or on the floor of the
+Senate. What are these Irish fellow-creatures doing here? Well, Bridget
+serves us in the kitchen; but Patrick is more helpful yet; he goes to the
+legislature, and is the servant of the people at large. It is very
+obliging of him; but turn and turn about is fair play; and it would be no
+more than justice were we, once in a while, to take off our coat and serve
+Patrick in the same way.
+
+When we get into a tight place we are apt to try to slip out of it under
+some plea of a European precedent. But it used to be supposed that it was
+precisely European precedents that we came over here to avoid. I am not
+profoundly versed in political economy, nor is this the time or place to
+discuss its principles; but, as regards protection, for example, I can
+conceive that there may be arguments against it as well as for it. Emerson
+used to say that the way to conquer the foreign artisan was not to kill
+him but to beat his work. He also pointed out that the money we made out
+of the European wars, at the beginning of this century, had the result of
+bringing the impoverished population of those countries down upon us in
+the shape of emigrants. They shared our crops and went on the poor-rates,
+and so we did not gain so much after all. One cannot help wishing that
+America would assume the loftiest possible ground in her political and
+commercial relations. With all due respect to the sagacity and ability of
+our ruling demagogues, I should not wish them to be quoted as typical
+Americans. The domination of such persons has an effect which is by no
+means measurable by their personal acts. What they can do is of
+infinitesimal importance. But the mischief is that they incline every one
+of us to believe, as Emerson puts it, in two gods. They make the morality
+of Wall Street and the White House seem to be a different thing from that
+of our parlors and nurseries. "He may be a little shady on 'change," we
+say, "but he is a capital fellow when you know him." But if he is a
+capital fellow when I know him, then I shall never find much fault with
+his professional operations, and shall end, perhaps, by allowing him to
+make some investments for me. Why should not I be a capital fellow too--
+and a fellow of capital, to boot! I can endure public opprobrium with
+tolerable equanimity so long as it remains public. It is the private cold
+looks that trouble me.
+
+In short, we may speak of America in two senses--either meaning the
+America that actually meets us at the street corners and in the
+newspapers, or the ideal America--America as it ought to be. They are not
+the same thing; and, at present, there seems to be a good deal more of the
+former than of the latter. And yet, there is a connection between them;
+the latter has made the former possible. We sometimes see a great crowd
+drawn together by proclamation, for some noble purpose--to decide upon a
+righteous war, or to pass a just decree. But the people on the outskirts
+of the crowd, finding themselves unable to hear the orators, and their
+time hanging idle on their hands, take to throwing stones, knocking off
+hats, or, perhaps, picking pockets. They may have come to the meeting with
+as patriotic or virtuous intentions as the promoters themselves; nay,
+under more favorable circumstances, they might themselves have become
+promoters. Virtue and patriotism are not private property; at certain
+times any one may possess them. And, on the other hand, we have seen
+examples enough, of late, of persons of the highest respectability and
+trust turning out, all at once, to be very sorry scoundrels. A man changes
+according to the person with whom he converses; and though the outlook is
+rather sordid to-day, we have not forgotten that during the Civil War the
+air seemed full of heroism. So that these two Americas--the real and the
+ideal--far apart though they may be in one sense, may, in another sense,
+be as near together as our right hand to our left. In a greater or less
+degree, they exist side by side in each one of us. But civil wars do not
+come every day; nor can we wish them to, even to show us once more that we
+are worthy of our destiny. We must find some less expensive and quieter
+method of reminding ourselves of that. And of such methods, none, perhaps,
+is better than to review the lives of Americans who were truly great; to
+ask what their country meant to them; what they wished her to become; what
+virtues and what vices they detected in her. Passion may be generous, but
+passion cannot last; and when it is over, we are cold and indifferent
+again. But reason and example reach us when we are calm and passive; and
+what they inculcate is more likely to abide. At least, it will be only
+evil passion that can cast it out.
+
+I have said that many a true American is doubtless born, and lives,
+abroad; but that does not prevent Emerson from having been born here. So
+far as the outward accidents of generation and descent go, he could not
+have been more American than he was. Of course, one prefers that it should
+be so. A rare gem should be fitly set. A noble poem should be printed with
+the fairest type of the Riverside Press, and upon fine paper with wide
+margins. It helps us to believe in ourselves to be told that Emerson's
+ancestry was not only Puritan, but clerical; that the central and vital
+thread of the idea that created us, ran through his heart. The nation, and
+even New England, Massachusetts, Boston, have many traits that are not
+found in him; but there is nothing in him that is not a refinement, a
+sublimation and concentration of what is good in them; and the selection
+and grouping of the elements are such that he is a typical figure. Indeed,
+he is all type; which is the same as saying that there is nobody like him.
+And, mentally, he produces the impression of being all force; in his
+writings, his mind seems to have acted immediately, without natural
+impediment or friction; as if a machine should be run that was not
+hindered by the contact of its parts. As he was physically lean and narrow
+of figure, and his face nothing but so many features welded together, so
+there was no adipose tissue in his thought. It is pure, clear, and
+accurate, and has the fault of dryness; but often moves in forms of
+exquisite beauty. It is not adhesive; it sticks to nothing, nor anything
+to it; after ranging through all the various philosophies of the world, it
+comes out as clean and characteristic as ever. It has numberless
+affinities, but no adhesion; it does not even adhere to itself. There are
+many separate statements in any one of his essays which present no logical
+continuity; but although this fact has caused great anxiety to many
+disciples of Emerson, it never troubled him. It was the inevitable result
+of his method of thought. Wandering at will in the flower-garden of
+religious and moral philosophy, it was his part to pluck such blossoms as
+he saw were beautiful; not to find out their botanical interconnection. He
+would afterward arrange them, for art or harmony's sake, according to
+their color or their fragrance; but it was not his affair to go any
+farther in their classification.
+
+This intuitive method of his, however little it may satisfy those who wish
+to have all their thinking done for them, who desire not only to have
+given to them all the cities of the earth, but also to have straight roads
+built for them from one to the other, carries with it its own
+justification. "There is but one reason," is Emerson's saying; and again
+and again does he prove without proving it. We confess, over and over,
+that the truth which he asserts is indeed a truth. Even his own variations
+from the truth, when he is betrayed into them, serve to confirm the rule.
+For these are seldom or never intuitions at first hand--pure intuitions;
+but, as it were, intuitions from previous intuitions--deductions. The form
+of statement is the same, but the source is different; they are from
+Emerson, instead of from the Absolute; tinted, not colorless. They show a
+mental bias, very slight, but redeeming him back to humanity. We love him
+the more for them, because they indicate that for him, too, there was a
+choice of ways, and that he must struggle and watch to choose the right.
+
+We are so much wedded to systems, and so accustomed to connect a system
+with a man, that the absence of system, either explicit or implicit, in
+Emerson, strikes us as a defect. And yet truth has no system, nor the
+human mind. This philosopher maintains one, that another thesis. Both are
+true essentially, and yet there seems a contradiction between them. We
+cannot bear to be illogical, and so we enlist some under this banner, some
+under that. By so doing we sacrifice to consistency at least the half of
+truth. Thence we come to examine our intuitions, and ask them, not whether
+they are true in themselves, but what are their tendencies. If it turn out
+that they will lead us to stultify some past conclusion to which we stand
+committed, we drop them like hot coals. To Emerson, this behavior appeared
+the nakedest personal vanity. Recognizing that he was finite, he could not
+desire to be consistent. If he saw to-day that one thing was true, and to-
+morrow that its opposite was true, was it for him to elect which of the
+two truths should have his preference? No; to reject either would be to
+reject all; it belonged to God alone to reconcile these contradictious.
+Between infinite and finite can be no ratio; and the consistency of the
+Creator implies the inconsistency of the creature.
+
+Emerson's Americanism, therefore, was Americanism in its last and purest
+analysis, which is giving him high praise, and to America great hope. But
+I do not mean to pay him, who was so full of modesty and humility, the
+ungrateful compliment of holding him up as the permanent American ideal.
+It is his tendencies, his quality, that are valuable, and only in a minor,
+incipient degree his actual results. All human results must be strictly
+limited, and according to the epoch and outlook. Emerson does not solve
+for all time the problem of the universe; he solves nothing; but he does
+what is far more useful--he gives a direction and an impetus to lofty
+human endeavor. He does not anticipate the lessons and the discipline of
+the ages, but he shows us how to deal with circumstances in such a manner
+as to secure the good instead of the evil influence. New conditions, fresh
+discoveries, unexpected horizons opening before us, will, no doubt, soon
+carry us beyond the scope of Emerson's surmise; but we shall not so easily
+improve upon his aim and attitude. In the spaces beyond the stars there
+may be marvels such as it has not entered into the mind of man to
+conceive; but there, as here, the right way to look will still be upward,
+and the right aspiration be still toward humbleness and charity. I have
+just spoken of Emerson's absence of system; but his writings have
+nevertheless a singular coherence, by virtue of the single-hearted motive
+that has inspired them. Many will, doubtless, have noticed, as I have
+done, how the whole of Emerson illustrates every aspect of him.
+
+Whether your discourse be of his religion, of his ethics, of his relation
+to society, or what not, the picture that you draw will have gained color
+and form from every page that he has written. He does not lie in strata;
+all that he is permeates all that he has done. His books cannot be
+indexed, unless you would refer every subject to each paragraph. And so he
+cannot treat, no matter what subject, without incorporating in his
+statement the germs at least of all that he has thought and believed. In
+this respect he is like light--the presence of the general at the
+particular. And, to confess the truth, I find myself somewhat loath to
+diffract this pure ray to the arbitrary end of my special topic. Why
+should I speak of him as an American? That is not his definition. He was
+an American because he was himself. America, however, gives less
+limitation than any other nationality to a generous and serene
+personality.
+
+I am sometimes disposed to think that Emerson's "English Traits" reveal
+his American traits more than anything else he has written. We are
+described by our own criticisms of others, and especially by our
+criticisms of another nation; the exceptions we take are the mould of our
+own figures. So we have valuable glimpses of Emerson's contours throughout
+this volume. And it is in all respects a fortunate work; as remarkable a
+one almost for him to write as a volume of his essays for any one else.
+Comparatively to his other books, it is as flesh and blood to spirit;
+Emersonian flesh and blood, it is true, and semi-translucent; but still it
+completes the man for us: he would have remained too problematical without
+it. Those who have never personally known him may finish and solidify
+their impressions of him here. He likes England and the English, too; and
+that sympathy is beyond our expectation of the mind that evolved "Nature"
+and "The Over-Soul." The grasp of his hand, I remember, was firm and
+stout, and we perceive those qualities in the descriptions and cordiality
+of "English Traits." Then, it is an objective book; the eye looks outward,
+not inward; these pages afford a basis not elsewhere obtainable of
+comparing his general human faculty with that of other men. Here he
+descends from the airy heights he treads so easily and, standing foot to
+foot with his peers, measures himself against them. He intends only to
+report their stature, and to leave himself out of the story; but their
+answers to his questions show what the questions were, and what the
+questioner. And we cannot help suspecting, though he did not, that the
+Englishmen were not a little put to it to keep pace with their clear-
+faced, penetrating, attentive visitor.
+
+He has never said of his own countrymen the comfortable things that he
+tells of the English; but we need not grumble at that. The father who is
+severe with his own children will freely admire those of others, for whom
+he is not responsible. Emerson is stern toward what we are, and arduous
+indeed in his estimate of what we ought to be. He intimates that we are
+not quite worthy of our continent; that we have not as yet lived up to our
+blue china. "In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not."
+And he adds that even our more presentable public acts are due to a money-
+making spirit: "The benefaction derived in Illinois and the great West
+from railroads is inestimable, and vastly exceeding any intentional
+philanthropy on record." He does not think very respectfully of the
+designs or the doings of the people who went to California in 1849, though
+he admits that "California gets civilized in this immoral way," and is
+fain to suppose that, "as there is use in the world for poisons, so the
+world cannot move without rogues," and that, in respect of America, "the
+huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests
+the strength of the constitution." He ridicules our unsuspecting
+provincialism: "Have you seen the dozen great men of New York and Boston?
+Then you may as well die!" He does not spare our tendency to spread-
+eagleism and declamation, and having quoted a shrewd foreigner as saying
+of Americans that, "Whatever they say has a little the air of a speech,"
+he proceeds to speculate whether "the American forest has refreshed some
+weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out?" He finds the foible
+especially of American youth to be--pretension; and remarks, suggestively,
+that we talk much about the key of the age, but "the key to all ages is
+imbecility!" He cannot reconcile himself to the mania for going abroad.
+"There is a restlessness in our people that argues want of character....
+Can we never extract this tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our
+countrymen?" He finds, however, this involuntary compensation in the
+practice--that, practically "we go to Europe to be Americanized," and has
+faith that "one day we shall cast out the passion for Europe by the
+passion for America." As to our political doings, he can never regard them
+with complacency. "Politics is an afterword," he declares--"a poor
+patching. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education." He
+sympathizes with Lovelace's theory as to iron bars and stone walls, and
+holds that freedom and slavery are inward, not outward conditions. Slavery
+is not in circumstance, but in feeling; you cannot eradicate the irons by
+external restrictions; and the truest way to emancipate the slave would be
+to educate him to a comprehension of his inviolable dignity and freedom as
+a human being. Amelioration of outward circumstances will be the effect,
+but can never be the means of mental and moral improvement. "Nothing is
+more disgusting," he affirms, generalizing the theme, "than the crowing
+about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for
+freedom of some paper preamble like a 'Declaration of Independence' or the
+statute right to vote." But, "Our America has a bad name for
+superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and
+buffoons, but perceivers of the terrors of life, and have nerved
+themselves to face it." He will not be deceived by the clamor of blatant
+reformers. "If an angry bigot assumes the bountiful cause of abolition,
+and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say
+to him: 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and
+modest; have that grace, and never varnish your hard, uncharitable
+ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles
+off!'"
+
+He does not shrink from questioning the validity of some of our pet
+institutions, as, for instance, universal suffrage. He reminds us that in
+old Egypt the vote of a prophet was reckoned equal to one hundred hands,
+and records his opinion that it was much underestimated. "Shall we, then,"
+he asks, "judge a country by the majority or by the minority? By the
+minority, surely! 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by
+square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the
+time." The majority are unripe, and do not yet know their own opinion. He
+would not, however, counsel an organic alteration in this respect,
+believing that, with the progress of enlightenment, such coarse
+constructions of human rights will adjust themselves. He concedes the
+sagacity of the Fultons and Watts of politics, who, noticing that the
+opinion of the million was the terror of the world, grouped it on a level,
+instead of piling it into a mountain, and so contrived to make of this
+terror the most harmless and energetic form of a State. But, again, he
+would not have us regard the State as a finality, or as relieving any man
+of his individual responsibility for his actions and purposes. We are to
+confide in God--and not in our money, and in the State because it is guard
+of it. The Union itself has no basis but the good pleasure of the majority
+to be united. The wise and just men impart strength to the State, not
+receive it; and, if all went down, they and their like would soon combine
+in a new and better constitution. Yet he will not have us forget that only
+by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing so weak as an egotist. We are
+mighty only as vehicles of a truth before which State and individual are
+alike ephemeral. In this sense we, like other nations, shall have our
+kings and nobles--the leading and inspiration of the best; and he who
+would become a member of that nobility must obey his heart.
+
+Government, he observes, has been a fossil--it should be a plant; statute
+law should express, not impede, the mind of mankind. In tracing the course
+of human political institutions, he finds feudalism succeeding monarchy,
+and this again followed by trade, the good and evil of which is that it
+would put everything in the market, talent, beauty, virtue, and man
+himself. By this means it has done its work; it has faults and will end as
+the others. Its aristocracy need not be feared, for it can have no
+permanence, it is not entailed. In the time to come, he hopes to see us
+less anxious to be governed, in the technical sense; each man shall govern
+himself in the interests of all; government without any governor will be,
+for the first time, adamantine. Is not every man sometimes a radical in
+politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they
+are most luxurious; conservatism stands on man's limitations, reform on
+his infinitude. The age of the quadruped is to go out; the age of the
+brain and the heart is to come in. We are too pettifogging and imitative
+in our legislative conceptions; the Legislature of this country should
+become more catholic and cosmopolitan than any other. Let us be brave and
+strong enough to trust in humanity; strong natures are inevitable
+patriots. The time, the age, what is that, but a few prominent persons and
+a few active persons who epitomize the times? There is a bribe possible
+for any finite will; but the pure sympathy with universal ends is an
+infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent. The world wants saviors and
+religions; society is servile from want of will; but there is a Destiny by
+which the human race is guided, the race never dying, the individual never
+spared; its law is, you shall have everything as a member, nothing to
+yourself. Referring to the communities of various kinds, which were so
+much in vogue some years ago, he holds such to be valuable, not for what
+they have done, but for the indication they give of the revolution that is
+on the way. They place great faith in mutual support, but it is only as a
+man puts off from himself all external support and stands alone, that he
+is strong and will prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. A
+man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain.
+He must not shun whatever comes to him in the way of duty; the only path
+of escape is--performance. He must rely on Providence, but not in a timid
+or ecclesiastical spirit; it is no use to dress up that terrific
+benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.
+We shall come out well, whatever personal or political disasters may
+intervene. For here in America is the home of man. After deducting our
+pitiful politics--shall John or Jonathan sit in the chair and hold the
+purse?--and making due allowance for our frivolities and insanities, there
+still remains an organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses its
+balance, redresses itself presently, and which offers to the human mind
+opportunities not known elsewhere.
+
+Whenever he touches upon the fundamental elements of social and rational
+life, it is always to enlarge and illuminate our conception of them. We
+are not wont to question the propriety of the sentiment of patriotism, for
+instance. We are to swear by our own _lares_ and _penates_, and stand up
+for the American eagle, right or wrong. But Emerson instantly goes beneath
+this interpretation and exposes its crudity. The true sense of patriotism,
+according to him, is almost the reverse of its popular sense. He has no
+sympathy with that boyish egotism, hoarse with cheering for our side, for
+our State, for our town; the right patriotism consists in the delight
+which springs from contributing our peculiar and legitimate advantages to
+the benefit of humanity. Every foot of soil has its proper quality; the
+grape on two sides of the fence has new flavors; and so every acre on the
+globe, every family of men, every point of climate, has its distinguishing
+virtues. This being admitted, however, Emerson will yield in patriotism to
+no one; his only concern is that the advantages we contribute shall be the
+most instead of the least possible. "This country," he says, "does not lie
+here in the sun causeless, and though it may not be easy to define its
+influence, men feel already its emancipating quality in the careless self-
+reliance of the manners, in the freedom of thought, in the direct roads by
+which grievances are reached and redressed, and even in the reckless and
+sinister politics, not less than in purer expressions. Bad as it is, this
+freedom leads onward and upward to a Columbia of thought and art, which is
+the last and endless end of Columbus's adventure." Nor is this poet of
+virtue and philosophy ever more truly patriotic, from his spiritual
+standpoint, than when he throws scorn and indignation upon his country's
+sins and frailties. "But who is he that prates of the culture of mankind,
+of better arts and life? Go, blind worm, go--behold the famous States
+harrying Mexico with rifle and with knife! Or who, with accent bolder,
+dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer? I found by thee, O rushing
+Contoocook! and in thy valleys, Agiochook! the jackals of the negro-
+holder.... What boots thy zeal, O glowing friend, that would indignant
+rend the northland from the South? Wherefore? To what good end? Boston Bay
+and Bunker Hill would serve things still--things are of the snake. The
+horseman serves the horse, the neat-herd serves the neat, the merchant
+serves the purse, the eater serves his meat; 'tis the day of the chattel,
+web to weave, and corn to grind; things are in the saddle, and ride
+mankind!"
+
+But I must not begin to quote Emerson's poetry; only it is worth noting
+that he, whose verse is uniformly so abstractly and intellectually
+beautiful, kindles to passion whenever his theme is of America. The
+loftiest patriotism never found more ardent and eloquent expression than
+in the hymn sung at the completion of the Concord monument, on the 19th of
+April, 1836. There is no rancor in it; no taunt of triumph; "the foe long
+since in silence slept"; but throughout there resounds a note of pure and
+deep rejoicing at the victory of justice over oppression, which Concord
+fight so aptly symbolized. In "Hamatreya" and "The Earth Song," another
+chord is struck, of calm, laconic irony. Shall we too, he asks, we Yankee
+farmers, descendants of the men who gave up all for freedom, go back to
+the creed outworn of medieval feudalism and aristocracy, and say, of the
+land that yields us its produce, "'Tis mine, my children's, and my
+name's"? Earth laughs in flowers at our boyish boastfulness, and asks "How
+am I theirs if they cannot hold me, but I hold them?" "When I heard 'The
+Earth Song,' I was no longer brave; my avarice cooled, like lust in the
+child of the grave" Or read "Monadnoc," and mark the insight and the power
+with which the significance and worth of the great facts of nature are
+interpreted and stated. "Complement of human kind, having us at vantage
+still, our sumptuous indigence, oh, barren mound, thy plenties fill! We
+fool and prate; thou art silent and sedate. To myriad kinds and times one
+sense the constant mountain doth dispense; shedding on all its snows and
+leaves, one joy it joys, one grief it grieves. Thou seest, oh, watchman
+tall, our towns and races grow and fall, and imagest the stable good for
+which we all our lifetime grope; and though the substance us elude, we in
+thee the shadow find." ... "Thou dost supply the shortness of our days,
+and promise, on thy Founder's truth, long morrow to this mortal youth!" I
+have ignored the versified form in these extracts, in order to bring them
+into more direct contrast with the writer's prose, and show that the
+poetry is inherent. No other poet, with whom I am acquainted, has caused
+the very spirit of a land, the mother of men, to express itself so
+adequately as Emerson has done in these pieces. Whitman falls short of
+them, it seems to me, though his effort is greater.
+
+Emerson is continually urging us to give heed to this grand voice of hills
+and streams, and to mould ourselves upon its suggestions. The difficulty
+and the anomaly are that we are not native; that England is our mother,
+quite as much as Monadnoc; that we are heirs of memories and traditions
+reaching far beyond the times and the confines of the Republic. We cannot
+assume the splendid childlikeness of the great primitive races, and
+exhibit the hairy strength and unconscious genius that the poet longs to
+find in us. He remarks somewhere that the culminating period of good in
+nature and the world is in just that moment of transition, when the
+swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency
+or acidity is got out by ethics and humanity.
+
+It was at such a period that Greece attained her apogee; but our
+experience, it seems to me, must needs be different. Our story is not of
+birth, but of regeneration, a far more subtle and less obvious
+transaction. The Homeric California of which Bret Harte is the reporter
+does not seem to me in the closest sense American. It is a comparatively
+superficial matter--this savage freedom and raw poetry; it belongs to all
+pioneering life, where every man must stand for himself, and Judge Lynch
+strings up the defaulter to the nearest tree. But we are only incidentally
+pioneers in this sense; and the characteristics thus impressed upon us
+will leave no traces in the completed American. "A sturdy lad from New
+Hampshire or Vermont," says Emerson, "who in turn tries all the
+professions--who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches,
+edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in
+successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet--is worth a
+hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no
+shame in not studying a 'profession,' for he does not postpone his life,
+but lives already." That is stirringly said: but, as a matter of fact,
+most of the Americans whom we recognize as great did not have such a
+history; nor, if they had it, would they be on that account more American.
+On the other hand, the careers of men like Jim Fiske and Commodore
+Vanderbilt might serve very well as illustrations of the above sketch. If
+we must wait for our character until our geographical advantages and the
+absence of social distinctions manufacture it for us, we are likely to
+remain a long while in suspense. When our foreign visitors begin to evince
+a more poignant interest in Concord and Fifth Avenue than in the
+Mississippi and the Yellowstone, it may be an indication to us that we are
+assuming our proper position relative to our physical environment. "The
+_land_," says Emerson, "is a sanative and Americanizing influence which
+promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come." Well, when we are
+virtuous, we may, perhaps, spare our own blushes by allowing our
+topography, symbolically, to celebrate us, and when our admirers would
+worship the purity of our intentions, refer them to Walden Pond; or to
+Mount Shasta, when they would expatiate upon our lofty generosity. It is,
+perhaps, true, meanwhile, that the chances of a man's leading a decent
+life are greater in a palace than in a pigsty.
+
+But this is holding our author too strictly to the letter of his message.
+And, at any rate, the Americanism of Emerson is better than anything that
+he has said in vindication of it. He is the champion of this commonwealth;
+he is our future, living in our present, and showing the world, by
+anticipation, as it were, what sort of excellence we are capable of
+attaining. A nation that has produced Emerson, and can recognize in him
+bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh--and, still more, spirit of her
+spirit--that nation may look toward the coming age with security. But he
+has done more than thus to prophesy of his country; he is electric and
+stimulates us to fulfil our destiny. To use a phrase of his own, we
+"cannot hear of personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance,
+without fresh resolution." Emerson, helps us most in provoking us to help
+ourselves. The pleasantest revenge is that which we can sometimes take
+upon our great men in quoting of themselves what they have said of others.
+
+It is easy to be so revenged upon Emerson, because he, more than most
+persons of such eminence, has been generous and cordial in his
+appreciation of all human worth. "If there should appear in the company,"
+he observes, "some gentle soul who knows little of persons and parties, of
+Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these particulars,
+and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player,
+bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any
+conditions of country, or time, or human body, that man liberates me....
+I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods."
+Who can state the mission and effect of Emerson more tersely and aptly
+than those words do it?
+
+But, once more, he does not desire eulogiums, and it seems half ungenerous
+to force them upon him now that he can no longer defend himself. I prefer
+to conclude by repeating a passage characteristic of him both as a man and
+as an American, and which, perhaps, conveys a sounder and healthier
+criticism, both for us and for him, than any mere abject and nerveless
+admiration; for great men are great only in so far as they liberate us,
+and we undo their work in courting their tyranny. The passage runs thus:--
+
+"Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the
+least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I
+pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No
+facts to me are sacred; none are profane. I simply experiment--an endless
+seeker, with no Past at my back!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MODERN MAGIC.
+
+
+Human nature enjoys nothing better than to wonder--to be mystified; and it
+thanks and remembers those who have the skill to gratify this craving. The
+magicians of old knew that truth and conducted themselves accordingly. But
+our modern wonder-workers fail of their due influence, because, not
+content to perform their marvels, they go on to explain them. Merlin and
+Roger Bacon were greater public benefactors than Morse and Edison. Man is
+--and he always has been and will be--something else besides a pure
+intelligence: and science, in order to become really popular, must
+contrive to touch man somewhere else besides on the purely intellectual
+side: it must remember that man is all heart, all hope, all fear, and all
+foolishness, quite as much as he is all brains. Otherwise, science can
+never expect to take the place of superstition, much less of religion, in
+mankind's affection. In order to be a really successful man of science, it
+is first of all indispensable to make one's self master of everything in
+nature and in human nature that science is not.
+
+What must one do, in short, in order to become a magician? I use the term,
+here, in its weightiest sense. How to make myself visible and invisible at
+will? How to present myself in two or more places at once? How answer your
+question before you ask it, and describe to you your most secret thoughts
+and actions? How shall I call spirits from the vasty deep, and make you
+see and hear and feel them? How paralyze your strength with a look, heal
+your wound with a touch, or cause your bullet to rebound harmless from my
+unprotected flesh? How shall I walk on the air, sink through the earth,
+pass through stone walls, or walk, dry-shod, on the floor of the ocean?
+How shall I visit the other side of the moon, jump through the ring of
+Saturn, and gather sunflowers in Sirius? There are persons now living who
+profess to do no less remarkable feats, and to regard them as incidental
+merely to achievements far more important. A school of hierophants or
+adepts is said to exist in Tibet, who, as a matter of daily routine, quite
+transcend everything that we have been accustomed to consider natural
+possibility. What is the course of study, what are the ways and means
+whereby such persons accomplish such results?
+
+The conventional attitude towards such matters is, of course, that of
+unconditional scepticism. But it is pleasant, occasionally, to take an
+airing beyond the bounds of incredulity. For my own part, it is true, I
+must confess my inability to believe in anything positively supernatural.
+The supernatural and the illusory are to my mind convertible terms: they
+cannot really exist or take place. Let us be sure, however, that we are
+agreed as to what supernatural means. If a magician, before my eyes,
+transformed an old man into a little girl, I should call that
+supernatural; and nothing should convince me that my senses had not been
+grossly deceived. But were the magician to leave the room by passing
+through the solid wall, or "go out" like an exploding soap-bubble,--I
+might think what I please, but I should not venture to dogmatically
+pronounce the thing supernatural; because the phenomenon known as "matter"
+is scientifically unknown, and therefore no one can tell what
+modifications it may not be susceptible of:--no one, that is to say,
+except the person who, like the magician of our illustration, professes to
+possess, and (for aught I can affirm to the contrary) may actually possess
+a knowledge unshared by the bulk of mankind. The transformation of an old
+man into a little girl, on the other hand, would be a transaction
+involving the immaterial soul as well as the material body; and if I do
+not know that that cannot take place, I am forever incapable of knowing
+anything. These are extreme examples, but they serve to emphasize an
+important distinction.
+
+The whole domain of magic, in short, occupies that anomalous neutral
+ground that intervenes between the facts of our senses and the truths of
+our intuitions. Fact and truth are not convertible terms; they abide in
+two distinct planes, like thought and speech, or soul and body; one may
+imply or involve the other, but can never demonstrate it. Experience and
+intuition together comprehend the entire realm of actual and conceivable
+knowledge. Whatever contradicts both experience and intuition may,
+therefore, be pronounced illusion. But this neutral ground is the home of
+phenomena which intuition does not deny, and which experience has not
+confirmed. It is still a wide zone, though not so wide as it was a hundred
+years ago, or fifty, or even ten. It narrows every day, as science, or the
+classification of experience, expands. Are we, then, to look for a time
+when the zone shall have dwindled to a mathematical line, and magic
+confess itself to have been nothing but the science of an advanced school
+of investigators? Will the human intellect acquire a power before which
+all mysteries shall become transparent? Let us dwell upon this question a
+little longer.
+
+A mystery that is a mystery can never, humanly speaking, become anything
+else. Instances of such mysteries can readily be adduced. The universe
+itself is built upon them and is the greatest of them. They lie before the
+threshold and at the basis of all existence. For example:--here is a lump
+of compact, whitish, cheese-like substance, about as much as would go into
+a thimble. From this I profess to be able to produce a gigantic, intricate
+structure, sixty feet in height and diameter, hard, solid, and enduring,
+which shall furthermore possess the power of extending and multiplying
+itself until it covers the whole earth, and even all the earths in the
+universe, if it could reach them. Is such a profession as this credible?
+It is entirely credible, as soon as I paraphrase it by saying that I
+propose to plant an acorn. And yet all magic has no mystery which is so
+wonderful as this universal mystery of growth: and the only reason we are
+not lost in amazement at it is that it goes quietly on all the time, and
+perfects itself under uniform conditions. But let me eliminate from the
+phenomenon the one element of time--which is logically the least essential
+factor in the product, unreal and arbitrary, based on the revolution of
+the earth, and conceivably variable to any extent--grant me this, and the
+world would come to see me do the miracle. But, with time or without it,
+the mystery is just as mysterious.
+
+Natural mysteries, then,--the mysteries of life, death, creation, growth,
+--do not fall under our present consideration: they are beyond the
+legitimate domain of magic: and no intellectual development to which we
+may hereafter attain will bring us a step nearer their solution. But with
+the problems proper to magic, the case is different. Magic is
+distinctively not Divine, but human: a finite conundrum, not an Infinite
+enigma. If there has ever been a magician since the world began, then all
+mankind may become magicians, if they will give the necessary time and
+trouble. And yet, magic is not simply an advanced region of the path which
+science is pursuing. Science is concerned with results,--with material
+phenomena; whereas magic is, primarily, the study of causes, or of
+spiritual phenomena; or, to use another definition,--of phenomena which
+the senses perceive, not in themselves, but only in their results. So long
+as we restrict ourselves to results, our activity is confined to analysis;
+but when we begin to investigate causes, we are on the road not only to
+comprehend results, but (within limits) to modify or produce them.
+
+Science, however, blocks our advance in this direction by denying, or at
+least refusing to admit, the existence of the spiritual world, or world of
+causes: because, being spiritual, it is not sensible, or cognizable in
+sense. Science admits only material causes, or the changes wrought in
+matter by itself. If we ask what is the cause of a material cause, we are
+answered that it is a supposed entity called Force, concerning which there
+is nothing further to be known.
+
+At this point, then, argument (on the material plane) comes to an end, and
+speculation or assumption begins. Science answers its own questions, but
+neither can nor will answer any others. And upon what pretence do we ask
+any others? We ask them upon two grounds. The first is that some people,--
+we might even say, most people,--would be glad to believe in supersensuous
+existence, and are always on the alert to examine any plausible hypothesis
+pointing in that direction: and secondly, there exists a vast amount of
+testimony (we need not call it evidence) tending to show that the
+supersensuous world has been discovered, and that it endows its
+discoverers with sundry notable advantages. Of course, we are not obliged
+to credit this testimony, unless we want to: and--for some reason, never
+fully explained--a great many people who accept natural mysteries quite
+amiably become indignant when requested to examine mysteries of a much
+milder order. But it is not my intention to discuss the limits of the
+probable; but to swallow as much as possible first, and endeavor to
+account for it afterwards.
+
+There is, as every reader knows, a class of phenomena--such as hypnotism,
+trance, animal magnetism, and so forth--the occurrence of which science
+has conceded, though failing as yet to offer any intelligent explanation
+of them. It is suggested that they are peculiar states of the brain and
+nerve-centres, physical in their nature and origin, though evading our
+present physical tests. Be that as it may, they afford a capital
+introduction to the study of magic; if, indeed, they, and a few allied
+phenomena, do not comprise the germs of the whole matter. Apropos of this
+subject, a society has lately been organized in London, with branches on
+the Continent and in this country, composed of scientific men, Fellows of
+the Royal Society, members of Parliament, professors, and literary men,
+calling themselves the "Psychical Research Society," and making it their
+business to test and investigate these very marvels, under the most
+stringent scientific conditions. But the capacity to be deceived of the
+bodily senses is almost unlimited; in fact, we know that they are
+incapable of telling us the ultimate truth on any subject; and we are able
+to get along with them only because we have found their misinformation to
+be sufficiently uniform for most practical purposes. But once admit that
+the origin of these phenomena is not on the physical plane, and then, if
+we are to give any weight at all to them, it can be only from a spiritual
+standpoint. In other words, unless we can approach such questions by an _a
+priori_ route, we might as well let them alone. We can reason from spirit
+to body--from mind to matter--but we can never reverse that process, and
+from matter evolve mind. The reason is that matter is not found to contain
+mind, but is only acted upon by it, as inferior by superior; and we cannot
+get out of the bag more than has been put into it. The acorn (to use our
+former figure) can never explain the oak; but the oak readily accounts for
+the acorn. It may be doubted, therefore, whether the Psychical Research
+Society can succeed in doing more than to give a respectable endorsement
+to a perplexing possibility,--so long as they adhere to the inductive
+method. Should they, however, abandon the inductive method for the
+deductive, they will forfeit the allegiance of all consistently scientific
+minds; and they may, perhaps, make some curious contributions to
+philosophy. At present, they appear to be astride the fence between
+philosophy and science, as if they hoped in some way to make the former
+satisfy the latter's demands. But the difference between the evidence that
+demonstrates a fact and the evidence that confirms a truth is, once more,
+a difference less of degree than of kind. We can never obtain sensible
+verification of a proposition that transcends sense. We must accept it
+without material proof, or not at all. We may believe, for instance, that
+Creation is the work of an intelligent Divine Being; or we may disbelieve
+it; but we can never prove it. If we do believe it, innumerable
+confirmations of it meet us at every turn: but no such confirmations, and
+no multiplication of them, can persuade a disbeliever. For belief is ever
+incommunicable from without; it can be generated only from within. The
+term "belief" cannot be applied to our recognition of a physical fact: we
+do not believe in that--we are only sensible of it.
+
+In this connection, a few words will be in order concerning what is called
+Spiritism,--a subject which has of late years been exciting a good deal of
+remark. Its disciples claim for it the dignity of a new and positive
+revelation,--a revelation to sense of spiritual being. Now, the entire
+universe may be described as a revelation to sense of spiritual being--for
+those who happen to believe _a priori_, or from spontaneous inward
+conviction, in spiritual being. We may believe a man's body, for example,
+to be the effect of which his soul is the cause; but no one can reach that
+conviction by the most refined dissection of the bodily tissues. How,
+then, does the spiritists' Positive Revelation help the matter? Their
+answer is that the physical universe is a permanent and orderly phenomenon
+which (setting aside the problem of its First Cause) fully accounts for
+itself; whereas the phenomena of Spiritism, such as rapping, table-
+tipping, materializing, and so forth, are, if not supernatural, at any
+rate extra-natural. They occur in consequence of a conscious effort to
+bring them about; they cease when that effort is discontinued; they abound
+in indications of being produced by independent intelligencies; they are
+inexplicable upon any recognized theory of physics; and, therefore, there
+is nothing for it but to regard them as spiritual. And what then? Then, of
+course, there must be spirits, and a life after the death of the body; and
+the great question of Immortality is answered in the affirmative!
+
+Let us, for the sake of argument, concede that the manifestations upon
+which the Spiritists found their claims are genuine: that they are or can
+be produced without fraud; and let us then enquire in what respect our
+means for the conversion of the sceptic are improved. In the first place
+we find that all the manifestations--be their cause what it may--can occur
+only on the physical plane. However much the origin of the phenomena may
+perplex us, the phenomena themselves must be purely material, in so far as
+they are perceptible at all. "Raps" are audible according to the same laws
+of vibration as other sounds: the tilting table is simply a material body
+displaced by an adequate agency; the materialized hand or face is nothing
+but physical substance assuming form. Plainly, therefore, we have as much
+right to ascribe a spiritual source to such phenomena as we have to
+ascribe a spiritual source to the ordinary phenomena of nature, such as a
+tree or a man's body,--just as much right--and no more! Consequently, we
+are no nearer converting our sceptic than we were at the outset. He admits
+the physical manifestation: there is no intrinsic novelty about that: but
+when we proceed to argue that the manifestations are wrought by spirits,
+he points out to us that this is sheer assumption on our part. "I have not
+seen a spirit," he says: "I have not heard one; I have not felt one; nor
+is it possible that my bodily senses should perceive anything that is not
+at least as physical as they are. I have witnessed certain transactions
+effected by means unknown to me--possibly by the action of a natural law
+not yet fully expounded by science. If there was anything spiritual in the
+affair, it has not been manifest to my apprehension: and I must decline to
+lend my countenance to any such pretensions."
+
+That would be the reply of the sceptic who was equal to the emergency. But
+let us suppose that he is not equal to it: that he is a weak-kneed,
+impressionable person, with a tendency to jump at conclusions; and that he
+is scared or mystified into believing that "spirits" may be at the bottom
+of it. What, then, will be the character of the faith which the Positive
+Revelation has furnished him? He has discovered that existence continues,
+in some fashion, after the death of the body. He has learned that there
+may be such a thing as--not immortality exactly, but--postmortem
+consciousness. He has been saddled with the conviction that the other
+world is full of restless ghosts, who come shuddering back from their cold
+emptiness, and try to warm themselves in the borrowed flesh and blood, and
+with the purblind selfishness and curiosity of us who still remain here.
+"Have faith: be not impatient: the conditions are unfavorable: but we are
+working for you!"--such is the constant burden of the communications. But,
+if there be a God, why must our relations with him be complicated by the
+interference of such forlorn prevaricators and amateur Paracletes as
+these? we do not wish to be "worked for,"--to be carried heavenward on
+some one else's shoulders: but to climb thither by God's help and our own
+will, or to stay where we are. Moreover, by what touchstone shall we test
+the veracity of the self-appointed purveyors of this Positive Revelation?
+Are we to believe what they say, because they have lost their bodies? If
+life teaches us anything, it is that God does above all things respect the
+spiritual freedom of his creatures. He does not terrify and bully us into
+acknowledging Him by ghostly juggleries in darkened rooms, and by vapid
+exhibitions addressed to our outward senses. He approaches each man in the
+innermost sacred audience-chamber of his heart, and there shows him good
+and evil, truth and falsehood, and bids him choose. And that choice, if
+made aright, becomes a genuine and undying belief, because it was made in
+freedom, unbiassed by external threats and cajoleries.
+
+Such belief is, itself, immortality,--something as distinct from post-
+mortem consciousness as wisdom is distinct from mere animal intelligence.
+On the whole, therefore, there seems to be little real worth in Spiritism,
+even accepting it at its own valuation. The nourishment it yields the soul
+is too meagre; and--save on that one bare point of life beyond the grave,
+which might just as easily prove an infinite curse as an infinite
+blessing--it affords no trustworthy news whatever.
+
+But these objections do not apply to magic proper. Magic seems to consist
+mainly in the control which mind may exceptionally exercise over matter.
+In hypnotism, the subject abjectly believes and obeys the operator. If he
+be told that he cannot step across a chalk mark on the floor, he cannot
+step across it. He dissolves in tears or explodes with laughter, according
+as the operator tells him he has cause for merriment or tears: and if he
+be assured that the water he drinks is Madeira wine or Java coffee, he has
+no misgiving that such is not the case.
+
+To say that this state of things is brought about by the exercise of the
+operator's will, is not to explain the phenomenon, but to put it in
+different terms. What is the will, and how does it produce such a result?
+Here is a man who believes, at the word of command, that the thing which
+all the rest of the world calls a chair is a horse. How is such
+misapprehension on his part possible? our senses are our sole means of
+knowing external objects: and this man's senses seem to confirm--at least
+they by no means correct--his persuasion that a given object is something
+very different. Could we solve this puzzle, we should have done something
+towards gaining an insight into the philosophy of magic.
+
+We observe, in the first place, that the _rationale_ of hypnotism, and of
+trance in general, is distinct from that of memory and of imagination, and
+even from that of dreams. It resembles these only in so far as it involves
+a quasi-perception of something not actually present or existent. But
+memory and imagination never mislead us into mistaking their suggestions
+for realities: while in dreams, the dreamer's fancy alone is active; the
+bodily faculties are not in action. In trance, however, the subject may
+appear to be, to all intents and purposes, awake. Yet this state, unlike
+the others, is abnormal. The brain seems to be in a passive, or, at any
+rate, in a detached condition; it cannot carry out or originate ideas, nor
+can it examine an idea as to its truth or falsehood. Furthermore, it
+cannot receive or interpret the reports of its own bodily senses. In
+short, its relations with the external world are suspended: and since the
+body is a part of the external world, the brain can no longer control the
+body's movements.
+
+Bodily movements are, however, to some extent, automatic. Given a certain
+stimulus in the brain or nerve-centres, and certain corresponding muscular
+contractions follow: and this whether or not the stimulus be applied in a
+normal manner. Although, therefore, the entranced brain cannot
+spontaneously control the body, yet if we can apply an independent
+stimulus to it, the body will make a fitting and apparently intelligent
+response. The reader has doubtless seen those ingenious pieces of
+mechanism which are set in motion by dropping into an orifice a coin or
+pellet. Now, could we drop into the passive brain of an entranced person
+the idea that a chair is a horse, for instance,--the person would give
+every sensible indication of having adopted that figment as a fact.
+
+But how (since he can no longer communicate with the world by means of his
+senses) is this idea to be insinuated? The man is magnetized--that is to
+say, insulated; how can we have intercourse with him?
+
+Experiments show that this can be effected only through the magnetizer.
+Asleep towards the rest of the world, towards him the entranced person is
+awake. Not awake, however, as to the bodily senses; neither the magnetizer
+nor any one else can approach by that route. It is true that, if the
+magnetizer speaks to him, he knows what is said: but he does not hear
+physically; because he perceives the unspoken thought just as readily. But
+since whatever does not belong to his body must belong to his soul (or
+mind, if that term be preferable), it follows that the magnetizer must
+communicate with the magnetized on the mental or spiritual plane; that is,
+immediately, or without the intervention of the body.
+
+Let us review the position we have reached:--We have an entranced or
+magnetized person,--a person whose mind, or spirit, has, by a certain
+process, been so far withdrawn from conscious communion with his own
+bodily senses as to disable him from receiving through them any tidings
+from the external world. He is not, however, wholly withdrawn from his
+body, for, in that case, the body would be dead; whereas, in fact, its
+organic or animal life continues almost unimpaired. He is therefore
+neither out of the body nor in it, but in an anomalous region midway
+between the two,--a state in which he can receive no sensuous impressions
+from the physical world, nor be put in conscious communication with the
+spiritual world through any channel--save one.
+
+This one exception is, as we have seen, the person who magnetized him. The
+magnetizer is, then, the one and only medium through which the person
+magnetized can obtain impressions: and these impressions are conveyed
+directly from the mind, or spirit, of the magnetizer to that of the
+magnetized. Let us note, further, that the former is not, like the latter,
+in a semi-disembodied state, but is in the normal exercise of his bodily
+functions and faculties. He possesses, consequently, his normal ability to
+originate ideas and to impart them: and whatever ideas he chooses to
+impart to the magnetized person, the latter is fain passively and
+implicitly to accept. And having so received them, they descend naturally
+into the automatic mechanism of the body, and are by it mechanically
+interpreted or enacted.
+
+So far, the theory is good: but something seems amiss in the working. We
+find that a certain process frequently issues in a certain effect: but we
+do not yet know why this should be the case. Some fundamental link is
+wanting; and this link is manifestly a knowledge of the true relations
+between mind and matter: of the laws to which the mental or spiritual
+world is subject: of what nature itself is: and of what Creation means.
+Let us cast a glance at these fundamental subjects; for they are the key
+without which the secrets of magic must remain locked and hidden.
+
+In common speech we call the realm of the material universe, Creation; but
+philosophy denies its claim to that title. Man alone is Creation:
+everything else is appearance. The universe appears, because man exists:
+he implies the universe, but is not implied by it. We may assist our
+metaphysics, here, by a physical illustration. Take a glass prism and hold
+in the sunlight before a white surface. Let the prism represent man: the
+sun, man's Creator: and the seven-hued ray cast by the prism, nature, or
+the material universe. Now, if we remove the light, the ray vanishes: it
+vanishes, also, if we take away the prism: but so long as the sun and the
+prism--God and man--remain in their mutual relation, so long must the
+rainbow nature appear. Nature, in short, is not God; neither is it man;
+but it is the inevitable concomitant or expression of the creative
+attitude of God towards man. It is the shadow of the elements of which
+humanity or human nature is composed: or, shall we say, it is the
+apparition in sense of the spiritual being of mankind,--not, be it
+observed, of the being of any individual or of any aggregation of
+individuals; but of humanity as a whole. For this reason, also, is nature
+orderly, complete, and permanent,--that it is conditioned not upon our
+frail and faulty personalities, but upon our impersonal, universal human
+nature, in which is transacted the miracle of God's incarnation, and
+through which He forever shines.
+
+Besides Creator and creature, nothing else can be; and whatever else seems
+to be, must be only a seeming. Nature, therefore, is the shadow of a
+shade, but it serves an indispensable use. For since there can be no
+direct communication between finite and Infinite--God and man--a medium or
+common ground is needed, where they may meet; and nature, the shadow which
+the Infinite causes the finite to project, is just that medium. Man,
+looking upon this shadow, mistakes it for real substance, serving him for
+foothold and background, and assisting him to attain self-consciousness.
+God, on the other hand, finds in nature the means of revealing Himself to
+His creature without compromising the creature's freedom. Man supposes the
+universe to be a physical structure made by God in space and time, and in
+some region of which He resides, at a safe distance from us His creatures:
+whereas, in truth, God is distant from us only so far as we remove
+ourselves from our own inmost intuitions of truth and good.
+
+But what is that substance or quality which underlies and gives
+homogeneity to the varying forms of nature, so that they seem to us to own
+a common origin?--what is that logical abstraction upon which we have
+bestowed the name of matter? scientific analysis finds matter only as
+forms, never as itself: until, in despair, it invents an atomic theory,
+and lets it go at that. But if, discarding the scientific method, we
+question matter from the philosophical standpoint, we shall find it less
+obdurate.
+
+Man, considered as a mind or spirit, consists of volition and
+intelligence; or, what is the same, of emotion or affection, and of the
+thoughts which are created by this affection. Nothing can be affirmed of
+man as a spirit which does not fall under one or other of these two parts.
+Now, a creature consisting solely of affections and thoughts must, of
+course, have something to love and to think about. Man's final destiny is
+no doubt to love and consider his Creator; but that can only be after a
+reactionary or regenerative process has begun in him. Meanwhile, he must
+love and consider the only other available object--that is, himself.
+Manifestly, however, in order to bestow this attention upon himself, he
+must first be made aware of his own existence. In order to effect this,
+something must be added to man as spirit, enabling him to discriminate
+between the subject thinking and loving, and the object loved and thought
+of. This additional something, again, in order to fulfill its purpose,
+must be so devised as not to appear an addition: it must seem even more
+truly the man than the man himself. It must, therefore, perfectly
+represent or correspond to the spiritual form and constitution; so that
+the thoughts and affections of the spirit may enter into it as into their
+natural home and continent.
+
+This continent or vehicle of the mind is the human body. The body has two
+aspects,--substance and form, answering to the two aspects of the mind,--
+affection and thought: and affection finds its incarnation or
+correspondence in substance; and thought, in form. The mind, in short,
+realizes itself in terms of its reflection in the body, much as the body
+realizes itself in terms of its reflection in the looking-glass: but it
+does more than this, for it identifies itself with this its image. And how
+is this identification made possible?
+
+It is brought about by the deception of sense, which is the medium of
+communication between the spiritual and the material man. Until this
+miraculous medium is put in action, there can be no conscious relation
+between these two planes, admirably as they are adapted to each other.
+Sense is spiritual on one side and material on the other: but it is only
+on the material side that it gathers its reports: on the spiritual side it
+only delivers them. Every one of the five messengers whereby we are
+apprised of external existence brings us an earthly message only. And
+since these messengers act spontaneously, and since the mind's only other
+source of knowledge is intuition, which cannot be sensuously confirmed,--
+it is little wonder if man has inclined to the persuasion that what is
+highest in him is but an attribute of what is lowest, and that when the
+body dies, the soul must follow it into nothingness.
+
+Creative energy, being infinite, passes through the world of causes to the
+world of effects--through the spiritual to the physical plane. Matter is
+therefore the symbol of the ultimate of creative activity; it is the
+negative of God. As God is infinite, matter is finite; as He is life, it
+is death; as He is real, it is unreal; as He reveals, matter veils. And as
+the relation of God to man's spirit is constant and eternal, so is the
+physical quality of matter fixed and permanent. Now, in order to arrive at
+a comprehension of what matter is in itself, let us descend from the
+general to the specific, and investigate the philosophical elements of a
+pebble, for instance. A pebble is two things: it is a mineral: and it is a
+particular concrete example of mineral. In its mineral aspect, it is out
+of space and time, and is--not a fact, but--a truth; a perception of the
+mind. In so far as it is mineral, therefore, it has no relation to sense,
+but only to thought: and on the other hand, in so far as it is a
+particular concrete pebble, it is cognizable by sense but not by thought;
+for what is in sense is out of thought: the one supersedes the other. But
+if sense thus absorbs matter, so as to be philosophically
+indistinguishable from it, we are constrained to identify matter with our
+sensuous perception of it: and if our exemplary pebble had nothing but its
+material quality to depend upon, it would cease to exist not only to
+thought, but to sense likewise. Its metaphysical aspect, in short, is the
+only reality appertaining to it. Matter, then, may be defined as the
+impact upon sense of that prismatic ray which we have called nature.
+
+To apply this discussion to the subject in hand: Magic is a sort of parody
+of reality. And when we recognize that Creation proceeds from within
+outwards, or endogenously; and that matter is not the objective but the
+subjective side of the universe, we are in a position to perceive that in
+order magically to control matter, we must apply our efforts not to matter
+itself, but to our own minds. The natural world affects us from without
+inwards: the magical world affects us from within outwards: instead of
+objects suggesting ideas, ideas are made to suggest objects. And as, in
+the former case, when the object is removed the idea vanishes; so in the
+latter case, when the idea is removed, the object vanishes. Both objects
+are illusions; but the illusion in the first instance is the normal
+illusion of sense, whereas in the second instance it is the abnormal
+illusion of mind.
+
+The above argument can at best serve only as a hint to such as incline
+seriously to investigate the subject, and perhaps as a touchstone for
+testing the validity of a large and noisy mass of pretensions which engage
+the student at the outset of his enquiry. Many of these pretensions are
+the result of ignorance; many of deliberate intent to deceive; some,
+again, of erroneous philosophical theories. The Tibetan adepts seem to
+belong either to the second or to the last of these categories,--or,
+perhaps, to an impartial mingling of all three. They import a cumbrous
+machinery of auras, astral bodies, and elemental spirits; they divide man
+into seven principles, nature into seven kingdoms; they regard spirit as a
+refined form of matter, and matter as the one absolute fact of the
+universe,--the alpha and omega of all things. They deny a supreme Deity,
+but hold out hopes of a practical deityship for the majority of the human
+race. In short, their philosophy appeals to the most evil instincts of the
+soul, and has the air of being ex-post-facto; whenever they run foul of a
+prodigy, they invent arbitrarily a fanciful explanation of it. But it will
+be found, I think, that the various phases of hypnotism, and a
+systematized use of spiritism, will amply account for every miracle they
+actually bring to pass.
+
+Upon the whole, a certain vulgarity is inseparable from even the most
+respectable forms of magic,--an atmosphere of tinsel, of ostentation, of
+big cry and little wool. A child might have told us that matter is not
+almighty, that minds are sometimes transparent to one another, that love
+and faith can work wonders. And we also know that, in this mortal life,
+our means are exquisitely adapted to our ends; and that we can gain no
+solid comfort or advantage by striving to elbow our way a few inches
+further into the region of the occult and abnormal. Magic, however
+specious its achievements, is only a mockery of the Creative power, and
+exposes its unlikeness to it. "It is the attribute of natural existence,"
+a profound writer has said, "to be a form of use to something higher than
+itself, so that whatever does not, either potentially or actually, possess
+within it this soul of use, does not honestly belong to nature, but is a
+sensational effect produced upon the individual intelligence." [Footnote:
+Henry James, in "Society the Redeemed Form of Man."]
+
+No one can overstep the order and modesty of general existence without
+bringing himself into perilous proximity to subjects more profound and
+sacred than the occasion warrants. Life need not be barren of mystery and
+miracle to any one of us; but they shall be such tender mysteries and
+instructive miracles as the devotion of motherhood, and the blooming of
+spring. We are too close to Infinite love and wisdom to play pranks before
+it, and provoke comparison between our paltry juggleries and its
+omnipotence and majesty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+AMERICAN WILD ANIMALS IN ART.
+
+
+The hunter and the sportsman are two very different persons. The hunter
+pursues animals because he loves them and sympathizes with them, and kills
+them as the champions of chivalry used to slay one another--courteously,
+fairly, and with admiration and respect. To stalk and shoot the elk and
+the grizzly bear is to him what wooing and winning a beloved maiden would
+be to another man. Far from being the foe or exterminator of the game he
+follows, he, more than any one else, is their friend, vindicator, and
+confidant. A strange mutual ardor and understanding unites him with his
+quarry. He loves the mountain sheep and the antelope, because they can
+escape him; the panther and the bear, because they can destroy him. His
+relations with them are clean, generous, and manly. And on the other hand,
+the wild animals whose wildness can never be tamed, whose inmost principle
+of existence it is to be apart and unapproachable,--those creatures who
+may be said to cease to be when they cease to be intractable,--seem, after
+they have eluded their pursuer to the utmost, or fought him to the death,
+to yield themselves to him with a sort of wild contentment--as if they
+were glad to admit the sovereignty of man, though death come with the
+admission. The hunter, in short, asks for his happiness only to be alone
+with what he hunts; the sportsman, after his day's sport, must needs
+hasten home to publish the size of the "bag," and to wring from his
+fellow-men the glory and applause which he has not the strength and
+simplicity to find in the game itself.
+
+But if the true hunter is rare, the union of the hunter and the artist is
+rarer still. It demands not only the close familiarity, the loving
+observation, and the sympathy, but also the faculty of creation--the eye
+which selects what is constructive and beautiful, and passes over what is
+superfluous and inharmonious, and the hand skilful to carry out what the
+imagination conceives. In the man whose work I am about to consider, these
+qualities are developed in a remarkable degree, though it was not until he
+was a man grown, and had fought with distinction through the civil war,
+that he himself became aware of the artistic power that was in him. The
+events of his life, could they be rehearsed here, would form a tale of
+adventure and vicissitude more varied and stirring than is often found in
+fiction. He has spent by himself days and weeks in the vast solitudes of
+our western prairies and southern morasses. He has been the companion of
+trappers and frontiersmen, the friend and comrade of Indians, sleeping
+side by side with them in their wigwams, running the rapids in their
+canoes, and riding with them in the hunt. He has met and overcome the
+panther and the grizzly single-handed, and has pursued the flying cimmaron
+to the snowy summits of the Rocky Mountains, and brought back its crescent
+horns as a trophy. He has fought and slain the gray wolf with no other
+weapons than his hands and teeth; and at night he has lain concealed by
+lonely tarns, where the wild coyote came to patter and bark and howl at
+the midnight moon. His name and achievements are familiar to the dwellers
+in those savage regions, whose estimate of a man is based, not upon his
+social and financial advantages, but upon what he is and can do. Yet he is
+not one who wears his merit outwardly. His appearance, indeed, is
+striking; tall and athletic, broad-shouldered and stout-limbed, with the
+long, elastic step of the moccasined Indian, and something of the Indian's
+reticence and simplicity. But he can with difficulty be brought to allude
+to his adventures, and is reserved almost to the point of ingenuity on all
+that concerns himself or redounds to his credit. It is only in familiar
+converse with friends that the humor, the cultivation, the knowledge, and
+the social charm of the man appear, and his marvellous gift of vivid and
+picturesque narration discloses itself. But, in addition to all this, or
+above it all, he is the only great animal sculptor of his time, the
+successor of the French Barye, and (as any one may satisfy himself who
+will take the trouble to compare their works) the equal of that famous
+artist in scope and treatment of animal subjects, and his superior in
+knowledge and in truth and power of conception. It would be a poor
+compliment to call Edward Kemeys the American Barye; but Barye is the only
+man whose animal sculptures can bear comparison with Mr. Kemeys's.
+
+Of Mr. Kemeys's productions, a few are to be seen at his studio, 133 West
+Fifty-third Street, New York city. These are the models, in clay or
+plaster, as they came fresh from the artist's hand. From this condition
+they can either be enlarged to life or colossal size, for parks or public
+buildings, or cast in bronze in their present dimensions for the
+enrichment of private houses. Though this collection includes scarce a
+tithe of what the artist has produced, it forms a series of groups and
+figures which, for truth to nature, artistic excellence, and originality,
+are actually unique. So unique are they, indeed, that the uneducated eye
+does not at first realize their really immense value. Nothing like this
+little sculpture gallery has been seen before, and it is very improbable
+that there will ever again be a meeting of conditions and qualities
+adequate to reproducing such an exhibition. For we see here not merely,
+nor chiefly, the accurate representation of the animal's external aspect,
+but--what is vastly more difficult to seize and portray--the essential
+animal character or temperament which controls and actuates the animal's
+movements and behavior. Each one of Mr. Kemeys's figures gives not only
+the form and proportions of the animal, according to the nicest anatomical
+studies and measurements, but it is the speaking embodiment of profound
+insight into that animal's nature and knowledge of its habits. The
+spectator cannot long examine it without feeling that he has learned much
+more of its characteristics and genius than if he had been standing in
+front of the same animal's cage at the Zoological Gardens; for here is an
+artist who understands how to translate pose into meaning, and action into
+utterance, and to select those poses and actions which convey the broadest
+and most comprehensive idea of the subject's prevailing traits. He not
+only knows what posture or movement the anatomical structure of the animal
+renders possible, but he knows precisely in what degree such posture or
+movement is modified by the animal's physical needs and instincts. In
+other words, he always respects the modesty of nature, and never yields to
+the temptation to be dramatic and impressive at the expense of truth. Here
+is none of Barye's exaggeration, or of Landseer's sentimental effort to
+humanize animal nature. Mr. Kemeys has rightly perceived that animal
+nature is not a mere contraction of human nature; but that each animal, so
+far as it owns any relation to man at all, represents the unimpeded
+development of some particular element of man's nature. Accordingly,
+animals must be studied and portrayed solely upon their own basis and
+within their own limits; and he who approaches them with this
+understanding will find, possibly to his surprise, that the theatre thus
+afforded is wide and varied enough for the exercise of his best ingenuity
+and capacities. At first, no doubt, the simple animal appears too simple
+to be made artistically interesting, apart from this or that conventional
+or imaginative addition. The lion must be presented, not as he is, but as
+vulgar anticipation expects him to be; not with the savageness and terror
+which are native to him, but with the savageness and terror which those
+who have trembled and fled at the echo of his roar invest him with,--which
+are quite another matter. Zoological gardens and museums have their uses,
+but they cannot introduce us to wild animals as they really are; and the
+reports of those who have caught terrified or ignorant glimpses of them in
+their native regions will mislead us no less in another direction. Nature
+reveals her secrets only to those who have faithfully and rigorously
+submitted to the initiation; but to them she shows herself marvellous and
+inexhaustible. The "simple animal" avouches his ability to transcend any
+imaginative conception of him. The stern economy of his structure and
+character, the sureness and sufficiency of his every manifestation, the
+instinct and capacity which inform all his proceedings,--these are things
+which are concealed from a hasty glance by the very perfection of their
+state. Once seen and comprehended, however, they work upon the mind of the
+observer with an ever increasing power; they lead him into a new, strange,
+and fascinating world, and generously recompense him for any effort he may
+have made to penetrate thither. Of that strange and fascinating world Mr.
+Kemeys is the true and worthy interpreter, and, so far as appears, the
+only one. Through difficulty and discouragement of all kinds, he has kept
+to the simple truth, and the truth has rewarded him. He has done a service
+of incalculable value to his country, not only in vindicating American
+art, but in preserving to us, in a permanent and beautiful form, the vivid
+and veracious figures of a wild fauna which, in the inevitable progress of
+colonization and civilization, is destined within a few years to vanish
+altogether. The American bear and bison, the cimmaron and the elk, the
+wolf and the 'coon--where will they be a generation hence? Nowhere, save
+in the possession of those persons who have to-day the opportunity and the
+intelligence to decorate their rooms and parks with Mr. Kemeys's
+inimitable bronzes. The opportunity is great--much greater, I should
+think, than the intelligence necessary for availing ourselves of it; and
+it is a unique opportunity. In other words, it lies within the power of
+every cultivated family in the United States to enrich itself with a work
+of art which is entirely American; which, as art, fulfils every
+requirement; which is of permanent and increasing interest and value from
+an ornamental point of view; and which is embodied in the most enduring of
+artistic materials.
+
+The studio in which Mr. Kemeys works--a spacious apartment--is, in
+appearance, a cross between a barn-loft and a wigwam. Round the walls are
+suspended the hides, the heads, and the horns of the animals which the
+hunter has shot; and below are groups, single figures, and busts, modelled
+by the artist, in plaster, terracotta, or clay. The colossal design of the
+"Still Hunt"--an American panther crouching before its spring--was
+modelled here, before being cast in bronze and removed to its present site
+in Central Park. It is a monument of which New York and America may be
+proud; for no such powerful and veracious conception of a wild animal has
+ever before found artistic embodiment. The great cat crouches with head
+low, extended throat, and ears erect. The shoulders are drawn far back,
+the fore paws huddled beneath the jaws. The long, lithe back rises in an
+arch in the middle, sinking thence to the haunches, while the angry tail
+makes a strong curve along the ground to the right. The whole figure is
+tense and compact with restrained and waiting power; the expression is
+stealthy, pitiless, and terrible; it at once fascinates and astounds the
+beholder. While Mr. Kemeys was modelling this animal, an incident occurred
+which he has told me in something like the following words. The artist
+does not encourage the intrusion of idle persons while he is at work,
+though no one welcomes intelligent inspection and criticism more cordially
+than he. On this occasion he was alone in the studio with his Irish
+factotum, Tom, and the outer door, owing to the heat of the weather, had
+been left ajar. All of a sudden the artist was aware of the presence of a
+stranger in the room. "He was a tall, hulking fellow, shabbily dressed,
+like a tramp, and looked as if he might make trouble if he had a mind to.
+However, he stood quite still in front of the statue, staring at it, and
+not saying anything. So I let him alone for a while; I thought it would be
+time enough to attend to him when he began to beg or make a row. But after
+some time, as he still hadn't stirred, Tom came to the conclusion that a
+hint had better be given him to move on; so he took a broom and began
+sweeping the floor, and the dust went all over the fellow; but he didn't
+pay the least attention. I began to think there would probably be a fight;
+but I thought I'd wait a little longer before doing anything. At last I
+said to him, 'Will you move aside, please? You're in my way.' He stepped
+over a little to the right, but still didn't open his mouth, and kept his
+eyes fixed on the panther. Presently I said to Tom, 'Well, Tom, the cheek
+of some people passes belief!' Tom replied with more clouds of dust; but
+the stranger never made a sign. At last I got tired, so I stepped up to
+the fellow and said to him: 'Look here, my friend, when I asked you to
+move aside, I meant you should move the other side of the door.' He roused
+up then, and gave himself a shake, and took a last look at the panther,
+and said he, 'That's all right, boss; I know all about the door; but--what
+a spring she's going to make!' Then," added Kemeys, self-reproachfully, "I
+could have wept!"
+
+But although this superb figure no longer dominates the studio, there is
+no lack of models as valuable and as interesting, though not of heroic
+size. Most interesting of all to the general observer are, perhaps, the
+two figures of the grizzly bear. These were designed from a grizzly which
+Mr. Kemeys fought and killed in the autumn of 1881 in the Rocky Mountains,
+and the mounted head of which grins upon the wall overhead, a grisly
+trophy indeed. The impression of enormous strength, massive yet elastic,
+ponderous yet alert, impregnable for defence as irresistible in attack; a
+strength which knows no obstacles, and which never meets its match,--this
+impression is as fully conveyed in these figures, which are not over a
+foot in height, as if the animal were before us in its natural size. You
+see the vast limbs, crooked with power, bound about with huge ropes and
+plates of muscle, and clothed in shaggy depths of fur; the vast breadth of
+the head, with its thick, low ears, dull, small eyes, and long up-curving
+snout; the roll and lunge of the gait, like the motion of a vessel
+plunging forward before the wind; the rounded immensity of the trunk, and
+the huge bluntness of the posteriors; and all these features are combined
+with such masterly unity of conception and plastic vigor, that the
+diminutive model insensibly grows mighty beneath your gaze, until you
+realize the monster as if he stood stupendous and grim before you. In the
+first of the figures the bear has paused in his great stride to paw over
+and snuff at the horned head of a mountain sheep, half buried in the soil.
+The action of the right arm and shoulder, and the burly slouch of the
+arrested stride, are of themselves worth a gallery of pseudo-classic
+Venuses and Roman senators. The other bear is lolling back on his
+haunches, with all four paws in the air, munching some grapes from a vine
+which he has torn from its support. The contrast between the savage
+character of the beast and his absurdly peaceful employment gives a touch
+of terrific comedy to this design. After studying these figures, one
+cannot help thinking what a noble embellishment either of them would be,
+put in bronze, of colossal size, in the public grounds of one of our great
+Western cities. And inasmuch as the rich citizens of the West not only
+know what a grizzly bear is, but are more fearless and independent, and
+therefore often more correct in their artistic opinion than the somewhat
+sophisticated critics of the East, there is some cause for hoping that
+this thing may be brought to pass.
+
+Beside the grizzly stands the mountain sheep, or cimmaron, the most
+difficult to capture of all four-footed animals, whose gigantic curved
+horns are the best trophy of skill and enterprise that a hunter can bring
+home with him. The sculptor has here caught him in one of his most
+characteristic attitudes--just alighted from some dizzy leap on the
+headlong slope of a rocky mountainside. On such a spot nothing but the
+cimmaron could retain its footing; yet there he stands, firm and secure as
+the rock itself, his fore feet planted close together, the fore legs rigid
+and straight as the shaft of a lance, while the hind legs pose easily in
+attendance upon them. "The cimmaron always strikes plumb-centre, and he
+never makes a mistake," is Mr. Kemeys's laconic comment; and we can
+recognize the truth of the observation in this image. Perfectly at home
+and comfortable on its almost impossible perch, the cimmaron curves its
+great neck and turns its head upward, gazing aloft toward the height
+whence it has descended. "It's the golden eagle he hears," says the
+sculptor; "they give him warning of danger." It is a magnificent animal, a
+model of tireless vigor in all its parts; a creature made to hurl itself
+head-foremost down appalling gulfs of space, and poise itself at the
+bottom as jauntily as if gravitation were but a bugbear of timid
+imaginations. I find myself unconsciously speaking about these plaster
+models as if they were the living animals which they represent; but the
+more one studies Mr. Kemeys's works, the more instinct with redundant and
+breathing life do they appear.
+
+It would be impossible even to catalogue the contents of this studio, the
+greater part of which is as well worth describing as those examples which
+have already been touched upon; nor could a more graphic pen than mine
+convey an adequate impression of their excellence. But there is here a
+figure of the 'coon, which, as it is the only one ever modelled, ought not
+to be passed over in silence. In appearance this animal is a curious
+medley of the fox, the wolf, and the bear, besides I-know-not-what (as the
+lady in "Punch" would say) that belongs to none of those beasts. As may be
+imagined, therefore, its right portrayal involves peculiar difficulties,
+and Mr. Kemeys's genius is nowhere better shown than in the manner in
+which these have been surmounted. Compact, plump, and active in figure,
+quick and subtle in its movements, the 'coon crouches in a flattened
+position along the limb of a tree, its broad, shallow head and pointed
+snout a little lifted, as it gazes alertly outward and downward. It
+sustains itself by the clutch of its slender-clawed toes on the branch,
+the fore legs being spread apart, while the left hind leg is withdrawn
+inward, and enters smoothly into the contour of the furred side; the
+bushy, fox-like tail, ringed with dark and light bands, curving to the
+left. Thus posed and modelled in high relief on a tile-shaped plaque, Mr.
+Kemeys's coon forms a most desirable ornament for some wise man's
+sideboard or mantle-piece, where it may one day be pointed out as the only
+surviving representative of its species.
+
+The two most elaborate groups here have already attained some measure of
+publicity; the "Bison and Wolves" having been exhibited in the Paris Salon
+in 1878, and the "Deer and Panther" having been purchased in bronze by Mr.
+Winans during the sculptor's sojourn in England. Each group represents one
+of those deadly combats between wild beasts which are among the most
+terrific and at the same time most natural incidents of animal existence;
+and they are of especial interest as showing the artist's power of
+concentrated and graphic composition. A complicated story is told in both
+these instances with a masterly economy of material and balance of
+proportion; so that the spectator's eye takes in the whole subject at a
+glance, and yet finds inexhaustible interest in the examination of
+details, all of which contribute to the central effect without distracting
+the attention. A companion piece to the "Deer and Panther" shows the same
+animals as they have fallen, locked together in death after the combat is
+over. In the former group, the panther, in springing upon the deer, had
+impaled its neck on the deer's right antler, and had then swung round
+under the latter's body, burying the claws of its right fore foot in the
+ruminant's throat. In order truthfully to represent the second stage of
+the encounter, therefore, it was necessary not merely to model a second
+group, but to retain the elements and construction of the first group
+under totally changed conditions. This is a feat of such peculiar
+difficulty that I think few artists in any branch of art would venture to
+attempt it; nevertheless, Mr. Kemeys has accomplished it; and the more the
+two groups are studied in connection with each other, the more complete
+will his success be found to have been. The man who can do this may surely
+be admitted a master, whose works are open only to affirmative criticism.
+For his works the most trying of all tests is their comparison with one
+another; and the result of such comparison is not merely to confirm their
+merit, but to illustrate and enhance it.
+
+For my own part, my introduction to Mr. Kemeys's studio was the opening to
+me of a new world, where it has been my good fortune to spend many days of
+delightful and enlightening study. How far the subject of this writing may
+have been already familiar to the readers of it, I have no means of
+knowing; but I conceive it to be no less than my duty, as a countryman of
+Mr. Kemeys's and a lover of all that is true and original in art, to pay
+the tribute of my appreciation to what he has done. There is no danger of
+his getting more recognition than he deserves, and he is not one whom
+recognition can injure. He reverences his art too highly to magnify his
+own exposition of it; and when he reads what I have set down here, he will
+smile and shake his head, and mutter that I have divined the perfect idea
+in the imperfect embodiment. Unless I greatly err, however, no one but
+himself is competent to take that exception. The genuine artist is never
+satisfied with his work; he perceives where it falls short of his
+conception. But to others it will not be incomplete; for the achievements
+of real art are always invested with an atmosphere and aroma--a spiritual
+quality perhaps--proceeding from the artist's mind and affecting that of
+the beholder. And thus it happens that the story or the poem, the picture
+or the sculpture, receives even in its material form that last indefinable
+grace, that magic light that never was on sea or land, which no pen or
+brush or graving-tool has skill to seize. Matter can never rise to the
+height of spirit; but spirit informs it when it has done its best, and
+ennobles it with the charm that the artist sought and the world desired.
+
+*** Since the above was written, Mr. Kemeys has removed his studio to
+Perth Amboy, N. J.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Confessions and Criticisms, by Julian Hawthorne
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+Project Gutenberg's Confessions and Criticisms, by Julian Hawthorne
+#8 in our series by Julian Hawthorne
+
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+Title: Confessions and Criticisms
+
+Author: Julian Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7431]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 29, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONFESSIONS AND CRITICISMS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, John R. Bilderback
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS AND CRITICISMS
+
+BY
+JULIAN HAWTHORNE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+CHAPTER
+
+   I. A PRELIMINARY CONFESSION
+  II. NOVELS AND AGNOSTICISM
+ III. AMERICANISM IN FICTION
+  IV. LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN
+   V. THE MORAL AIM IN FICTION
+  VI. THE MAKER OF MANY BOOKS
+ VII. MR. MALLOCK'S MISSING SCIENCE
+VIII. THEODORE WINTHROP'S WRITINGS
+  IX. EMERSON AS AN AMERICAN
+   X. MODERN MAGIC
+  XI. AMERICAN WILD ANIMALS IN ART
+
+
+
+
+CONFESSIONS AND CRITICISMS.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+A PRELIMINARY CONFESSION.
+
+
+In 1869, when I was about twenty-three years old, I sent a couple of
+sonnets to the revived _Putnam's Magazine_. At that period I had no
+intention of becoming a professional writer: I was studying civil
+engineering at the Polytechnic School in Dresden, Saxony. Years before, I
+had received parental warnings--unnecessary, as I thought--against writing
+for a living. During the next two years, however, when I was acting as
+hydrographic engineer in the New York Dock Department, I amused myself by
+writing a short story, called "Love and Counter-Love," which was published
+in _Harper's Weekly_, and for which I was paid fifty dollars. "If fifty
+dollars can be so easily earned," I thought, "why not go on adding to my
+income in this way from time to time?" I was aided and abetted in the idea
+by the late Robert Carter, editor of _Appletons' Journal_; and the latter
+periodical and _Harper's Magazine_ had the burden, and I the benefit, of
+the result. When, in 1872, I was abruptly relieved from my duties in the
+Dock Department, I had the alternative of either taking my family down to
+Central America to watch me dig a canal, or of attempting to live by my
+pen. I bought twelve reams of large letter-paper, and began my first
+work,--"Bressant." I finished it in three weeks; but prudent counsellors
+advised me that it was too immoral to publish, except in French: so I
+recast it, as the phrase is, and, in its chastened state, sent it through
+the post to a Boston publisher. It was lost on the way, and has not yet
+been found. I was rather pleased than otherwise at this catastrophe; for I
+had in those days a strange delight in rewriting my productions: it was,
+perhaps, a more sensible practice than to print them. Accordingly, I
+rewrote and enlarged "Bressant" in Dresden (whither I returned with my
+family in 1872); but--immorality aside--I think the first version was the
+best of the three. On my way to Germany I passed through London, and there
+made the acquaintance of Henry S. King, the publisher, a charming but
+imprudent man, for he paid me one hundred pounds for the English copyright
+of my novel: and the moderate edition he printed is, I believe, still
+unexhausted. The book was received in a kindly manner by the press; but
+both in this country and in England some surprise and indignation were
+expressed that the son of his father should presume to be a novelist. This
+sentiment, whatever its bearing upon me, has undoubtedly been of service
+to my critics: it gives them something to write about. A disquisition upon
+the mantle of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and an analysis of the differences and
+similarities between him and his successor, generally fill so much of a
+notice as to enable the reviewer to dismiss the book itself very briefly.
+I often used to wish, when, years afterwards, I was myself a reviewer for
+the London _Spectator_, that I could light upon some son of his father who
+might similarly lighten my labors. Meanwhile, I was agreeably astonished
+at what I chose to consider the success of "Bressant," and set to work to
+surpass it in another romance, called (for some reason I have forgotten)
+"Idolatry." This unknown book was actually rewritten, in whole or in part,
+no less than seven times. _Non sum qualis eram_. For seven or eight years
+past I have seldom rewritten one of the many pages which circumstances
+have compelled me to inflict upon the world. But the discipline of
+"Idolatry" probably taught me how to clothe an idea in words.
+
+By the time "Idolatry" was published, the year 1874 had come, and I was
+living in London. From my note-books and recollections I compiled a series
+of papers on life in Dresden, under the general title of "Saxon Studies."
+Alexander Strahan, then editor of the _Contemporary Review_, printed them
+in that periodical as fast as I wrote them, and they were reproduced in
+certain eclectic magazines in this country,--until I asserted my American
+copyright. Their publication in book form was followed by the collapse of
+both the English and the American firm engaging in that enterprise. I draw
+no deductions from that fact: I simply state it. The circulation of the
+"Studies" was naturally small; but one copy fell into the hands of a
+Dresden critic, and the manner in which he wrote of it and its author
+repaid me for the labor of composition and satisfied me that I had not
+done amiss.
+
+After "Saxon Studies" I began another novel, "Garth," instalments of which
+appeared from month to month in _Harper's Magazine_. When it had run for a
+year or more, with no signs of abatement, the publishers felt obliged to
+intimate that unless I put an end to their misery they would. Accordingly,
+I promptly gave Garth his quietus. The truth is, I was tired of him
+myself. With all his qualities and virtues, he could not help being a
+prig. He found some friends, however, and still shows signs of vitality. I
+wrote no other novel for nearly two years, but contributed some sketches
+of English life to _Appletons' Journal_, and produced a couple of
+novelettes,--"Mrs. Gainsborough's Diamonds" and "Archibald Malmaison,"--
+which, by reason of their light draught, went rather farther than usual.
+Other short tales, which I hardly care to recall, belong to this period. I
+had already ceased to take pleasure in writing for its own sake,--partly,
+no doubt, because I was obliged to write for the sake of something else.
+Only those who have no reverence for literature should venture to meddle
+with the making of it,--unless, at all events, they can supply the demands
+of the butcher and baker from an independent source.
+
+In 1879, "Sebastian Strome" was published as a serial in _All the Year
+Round_. Charley Dickens, the son of the great novelist, and editor of the
+magazine, used to say to me while the story was in progress, "Keep that
+red-haired girl up to the mark, and the story will do." I took a fancy to
+Mary Dene myself. But I uniformly prefer my heroines to my heroes; perhaps
+because I invent the former out of whole cloth, whereas the latter are
+often formed of shreds and patches of men I have met. And I never raised a
+character to the position of hero without recognizing in him, before I had
+done with him, an egregious ass. Differ as they may in other respects,
+they are all brethren in that; and yet I am by no means disposed to take a
+Carlylese view of my actual fellow-creatures.
+
+I did some hard work at this time: I remember once writing for twenty-six
+consecutive hours without pausing or rising from my chair; and when,
+lately, I re-read the story then produced, it seemed quite as good as the
+average of my work in that kind. I hasten to add that it has never been
+printed in this country: for that matter, not more than half my short
+tales have found an American publisher. "Archibald Malmaison" was offered
+seven years ago to all the leading publishers in New York and Boston, and
+was promptly refused by all. Since its recent appearance here, however, it
+has had a circulation larger perhaps than that of all my other stories
+combined. But that is one of the accidents that neither author nor
+publisher can foresee. It was the horror of "Archibald Malmaison," not any
+literary merit, that gave it vogue,--its horror, its strangeness, and its
+brevity.
+
+On Guy Fawkes's day, 1880, I began "Fortune's Fool,"--or "Luck," as it was
+first called,--and wrote the first ten of the twelve numbers in three
+months. I used to sit down to my table at eight o'clock in the evening and
+write till sunrise. But the two remaining instalments were not written and
+published until 1883, and this delay and its circumstances spoiled the
+book. In the interval between beginning and finishing it another long
+novel--"Dust"--was written and published. I returned to America in 1882,
+after an absence in Europe far longer than I had anticipated or desired. I
+trust I may never leave my native land again for any other on this planet.
+
+"Beatrix Randolph," "Noble Blood," and "Love--or a Name," are the novels
+which I have written since my return; and I also published a biography,
+"Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife." I cannot conscientiously say that I
+have found the literary profession--in and for itself--entirely agreeable.
+Almost everything that I have written has been written from necessity; and
+there is very little of it that I shall not be glad to see forgotten. The
+true rewards of literature, for men of limited calibre, are the incidental
+ones,--the valuable friendships and the charming associations which it
+brings about. For the sake of these I would willingly endure again many
+passages of a life that has not been all roses; not that I would appear to
+belittle my own work: it does not need it. But the present generation (in
+America at least) does not strike me as containing much literary genius.
+The number of undersized persons is large and active, and we hardly
+believe in the possibility of heroic stature. I cannot sufficiently admire
+the pains we are at to make our work--embodying the aims it does--
+immaculate in form. Form without idea is nothing, and we have no ideas. If
+one of us were to get an idea, it would create its own form, as easily as
+does a flower or a planet. I think we take ourselves too seriously: our
+posterity will not be nearly so grave over us. For my part, I do not write
+better than I do, because I have no ideas worth better clothes than they
+can pick up for themselves. "Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing
+with your best pains," is a saying which has injured our literature more
+than any other single thing. How many a lumber-closet since the world
+began has been filled by the results of this purblind and delusive theory!
+But this is not autobiographical,--save that to have written it shows how
+little prudence my life has taught me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember wondering, in 1871, how anybody could write novels. I had
+produced two or three short stories; but to expand such a thing until it
+should cover two or three hundred pages seemed an enterprise far beyond my
+capacity. Since then, I have accomplished the feat only too often; but I
+doubt whether I have a much clearer idea than before of the way it is
+done; and I am certain of never having done it twice in the same way. The
+manner in which the plant arrives at maturity varies according to the
+circumstances in which the seed is planted and cultivated; and the
+cultivator, in this instance at least, is content to adapt his action to
+whatever conditions happen to exist.
+
+While, therefore, it might be easy to formulate a cut-and-dried method of
+procedure, which should be calculated to produce the best results by the
+most efficient means, no such formula would truly represent the present
+writer's actual practice. If I ever attempted to map out my successive
+steps beforehand, I never adhered to the forecast or reached the
+anticipated goal. The characters develop unexpected traits, and these
+traits become the parents of incidents that had not been contemplated. The
+characters themselves, on the other hand, cannot be kept to any
+preconceived characteristics; they are, in their turn, modified by the
+exigencies of the plot.
+
+In two or three cases I have tried to make portraits of real persons whom
+I have known; but these persons have always been more lifeless than the
+others, and most lifeless in precisely those features that most nearly
+reproduced life. The best results in this direction are realized by those
+characters that come to their birth simultaneously with the general scheme
+of the proposed events; though I remember that one of the most lifelike of
+my personages (Madge, in the novel "Garth") was not even thought of until
+the story of which she is the heroine had been for some time under
+consideration.
+
+Speaking generally, I should suppose that the best novels are apt to be
+those that have been longest in the novelist's mind before being committed
+to paper; and the best materials to use, in the way of character and
+scenery, are those that were studied not less than seven or eight years
+previous to their reproduction. Thereby is attained that quality in a
+story known as atmosphere or tone, perhaps the most valuable and telling
+quality of all. Occasionally, however, in the rare case of a story that
+suddenly seizes upon the writer's imagination and despotically "possesses"
+him, the atmosphere is created by the very strength of the "possession."
+In the former instance, the writer is thoroughly master of his subject; in
+the latter, the subject thoroughly masters him; and both amount
+essentially to the same thing, harmony between subject and writer.
+
+With respect to style, there is little to be said. Without a good style,
+no writer can do much; but it is impossible really to create a good style.
+A writer's style was born at the same time and under the same conditions
+that he himself was. The only rule that can be given him is, to say what
+he has to say in the clearest and most direct way, using the most fitting
+and expressive words. But often, of course, this advice is like that of
+the doctor who counsels his patient to free his mind from all care and
+worry, to live luxuriously on the fat of the land, and to make a voyage
+round the world in a private yacht. The patient has not the means of
+following the prescription. A writer may improve a native talent for
+style; but the talent itself he must either have by nature, or forever go
+without. And the style that rises to the height of genius is like the
+Phoenix; there is hardly ever more than one example of it in an age.
+
+Upon the whole, I conceive that the best way of telling how a novel may be
+written will be to trace the steps by which some one novel of mine came
+into existence, and let the reader draw his own conclusions from the
+record. For this purpose I will select one of the longest of my
+productions, "Fortune's Fool."
+
+It is so long that, rather than be compelled to read it over again, I
+would write another of equal length; though I hasten to add that neither
+contingency is in the least probable. In very few men is found the power
+of sustained conception necessary to the successful composition of so
+prolix a tale; and certainly I have never betrayed the ownership of such a
+qualification. The tale, nevertheless, is an irrevocable fact; and my
+present business it is to be its biographer.
+
+When, in the winter of 1879, the opportunity came to write it, the central
+idea of it had been for over a year cooking in my mind. It was originally
+derived from a dream. I saw a man who, upon some occasion, caught a
+glimpse of a woman's face. This face was, in his memory, the ideal of
+beauty, purity, and goodness. Through many years and vicissitudes he
+sought it; it was his religion, a human incarnation of divine qualities.
+
+At certain momentous epochs of his career, he had glimpses of it again;
+and the effect was always to turn him away from the wrong path and into
+the right. At last, near the end of his life, he has, for the first time,
+an opportunity of speaking to this mortal angel and knowing her; and then
+he discovers that she is mortal indeed, and chargeable with the worst
+frailties of mortality. The moral was that any substitute for a purely
+spiritual religion is fatal, and, sooner or later, reveals its rottenness.
+
+This seemed good enough for a beginning; but, when I woke up, I was not
+long in perceiving that it would require various modifications before
+being suitable for a novel; and the first modifications must be in the way
+of rendering the plot plausible. What sort of a man, for example, must the
+hero be to fall into and remain in such an error regarding the character
+of the heroine? He must, I concluded, be a person of great simplicity and
+honesty of character, with a strong tinge of ideality and imagination, and
+with little or no education.
+
+These considerations indicated a person destitute of known parentage, and
+growing up more or less apart from civilization, but possessing by nature
+an artistic or poetic temperament. Fore-glimpses of the further
+development of the story led me to make him the child of a wealthy English
+nobleman, but born in a remote New England village. His artistic
+proclivities must be inherited from his father, who was, therefore,
+endowed with a talent for amateur sketching in oils; which talent, again,
+led him, during his minority, to travel on the continent for purposes of
+artistic study. While in Paris, this man, Floyd Vivian, meets a young
+Frenchwoman, whom he secretly marries, and with whom he elopes to America.
+Then Vivian receives news of his father's death, compelling him to return
+to England; and he leaves his wife behind him.
+
+A child (Jack, the hero of the story) is born during his absence, and the
+mother dies. Vivian, now Lord Castleman, finds reason to believe that his
+wife is dead, but knows nothing of the boy; and he marries again. The boy,
+therefore, is left to grow up in the Maine woods, ignorant of his
+parentage, but with one or two chances of finding it out hereafter. So
+far, so good.
+
+But now it was necessary to invent a heroine for this hero. In order to
+make the construction compact, I made her Jack's cousin, the daughter, of
+Lord Vivian's younger brother, who came into being for that purpose. This
+brother (Murdock) was a black sheep; and his daughter, Madeleine, was
+adopted by Lord Vivian, because I now perceived that Lord Vivian's
+conscience was going to trouble him with regard to his dead wife and her
+possible child, and that he would make a pilgrimage to New England to
+settle his doubts, taking Madeleine with him; intending, if no child by
+the first marriage were forthcoming, to make Madeleine his heir; for he
+had no issue by his second marriage. This journey would enable Jack and
+Madeleine to meet as children. But it was necessary that they should have
+no suspicion of their cousinship. Consequently, Lord Vivian, who alone
+could acquaint them with this fact, must die in the very act of learning
+it himself. And what should be the manner of his death?
+
+At first, I thought he should be murdered by his younger brother; but I
+afterwards hit upon another plan, that seemed less hackneyed and provided
+more interesting issues. Murdock should arrive at the Maine village at the
+same time as Lord Vivian, and upon the same errand, to get hold of Lord
+Vivian's son, of whose existence he had heard, and whom he wished to get
+out of the way, in order that his own daughter, Madeleine, might inherit
+the property. Murdock should find Jack, and Jack, a mere boy, should kill
+him, though not, of course, intentionally, or even consciously (for which
+purpose the machinery of the Witch's Head was introduced).
+
+With Murdock's death, the papers that he carried, proving Jack's
+parentage, should disappear, to be recovered long afterward, when they
+were needed. Lord Vivian should quietly expire at the same time, of heart
+disease (to which he was forthwith made subject), and Madeleine should be
+left temporarily to her own devices. Thus was brought about her meeting
+with Jack in the cave. It was their first meeting; and Jack must remember
+her face, so as to recognize her when they meet, years later, in England.
+But, as it was beyond belief that the girl's face should resemble the
+woman's enough to make such a recognition possible, I devised the
+miniature portrait of her mother, which Madeleine gave to Jack for a
+keepsake, and which was the image of what Madeleine herself should
+afterward become.
+
+Something more was needed, however, to complete the situation; and to meet
+this exigency, I created M. Jacques Malgré, the grandfather of Jack, who
+had followed his daughter to America, in the belief that she had been
+seduced by Vivian; who had brought up Jack, hating him for his father's
+sake, and loving him for his mother's sake; and who dwelt year after year
+in the Maine village, hoping some day to wreak his vengeance upon the
+seducer. But when M. Malgré and Vivian at last meet, this revenge is
+balked by the removal of its supposed motive; Vivian having actually
+married Malgré's daughter, and being prepared to make Jack heir of
+Castlemere. Moral: "'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, 'I will repay.'"
+
+The groundwork of the story was now sufficiently denned. Madeleine and
+Jack were born and accounted for. They had met and made friends with each
+other without either knowing who the other was; they were rival claimants
+for the same property, and would hereafter contend for it; still, without
+identifying each other as the little boy and girl that had met by chance
+in the cave so long ago. In the meanwhile, there might be personal
+meetings, in which they should recognize each other as persons though not
+by name; and should thus be cementing their friendship as man and woman,
+while, as Jack Vivian and Madeleine, they were at open war in the courts
+of law.
+
+This arrangement would need careful handling to render it plausible; but
+it could be done. I am now of opinion, however, that I should have done
+well to have given up the whole fundamental idea of the story, as
+suggested by the dream. The dream had done its office when it had provided
+me with characters and materials for a more probable and less abstruse and
+difficult plot. All further dependence upon it should then have been
+relinquished, and the story allowed to work out its own natural and
+unforced conclusion. But it is easy to be wise after the event; and the
+event, at this time, was still in the future.
+
+As Madeleine was to be the opposite of the sinless, ideal woman that Jack
+was to imagine her to be, it was necessary to subject her to some evil
+influence; and this influence was embodied in the form of Bryan Sinclair,
+who, though an afterthought, came to be the most powerful figure in the
+story. But, before he would bring himself to bear upon her, she must have
+reached womanhood; and I also perceived that Jack must become a man before
+the action of the story, as between him and Madeleine, could continue. An
+interval of ten or fifteen years must therefore occur; and this was
+arranged by sending Jack into the western wilderness of California, and
+fixing the period as just preceding the date of the California gold fever
+of '49.
+
+Jack and Bryan were to be rivals for Madeleine; but artistic
+considerations seemed to require that they should first meet and become
+friends much in the same way that Jack and Madeleine had done. So I sent
+Bryan to California, and made him the original discoverer of the precious
+metal there; brought him and Jack together; and finally sent them to
+England in each other's company. Jack, of course, as yet knows nothing of
+his origin, and appears in London society merely as a natural genius and a
+sculptor of wild animals.
+
+By this time, I had begun to make Madeleine's acquaintance, and, in
+consequence, to doubt the possibility of her becoming wholly evil, even
+under the influence of Bryan Sinclair. There would be a constant struggle
+between them; she would love him, but would not yield to him, though her
+life and happiness would be compromised by his means. He, on the other
+hand, would love her, and he would make some effort to be worthy of her;
+but his other crimes would weigh him down, until, at the moment when the
+battle cost her her life, he should be destroyed by the incarnation of his
+own wickedness, in the shape of Tom Berne.
+
+This was not the issue that I had originally designed, and, whether better
+or worse than that, did not harmonize with what had gone before. The story
+lacked wholeness and continuous vitality. As a work of art, it was a
+failure. But I did not realize this fact until it was too late, and
+probably should not have known how to mend matters had it been otherwise.
+One of the dangers against which a writer has especially to guard is that
+of losing his sense of proportion in the conduct of a story. An episode
+that has little relative importance may be allowed undue weight, because
+it seems interesting intrinsically, or because he has expended special
+pains upon it. It is only long afterward, when he has become cool and
+impartial, if not indifferent or disgusted, that he can see clearly where
+the faults of construction lie.
+
+I need not go further into the details of the story. Enough has been said
+to give a clew to what might remain to say. I began to write it in the
+winter of 1879-80, in London; and, in order to avoid noise and
+interruption, it was my custom to begin writing at eight in the evening,
+and continue at work until six or seven o'clock the next morning. In three
+months I had written as far as the 393d page, in the American edition. The
+remaining seventy pages were not completed, in their published form, until
+about three years later, an extraordinary delay, which did not escape
+censure at the time, and into the causes of which I will not enter here.
+
+The title of the story also underwent various vicissitudes. The one first
+chosen was "Happy Jack"; but that was objected to as suggesting, to an
+English ear at least, a species of cheap Jack or rambling peddler. The
+next title fixed upon was "Luck"; but before this could be copyrighted,
+somebody published a story called "Luck, and What Came of It," and thereby
+invalidated my briefer version. For several weeks, I was at a loss what to
+call it; but one evening, at a representation of "Romeo and Juliet," I
+heard the exclamation of _Romeo_, "Oh, I am fortune's fool!" and
+immediately appropriated it to my own needs. It suited the book well
+enough, in more ways than one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+NOVELS AND AGNOSTICISM.
+
+
+The novel of our times is susceptible of many definitions. The American
+publishers of Railway libraries think that it is forty or fifty double-
+column pages of pirated English fiction. Readers of the "New York Ledger"
+suppose it to be a romance of angelic virtue at last triumphant over
+satanic villany. The aristocracy of culture describe it as a philosophic
+analysis of human character and motives, with an agnostic bias on the
+analyst's part. Schoolboys are under the impression that it is a tale of
+Western chivalry and Indian outrage--price, ten cents. Most of us agree in
+the belief that it should contain a brace or two of lovers, a suspense,
+and a solution.
+
+To investigate the nature of the novel in the abstract would involve going
+back to the very origin of things. It would imply the recognition of a
+certain faculty of the mind, known as imagination; and of a certain fact
+in history, called art. Art and imagination are correlatives,--one implies
+the other. Together, they may be said to constitute the characteristic
+badge and vindication of human nature; imagination is the badge, and art
+is the vindication. Reason, which gets so much vulgar glorification, is,
+after all, a secondary quality. It is posterior to imagination,--it is one
+of the means by which imagination seeks to realize its ends. Some animals
+reason, or seem to do so: but the most cultivated ape or donkey has not
+yet composed a sonnet, or a symphony, or "an arrangement in green and
+yellow." Man still retains a few prerogatives, although, like Aesop's
+stag, which despised the legs that bore it away from the hounds, and
+extolled the antlers that entangled it in the thicket,--so man often
+magnifies those elements of his nature that least deserve it.
+
+But, before celebrating art and imagination, we should have a clear idea
+what those handsome terms mean. In the broadest sense, imagination is the
+cause of the effect we call progress. It marks all forms of human effort
+towards a better state of things. It embraces a perception of existing
+shortcomings, and an aspiration towards a loftier ideal. It is, in fact, a
+truly divine force in man, reminding him of his heavenly origin, and
+stimulating him to rise again to the level whence he fell. For it has
+glimpses of the divine Image within or behind the material veil; and its
+constant impulse is to tear aside the veil and grasp the image. The world,
+let us say, is a gross and finite translation of an infinite and perfect
+Word; and imagination is the intuition of that perfection, born in the
+human heart, and destined forever to draw mankind into closer harmony with
+it.
+
+In common speech, however, imagination is deprived of this broader
+significance, and is restricted to its relations with art. Art is not
+progress, though progress implies art. It differs from progress chiefly in
+disclaiming the practical element. You cannot apply a poem, a picture, or
+a strain of music, to material necessities; they are not food, clothing,
+or shelter. Only after these physical wants are assuaged, does art
+supervene. Its sphere is exclusively mental and moral. But this definition
+is not adequate; a further distinction is needed. For such things as
+mathematics, moral philosophy, and political economy also belong to the
+mental sphere, and yet they are not art. But these, though not actually
+existing on the plane of material necessities, yet do exist solely in
+order to relieve such necessities. Unlike beauty, they are not their own
+excuse for being. Their embodiment is utilitarian, that of art is
+aesthetic. Political economy, for example, shows me how to buy two drinks
+for the same price I used to pay for one; while art inspires me to
+transmute a pewter mug into a Cellini goblet. My physical nature, perhaps,
+prefers two drinks to one; but, if my taste be educated, and I be not too
+thirsty, I would rather drink once from the Cellini goblet than twice from
+the mug. Political economy gravitates towards the material level; art
+seeks incarnation only in order to stimulate anew the same spiritual
+faculties that generated it. Art is the production, by means of
+appearances, of the illusion of a loftier reality; and imagination is the
+faculty which holds that loftier reality up for imitation.
+
+The disposition of these preliminaries brings us once more in sight of the
+goal of our pilgrimage. The novel, despite its name, is no new thing, but
+an old friend in a modern dress. Ever since the time of Cadmus,--ever
+since language began to express thought as well as emotion,--men have
+betrayed the impulse to utter in forms of literary art,--in poetry and
+story,--their conceptions of the world around them. According to many
+philologists, poetry was the original form of human speech. Be that as it
+may, whatever flows into the mind, from the spectacle of nature and of
+mankind, that influx the mind tends instinctively to reproduce, in a shape
+accordant with its peculiar bias and genius. And those minds in which
+imagination is predominant, impart to their reproductions a balance and
+beauty which stamp them as art. Art--and literary art especially--is the
+only evidence we have that this universal frame of things has relation to
+our minds, and is a universe and not a poliverse. Outside revelation, it
+is our best assurance of an intelligent purpose in creation.
+
+Novels, then, instead of being (as some persons have supposed) a wilful
+and corrupt conspiracy on the part of the evilly disposed, against the
+peace and prosperity of the realm, may claim a most ancient and
+indefeasible right to existence. They, with their ancestors and near
+relatives, constitute Literature,--without which the human race would be
+little better than savages. For the effect of pure literature upon a
+receptive mind is something more than can be definitely stated. Like
+sunshine upon a landscape, it is a kind of miracle. It demands from its
+disciple almost as much as it gives him, and is never revealed save to the
+disinterested and loving eye. In our best moments, it touches us most
+deeply; and when the sentiment of human brotherhood kindles most warmly
+within us, we discover in literature an exquisite answering ardor. When
+everything that can be, has been said about a true work of art, its finest
+charm remains,--the charm derived from a source beyond the conscious reach
+even of the artist.
+
+The novel, then, must be pure literature; as much so as the poem. But
+poetry--now that the day of the broad Homeric epic is past, or temporarily
+eclipsed--appeals to a taste too exclusive and abstracted for the demands
+of modern readers. Its most accommodating metre fails to house our endless
+variety of mood and movement; it exacts from the student an exaltation
+above the customary level of thought and sentiment greater than he can
+readily afford. The poet of old used to clothe in the garb of verse his
+every observation on life and nature; but to-day he reserves for it only
+his most ideal and abstract conceptions. The merit of Cervantes is not so
+much that he laughed Spain's chivalry away, as that he heralded the modern
+novel of character and manners. It is the latest, most pliable, most
+catholic solution of the old problem,--how to unfold man to himself. It
+improves on the old methods, while missing little of their excellence. No
+one can read a great novel without feeling that, from its outwardly
+prosaic pages, strains of genuine poetry have ever and anon reached his
+ears. It does not obtrude itself; it is not there for him who has not
+skill to listen for it: but for him who has ears, it is like the music of
+a bird, denning itself amidst the innumerable murmurs of the forest.
+
+So, the ideal novel, conforming in every part to the behests of the
+imagination, should produce, by means of literary art, the illusion of a
+loftier reality. This excludes the photographic method of novel-writing.
+"That is a false effort in art," says Goethe, towards the close of his
+long and splendid career, "which, in giving reality to the appearance,
+goes so far as to leave in it nothing but the common, every-day actual."
+It is neither the actual, nor Chinese copies of the actual, that we demand
+of art. Were art merely the purveyor of such things, she might yield her
+crown to the camera and the stenographer; and divine imagination would
+degenerate into vulgar inventiveness. Imagination is incompatible with
+inventiveness, or imitation. Imitation is death, imagination is life.
+Imitation is servitude, imagination is royalty. He who claims the name of
+artist must rise to that vision of a loftier reality--a more true because
+a more beautiful world--which only imagination can reveal. A truer world,
+--for the world of facts is not and cannot be true. It is barren,
+incoherent, misleading. But behind every fact there is a truth: and these
+truths are enlightening, unifying, creative. Fasten your hold upon them,
+and facts will become your servants instead of your tyrants. No charm of
+detail will be lost, no homely picturesque circumstance, no touch of human
+pathos or humor; but all hardness, rigidity, and finality will disappear,
+and your story will be not yours alone, but that of every one who feels
+and thinks. Spirit gives universality and meaning; but alas! for this new
+gospel of the auctioneer's catalogue, and the crackling of thorns under a
+pot. He who deals with facts only, deprives his work of gradation and
+distinction. One fact, considered in itself, has no less importance than
+any other; a lump of charcoal is as valuable as a diamond. But that is the
+philosophy of brute beasts and Digger Indians. A child, digging on the
+beach, may shape a heap of sand into a similitude of Vesuvius; but is it
+nothing that Vesuvius towers above the clouds, and overwhelms Pompeii?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In proceeding from the general to the particular,--to the novel as it
+actually exists in England and America,--attention will be confined
+strictly to the contemporary outlook. The new generation of novelists (by
+which is intended not those merely living in this age, but those who
+actively belong to it) differ in at least one fundamental respect from the
+later representatives of the generation preceding them. Thackeray and
+Dickens did not deliberately concern themselves about a philosophy of
+life. With more or less complacency, more or less cynicism, they accepted
+the religious and social canons which had grown to be the commonplace of
+the first half of this century. They pictured men and women, not as
+affected by questions, but as affected by one another. The morality and
+immorality of their personages were of the old familiar Church-of-England
+sort; there was no speculation as to whether what had been supposed to be
+wrong was really right, and _vice versa_. Such speculations, in various
+forms and degrees of energy, appear in the world periodically; but the
+public conscience during the last thirty or forty years had been gradually
+making itself comfortable after the disturbances consequent upon the
+French Revolution; the theoretical rights of man had been settled for the
+moment; and interest was directed no longer to the assertion and support
+of these rights, but to the social condition and character which were
+their outcome. Good people were those who climbed through reverses and
+sorrows towards the conventional heaven; bad people were those who, in
+spite of worldly and temporary successes and triumphs, gravitated towards
+the conventional hell. Novels designed on this basis in so far filled the
+bill, as the phrase is: their greater or less excellence depended solely
+on the veracity with which the aspect, the temperament, and the conduct of
+the _dramatis personae_ were reported, and upon the amount of ingenuity
+wherewith the web of events and circumstances was woven, and the
+conclusion reached. Nothing more was expected, and, in general, little or
+nothing more was attempted. Little more, certainly, will be found in the
+writings of Thackeray or of Balzac, who, it is commonly admitted, approach
+nearest to perfection of any novelists of their time. There was nothing
+genuine or commanding in the metaphysical dilettanteism of Bulwer: the
+philosophical speculations of Georges Sand are the least permanently
+interesting feature of her writings; and the same might in some measure be
+affirmed of George Eliot, whose gloomy wisdom finally confesses its
+inability to do more than advise us rather to bear those ills we have than
+fly to others that we know not of. As to Nathaniel Hawthorne, he cannot
+properly be instanced in this connection; for he analyzed chiefly those
+parts of human nature which remain substantially unaltered in the face of
+whatever changes of opinion, civilization, and religion. The truth that he
+brings to light is not the sensational fact of a fashion or a period, but
+a verity of the human heart, which may foretell, but can never be affected
+by, anything which that heart may conceive. In other words, Hawthorne
+belonged neither to this nor to any other generation of writers further
+than that his productions may be used as a test of the inner veracity of
+all the rest.
+
+But of late years a new order of things has been coming into vogue, and
+the new novelists have been among the first to reflect it; and of these
+the Americans have shown themselves among the most susceptible. Science,
+or the investigation of the phenomena of existence (in opposition to
+philosophy, the investigation of the phenomena of being), has proved
+nature to be so orderly and self-sufficient, and inquiry as to the origin
+of the primordial atom so unproductive and quixotic, as to make it
+convenient and indeed reasonable to accept nature as a self-existing fact,
+and to let all the rest--if rest there be--go. From this point of view,
+God and a future life retire into the background; not as finally
+disproved,--because denial, like affirmation, must, in order to be final,
+be logically supported; and spirit is, if not illogical, at any rate
+outside the domain of logic,--but as being a hopelessly vague and
+untrustworthy hypothesis. The Bible is a human book; Christ was a
+gentleman, related to the Buddha and Plato families; Joseph was an ill-
+used man; death, so far as we have any reason to believe, is annihilation
+of personal existence; life is--the predicament of the body previous to
+death; morality is the enlightened selfishness of the greatest number;
+civilization is the compromises men make with one another in order to get
+the most they can out of the world; wisdom is acknowledgment of these
+propositions; folly is to hanker after what may lie beyond the sphere of
+sense. The supporter of these doctrines by no means permits himself to be
+regarded as a rampant and dogmatic atheist; he is simply the modest and
+humble doubter of what he cannot prove. He even recognizes the persistence
+of the religious instinct in man, and caters to it by a new religion
+suited to the times--the Religion of Humanity. Thus he is secure at all
+points: for if the religion of the Bible turn out to be true, his
+disappointment will be an agreeable one; and if it turns out false, he
+will not be disappointed at all. He is an agnostic--a person bound to be
+complacent whatever happens. He may indulge a gentle regret, a musing
+sadness, a smiling pensiveness; but he will never refuse a comfortable
+dinner, and always wear something soft next his skin, nor can he
+altogether avoid the consciousness of his intellectual superiority.
+
+Agnosticism, which reaches forward into nihilism on one side, and extends
+back into liberal Christianity on the other, marks, at all events, a
+definite turning-point from what has been to what is to come. The human
+mind, in the course of its long journey, is passing through a dark place,
+and is, as it were, whistling to keep up its courage. It is a period of
+doubt: what it will result in remains to be seen; but analogy leads us to
+infer that this doubt, like all others, will be succeeded by a
+comparatively definite belief in something--no matter what. It is a
+transient state--the interval between one creed and another. The agnostic
+no longer holds to what is behind him, nor knows what lies before, so he
+contents himself with feeling the ground beneath his feet. That, at least,
+though the heavens fall, is likely to remain; meanwhile, let the heavens
+take care of themselves. It may be the part of valor to champion divine
+revelation, but the better part of valor is discretion, and if divine
+revelation prove true, discretion will be none the worse off. On the other
+hand, to champion a myth is to make one's self ridiculous, and of being
+ridiculous the agnostic has a consuming fear. From the superhuman
+disinterestedness of the theory of the Religion of Humanity, before which
+angels might quail, he flinches not, but when it comes to the risk of
+being laughed at by certain sagacious persons he confesses that bravery
+has its limits. He dares do all that may become an agnostic,--who dares do
+more is none.
+
+But, however open to criticism this phase of thought may be, it is a
+genuine phase, and the proof is the alarm and the shifts that it has
+brought about in the opposite camp. "Established" religion finds the
+foundation of her establishment undermined, and, like the lady in Hamlet's
+play, she doth protest too much. In another place, all manner of odd
+superstitions and quasi-miracles are cropping up and gaining credence, as
+if, since the immortality of the soul cannot be proved by logic, it should
+be smuggled into belief by fraud and violence--that is, by the testimony
+of the bodily senses themselves. Taking a comprehensive view of the whole
+field, therefore, it seems to be divided between discreet and supercilious
+skepticism on one side, and, on the other, the clamorous jugglery of
+charlatanism. The case is not really so bad as that: nihilists are not
+discreet and even the Bishop of Rome is not necessarily a charlatan.
+Nevertheless, the outlook may fairly be described as confused and the
+issue uncertain. And--to come without further preface to the subject of
+this paper--it is with this material that the modern novelist, so far as
+he is a modern and not a future novelist, or a novelist _temporis acti_,
+has to work. Unless a man have the gift to forecast the years, or, at
+least, to catch the first ray of the coming light, he can hardly do better
+than attend to what is under his nose. He may hesitate to identify himself
+with agnosticism, but he can scarcely avoid discussing it, either in
+itself or in its effects. He must entertain its problems; and the
+personages of his story, if they do not directly advocate or oppose
+agnostic views, must show in their lives either confirmation or disproof
+of agnostic principles. It is impossible, save at the cost of affectation
+or of ignorance, to escape from the spirit of the age. It is in the air we
+breathe, and, whether we are fully conscious thereof or not, our lives and
+thoughts must needs be tinctured by it.
+
+Now, art is creative; but Mephistopheles, the spirit that denies, is
+destructive. A negative attitude of mind is not favorable for the
+production of works of art. The best periods of art have also been periods
+of spiritual or philosophical convictions. The more a man doubts, the more
+he disintegrates and the less he constructs. He has in him no central
+initial certainty round which all other matters of knowledge or
+investigation may group themselves in symmetrical relation. He may analyze
+to his heart's content, but must be wary of organizing. If creation is not
+of God, if nature is not the expression of the contact between an infinite
+and a finite being, then the universe and everything in it are accidents,
+which might have been otherwise or might have not been at all; there is no
+design in them nor purpose, no divine and eternal significance. This being
+conceded, what meaning would there be in designing works of art? If art
+has not its prototype in creation, if all that we see and do is chance,
+uninspired by a controlling and forming intelligence behind or within it,
+then to construct a work of art would be to make something arbitrary and
+grotesque, something unreal and fugitive, something out of accord with the
+general sense (or nonsense) of things, something with no further basis or
+warrant than is supplied by the maker's idle and irresponsible fancy. But
+since no man cares to expend the trained energies of his mind upon the
+manufacture of toys, it will come to pass (upon the accidental hypothesis
+of creation) that artists will become shy of justifying their own title.
+They will adopt the scientific method of merely collecting and describing
+phenomena; but the phenomena will no longer be arranged as parts or
+developments of a central controlling idea, because such an arrangement
+would no longer seem to be founded on the truth: the gratification which
+it gives to the mind would be deemed illusory, the result of tradition and
+prejudice; or, in other words, what is true being found no longer
+consistent with what we have been accustomed to call beauty, the latter
+would cease to be an object of desire, though something widely alien to it
+might usurp its name. If beauty be devoid of independent right to be, and
+definable only as an attribute of truth, then undoubtedly the cynosure to-
+day may be the scarecrow of to-morrow, and _vice versâ_, according to our
+varying conception of what truth is.
+
+And, as a matter of fact, art already shows the effects of the agnostic
+influence. Artists have begun to doubt whether their old conceptions of
+beauty be not fanciful and silly. They betray a tendency to eschew the
+loftier flights of the imagination, and confine themselves to what they
+call facts. Critics deprecate idealism as something fit only for children,
+and extol the courage of seeing and representing things as they are.
+Sculpture is either a stern student of modern trousers and coat-tails or a
+vapid imitator of classic prototypes. Painters try all manner of
+experiments, and shrink from painting beneath the surface of their canvas.
+Much of recent effort in the different branches of art comes to us in the
+form of "studies," but the complete work still delays to be born. We would
+not so much mind having our old idols and criterions done away with were
+something new and better, or as good, substituted for them. But apparently
+nothing definite has yet been decided on. Doubt still reigns, and, once
+more, doubt is not creative. One of two things must presently happen. The
+time will come when we must stop saying that we do not know whether or not
+God, and all that God implies, exists, and affirm definitely and finally
+either that he does not exist or that he does. That settled, we shall soon
+see what will become of art. If there is a God, he will be understood and
+worshipped, not superstitiously and literally as heretofore, but in a new
+and enlightened spirit; and an art will arise commensurate with this new
+and loftier revelation. If there is no God, it is difficult to see how art
+can have the face to show herself any more. There is no place for her in
+the Religion of Humanity; to be true and living she can be nothing which
+it has thus far entered into the heart of man to call beautiful; and she
+could only serve to remind us of certain vague longings and aspirations
+now proved to be as false as they were vain. Art is not an orchid: it
+cannot grow in the air. Unless its root can be traced as deep down as
+Yggdrasil, it will wither and vanish, and be forgotten as it ought to be;
+and as for the cowslip by the river's brim, a yellow cowslip it shall be,
+and nothing more; and the light that never was on sea or land shall be
+permanently extinguished, in the interests of common sense and economy,
+and (what is least inviting of all to the unregenerate mind) we shall
+speedily get rid of the notion that we have lost anything worth
+preserving.
+
+This, however, is only what may be, and our concern at present is with
+things as they are. It has been observed that American writers have shown
+themselves more susceptible of the new influences than most others, partly
+no doubt from a natural sensitiveness of organization, but in some measure
+also because there are with us no ruts and fetters of old tradition from
+which we must emancipate ourselves before adopting anything new. We have
+no past, in the European sense, and so are ready for whatever the present
+or the future may have to suggest. Nevertheless, the novelist who, in a
+larger degree than any other, seems to be the literary parent of our own
+best men of fiction, is himself not an American, nor even an Englishman,
+but a Russian--Turguénieff. His series of extraordinary novels, translated
+into English and French, is altogether the most important fact in the
+literature of fiction of the last twelve years. To read his books you
+would scarcely imagine that their author could have had any knowledge of
+the work of his predecessors in the same field. Originality is a term
+indiscriminately applied, and generally of trifling significance, but so
+far as any writer may be original, Turguénieff is so. He is no less
+original in the general scheme and treatment of his stories than in their
+details. Whatever he produces has the air of being the outcome of his
+personal experience and observation. He even describes his characters,
+their aspect, features, and ruling traits, in a novel and memorable
+manner. He seizes on them from a new point of vantage, and uses scarcely
+any of the hackneyed and conventional devices for bringing his portraits
+before our minds; yet no writer, not even Carlyle, has been more vivid,
+graphic, and illuminating than he. Here are eyes that owe nothing to other
+eyes, but examine and record for themselves. Having once taken up a
+character he never loses his grasp on it: on the contrary, he masters it
+more and more, and only lets go of it when the last recesses of its
+organism have been explored. In the quality and conduct of his plots he is
+equally unprecedented. His scenes are modern, and embody characteristic
+events and problems in the recent history of Russia. There is in their
+arrangement no attempt at symmetry, nor poetic justice. Temperament and
+circumstances are made to rule, and against their merciless fiat no appeal
+is allowed. Evil does evil to the end; weakness never gathers strength;
+even goodness never varies from its level: it suffers, but is not
+corrupted; it is the goodness of instinct, not of struggle and aspiration;
+it happens to belong to this or that person, just as his hair happens to
+be black or brown. Everything in the surroundings and the action is to the
+last degree matter-of-fact, commonplace, inevitable; there are no
+picturesque coincidences, no providential interferences, no desperate
+victories over fate; the tale, like the world of the materialist, moves
+onward from a predetermined beginning to a helpless and tragic close. And
+yet few books have been written of deeper and more permanent fascination
+than these. Their grim veracity; the creative sympathy and steady
+dispassionateness of their portrayal of mankind; their constancy of
+motive, and their sombre earnestness, have been surpassed by none. This
+earnestness is worth dwelling upon for a moment. It bears no likeness to
+the dogmatism of the bigot or the fanaticism of the enthusiast. It is the
+concentration of a broadly gifted masculine mind, devoting its unstinted
+energies to depicting certain aspects of society and civilization, which
+are powerfully representative of the tendencies of the day. "Here is the
+unvarnished fact--give heed to it!" is the unwritten motto. The author
+avoids betraying, either explicitly or implicitly, the tendency of his own
+sympathies; not because he fears to have them known, but because he holds
+it to be his office simply to portray, and to leave judgment thereupon
+where, in any case, it must ultimately rest--with the world of his
+readers. He tells us what is; it is for us to consider whether it also
+must be and shall be. Turguénieff is an artist by nature, yet his books
+are not intentionally works of art; they are fragments of history,
+differing from real life only in presenting such persons and events as are
+commandingly and exhaustively typical, and excluding all others. This
+faculty of selection is one of the highest artistic faculties, and it
+appears as much in the minor as in the major features of the narrative. It
+indicates that Turguénieff might, if he chose, produce a story as
+faultlessly symmetrical as was ever framed. Why, then, does he not so
+choose? The reason can only be that he deems the truth-seeming of his
+narrative would thereby be impaired. "He is only telling a story," the
+reader would say, "and he shapes the events and persons so as to fit the
+plot." But is this reason reasonable? To those who believe that God has no
+hand in the ordering of human affairs, it undoubtedly is reasonable. To
+those who believe the contrary, however, it appears as if the story of no
+human life or complex of lives could be otherwise than a rounded and
+perfect work of art--provided only that the spectator takes note, not
+merely of the superficial accidents and appearances, but also of the
+underlying divine purpose and significance. The absence of this
+recognition in Turguénieff's novels is the explanation of them: holding
+the creed their author does, he could not have written them otherwise;
+and, on the other hand, had his creed been different, he very likely would
+not have written novels at all.
+
+The pioneer, in whatever field of thought or activity, is apt to be also
+the most distinguished figure therein. The consciousness of being the
+first augments the keenness of his impressions, and a mind that can see
+and report in advance of others a new order of things may claim a finer
+organization than the ordinary. The vitality of nature animates him who
+has insight to discern her at first hand, whereas his followers miss the
+freshness of the morning, because, instead of discovering, they must be
+content to illustrate and refine. Those of our writers who betray
+Turguénieff's influence are possibly his superiors in finish and culture,
+but their faculty of convincing and presenting is less. Their interest in
+their own work seems less serious than his; they may entertain us more,
+but they do not move and magnetize so much. The persons and events of
+their stories are conscientiously studied, and are nothing if not natural;
+but they lack distinction. In an epitome of life so concise as the longest
+novel must needs be, to use any but types is waste of time and space. A
+typical character is one who combines the traits or beliefs of a certain
+class to which he is affiliated--who is, practically, all of them and
+himself besides; and, when we know him, there is nothing left worth
+knowing about the others. In Shakespeare's Hamlet and Enobarbus, in
+Fielding's Squire Western, in Walter Scott's Edie Ochiltree and Meg
+Merrilies, in Balzac's Père Goriot and Madame Marneff, in Thackeray's
+Colonel Newcome and Becky Sharp, in Turguénieff's Bazarof and Dimitri
+Roudine, we meet persons who exhaust for us the groups to which they
+severally belong. Bazarof, the nihilist, for instance, reveals to us the
+motives and influences that have made nihilism, so that we feel that
+nothing essential on that score remains to be learnt.
+
+The ability to recognize and select types is a test of a novelist's talent
+and experience. It implies energy to rise above the blind walls of one's
+private circle of acquaintance; the power to perceive what phases of
+thought and existence are to be represented as well as who represents
+them; the sagacity to analyze the age or the moment and reproduce its
+dominant features. The feat is difficult, and, when done, by no means
+blows its own trumpet. On the contrary, the reader must open his eyes to
+be aware of it. He finds the story clear and easy of comprehension; the
+characters come home to him familiarly and remain distinctly in his
+memory; he understands something which was, till now, vague to him: but he
+is as likely to ascribe this to an exceptional lucidity in his own mental
+condition as to any special merit in the author. Indeed, it often happens
+that the author who puts out-of-the-way personages into his stories--
+characters that represent nothing but themselves, or possibly some
+eccentricity of invention on their author's part, will gain the latter a
+reputation for cleverness higher than his fellow's who portrays mankind in
+its masses as well as in its details. But the finest imagination is not
+that which evolves strange images, but that which explains seeming
+contradictions, and reveals the unity within the difference and the
+harmony beneath the discord.
+
+Were we to compare our fictitious literature, as a whole, with that of
+England, the balance must be immeasurably on the English side. Even
+confining ourselves to to-day, and to the prospect of to-morrow, it must
+be conceded that, in settled method, in guiding tradition, in training and
+associations both personal and inherited, the average English novelist is
+better circumstanced than the American. Nevertheless, the English novelist
+is not at present writing better novels than the American. The reason
+seems to be that he uses no material which has not been in use for
+hundreds of years; and to say that such material begins to lose its
+freshness is not putting the case too strongly. He has not been able to
+detach himself from the paralyzing background of English conventionality.
+The vein was rich, but it is worn out; and the half-dozen pioneers had all
+the luck.
+
+There is no commanding individual imagination in England--nor, to say the
+truth, does there seem to be any in America. But we have what they have
+not--a national imaginative tendency. There are no fetters upon our fancy;
+and, however deeply our real estate may be mortgaged, there is freedom for
+our ideas. England has not yet appreciated the true inwardness of a
+favorite phrase of ours,--a new deal. And yet she is tired to death of her
+own stale stories; and when, by chance, any one of her writers happens to
+chirp out a note a shade different from the prevailing key, the whole
+nation pounces down upon him, with a shriek of half-incredulous joy, and
+buys him up, at the rate of a million copies a year. Our own best writers
+are more read in England, or, at any rate, more talked about, than their
+native crop; not so much, perhaps, because they are different as because
+their difference is felt to be of a significant and typical kind. It has
+in it a gleam of the new day. They are realistic; but realism, so far as
+it involves a faithful study of nature, is useful. The illusion of a
+loftier reality, at which we should aim, must be evolved from adequate
+knowledge of reality itself. The spontaneous and assured faith, which is
+the mainspring of sane imagination, must be preceded by the doubt and
+rejection of what is lifeless and insincere. We desire no resurrection of
+the Ann Radclyffe type of romance: but the true alternative to this is not
+such a mixture of the police gazette and the medical reporter as Emile
+Zola offers us. So far as Zola is conscientious, let him live; but, in so
+far as he is revolting, let him die. Many things in the world seem ugly
+and purposeless; but to a deeper intelligence than ours, they are a part
+of beauty and design. What is ugly and irrelevant, can never enter, as
+such, into a work of art; because the artist is bound, by a sacred
+obligation, to show us the complete curve only,--never the undeveloped
+fragments.
+
+But were the firmament of England still illuminated with her Dickenses,
+her Thackerays, and her Brontës, I should still hold our state to be
+fuller of promise than hers. It may be admitted that almost everything was
+against our producing anything good in literature. Our men, in the first
+place, had to write for nothing; because the publisher, who can steal a
+readable English novel, will not pay for an American novel, for the mere
+patriotic gratification of enabling its American author to write it. In
+the second place, they had nothing to write about, for the national life
+was too crude and heterogeneous for ordinary artistic purposes. Thirdly,
+they had no one to write for: because, although, in one sense, there might
+be readers enough, in a higher sense there were scarcely any,--that is to
+say, there was no organized critical body of literary opinion, from which
+an author could confidently look to receive his just meed of encouragement
+and praise. Yet, in spite of all this, and not to mention honored names
+that have ceased or are ceasing to cast their living weight into the
+scale, we are contributing much that is fresh and original, and something,
+it may be, that is of permanent value, to literature. We have accepted the
+situation; and, since no straw has been vouchsafed us to make our bricks
+with, we are trying manfully to make them without.
+
+It will not be necessary, however, to call the roll of all the able and
+popular gentlemen who are contending in the forlorn hope against
+disheartening odds; and as for the ladies who have honored our literature
+by their contributions, it will perhaps be well to adopt regarding them a
+course analogous to that which Napoleon is said to have pursued with the
+letters sent to him while in Italy. He left them unread until a certain
+time had elapsed, and then found that most of them no longer needed
+attention. We are thus brought face to face with the two men with whom
+every critic of American novelists has to reckon; who represent what is
+carefullest and newest in American fiction; and it remains to inquire how
+far their work has been moulded by the skeptical or radical spirit of
+which Turguénieff is the chief exemplar.
+
+The author of "Daisy Miller" had been writing for several years before the
+bearings of his course could be confidently calculated. Some of his
+earlier tales,--as, for example, "The Madonna of the Future,"--while
+keeping near reality on one side, are on the other eminently fanciful and
+ideal. He seemed to feel the attraction of fairyland, but to lack
+resolution to swallow it whole; so, instead of idealizing both persons and
+plot, as Hawthorne had ventured to do, he tried to persuade real persons
+to work out an ideal destiny. But the tact, delicacy, and reticence with
+which these attempts were made did not blind him to the essential
+incongruity; either realism or idealism had to go, and step by step he
+dismissed the latter, until at length Turguénieff's current caught him. By
+this time, however, his culture had become too wide, and his independent
+views too confirmed, to admit of his yielding unconditionally to the great
+Russian. Especially his critical familiarity with French literature
+operated to broaden, if at the same time to render less trenchant, his
+method and expression. His characters are drawn with fastidious care, and
+closely follow the tones and fashions of real life. Each utterance is so
+exactly like what it ought to be that the reader feels the same sort of
+pleased surprise as is afforded by a phonograph which repeats, with all
+the accidental pauses and inflections, the speech spoken into it. Yet the
+words come through a medium; they are not quite spontaneous; these figures
+have not the sad, human inevitableness of Turguénieff's people. The reason
+seems to be (leaving the difference between the genius of the two writers
+out of account) that the American, unlike the Russian, recognizes no
+tragic importance in the situation. To the latter, the vision of life is
+so ominous that his voice waxes sonorous and terrible; his eyes, made keen
+by foreboding, see the leading elements of the conflict, and them only; he
+is no idle singer of an empty day, but he speaks because speech springs
+out of him. To his mind, the foundations of human welfare are in jeopardy,
+and it is full time to decide what means may avert the danger. But the
+American does not think any cataclysm is impending, or if any there be,
+nobody can help it. The subjects that best repay attention are the minor
+ones of civilization, culture, behavior; how to avoid certain vulgarities
+and follies, how to inculcate certain principles: and to illustrate these
+points heroic types are not needed. In other words, the situation being
+unheroic, so must the actors be; for, apart from the inspirations of
+circumstances, Napoleon no more than John Smith is recognizable as a hero.
+
+Now, in adopting this view, a writer places himself under several manifest
+disadvantages. If you are to be an agnostic, it is better (for novel-
+writing purposes) not to be a complacent or resigned one. Otherwise your
+characters will find it difficult to show what is in them. A man reveals
+and classifies himself in proportion to the severity of the condition or
+action required of him, hence the American novelist's people are in
+considerable straits to make themselves adequately known to us. They
+cannot lay bare their inmost soul over a cup of tea or a picture by Corôt;
+so, in order to explain themselves, they must not only submit to
+dissection at the author's hands, but must also devote no little time and
+ingenuity to dissecting themselves and one another. But dissection is one
+thing, and the living word rank from the heart and absolutely reeking of
+the human creature that uttered it--the word that Turguénieff's people are
+constantly uttering--is another. Moreover, in the dearth of commanding
+traits and stirring events, there is a continual temptation to magnify
+those which are petty and insignificant. Instead of a telescope to sweep
+the heavens, we are furnished with a microscope to detect infusoria. We
+want a description of a mountain; and, instead of receiving an outline,
+naked and severe, perhaps, but true and impressive, we are introduced to a
+tiny field on its immeasurable side, and we go botanizing and insect-
+hunting there. This is realism; but it is the realism of texture, not of
+form and relation. It encourages our glance to be near-sighted instead of
+comprehensive. Above all, there is a misgiving that we do not touch the
+writer's true quality, and that these scenes of his, so elaborately and
+conscientiously prepared, have cost him much thought and pains, but not
+one throb of the heart or throe of the spirit. The experiences that he
+depicts have not, one fancies, marked wrinkles on his forehead or turned
+his hair gray. There are two kinds of reserve--the reserve which feels
+that its message is too mighty for it, and the reserve which feels that it
+is too mighty for its message. Our new school of writers is reserved, but
+its reserve does not strike one as being of the former kind. It cannot be
+said of any one of Mr. James's stories, "This is his best," or "This is
+his worst," because no one of them is all one way. They have their phases
+of strength and veracity, and, also, phases that are neither veracious nor
+strong. The cause may either lie in a lack of experience in a certain
+direction on the writer's part; or else in his reluctance to write up to
+the experience he has. The experience in question is not of the ways of
+the world,--concerning which Mr. James has every sign of being politely
+familiar,--nor of men and women in their every-day aspect; still less of
+literary ways and means, for of these, in his own line, he is a master.
+The experience referred to is experience of passion. If Mr. James be not
+incapable of describing passion, at all events he has still to show that
+he is capable of it. He has introduced us to many characters that seem to
+have in them capacity for the highest passion,--as witness Christina
+Light,--and yet he has never allowed them an opportunity to develop it. He
+seems to evade the situation; but the evasion is managed with so much
+plausibility that, although we may be disappointed, or even irritated, and
+feel, more or less vaguely, that we have been unfairly dealt with, we are
+unable to show exactly where or how the unfairness comes in. Thus his
+novels might be compared to a beautiful face, full of culture and good
+breeding, but lacking that fire of the eye and fashion of the lip that
+betray a living human soul.
+
+The other one of the two writers whose names are so often mentioned
+together, seems to have taken up the subject of our domestic and social
+pathology; and the minute care and conscientious veracity which he has
+brought to bear upon his work has not been surpassed, even by Shakespeare.
+But, if I could venture a criticism upon his productions, it would be to
+the effect that there is not enough fiction in them. They are elaborate
+and amiable reports of what we see around us. They are not exactly
+imaginative,--in the sense in which I have attempted to define the word.
+There are two ways of warning a man against unwholesome life--one is, to
+show him a picture of disease; the other is, to show him a picture of
+health. The former is the negative, the latter the positive treatment.
+Both have their merits; but the latter is, perhaps, the better adapted to
+novels, the former to essays. A novelist should not only know what he has
+got; he should also know what he wants. His mind should have an active, or
+theorizing, as well as a passive, or contemplative, side. He should have
+energy to discount the people he personally knows; the power to perceive
+what phases of thought are to be represented, as well as to describe the
+persons who happen to be their least inadequate representatives; the
+sagacity to analyze the age or the moment, and to reveal its tendency and
+meaning. Mr. Howells has produced a great deal of finely wrought tapestry;
+but does not seem, as yet, to have found a hall fit to adorn it with.
+
+And yet Mr. James and Mr. Howells have done more than all the rest of us
+to make our literature respectable during the last ten years. If texture
+be the object, they have brought texture to a fineness never surpassed
+anywhere. They have discovered charm and grace in much that was only blank
+before. They have detected and described points of human nature hitherto
+unnoticed, which, if not intrinsically important, will one day be made
+auxiliary to the production of pictures of broader as well as minuter
+veracity than have heretofore been produced. All that seems wanting thus
+far is a direction, an aim, a belief. Agnosticism has brought about a
+pause for a while, and no doubt a pause is preferable to some kinds of
+activity. It may enable us, when the time comes to set forward again, to
+do so with better equipment and more intelligent purpose. It will not do
+to be always at a prophetic heat of enthusiasm, sympathy, denunciation:
+the coolly critical mood is also useful to prune extravagance and promote
+a sense of responsibility. The novels of Mr. James and of Mr. Howells have
+taught us that men and women are creatures of infinitely complicated
+structure, and that even the least of these complications, if it is
+portrayed at all, is worth portraying truthfully. But we cannot forget, on
+the other hand, that honest emotion and hearty action are necessary to the
+wholesomeness of society, because in their absence society is afflicted
+with a lamentable sameness and triviality; the old primitive impulses
+remain, but the food on which they are compelled to feed is insipid and
+unsustaining; our eyes are turned inward instead of outward, and each one
+of us becomes himself the Rome towards which all his roads lead. Such
+books as these authors have written are not the Great American Novel,
+because they take life and humanity not in their loftier, but in their
+lesser manifestations. They are the side scenes and the background of a
+story that has yet to be written. That story will have the interest not
+only of the collision of private passions and efforts, but of the great
+ideas and principles which characterize and animate a nation. It will
+discriminate between what is accidental and what is permanent, between
+what is realistic and what is real, between what is sentimental and what
+is sentiment. It will show us not only what we are, but what we are to be;
+not only what to avoid, but what to do. It will rest neither in the tragic
+gloom of Turguénieff, nor in the critical composure of James, nor in the
+gentle deprecation of Howells, but will demonstrate that the weakness of
+man is the motive and condition of his strength. It will not shrink from
+romance, nor from ideality, nor from artistic completeness, because it
+will know at what depths and heights of life these elements are truly
+operative. It will be American, not because its scene is laid or its
+characters born in the United States, but because its burden will be
+reaction against old tyrannies and exposure of new hypocrisies; a
+refutation of respectable falsehoods, and a proclamation of
+unsophisticated truths. Indeed, let us take heed and diligently improve
+our native talent, lest a day come when the Great American Novel make its
+appearance, but written in a foreign language, and by some author who--
+however purely American at heart--never set foot on the shores of the
+Republic.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+AMERICANISM IN FICTION.
+
+
+Contemporary criticism will have it that, in order to create an American
+Literature, we must use American materials. The term "Literature" has, no
+doubt, come to be employed in a loose sense. The London _Saturday Review_
+has (or used to have until lately) a monthly two-column article devoted to
+what it called "American Literature," three-fourths of which were devoted
+to an examination of volumes of State Histories, Statistical Digests,
+Records of the Census, and other such works as were never, before or
+since, suspected of being literature; while the remaining fourth mentioned
+the titles (occasionally with a line of comment) of whatever productions
+were at hand in the way of essays, novels, and poetry. This would seem to
+indicate that we may have--nay, are already possessed of--an American
+Literature, composed of American materials, provided only that we consent
+to adopt the _Saturday Review's_ conception of what literature is.
+
+Many of us believe, however, that the essays, the novels, and the poetry,
+as well as the statistical digests, ought to go to the making up of a
+national literature. It has been discovered, however, that the existence
+of the former does not depend, to the same extent as that of the latter,
+upon the employment of exclusively American material. A book about the
+census, if it be not American, is nothing; but a poem or a romance, though
+written by a native-born American, who, perhaps, has never crossed the
+Atlantic, not only may, but frequently does, have nothing in it that can
+be called essentially American, except its English and, occasionally, its
+ideas. And the question arises whether such productions can justly be held
+to form component parts of what shall hereafter be recognized as the
+literature of America.
+
+How was it with the makers of English literature? Beginning with Chaucer,
+his "Canterbury Pilgrims" is English, both in scene and character; it is
+even mentioned of the Abbess that "Frenche of Paris was to her unknowe";
+but his "Legende of Goode Women" might, so far as its subject-matter is
+concerned, have been written by a French, a Spanish, or an Italian
+Chaucer, just as well as by the British Daniel. Spenser's "Faërie Queene"
+numbers St. George and King Arthur among its heroes; but its scene is laid
+in Faërie Lande, if it be laid anywhere, and it is a barefaced moral
+allegory throughout. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, the elimination
+of which from English literature would undeniably be a serious loss to it;
+yet, of these plays twenty-three have entirely foreign scenes and
+characters. Milton, as a political writer, was English; but his "Paradise
+Lost and Regained," his "Samson," his "Ode on the Nativity," his "Comus,"
+bear no reference to the land of his birth. Dryden's best-known work to-
+day is his "Alexander's Feast." Pope has come down to us as the translator
+of Homer. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are the great quartet
+of English novelists of the last century; but Smollett, in his preface to
+"Roderick Random," after an admiring allusion to the "Gil Blas" of Le
+Sage, goes on to say: "The following sheets I have modelled on his plan";
+and Sterne was always talking and thinking about Cervantes, and comparing
+himself to the great Spaniard: "I think there is more laughable humor,
+with an equal degree of Cervantic satire, if not more, than in the last,"
+he writes of one of his chapters, to "my witty widow, Mrs. F." Many even
+of Walter Scott's romances are un-English in their elements; and the fame
+of Shelley, Keats, and Byron rests entirely upon their "foreign" work.
+Coleridge's poetry and philosophy bear no technical stamp of nationality;
+and, to come down to later times, Carlyle was profoundly imbued with
+Germanism, while the "Romola" of George Eliot and the "Cloister and the
+Hearth" of Charles Reade are by many considered to be the best of their
+works. In the above enumeration innumerable instances in point are, of
+course, omitted; but enough have been given, perhaps, to show that
+imaginative writers have not generally been disowned by their country on
+the ground that they have availed themselves, in their writings, of other
+scenes and characters than those of their own immediate neighborhoods.
+
+The statistics of the work of the foremost American writers could easily
+be shown to be much more strongly imbued with the specific flavor of their
+environment. Benjamin Franklin, though he was an author before the United
+States existed, was American to the marrow. The "Leather-Stocking Tales"
+of Cooper are the American epic. Irving's "Knickerbocker" and his
+"Woolfert's Roost" will long outlast his other productions. Poe's most
+popular tale, "The Gold-Bug," is American in its scene, and so is "The
+Mystery of Marie Roget," in spite of its French nomenclature; and all that
+he wrote is strongly tinged with the native hue of his strange genius.
+Longfellow's "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" and "Miles Standish," and such
+poems as "The Skeleton in Armor" and "The Building of the Ship," crowd out
+of sight his graceful translations and adaptations. Emerson is the
+veritable American eagle of our literature, so that to be Emersonian is to
+be American. Whittier and Holmes have never looked beyond their native
+boundaries, and Hawthorne has brought the stern gloom of the Puritan
+period and the uneasy theorizings of the present day into harmony with the
+universal and permanent elements of human nature. There was certainly
+nothing European visible in the crude but vigorous stories of Theodore
+Winthrop; and Bret Harte, the most brilliant figure among our later men,
+is not only American, but Californian,--as is, likewise, the Poet of the
+Sierras. It is not necessary to go any further. Mr. Henry James, having
+enjoyed early and singular opportunities of studying the effects of the
+recent annual influx of Americans, cultured and otherwise, into England
+and the Continent, has very sensibly and effectively, and with exquisite
+grace of style and pleasantness of thought, made the phenomenon the theme
+of a remarkable series of stories. Hereupon the cry of an "International
+School" has been raised, and critics profess to be seriously alarmed lest
+we should ignore the signal advantages for _mise-en-scène_ presented by
+this Western half of the planet, and should enter into vain and
+unpatriotic competition with foreign writers on their own ground. The
+truth is, meanwhile, that it would have been a much surer sign of
+affectation in us to have abstained from literary comment upon the patent
+and notable fact of this international _rapprochement_,--which is just as
+characteristic an American trait as the episode of the Argonauts of 1849,
+--and we have every reason to be grateful to Mr. Henry James, and to his
+school, if he has any, for having rescued us from the opprobrium of so
+foolish a piece of know-nothingism. The phase is, of course, merely
+temporary; its interest and significance will presently be exhausted; but,
+because we are American, are we to import no French cakes and English ale?
+As a matter of fact, we are too timid and self-conscious; and these
+infirmities imply a much more serious obstacle to the formation of a
+characteristic literature than does any amount of gadding abroad.
+
+That must be a very shallow literature which depends for its national
+flavor and character upon its topography and its dialect; and the
+criticism which can conceive of no deeper Americanism than this is
+shallower still. What is an American book? It is a book written by an
+American, and by one who writes as an American; that is, unaffectedly. So
+an English book is a book written by an unaffected Englishman. What
+difference can it make what the subject of the writing is? Mr. Henry James
+lately brought out a volume of essays on "French Poets and Novelists." Mr.
+E. C. Stedman recently published a series of monographs on "The Victorian
+Poets." Are these books French and English, or are they nondescript, or
+are they American? Not only are they American, but they are more
+essentially American than if they had been disquisitions upon American
+literature. And the reason is, of course, that they subject the things of
+the old world to the tests of the new, and thereby vindicate and
+illustrate the characteristic mission of America to mankind. We are here
+to hold up European conventionalisms and prejudices in the light of the
+new day, and thus afford everybody the opportunity, never heretofore
+enjoyed, of judging them by other standards, and in other surroundings
+than those amidst which they came into existence. In the same way,
+Emerson's "English Traits" is an American thing, and it gives categorical
+reasons why American things should be. And what is an American novel
+except a novel treating of persons, places, and ideas from an American
+point of view? The point of view is _the_ point, not the thing seen from
+it.
+
+But it is said that "the great American novel," in order fully to deserve
+its name, ought to have American scenery. Some thousands of years ago, the
+Greeks had a novelist--Homer--who evolved the great novel of that epoch;
+but the scenery of that novel was Trojan, not Greek. The story is a
+criticism, from a Greek standpoint, of foreign affairs, illustrated with
+practical examples; and, as regards treatment, quite as much care is
+bestowed upon the delineation of Hector, Priam, and Paris, as upon
+Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Achilles. The same story, told by a Trojan Homer,
+would doubtless have been very different; but it is by no means certain
+that it would have been any better told. It embodies, whether symbolically
+or literally matters not, the triumph of Greek ideas and civilization.
+But, even so, the sympathies of the reader are not always, or perhaps
+uniformly, on the conquering side. Homer was doubtless a patriot, but he
+shows no signs of having been a bigot. He described that great
+international episode with singular impartiality; what chiefly interested
+him was the play of human nature. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that
+the Greeks were backward in admitting his claims as their national poet;
+and we may legitimately conclude that were an American Homer--whether in
+prose or poetry--to appear among us, he might pitch his scene where he
+liked--in Patagonia, or on the banks of the Zambezi--and we should accept
+the situation with perfect equanimity. Only let him be a native of New
+York, or Boston, or San Francisco, or Mullenville, and be inspired with
+the American idea, and we ask no more. Whatever he writes will belong to
+our literature, and add lustre to it.
+
+One hears many complaints about the snobbishness of running after things
+European. Go West, young man, these moralists say, or go down Fifth
+Avenue, and investigate Chatham Street, and learn that all the elements of
+romance, to him who has the seeing eye, lie around your own front doorstep
+and back yard. But let not these persons forget that he who fears Europe
+is a less respectable snob than he who studies it. Let us welcome Europe
+in our books as freely as we do at Castle Garden; we may do so safely. If
+our digestion be not strong enough to assimilate her, and work up whatever
+is valuable in her into our own bone and sinew, then America is not the
+thing we took her for. For what is America? Is it simply a reproduction of
+one of these Eastern nationalities, which we are so fond of alluding to as
+effete? Surely not. It is a new departure in history; it is a new door
+opened to the development of the human race, or, as I should prefer to
+say, of humanity. We are misled by the chatter of politicians and the
+bombast of Congress. In the course of ages, the time has at last arrived
+when man, all over this planet, is entering upon a new career of moral,
+intellectual, and political emancipation; and America is the concrete
+expression and theatre of that great fact, as all spiritual truths find
+their fitting and representative physical incarnation. But what would this
+huge western continent be, if America--the real America of the mind--had
+no existence? It would be a body without a soul, and would better,
+therefore, not be at all. If America is to be a repetition of Europe on a
+larger scale, it is not worth the pain of governing it. Europe has shown
+what European ideas can accomplish; and whatever fresh thought or impulse
+comes to birth in it can be nothing else than an American thought and
+impulse, and must sooner or later find its way here, and become
+naturalized with its brethren. Buds and blossoms of America are sprouting
+forth all over the Old World, and we gather in the fruit. They do not find
+themselves at home there, but they know where their home is. The old
+country feels them like thorns in her old flesh, and is gladly rid of
+them; but such prickings are the only wholesome and hopeful symptoms she
+presents; if they ceased to trouble her, she would be dead indeed. She has
+an uneasy experience before her, for a time; but the time will come when
+she, too, will understand that her ease is her disease, and then Castle
+Garden may close its doors, for America will be everywhere.
+
+If, then, America is something vastly more than has hitherto been
+understood by the word nation, it is proper that we attach to that other
+word, patriotism, a significance broader and loftier than has been
+conceived till now. By so much as the idea that we represent is great, by
+so much are we, in comparison with it, inevitably chargeable with
+littleness and short-comings. For we are of the same flesh and blood as
+our neighbors; it is only our opportunities and our responsibilities that
+are fairer and weightier than theirs. Circumstances afford every excuse to
+them, but none to us. "_E Pluribus Unum_" is a frivolous motto; our true
+one should be, "_Noblesse oblige_." But, with a strange perversity, in all
+matters of comparison between ourselves and others, we display what we are
+pleased to call our patriotism by an absurd touchiness as to points
+wherein Europe, with its settled and polished civilization, must needs be
+our superior; and are quite indifferent about those things by which our
+real strength is constituted. Can we not be content to learn from Europe
+the graces, the refinements, the amenities of life, so long as we are able
+to teach her life itself? For my part, I never saw in England any
+appurtenance of civilization, calculated to add to the convenience and
+commodiousness of existence, that did not seem to me to surpass anything
+of the kind that we have in this country. Notwithstanding which--and I am
+far, indeed, from having any pretensions to asceticism--I would have been
+fairly stifled at the idea of having to spend my life there. No American
+can live in Europe, unless he means to return home, or unless, at any
+rate, he returns here in mind, in hope, in belief. For an American to
+accept England, or any other country, as both a mental and physical
+finality, would, it seems to me, be tantamount to renouncing his very
+life. To enjoy English comforts at the cost of adopting English opinions,
+would be about as pleasant as to have the privilege of retaining one's
+body on condition of surrendering one's soul, and would, indeed, amount to
+just about the same thing.
+
+I fail, therefore, to feel any apprehension as to our literature becoming
+Europeanized, because whatever is American in it must lie deeper than
+anything European can penetrate. More than that, I believe and hope that
+our novelists will deal with Europe a great deal more, and a great deal
+more intelligently, than they have done yet. It is a true and healthy
+artistic instinct that leads them to do so. Hawthorne--and no American
+writer had a better right than he to contradict his own argument--says, in
+the preface to the "Marble Faun," in a passage that has been often quoted,
+but will bear repetition:--
+
+    "Italy, as the site of a romance, was chiefly valuable to him as <
+    affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would
+    not be so terribly insisted on as they are, and must needs be, in
+    America. No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of
+    writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no
+    antiquity, n mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything
+    but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is
+    happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I
+    trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled
+    themes, either in the annals of our stalwart Republic, or in any
+    characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance
+    and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them
+    grow."
+
+Now, what is to be understood from this passage? It assumes, in the first
+place, that a work of art, in order to be effective, must contain profound
+contrasts of light and shadow; and then it points out that the shadow, at
+least, is found ready to the hand in Europe. There is no hint of patriotic
+scruples as to availing one's self of such a "picturesque and gloomy"
+background; if it is to be had, then let it be taken; the main object to
+be considered is the work of art. Europe, in short, afforded an excellent
+quarry, from which, in Hawthorne's opinion, the American novelist might
+obtain materials which are conspicuously deficient in his own country, and
+which that country is all the better for not possessing. In the "Marble
+Faun" the author had conceived a certain idea, and he considered that he
+had been not unsuccessful in realizing it. The subject was new, and full
+of especial attractions to his genius, and it would manifestly have been
+impossible to adapt it to an American setting. There was one drawback
+connected with it, and this Hawthorne did not fail to recognize. He
+remarks in the preface that he had "lived too long abroad not to be aware
+that a foreigner seldom acquires that knowledge of a country at once
+flexible and profound, which may justify him in endeavoring to idealize
+its traits." But he was careful not to attempt "a portraiture of Italian
+manners and character." He made use of the Italian scenery and atmosphere
+just so far as was essential to the development of his idea, and
+consistent with the extent of his Italian knowledge; and, for the rest,
+fell back upon American characters and principles. The result has been
+long enough before the world to have met with a proper appreciation. I
+have heard regret expressed that the power employed by the author in
+working out this story had not been applied to a romance dealing with a
+purely American subject. But to analyze this objection is to dispose of
+it. A man of genius is not, commonly, enfeebled by his own productions;
+and, physical accidents aside, Hawthorne was just as capable of writing
+another "Scarlet Letter" after the "Marble Faun" was published, as he had
+been before. Meanwhile, few will deny that our literature would be a loser
+had the "Marble Faun" never been written.
+
+The drawback above alluded to is, however, not to be underrated. It may
+operate in two ways. In the first place, the American's European
+observations may be inaccurate. As a child, looking at a sphere, might
+suppose it to be a flat disc, shaded at one side and lighted at the other,
+so a sightseer in Europe may ascribe to what he beholds qualities and a
+character quite at variance with what a more fundamental knowledge would
+have enabled him to perceive. In the second place, the stranger in a
+strange land, be he as accurate as he may, will always tend to look at
+what is around him objectively, instead of allowing it subjectively--or,
+as it were, unconsciously--to color his narrative. He will be more apt
+directly to describe what he sees, than to convey the feeling or aroma of
+it without description. It would doubtless, for instance, be possible for
+Mr. Henry James to write an "English" or even a "French" novel without
+falling into a single technical error; but it is no less certain that a
+native writer, of equal ability, would treat the same subject in a very
+different manner. Mr. James's version might contain a great deal more of
+definite information; but the native work would insinuate an impression
+which both comes from and goes to a greater depth of apprehension.
+
+But, on the other hand, it is not contended that any American should write
+an "English" or anything but an "American" novel. The contention is,
+simply, that he should not refrain from using foreign material, when it
+happens to suit his exigencies, merely because it is foreign. Objective
+writing may be quite as good reading as subjective writing, in its proper
+place and function. In fiction, no more than elsewhere, may a writer
+pretend to be what he is not, or to know what he knows not. When he finds
+himself abroad, he must frankly admit his situation; and more will not
+then be required of him than he is fairly competent to afford. It will
+seldom happen, as Hawthorne intimates, that he can successfully reproduce
+the inner workings and philosophy of European social and political customs
+and peculiarities; but he can give a picture of the scenery as vivid as
+can the aborigine, or more so; he can make an accurate study of personal
+native character; and, finally, and most important of all, he can make use
+of the conditions of European civilization in events, incidents, and
+situations which would be impossible on this side of the water. The
+restrictions, the traditions, the law, and the license of those old
+countries are full of suggestions to the student of character and
+circumstances, and supply him with colors and effects that he would else
+search for in vain. For the truth may as well be admitted; we are at a
+distinct disadvantage, in America, in respect of the materials of romance.
+Not that vigorous, pathetic, striking stories may not be constructed here;
+and there is humor enough, the humor of dialect, of incongruity of
+character; but, so far as the story depends for its effect, not upon
+psychical and personal, but upon physical and general events and
+situations, we soon feel the limit of our resources. An analysis of the
+human soul, such as may be found in the "House of the Seven Gables," for
+instance, is absolute in its interest, apart from outward conditions. But
+such an analysis cannot be carried on, so to say, _in vacuo_. You must
+have solid ground to stand on; you must have fitting circumstances,
+background, and perspective. The ruin of a soul, the tragedy of a heart,
+demand, as a necessity of harmony and picturesque effect, a corresponding
+and conspiring environment and stage--just as, in music, the air in the
+treble is supported and reverberated by the bass accompaniment. The
+immediate, contemporary act or predicament loses more than half its
+meaning and impressiveness if it be re-echoed from no sounding-board in
+the past--its notes, however sweetly and truly touched, fall flatly on the
+ear. The deeper we attempt to pitch the key of an American story,
+therefore, the more difficulty shall we find in providing a congruous
+setting for it; and it is interesting to note how the masters of the craft
+have met the difficulty. In the "Seven Gables"--and I take leave to say
+that if I draw illustrations from this particular writer, it is for no
+other reason than that he presents, more forcibly than most, a method of
+dealing with the special problem we are considering--Hawthorne, with the
+intuitive skill of genius, evolves a background, and produces a
+reverberation, from materials which he may be said to have created almost
+as much as discovered. The idea of a house, founded two hundred years ago
+upon a crime, remaining ever since in possession of its original owners,
+and becoming the theatre, at last, of the judgment upon that crime, is a
+thoroughly picturesque idea, but it is thoroughly un-American. Such a
+thing might conceivably occur, but nothing in this country could well be
+more unlikely. No one before Hawthorne had ever thought of attempting such
+a thing; at all events, no one else, before or since, has accomplished it.
+The preface to the romance in question reveals the principle upon which
+its author worked, and incidentally gives a new definition of the term
+"romance,"--a definition of which, thus far, no one but its propounder has
+known how to avail himself. It amounts, in fact, to an acknowledgment that
+it is impossible to write a "novel" of American life that shall be at once
+artistic, realistic, and profound. A novel, he says, aims at a "very
+minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and
+ordinary course of man's experience." A romance, on the other hand,
+"while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and
+while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of
+the human heart, has fairly a right to present that truth under
+circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or
+creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium
+as to bring out and mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows,
+of the picture." This is good advice, no doubt, but not easy to follow. We
+can all understand, however, that the difficulties would be greatly
+lessened could we but command backgrounds of the European order.
+Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, and others have written great
+stories, which did not have to be romances, because the literal conditions
+of life in England have a picturesqueness and a depth which correspond
+well enough with whatever moral and mental scenery we may project upon
+them. Hawthorne was forced to use the scenery and capabilities of his
+native town of Salem. He saw that he could not present these in a
+realistic light, and his artistic instinct showed him that he must modify
+or veil the realism of his figures in the same degree and manner as that
+of his accessories. No doubt, his peculiar genius and temperament
+eminently qualified him to produce this magical change; it was a
+remarkable instance of the spontaneous marriage, so to speak, of the means
+to the end; and even when, in Italy, he had an opportunity to write a
+story which should be accurate in fact, as well as faithful to "the truth
+of the human heart," he still preferred a subject which bore to the
+Italian environment the same relation that the "House of the Seven Gables"
+and the "Scarlet Letter" do to the American one; in other words, the
+conception of Donatello is removed as much further than Clifford or Hester
+Prynne from literal realism as the inherent romance of the Italian setting
+is above that of New England. The whole thing is advanced a step further
+towards pure idealism, the relative proportions being maintained.
+
+"The Blithedale Romance" is only another instance in point, and here, as
+before, we find the principle admirably stated in the preface. "In the old
+countries," says Hawthorne, "a novelist's work is not put exactly side by
+side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to everyday
+probability, in view of the improved effects he is bound to produce
+thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no Faëry Land,
+so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, we cannot well tell
+the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld
+through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This
+atmosphere is what the American romancer needs. In its absence, the beings
+of his imagination are compelled to show themselves in the same category
+as actually living mortals; a necessity that renders the paint and
+pasteboard of their composition but too painfully discernible."
+Accordingly, Hawthorne selects the Brook Farm episode (or a reflection of
+it) as affording his drama "a theatre, a little removed from the highway
+of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their
+phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison
+with the actual events of real lives." In this case, therefore, an
+exceptional circumstance is made to answer the same purpose that was
+attained by different means in the other romances.
+
+But in what manner have our other writers of fiction treated the
+difficulties that were thus dealt with by Hawthorne?--Herman Melville
+cannot be instanced here; for his only novel or romance, whichever it be,
+was also the most impossible of all his books, and really a terrible
+example of the enormities which a man of genius may perpetrate when
+working in a direction unsuited to him. I refer, of course, to "Pierre, or
+the Ambiguities." Oliver Wendell Holmes's two delightful stories are as
+favorable examples of what can be done, in the way of an American novel,
+by a wise, witty, and learned gentleman, as we are likely to see.
+Nevertheless, one cannot avoid the feeling that they are the work of a man
+who has achieved success and found recognition in other ways than by
+stories, or even poems and essays. The interest, in either book, centres
+round one of those physiological phenomena which impinge so strangely upon
+the domain of the soul; for the rest, they are simply accurate and
+humorous portraitures of local dialects and peculiarities, and thus afford
+little assistance in the search for a universally applicable rule of
+guidance. Doctor Holmes, I believe, objects to having the term "medicated"
+applied to his tales; but surely the adjective is not reproachful; it
+indicates one of the most charming and also, alas! inimitable features of
+his work.
+
+Bret Harte is probably as valuable a witness as could be summoned in this
+case. His touch is realistic, and yet his imagination is poetic and
+romantic. He has discovered something. He has done something both new and
+good. Within the space of some fifty pages, he has painted a series of
+pictures which will last as long as anything in the fifty thousand pages
+of Dickens. Taking "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" as perhaps the most nearly
+perfect of the tales, as well as the most truly representative of the
+writer's powers, let us try to guess its secret. In the first place, it is
+very short,--a single episode, succinctly and eloquently told. The
+descriptions of scenery and persons are masterly and memorable. The
+characters of these persons, their actions, and the circumstances of their
+lives, are as rugged, as grotesque, as terrible, and also as beautiful, as
+the scenery. Thus an artistic harmony is established,--the thing which is
+lacking in so much of our literature. The story moves swiftly on, through
+humor, pathos, and tragedy, to its dramatic close. It is given with
+perfect literary taste, and naught in its phases of human nature is either
+extenuated or set down in malice. The little narrative can be read in a
+few minutes, and can never be forgotten. But it is only an episode; and it
+is an episode of an episode,--that of the Californian gold-fever. The
+story of the Argonauts is only one story, after all, and these tales of
+Harte's are but so many facets of the same gem. They are not, however,
+like chapters in a romance; there is no such vital connection between them
+as develops a cumulative force. We are no more impressed after reading
+half a dozen of them than after the first; they are variations of the same
+theme. They discover to us no new truth about human nature; they only show
+us certain human beings so placed as to act out their naked selves,--to be
+neither influenced nor protected by the rewards and screens of
+conventional civilization. The affectation and insincerity of our daily
+life make such a spectacle fresh and pleasing to us. But we enjoy it
+because of its unexpectedness, its separateness, its unlikeness to the
+ordinary course of existence. It is like a huge, strange, gorgeous flower,
+an exaggeration and intensification of such flowers as we know; but a
+flower without roots, unique, never to be reproduced. It is fitting that
+its portrait should be painted; but, once done, it is done with; we cannot
+fill our picture-gallery with it. Carlyle wrote the History of the French
+Revolution, and Bret Harte has written the History of the Argonauts; but
+it is absurd to suppose that a national literature could be founded on
+either episode.
+
+But though Mr. Harte has not left his fellow-craftsmen anything to gather
+from the lode which he opened and exhausted, we may still learn something
+from his method. He took things as he found them, and he found them
+disinclined to weave themselves into an elaborate and balanced narrative.
+He recognized the deficiency of historical perspective, but he saw that
+what was lost in slowly growing, culminating power was gained in vivid,
+instant force. The deeds of his character could not be represented as the
+final result of long-inherited proclivities; but they could appear between
+their motive and their consequence, like the draw--aim--fire! of the
+Western desperado,--as short, sharp, and conclusive. In other words, the
+conditions of American life, as he saw it, justified a short story, or any
+number of them, but not a novel; and the fact that he did afterwards
+attempt a novel only served to confirm his original position. I think that
+the limitation that he discovered is of much wider application than we are
+prone to realize. American life has been, as yet, nothing but a series of
+episodes, of experiments. There has been no such thing as a fixed and
+settled condition of society, not subject to change itself, and therefore
+affording a foundation and contrast to minor or individual vicissitudes.
+We cannot write American-grown novels, because a novel is not an episode,
+nor an aggregation of episodes; we cannot write romances in the Hawthorne
+sense, because, as yet, we do not seem to be clever enough. Several
+courses are, however, open to us, and we are pursuing them all. First, we
+are writing "short stories," accounts of episodes needing no historical
+perspective, and not caring for any; and, so far as one may judge, we
+write the best short stories in the world. Secondly, we may spin out our
+short stories into long-short stories, just as we may imagine a baby six
+feet high; it takes up more room, but is just as much a baby as one of
+twelve inches. Thirdly, we may graft our flower of romance on a European
+stem, and enjoy ourselves as much as the European novelists do, and with
+as clear a conscience. We are stealing that which enriches us and does not
+impoverish them. It is silly and childish to make the boundaries of the
+America of the mind coincide with those of the United States. We need not
+dispute about free trade and protection here; literature is not commerce,
+nor is it politics. America is not a petty nationality, like France,
+England, and Germany; but whatever in such nationalities tends toward
+enlightenment and freedom is American. Let us not, therefore, confirm
+ourselves in a false and ignoble conception of our meaning and mission in
+the world. Let us not carry into the temple of the Muse the jealousies,
+the prejudice, the ignorance, the selfishness of our "Senate" and
+"Representatives," strangely so called! Let us not refuse to breathe the
+air of Heaven, lest there be something European or Asian in it. If we
+cannot have a national literature in the narrow, geographical sense of the
+phrase, it is because our inheritance transcends all geographical
+definitions. The great American novel may not be written this year, or
+even in this century. Meanwhile, let us not fear to ride, and ride to
+death, whatever species of Pegasus we can catch. It can do us no harm, and
+it may help us to acquire a firmer seat against the time when our own, our
+very own winged steed makes his appearance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN.
+
+
+Literature is that quality in books which affords delight and nourishment
+to the soul. But this is a scientific and skeptical age, insomuch that one
+hardly ventures to take for granted that every reader will know what his
+soul is. It is not the intellect, though it gives the intellect light; nor
+the emotions, though they receive their warmth from it. It is the most
+catholic and constant element of human nature, yet it bears no direct part
+in the practical affairs of life; it does not struggle, it does not even
+suffer; but merely emerges or retires, glows or congeals, according to the
+company in which it finds itself. We might say that the soul is a name for
+man's innate sympathy with goodness and truth in the abstract; for no man
+can have a bad soul, though his heart may be evil, or his mind depraved,
+because the soul's access to the mind or heart has been so obstructed as
+to leave the moral consciousness cold and dark. The soul, in other words,
+is the only conservative and peacemaker; it affords the only unalterable
+ground upon which all men can always meet; it unselfishly identifies or
+unites us with our fellows, in contradistinction to the selfish intellect,
+which individualizes us and sets each man against every other. Doubtless,
+then, the soul is an amiable and desirable possession, and it would be a
+pity to deprive it of so much encouragement as may be compatible with due
+attention to the serious business of life. For there are moments, even in
+the most active careers, when it seems agreeable to forget competition,
+rivalry, jealousy; when it is a rest to think of one's self as a man
+rather than a person;--moments when time and place appear impertinent, and
+that most profitable which affords least palpable profit. At such seasons,
+a man looks inward, or, as the American poet puts it, he loafs and invites
+his soul, and then he is at a disadvantage if his soul, in consequence of
+too persistent previous neglect, declines to respond to the invitation,
+and remains immured in that secret place which, as years pass by, becomes
+less and less accessible to so many of us.
+
+When I say that literature nourishes the soul, I implicitly refuse the
+title of literature to anything in books that either directly or
+indirectly promotes any worldly or practical use. Of course, what is
+literature to one man may be anything but literature to another, or to the
+same man under different circumstances; Virgil to the schoolboy, for
+instance, is a very different thing from the Virgil of the scholar. But
+whatever you read with the design of improving yourself in some
+profession, or of acquiring information likely to be of advantage to you
+in any pursuit or contingency, or of enabling yourself to hold your own
+with other readers, or even of rendering yourself that enviable
+nondescript, a person of culture,--whatever, in short, is read with any
+assignable purpose whatever, is in so far not literature. The Bible may be
+literature to Mr. Matthew Arnold, because he reads it for fun; but to
+Luther, Calvin, or the pupils of a Sunday-school, it is essentially
+something else. Literature is the written communications of the soul of
+mankind with itself; it is liable to appear in the most unexpected places,
+and in the oddest company; it vanishes when we would grasp it, and appears
+when we look not for it. Chairs of literature are established in the great
+universities, and it is literature, no doubt, that the professor
+discourses; but it ceases to be literature before it reaches the student's
+ear; though, again, when the same students stumble across it in the
+recesses of their memory ten or twenty years later, it may have become
+literature once more. Finally, literature may, upon occasion, avail a man
+more than the most thorough technical information; but it will not be
+because it supplements or supplants that information, but because it has
+so tempered and exalted his general faculty that whatever he may do is
+done more clearly and comprehensively than might otherwise be the case.
+
+Having thus, in some measure, considered what is literature and what the
+soul, let us note, further, that the literature proper to manhood is not
+proper to childhood, though the reverse is not--or, at least, never ought
+to be--true. In childhood, the soul and the mind act in harmony; the mind
+has not become preoccupied or sophisticated by so-called useful knowledge;
+it responds obediently to the soul's impulses and intuitions. Children
+have no morality; they have not yet descended to the level where morality
+suggests itself to them. For morality is the outcome of spiritual pride,
+the most stubborn and insidious of all sins; the pride which prompts each
+of us to declare himself holier than his fellows, and to support that
+claim by parading his docility to the Decalogue. Docility to any set of
+rules, no matter of how divine authority, so long as it is inspired by
+hope of future good or present advantage, is rather worse than useless:
+except our righteousness exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees,--that
+is, except it be spontaneous righteousness or morality, and, therefore,
+not morality, but unconscious goodness,--we shall in no wise have
+benefited either ourselves or others. Children, when left to themselves,
+artlessly and innocently act out the nature that is common to saint and
+sinner alike; they are selfish, angry, and foolish, because their state is
+human; and they are loving, truthful, and sincere, because their origin is
+divine. All that pleases or agrees with them is good; all that opposes or
+offends them is evil, and this, without any reference whatever to the
+moral code in vogue among their elders. But, on the other hand, children
+cannot be tempted as we are, because they suppose that everything is free
+and possible, and because they are as yet uncontaminated by the artificial
+cravings which the artificial prohibitions incident to our civilization
+create. Life is to them a constantly widening circle of things to be had
+and enjoyed; nor does it ever occur to them that their desires can
+conflict with those of others, or with the laws of the universe. They
+cannot consciously do wrong, nor understand that any one else can do so;
+untoward accidents may happen, but inanimate nature is just as liable to
+be objectionable in this respect as human beings: the stone that trips
+them up, the thorn that scratches them, the snow that makes their flesh
+tingle, is an object of their resentment in just the same kind and degree
+as are the men and women who thwart or injure them. But of duty--that
+dreary device to secure future reward by present suffering; of
+conscientiousness--that fear of present good for the sake of future
+punishment; of remorse--that disavowal of past pleasure for fear of the
+sting in its tail; of ambition--that begrudging of all honorable results
+that are not effected by one's self; of these, and all similar politic and
+arbitrary masks of self-love and pusillanimity, these poor children know
+and suspect nothing. Yet their eyes are much keener than ours, for they
+see through the surface of nature and perceive its symbolism; they see the
+living reality, of which nature is the veil, and are continually at fault
+because this veil is not, after all, the reality,--because it is fixed and
+unplastic. The "deep mind of dauntless infancy" is, in fact, the only
+revelation we have, except divine revelation itself, of that pure and
+natural life of man which we dream of, and liken to heaven; but we,
+nevertheless, in our penny-wise, pound-foolish way, insist upon regarding
+it as ignorance, and do our best, from the earliest possible moment, to
+disenchant and dispel it. We call the outrage education, understanding
+thereby the process of exterminating in the child the higher order of
+faculties and the intuitions, and substituting for them the external
+memory, timidity, self-esteem, and all that armament of petty weapons and
+defences which may enable us to get the better of our fellow-creatures in
+this world, and receive the reward of our sagacity in the next. The
+success of our efforts is pitiably complete; for though the child, if
+fairly engaged in single combat, might make a formidable resistance
+against the infliction of "lessons," it cannot long withstand our crafty
+device of sending it to a place where it sees a score or a hundred of
+little victims like itself, all being driven to the same Siberia. The
+spirit of emulation is aroused, and lo! away they all scamper, each
+straining its utmost to reach the barren goal ahead of all competitors. So
+do we make the most ignoble passions of our children our allies in the
+unholy task of divesting them of their childhood. And yet, who is not
+aware that the best men the world has seen have been those who, throughout
+their lives, retained the aroma of childlike simplicity which they brought
+with them into existence? Learning--the acquisition of specific facts--is
+not wisdom; it is almost incompatible with wisdom; indeed, unless the mind
+be powerful enough not only to fuse its facts, but to vaporize them,--to
+sublimate them into an impalpable atmosphere,--they will stand in wisdom's
+way. Wisdom comes from the pondering and the application to life of
+certain truths quite above the sphere of facts, and of infinitely more
+moment and less complexity,--truths which are often found to be in
+accordance with the spiritual instinct called intuition, which children
+possess more fully than grown persons. The wisdom of our children would
+often astonish us, if we would only forbear the attempt to make them
+knowing, and submissively accept instruction from them. Through all the
+imperfection of their inherited infirmity, we shall ever and anon be
+conscious of the radiance of a beautiful, unconscious intelligence, worth
+more than the smartness of schools and the cleverness of colleges. But no;
+we abhor the very notion of it, and generally succeed in extinguishing it
+long before the Three R's are done with.
+
+And yet, by wisely directing the child's use of the first of the Three,
+much of the ill effects of the trio and their offspring might be
+counteracted. If we believed--if the great mass of people known as the
+civilized world did actually and livingly believe--that there was really
+anything beyond or above the physical order of nature, our children's
+literature, wrongly so called, would not be what it is. We believe what we
+can see and touch; we teach them to believe the same, and, not satisfied
+with that, we sedulously warn them not to believe anything else. The
+child, let us suppose, has heard from some unauthorized person that there
+are fairies--little magical creatures an inch high, up to all manner of
+delightful feats. He comprehends the whole matter at half a word, feels
+that he had known it already, and half thinks that he sees one or two on
+his way home. He runs up to his mother and tells her about it; and has she
+ever seen fairies? Alas! His mother tells him that the existence of such a
+being as a fairy is impossible. In old times, when the world was very
+ignorant and superstitious, they used to ascribe everything that happened
+to supernatural agency; even the trifling daily accidents of one's life,
+such as tumbling down stairs, or putting the right shoe on the left foot,
+were thought or fancied to be the work of some mysterious power; and since
+ignorant people are very apt to imagine they see what they believe
+[proceeds this mother] instead of only believing what they see; and since,
+furthermore, ignorance disposes to exaggeration and thus to untruth, these
+people ended by asserting that they saw fairies. "Now, my child,"
+continues the parent, "it would grieve me to see you the victim of such
+folly. Do not read fairy stories. They are not true to life; they fill
+your mind with idle notions; they cannot form your understanding, or aid
+you to do your work in the world. If you should happen to fall in with
+such fables, be careful as you read to bear in mind that they are pure
+inventions--pretty, sometimes, perhaps, but essentially frivolous, if not
+immoral. You have, however, thanks to the enlightened enterprise of
+writers and publishers, an endless assortment of juvenile books and
+periodicals which combine legitimate amusement with sound and trustworthy
+instruction. Here are stories about little children, just like yourself,
+who talk and act just as you do, and to whom nothing supernatural or
+outlandish ever happens; and whose adventures, when you have read them,
+convey to you some salutary moral lesson. What more can you want? Yes,
+very likely 'Grimm's Tales' and 'The Arabian Nights' may seem more
+attractive; but in this world many harmful things put on an inviting
+guise, which deceives the inexperienced eye. May my child remember that
+all is not gold that glitters, and desire, not what is diverting merely,
+but what is useful and ... and conventional!"
+
+Let us admit that, things being as they are, it is necessary to develop
+the practical side of the child's nature, to ground him in moral
+principles, and to make him comprehend and fear--nominally God, but
+really--society. But why, in addition to doing this, should we strangle
+the unpractical side of his nature,--the ideal, imaginative, spiritual
+side,--the side which alone can determine his value or worthlessness in
+eternity? If our minds were visible as our bodies are, we should behold on
+every side of us, and in our own private looking-glasses, such abortions,
+cripples, and monstrosities as all the slums of Europe and the East could
+not parallel. We pretend to make little men and women out of our children,
+and we make little dwarfs and hobgoblins out of them. Moreover, we should
+not diminish even the practical efficiency of the coming generation by
+rejecting their unpractical side. Whether this boy's worldly destination
+be to clean a stable or to represent his country at a foreign court, he
+will do his work all the better, instead of worse, for having been allowed
+freedom of expansion on the ideal plane. He will do it comprehensively, or
+as from above downward, instead of blindly, or as from below upward. To a
+certain extent, this position is very generally admitted by instructors
+nowadays; but the admission bears little or no fruit. The ideality and
+imagination which they have in mind are but a partial and feeble imitation
+of what is really signified by those terms. Ideality and imagination are
+themselves merely the symptom or expression of the faculty and habit of
+spiritual or subjective intuition--a faculty of paramount value in life,
+though of late years, in the rush of rational knowledge and discovery, it
+has fallen into neglect. But it is by means of this faculty alone that the
+great religion of India was constructed--the most elaborate and seductive
+of all systems; and although as a faith Buddhism is also the most
+treacherous and dangerous attack ever made upon the immortal welfare of
+mankind, that circumstance certainly does not discredit or invalidate the
+claim to importance of spiritual intuition itself. It may be objected that
+spiritual intuition is a vague term. It undoubtedly belongs to an abstruse
+region of psychology; but its meaning for our present purpose is simply
+the act of testing questions of the moral consciousness by an inward
+touchstone of truth, instead of by external experience or information.
+That the existence of such a touchstone should be ridiculed by those who
+are accustomed to depend for their belief upon palpable or logical
+evidence, goes without saying; but, on the other hand, there need be no
+collision or argument on the point, since no question with which intuition
+is concerned can ever present itself to persons who pin their faith to the
+other sort of demonstration. The reverse of this statement is by no means
+true; but it would lead us out of our present path to discuss the matter.
+
+Assuming, however, that intuition is possible, it is evident that it
+should exist in children in an extremely pure, if not in its most potent
+state; and to deny it opportunity of development might fairly be called a
+barbarity. It will hardly be disputed that children are an important
+element in society. Without them we should lose the memory of our youth,
+and all opportunity for the exercise of unselfish and disinterested
+affection. Life would become arid and mechanical to a degree now scarcely
+conceivable; chastity and all the human virtues would cease to exist;
+marriage would be an aimless and absurd transaction; and the brotherhood
+of man, even in the nominal sense that it now exists, would speedily be
+abjured. Political economy and sociology neglect to make children an
+element in their arguments and deductions, and no small part of their
+error is attributable to that circumstance. But although children still
+are born, and all the world acknowledges their paramount moral and social
+value, the general tendency of what we are forced to call education at the
+present day is to shorten as much as possible the period of childhood. In
+America and Germany especially--but more in America than in Germany--
+children are urged and stimulated to "grow up" almost before they have
+been short-coated. That conceptions of order and discipline should be
+early instilled into them is proper enough; but no other order and
+discipline seems to be contemplated by educators than the forcing them to
+stand and be stuffed full of indigestible and incongruous knowledge, than
+which proceeding nothing more disorderly could be devised. It looks as if
+we felt the innocence and naturalness of our children to be a rebuke to
+us, and wished to do away with it in short order. There is something in
+the New Testament about offending the little ones, and the preferred
+alternative thereto; and really we are outraging not only the objective
+child, but the subjective one also--that in ourselves, namely, which is
+innocent and pure, and without which we had better not be at all. Now I do
+not mean to say that the only medicine that can cure this malady is
+legitimate children's literature; wise parents are also very useful,
+though not perhaps so generally available. My present contention is that
+the right sort of literature is an agent of great efficiency, and may be
+very easily come by. Children derive more genuine enjoyment and profit
+from a good book than most grown people are susceptible of: they see what
+is described, and themselves enact and perfect the characters of the story
+as it goes along.
+
+Nor is it indispensable that literature of the kind required should
+forthwith be produced; a great deal, of admirable quality, is already on
+hand. There are a few great poems----Spenser's "Faërie Queene" is one--
+which no well regulated child should be without; but poetry in general is
+not exactly what we want. Children--healthy children--never have the
+poetic genius; but they are born mystics, and they have the sense of
+humor. The best way to speak to them is in prose, and the best kind of
+prose is the symbolic. The hermetic philosophers of the Middle Ages are
+probably the authors of some of the best children's stories extant. In
+these tales, disguised beneath what is apparently the simplest and most
+artless flow of narrative, profound truths are discussed and explained.
+The child reads the narrative, and certainly cannot be accused of
+comprehending the hidden philosophical problem; yet that also has its
+share in charming him. The reason is partly that true symbolic or
+figurative writing is the simplest form known to literature. The simplest,
+that is to say, in outward form,--it may be indefinitely abstruse as to
+its inward contents. Indeed, the very cause of its formal simplicity is
+its interior profundity. The principle of hermetic writing was, as we
+know, to disguise philosophical propositions and results under a form of
+words which should ostensibly signify some very ordinary and trivial
+thing. It was a secret language, in the vocabulary of which material facts
+are used to represent spiritual truths. But it differed from ordinary
+secret language in this, that not only were the truths represented in the
+symbols, but the philosophical development of the truth, in its
+ramifications, was completely evolved under the cover of a logically
+consistent tale. This, evidently, is a far higher achievement of ingenuity
+than merely to string together a series of unrelated parts of speech,
+which, on being tested by the "key," shall discover the message or
+information really intended. It is, in fact, a practical application of
+the philosophical discovery, made by or communicated to the hermetic
+philosophers, that every material object in nature answers to or
+corresponds with a certain one or group of philosophical truths. Viewed in
+this light, the science of symbols or of correspondences ceases to be an
+arbitrary device, susceptible of alteration according to fancy, and
+avouches itself an essential and consistent relation between the things of
+the mind and the things of the senses. There is a complete mental
+creation, answering to the material creation, not continuously evolved
+from it, but on a different or detached plane. The sun,--to take an
+example,--the source of light and heat, and thereby of physical nature, is
+in these fables always the symbol of God, of love and wisdom, by which the
+spirit of man is created. Light, then, answers to wisdom, and heat to
+love. And since all physical substances are the result of the combined
+action of light and heat, we may easily perceive how these hermetic sages
+were enabled to use every physical object as a cloak of its corresponding
+philosophical truth,--with no other liability to error than might result
+from the imperfect condition of their knowledge of physical laws.
+
+To return, however, to the children, I need scarcely remark that the cause
+of children's taking so kindly to hermetic writing is that it is actually
+a living writing; it is alive in precisely the same way that nature, or
+man himself, is alive. Matter is dead; life organizes and animates it. And
+all writing is essentially dead which is a mere transcript of fact, and is
+not inwardly organized and vivified by a spiritual significance. Children
+do not know what it is that makes a human being smile, move, and talk; but
+they know that such a phenomenon is infinitely more interesting than a
+doll; and they prove it by themselves supplying the doll with speech and
+motions out of their own minds, so as to make it as much like a real
+person as possible. In the same way, they do not perceive the
+philosophical truth which is the cause of existence of the hermetic fable;
+but they find that fable far more juicy and substantial than the ordinary
+narrative of every-day facts, because, however fine the surface of the
+latter may be, it has, after all, nothing but its surface to recommend it.
+It has no soul; it is not alive; and, though they cannot explain why, they
+feel the difference between that thin, fixed grimace and the changing
+smile of the living countenance.
+
+It would scarcely be practicable, however, to confine the children's
+reading to hermetic literature; for not much of it is extant in its pure
+state. But it is hardly too much to say that all fairy stories, and
+derivations from these, trace their descent from an hermetic ancestry.
+They are often unaware of their genealogy; but the sparks of that primal
+vitality are in them. The fairy is itself a symbol for the expression of a
+more complex and abstract idea; but, once having come into existence, and
+being, not a pure symbol, but a hybrid between the symbol and that for
+which it stands, it presently began an independent career of its own. The
+mediaeval imagination went to work with it, found it singularly and
+delightfully plastic to its touch and requirements, and soon made it the
+centre of a new and charming world, in which a whole army of graceful and
+romantic fancies, which are always in quest of an arena in which to
+disport themselves before the mind, found abundant accommodation and
+nourishment. The fairy land of mediaeval Christianity seems to us the most
+satisfactory of all fairy lands, probably because it is more in accord
+with our genius and prejudices than those of the East; and it fitted in so
+aptly with the popular mediaeval ignorance on the subject of natural
+phenomena, that it became actually an article of belief with the mass of
+men, who trembled at it while they invented it, in the most delicious
+imaginable state of enchanted alarm. All this is prime reading for
+children; because, though it does not carry an orderly spiritual meaning
+within it, it is more spiritual than material, and is constructed entirely
+according to the dictates of an exuberant and richly colored, but,
+nevertheless, in its own sphere, legitimate imagination. Indeed, fairy
+land, though as it were accidentally created, has the same permanent right
+to be that Beauty has; it agrees with a genuine aspect of human nature,
+albeit one much discountenanced just at present. The sequel to it, in
+which romantic human personages are accredited with fairy-like attributes,
+as in the "Faërie Queene," already alluded to, is a step in the wrong
+direction, but not a step long enough to carry us altogether outside of
+the charmed circle. The child's instinct of selection being vast and
+cordial,--he will make a grain of true imagination suffuse and glorify a
+whole acre of twaddle,---we may with security leave him in that fantastic
+society. Moreover, some children being less imaginative than others, and
+all children being less imaginative in some moods and conditions than at
+other seasons, the elaborate compositions of Tasso, Cervantes, and the
+others, though on the boundary line between what is meat for babes and the
+other sort of meat, have also their abiding use.
+
+The "Arabian Nights" introduced us to the domain of the Oriental
+imagination, and has done more than all the books of travel in the East to
+make us acquainted with the Asiatic character and its differences from our
+own. From what has already been said on the subject of spiritual intuition
+in relation to these races, one is prepared to find that all the Eastern
+literature that has any value is hermetic writing, and therefore, in so
+far, proper for children. But the incorrigible subtlety of the Oriental
+intellect has vitiated much of their symbology, and the sentiment of sheer
+wonder is stimulated rather than that of orderly imagination. To read the
+"Arabian Nights" or the "Bhagavad-Gita" is a sort of dissipation; upon the
+unhackneyed mind of the child it leaves a reactionary sense of depression.
+The life which it embodies is distorted, over-colored, and exciting; it
+has not the serene and balanced power of the Western productions.
+Moreover, these books were not written with the grave philosophic purpose
+that animated our own hermetic school; it is rather a sort of jugglery
+practised with the subject---an exercise of ingenuity and invention for
+their own sake. It indicates a lack of the feeling of responsibility on
+the writers' part,--a result, doubtless, of the prevailing fatalism that
+underlies all their thought. It is not essentially wholesome, in short;
+but it is immeasurably superior to the best of the productions called
+forth by our modern notions of what should be given to children to read.
+
+But I can do no more than touch upon this branch of the subject; nor will
+it be possible to linger long over the department of our own literature
+which came into being with "Robinson Crusoe." No theory as to children's
+books would be worth much attention which found itself obliged to exclude
+that memorable work. Although it submits in a certain measure to
+classification, it is almost _sui generis_; no book of its kind,
+approaching it in merit, has ever been written. In what, then, does its
+fascination consist? There is certainly nothing hermetic about it; it is
+the simplest and most studiously matter-of-fact narrative of events,
+comprehensible without the slightest effort, and having no meaning that is
+not apparent on the face of it. And yet children, and grown people also,
+read it again and again, and cannot find it uninteresting. I think the
+phenomenon may largely be due to the nature of the subject, which is
+really of primary and universal interest to mankind. It is the story of
+the struggle of man with wild and hostile nature,--in the larger sense an
+elementary theme,--his shifts, his failures, his perils, his fears, his
+hopes, his successes. The character of Robinson is so artfully generalized
+or universalized, and sympathy for him is so powerfully aroused and
+maintained, that the reader, especially the child reader, inevitably
+identifies himself with him, and feels his emotions and struggles as his
+own. The ingredient of suspense is never absent from the story, and the
+absence of any plot prevents us from perceiving its artificiality. It is,
+in fact, a type of the history of the human race, not on the higher plane,
+but on the physical one; the history of man's contest with and final
+victory over physical nature. The very simplicity and obviousness of the
+details give them grandeur and comprehensiveness: no part of man's
+character which his contact with nature can affect or develop is left
+untried in Robinson. He manifests in little all historical earthly
+experiences of the race; such is the scheme of the book; and its
+permanence in literature is due to the sobriety and veracity with which
+that scheme is carried out. To speak succinctly, it does for the body what
+the hermetic and cognate literature does for the soul; and for the healthy
+man, the body is not less important than the soul in its own place and
+degree. It is not the work of the Creator, but it is contingent upon
+creation.
+
+But poor Robinson has been most unfortunate in his progeny, which at this
+day overrun the whole earth, and render it a worse wilderness than ever
+was the immortal Crusoe Island. Miss Edgeworth, indeed, might fairly pose
+as the most persistently malignant of all sources of error in the design
+of children's literature; but it is to be feared that it was Defoe who
+first made her aware of the availability of her own venom. She foisted her
+prim and narrow moral code upon the commonplace adventures of a priggish
+little boy and his companions; and straightway the whole dreary and
+disastrous army of sectarians and dogmatists took up the cry, and have
+been ringing the lugubrious changes on it ever since. There is really no
+estimating the mortal wrong that has been done to childhood by Maria
+Edgeworth's "Frank" and "The Parent's Assistant"; and, for my part, I
+derive a melancholy joy in availing myself of this opportunity to express
+my sense of my personal share in the injury. I believe that my affection
+for the human race is as genuine as the average; but I am sure it would
+have been greater had Miss Edgeworth never been born; and were I to come
+across any philosophical system whereby I could persuade myself that she
+belonged to some other order of beings than the human, I should be
+strongly tempted to embrace that system on that ground alone.
+
+After what has been advanced in the preceding pages, it does not need that
+I should state how earnestly I deprecate the kind of literary food which
+we are now furnishing to the coming generation in such sinister abundance.
+I am sure it is written and published with good and honorable motives; but
+at the very best it can only do no harm. Moreover, however well
+intentioned, it is bad as literature; it is poorly conceived and written,
+and, what is worse, it is saturated with affectation. For an impression
+prevails that one needs to talk down to children;--to keep them constantly
+reminded that they are innocent, ignorant little things, whose consuming
+wish it is to be good and go to Sunday-school, and who will be all
+gratitude and docility to whomsoever provides them with the latest fashion
+of moral sugarplums; whereas, so far as my experience and information
+goes, children are the most formidable literary critics in the world.
+Matthew Arnold himself has not so sure an instinct for what is sound and
+good in a book as any intelligent little boy or girl of eight years old.
+They judge absolutely; they are hampered by no comparisons or relative
+considerations. They cannot give chapter and verse for their opinion; but
+about the opinion itself there is no doubt. They have no theories; they
+judge in a white light. They have no prejudices nor traditions; they come
+straight from the simple source of life. But, on the other hand, they are
+readily hocussed and made morbid by improper drugs, and presently, no
+doubt, lose their appetite for what is wholesome. Now, we cannot hope that
+an army of hermetic philosophers or Mother-Gooses will arise at need and
+remedy all abuses; but at least we might refrain from moralizing and
+instruction, and, if we can do nothing more, confine ourselves to plain
+stories of adventure, say, with no ulterior object whatever. There still
+remains the genuine literature of the past to draw upon; but let us
+beware, as we would of forgery and perjury, of serving it up, as has been
+done too often, medicated and modified to suit the foolish dogmatism of
+the moment. Hans Christian Andersen was the last writer of children's
+stories, properly so called; though, considering how well married to his
+muse he was, it is a wonder as well as a calamity that he left no
+descendants.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE MORAL AIM IN FICTION.
+
+
+The producers of modern fiction, who have acquiesced more or less
+completely in the theory of art for art's sake, are not, perhaps, aware
+that a large class of persons still exist who hold fiction to be
+unjustifiable, save in so far as the author has it at heart not only (or
+chiefly) to adorn the tale, but also (and first of all) to point the
+moral. The novelist, in other words, should so mould the characters and
+shape the plot of his imaginary drama as to vindicate the wisdom and
+integrity of the Decalogue: if he fail to do this, or if he do the
+opposite of this, he deserves not the countenance of virtuous and God-
+fearing persons.
+
+Doubtless it should be evident to every sane and impartial mind, whether
+orthodox or agnostic, that an art which runs counter to the designs of God
+toward the human race, or to the growth of the sentiment of universal
+human brotherhood, must sooner or later topple down from its fantastic and
+hollow foundation. "Hitch your wagon to a star," says Emerson; "do not lie
+and steal: no god will help." And although, for the sake of his own
+private interests of the moment, a man will occasionally violate the moral
+law, yet, with mankind at large, the necessity of vindicating the superior
+advantages of right over wrong is acknowledged not only in the interests
+of civilized society, but because we feel that, however hostile "goodness"
+may seem to be to my or your personal and temporary aims, it still remains
+the only wholesome and handsome choice for the race at large: and
+therefore do we, as a race, refuse to tolerate--on no matter how plausible
+an artistic plea--any view of human life which either professes
+indifference to this universal sentiment, or perversely challenges it.
+
+The true ground of dispute, then, does not lie here. The art which can
+stoop to be "procuress to the lords of hell," is art no longer. But, on
+the other hand, it would be difficult to point to any great work of art,
+generally acknowledged to be such, which explicitly concerns itself with
+the vindication of any specific moral doctrine. The story in which the
+virtuous are rewarded for their virtue, and the evil punished for their
+wickedness, fails, somehow, to enlist our full sympathy; it falls flatly
+on the ear of the mind; it does not stimulate thought. It does not
+satisfy; we fancy that something still remains to be said, or, if this be
+all, then it was hardly worth saying. The real record of life--its terror,
+its beauty, its pathos, its depth--seems to have been missed. We may admit
+that the tale is in harmony with what we have been taught ought to happen;
+but the lessons of our private experience have not authenticated our moral
+formulas; we have seen the evil exalted and the good brought low; and we
+inevitably desire that our "fiction" shall tell us, not what ought to
+happen, but what, as a matter of fact, does happen. To put this a little
+differently: we feel that the God of the orthodox moralist is not the God
+of human nature. He is nothing but the moralist himself in a highly
+sublimated state, but betraying, in spite of that sublimation, a fatal
+savor of human personality. The conviction that any man--George
+Washington, let us say--is a morally unexceptionable man, does not in the
+least reconcile us to the idea of God being an indefinitely exalted
+counterpart of Washington. Such a God would be "most tolerable, and not to
+be endured"; and the more exalted he was, the less endurable would he be.
+In short, man instinctively refuses to regard the literal inculcation of
+the Decalogue as the final word of God to the human race, and much less to
+the individuals of that race; and when he finds a story-teller proceeding
+upon the contrary assumption, he is apt to put that story-teller down as
+either an ass or a humbug.
+
+As for art--if the reader happen to be competent to form an opinion on
+that phase of the matter--he will generally find that the art dwindles in
+direct proportion as the moralized deity expatiates; in fact, that they
+are incompatible. And he will also confess (if he have the courage of his
+opinions) that, as between moralized deity and true art, his choice is
+heartily and unreservedly for the latter.
+
+I do not apprehend that the above remarks, fairly interpreted, will
+encounter serious opposition from either party to the discussion; and yet,
+so far as I am aware, neither party has as yet availed himself of the
+light which the conclusion throws upon the nature of art itself. It should
+be obvious, however, that upon a true definition of art the whole argument
+must ultimately hinge: for we can neither deny that art exists, nor affirm
+that it can exist inconsistently with a recognition of a divinely
+beneficent purpose in creation. It must, therefore, in some way be an
+expression or reflection of that purpose. But in what does the purpose in
+question essentially consist?
+
+Broadly speaking--for it would be impossible within the present limits to
+attempt a full analysis of the subject--it may be considered as a gradual
+and progressive Purification, not of this or that particular individual in
+contradistinction to his fellows, but of human nature as an entirety. The
+evil into which all men are born, and of which the Decalogue, or
+conscience, makes us aware, is not an evil voluntarily contracted on our
+part, but is inevitable to us as the creation of a truly infinite love and
+wisdom. It is, in fact, our characteristic nature as animals: and it is
+only because we are not only animal, but also and above all human, that we
+are enabled to recognize it as evil instead of good. We absolve the cat,
+the dog, the wolf, and the lion from any moral responsibility for their
+deeds, because we feel them to be deficient in conscience, which, is our
+own divinely bestowed gift and privilege, and which has been defined as
+the spirit of God in the created nature, seeking to become the creature's
+own spirit. Now, the power to correct this evil does not abide in us as
+individuals, nor will a literal adherence to the moral law avail to purify
+any mother's son of us. Conscience always says "Do not,"--never "Do"; and
+obedience to it neither can give us a personal claim on God's favor nor
+was it intended to do so: its true function is to keep us innocent, so
+that we may not individually obstruct the accomplishment of the divine
+ends toward us as a race. Our nature not being the private possession of
+any one of us, but the impersonal substratum of us all, it follows that it
+cannot be redeemed piecemeal, but only as a whole; and, manifestly, the
+only Being capable of effecting such redemption is not Peter, or Paul, or
+George Washington, or any other atomic exponent of that nature, be he who
+he may; but He alone whose infinitude is the complement of our finiteness,
+and whose gradual descent into human nature (figured in Scripture under
+the symbol of the Incarnation) is even now being accomplished--as any one
+may perceive who reads aright the progressive enlightenment of conscience
+and intellect which history, through many vicissitudes, displays. We find,
+therefore, that art is, essentially, the imaginative expression of a
+divine life in man. Art depends for its worth and veracity, not upon its
+adherence to literal fact, but upon its perception and portrayal of the
+underlying truth, of which fact is but the phenomenal and imperfect
+shadow. And it can have nothing to do with personal vice or virtue, in the
+way either of condemning the one or vindicating the other; it can only
+treat them as elements in its picture--as factors in human destiny. For
+the notion commonly entertained that the practice of virtue gives us a
+claim upon the Divine Exchequer (so to speak), and the habit of acting
+virtuously for the sake of maintaining our credit in society, and ensuring
+our prosperity in the next world,--in so thinking and acting we
+misapprehend the true inwardness of the matter. To cultivate virtue
+because its pays, no matter what the sort of coin in which payment is
+looked for, is to be the victims of a lamentable delusion. For such virtue
+makes each man jealous of his neighbor; whereas the aim of Providence is
+to bring about the broadest human fellowship. A man's physical body
+separates him from other men; and this fact disposes him to the error that
+his nature is also a separate possession, and that he can only be "good"
+by denying himself. But the only goodness that is really good is a
+spontaneous and impersonal evolution, and this occurs, not where self-
+denial has been practised, but only where a man feels himself to be
+absolutely on the same level of desert or non-desert as are the mass of
+his fellow-creatures. There is no use in obeying the commandments, unless
+it be done, not to make one's self more deserving than another of God's
+approbation, but out of love for goodness and truth in themselves, apart
+from any personal considerations. The difference between true religion and
+formal religion is that the first leads us to abandon all personal claims
+to salvation, and to care only for the salvation of humanity as a whole;
+whereas the latter stimulates is to practise outward self-denial, in order
+that our real self may be exalted. Such self-denial results not in
+humility, but in spiritual pride.
+
+In no other way than this, it seems to me, can art and morality be brought
+into harmony. Art bears witness to the presence in us of something purer
+and loftier than anything of which we can be individually conscious. Its
+complete expression we call inspiration; and he who is the subject of the
+inspiration can account no better than any one else for the result which
+art accomplishes through him. The perfect poem is found, not made; the
+mind which utters it did not invent it. Art takes all nature and all
+knowledge for her province; but she does not leave it as she found it; by
+the divine necessity that is upon her, she breathes a soul into her
+materials, and organizes chaos into form. But never, under any
+circumstances, does she deign to minister to our selfish personal hope or
+greed. She shows us how to love our neighbor, never ourselves. Shakspeare,
+Homer, Phidias, Raphael, were no Pharisees--at least in so far as they
+were artists; nor did any one ever find in their works any countenance for
+that inhuman assumption--"I am holier than thou!" In the world's darkest
+hours, art has sometimes stood as the sole witness of the nobler life that
+was in eclipse. Civilizations arise and vanish; forms of religion hold
+sway and are forgotten; learning and science advance and gather strength;
+but true art was as great and as beautiful three thousand years ago as it
+is to-day. We are prone to confound the man with the artist, and to
+suppose that he is artistic by possession and inheritance, instead of
+exclusively by dint of what he does. No artist worthy the name ever dreams
+of putting himself into his work, but only what is infinitely distinct
+from and other than himself. It is not the poet who brings forth the poem,
+but the poem that begets the poet; it makes him, educates him, creates in
+him the poetic faculty. Those whom we call great men, the heroes of
+history, are but the organs of great crises and opportunities: as Emerson
+has said, they are the most indebted men. In themselves they are not
+great; there is no ratio between their achievements and them. Our judgment
+is misled; we do not discriminate between the divine purpose and the human
+instrument. When we listen to Napoleon fretting his soul away at Elba, or
+to Carlyle wrangling with his wife at Chelsea, we are shocked at the
+discrepancy between the lofty public performance and the petty domestic
+shortcoming. Yet we do wrong to blame them; the nature of which they are
+examples is the same nature that is shared also by the publican and the
+sinner.
+
+Instead, therefore, of saying that art should be moral, we should rather
+say that all true morality is art--that art is the test of morality. To
+attempt to make this heavenly Pegasus draw the sordid plough of our
+selfish moralistic prejudices is a grotesque subversion of true order. Why
+should the novelist make believe that the wicked are punished and the good
+are rewarded in this world? Does he not know, on the contrary, that
+whatsoever is basest in our common life tends irresistibly to the highest
+places, and that the selfish element in our nature is on the side of
+public order? Evil is at present a more efficient instrument of order
+(because an interested one) than good; and the novelist who makes this
+appear will do a far greater and more lasting benefit to humanity than he
+who follows the cut-and-dried artificial programme of bestowing crowns on
+the saint and whips of scorpions on the sinner.
+
+As a matter of fact, I repeat, the best influences of the best literature
+have never been didactic, and there is no reason to believe they ever will
+be. The only semblance of didacticism which can enter into literature is
+that which conveys such lessons as may be learned from sea and sky,
+mountain and valley, wood and stream, bird and beast; and from the broad
+human life of races, nations, and firesides; a lesson that is not obvious
+and superficial, but so profoundly hidden in the creative depths as to
+emerge only to an apprehension equally profound. For the chatter and
+affectation of sense disturb and offend that inward spiritual ear which,
+in the silent recesses of meditation, hears the prophetic murmur of the
+vast ocean of human nature that flows within us and around us all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE MAKER OF MANY BOOKS.
+
+
+During the winter of 1879, when I was in London, it was my fortune to
+attend, a social meeting of literary men at the rooms of a certain eminent
+publisher. The rooms were full of tobacco-smoke and talk, amid which were
+discernible, on all sides, the figures and faces of men more or less
+renowned in the world of books. Most noticeable among these personages was
+a broad-shouldered, sturdy man, of middle height, with a ruddy
+countenance, and snow-white tempestuous beard and hair. He wore large,
+gold-rimmed spectacles, but his eyes were black and brilliant, and looked
+at his interlocutor with a certain genial fury of inspection. He seemed to
+be in a state of some excitement; he spoke volubly and almost
+boisterously, and his voice was full-toned and powerful, though pleasant
+to the ear. He turned himself, as he spoke, with a burly briskness, from
+one side to another, addressing himself first to this auditor and then to
+that, his words bursting forth from beneath his white moustache with such
+an impetus of hearty breath that it seemed as if all opposing arguments
+must be blown quite away. Meanwhile he flourished in the air an ebony
+walking-stick, with much vigor of gesticulation, and narrowly missing, as
+it appeared, the pates of his listeners. He was clad in evening dress,
+though the rest of the company was, for the most part, in mufti; and he
+was an exceedingly fine-looking old gentleman. At the first glance, you
+would have taken him to be some civilized and modernized Squire Western,
+nourished with beef and ale, and roughly hewn out of the most robust and
+least refined variety of human clay. Looking at him more narrowly,
+however, you would have reconsidered this judgment. Though his general
+contour and aspect were massive and sturdy, the lines of his features were
+delicately cut; his complexion was remarkably pure and fine, and his face
+was susceptible of very subtle and sensitive changes of expression. Here
+was a man of abundant physical strength and vigor, no doubt, but carrying
+within him a nature more than commonly alert and impressible. His
+organization, though thoroughly healthy, was both complex and high-
+wrought; his character was simple and straightforward to a fault, but he
+was abnormally conscientious, and keenly alive to others' opinion
+concerning him. It might be thought that he was overburdened with self-
+esteem, and unduly opinionated; but, in fact, he was but overanxious to
+secure the good-will and agreement of all with whom he came in contact.
+There was some peculiarity in him--some element or bias in his composition
+that made him different from other men; but, on the other hand, there was
+an ardent solicitude to annul or reconcile this difference, and to prove
+himself to be, in fact, of absolutely the same cut and quality as all the
+rest of the world. Hence he was in a demonstrative, expository, or
+argumentative mood; he could not sit quiet in the face of a divergence
+between himself and his associates; he was incorrigibly strenuous to
+obliterate or harmonize the irreconcilable points between him and others;
+and since these points remained irreconcilable, he remained in a constant
+state of storm and stress on the subject.
+
+It was impossible to help liking such a man at first sight; and I believe
+that no man in London society was more generally liked than Anthony
+Trollope. There was something pathetic in his attitude as above indicated;
+and a fresh and boyish quality always invested him. His artlessness was
+boyish, and so were his acuteness and his transparent but somewhat belated
+good-sense. He was one of those rare persons who not only have no
+reserves, but who can afford to dispense with them. After he had shown you
+all he had in him, you would have seen nothing that was not gentlemanly,
+honest, and clean. He was a quick-tempered man, and the ardor and hurry of
+his temperament made him seem more so than he really was; but he was never
+more angry than he was forgiving and generous. He was hurt by little
+things, and little things pleased him; he was suspicious and perverse, but
+in a manner that rather endeared him to you than otherwise. Altogether, to
+a casual acquaintance, who knew nothing of his personal history, he was
+something of a paradox--an entertaining contradiction. The publication of
+his autobiography explained many things in his character that were open to
+speculation; and, indeed, the book is not only the most interesting and
+amusing that its author has ever written, but it places its subject before
+the reader more completely and comprehensively than most autobiographies
+do. This, however, is due much less to any direct effort or intention on
+the writer's part, than to the unconscious self-revelation which meets the
+reader on every page. No narrative could be simpler, less artificial; and
+yet, everywhere, we read between the lines, and, so to speak, discover
+Anthony Trollope in spite of his efforts to discover himself to us.
+
+The truth appears to be that the youthful Trollope, like a more famous
+fellow-novelist, began the world with more kicks than half-pence. His
+boyhood, he affirms, was as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could
+well be, owing to a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on his father's
+part, and, on his own, to "an utter lack of juvenile manhood"--whatever
+that may be. His father was a lawyer, who frightened away all his clients
+by his outrageous temper, and who encountered one mischance after another
+until he landed himself and his family in open bankruptcy; from which they
+were rescued, partly by death, which carried away four of them (including
+the old gentleman), and partly by Mrs. Trollope, who, at fifty years of
+age, brought out her famous book on America, and continued to make a fair
+income by literature (as she called it) until 1856, when, being seventy-
+six years old, and having produced one hundred and fourteen volumes, she
+permitted herself to retire. This extraordinary lady, in her youth,
+cherished what her son calls "an emotional dislike to tyrants"; but when
+her American experience had made her acquainted with some of the seamy
+aspects of democracy, and especially after the aristocracy of her own
+country had begun to patronize her, she confessed the error of her early
+way, "and thought that archduchesses were sweet." But she was certainly a
+valiant and indefatigable woman,--"of all the people I have ever known,"
+says her son, "the most joyous, or, at any rate, the most capable of joy";
+and he adds that her best novels were written in 1834-35, when her husband
+and four of her six children were dying upstairs of consumption, and she
+had to divide her time between nursing them and writing. Assuredly, no son
+of hers need apprehend the reproach--"_Tydides melior matre_"; though
+Anthony, and his brother Thomas Adolphus, must, together, have run her
+pretty hard. The former remarks, with that terrible complacency in an
+awful fact which is one of his most noticeable and astounding traits, that
+the three of them "wrote more books than were probably ever before
+produced by a single family." The existence of a few more such families
+could be consistent only with a generous enlargement of the British
+Museum.
+
+The elder Trollope was a scholar, and to make scholars of his sons was one
+of his ruling ideas. Poor little Anthony endured no less than twelve
+mortal years of schooling--from the time he was seven until he was
+nineteen--and declares that, in all that time, he does not remember that
+he ever knew a lesson. "I have been flogged," he says, "oftener than any
+other human being." Nay, his troubles began before his school-days; for
+his father used to make him recite his infantile tasks to him while he was
+shaving, and obliged him to sit with his head inclined in such a manner
+"that he could pull my hair without stopping his razor or dropping his
+shaving-brush." This is a depressing picture; and there are plenty more
+like it. Dr. Butler, the master of Harrow, meeting the poor little
+draggletail urchin in the yard, desired to know, in awful accents, how so
+dirty a boy dared to show himself near the school! "He must have known me,
+had he seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of
+flogging me constantly. Perhaps," adds his victim, "he did not recognize
+me by my face!" But it is comforting to learn, in another place, that
+justice overtook the oppressor. "Dr. Butler only lived to be Dean of
+Peterborough; but his successor (Dr. Longley) became Archbishop of
+Canterbury." There is a great deal of Trollopian morality in the fate of
+these two men, the latter of whom "could not have said anything ill-
+natured if he had tried."
+
+Black care, however, continued to sit behind the horseman with harrowing
+persistence. A certain Dr. Drury (another schoolmaster) punished him on
+suspicion of "some nameless horror," of which the unfortunate youngster
+happened to be innocent. When, afterward, the latter fact began to be
+obvious, "he whispered to me half a word that perhaps he had been wrong.
+But, with a boy's stupid slowness, I said nothing, and he had not the
+courage to carry reparation farther." The poverty of Anthony's father
+deprived the boy of all the external advantages that might have enabled
+him to take rank with his fellows: and his native awkwardness and
+sensitiveness widened the breach. "I had no friend to whom I could pour
+out my sorrows. I was big, awkward and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked
+about in a most unattractive manner. Something of the disgrace of my
+school-days has clung to me all through life. When I have been claimed as
+school-fellow by some of those many hundreds who were with me either at
+Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that I had no right to talk of things
+from most of which I was kept in estrangement. I was never a coward, but
+to make a stand against three hundred tyrants required a moral courage
+which I did not possess." Once, however, they pushed him too far, and he
+was driven to rebellion. "And then came a great fight--at the end of which
+my opponent had to be taken home to be cured." And then he utters the
+characteristic wish that some one, of the many who witnessed this combat,
+may still be left alive "who will be able to say that, in claiming this
+solitary glory of my school-days, I am making no false boast." The lonely,
+lugubrious little champion! One would almost have been willing to have
+received from him a black eye and a bloody nose, only to comfort his sad
+heart. It is delightful to imagine the terrific earnestness of that
+solitary victory: and I would like to know what boy it was (if any) who
+lent the unpopular warrior a knee and wiped his face.
+
+After he got through his school-days, his family being then abroad, he had
+an offer of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment; and he might
+have been a major-general or field-marshal at this day had his schooling
+made him acquainted with the French and German languages. Being, however,
+entirely ignorant of these, he was obliged to study them in order to his
+admission; and while he was thus employed, he received news of a vacant
+clerkship in the General Post-Office, with the dazzling salary of £90 a
+year. Needless to say that he jumped at such an opening, seeing before him
+a vision of a splendid civil and social career, at something over twenty
+pounds a quarter. But London, even fifty years ago, was a more expensive
+place than Anthony imagined. Moreover, the boy was alone in the wilderness
+of the city, with no one to advise or guide him. The consequence was that
+these latter days of his youth were as bad or worse than the beginning. In
+reviewing his plight at this period, he observes: "I had passed my life
+where I had seen gay things, but had never enjoyed them. There was no
+house in which I could habitually see a lady's face or hear a lady's
+voice. At the Post-Office I got credit for nothing, and was reckless. I
+hated my work, and, more than all, I hated my idleness. Borrowings of
+money, sometimes absolute want, and almost constant misery, followed as a
+matter of course. I Had a full conviction that my life was taking me down
+to the lowest pits--a feeling that I had been looked upon as an evil, an
+encumbrance, a useless thing, a creature of whom those connected with me
+had to be ashamed. Even my few friends were half-ashamed of me. I
+acknowledge the weakness of a great desire to be loved--a strong wish to
+be popular. No one had ever been less so." Under these circumstances, he
+remarks that, although, no doubt, if the mind be strong enough, the
+temptation will not prevail, yet he is fain to admit that the temptation
+prevailed with him. He did not sit at home, after his return from the
+office, in the evening, to drink tea and read, but tramped out in the
+streets, and tried to see life and be jolly on £90 a year. He borrowed
+four pounds of a money-lender, to augment his resources, and found, after
+a few years, that he had paid him two hundred pounds for the
+accommodation. He met with every variety of absurd and disastrous
+adventure. The mother of a young woman with whom he had had an innocent
+flirtation in the country appeared one day at his desk in the office, and
+called out before all the clerks, "Anthony Trollope, when are you going to
+marry my daughter?" On another occasion a sum of money was missing from
+the table of the director. Anthony was summoned. The director informed him
+of the loss--"and, by G--!" he continued, thundering his fist down on the
+table, "no one has been in the room but you and I." "Then, by G--!" cried
+Anthony, thundering _his_ fist down upon something, "you have taken it!"
+This was very well; but the thing which Anthony had thumped happened to
+be, not a table, but a movable desk with an inkstand on it, and the ink
+flew up and deluged the face and shirt-front of the enraged director.
+Still another adventure was that of the Queen of Saxony and the Half-
+Crown; but the reader must investigate these matters for himself.
+
+So far there has been nothing looking toward the novel-writer. But now we
+learn that from the age of fifteen to twenty-six Anthony kept a journal,
+which, he says, "convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness,
+and conceit, but habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught
+me how to express myself with facility." In addition to this, and more to
+the purpose, he had formed an odd habit. Living, as he was forced to do,
+so much to himself, if not by himself, he had to play, not with other
+boys, but with himself; and his favorite play was to conceive a tale, or
+series of fictitious events, and to carry it on, day after day, for months
+together, in his mind. "Nothing impossible was ever introduced, or
+violently improbable. I was my own hero, but I never became a king or a
+duke, still less an Antinoüs, or six feet high. But I was a very clever
+person, and beautiful young women used to be very fond of me. I learned in
+this way to live in a world outside the world of my own material life."
+This is pointedly, even touchingly, characteristic. Never, to the day of
+his death, did Mr. Trollope either see or imagine anything impossible, or
+violently improbable, in the world. This mortal plane of things never
+dissolved before his gaze and revealed the mysteries of absolute Being;
+his heavens were never rolled up as a scroll, and his earth had no bubbles
+as the water hath. He took things as he found them; and he never found
+them out. But if the light that never was on sea or land does not
+illuminate the writings of Mr. Trollope, there is generally plenty of that
+other kind of light with which, after all, the average reader is more
+familiar, and which not a few, perhaps, prefer to the transcendental
+lustre. There is no modern novelist who has more clearly than Trollope
+defined to his own apprehension his own literary capabilities and
+limitations. He is thoroughly acquainted with both his fortes and his
+foibles; and so sound is his good sense, that he is seldom beguiled into
+toiling with futile ambition after effects that are beyond him. His proper
+domain is a sufficiently wide one; he is inimitably at home here; and when
+he invites us there to visit him, we may be sure of getting good and
+wholesome entertainment. The writer's familiarity with his characters
+communicates itself imperceptibly to the reader; there are no difficult or
+awkward introductions; the toning of the picture (to use the painter's
+phrase) is unexceptionable; and if it be rather tinted than colored, the
+tints are handled in a workmanlike manner. Again, few English novelists
+seem to possess so sane a comprehension of the modes of life and thought
+of the British aristocracy as Trollope. He has not only made a study of
+them from the observer's point of view, but he has reasoned them out
+intellectually. The figures are not vividly defined; the realism is
+applied to events rather than to personages: we have the scene described
+for us but we do not look upon it. We should not recognize his characters
+if we saw them; but if we were told who they were, we should know, from
+their author's testimony, what were their characteristic traits and how
+they would act under given circumstances. The logical sequence of events
+is carefully maintained; nothing happens, either for good or for evil,
+other than might befall under the dispensations of a Providence no more
+unjust, and no more far-sighted, than Trollope himself. There is a good
+deal of the _a priori_ principle in his method; he has made up his mind as
+to certain fundamental data, and thence develops or explains whatever
+complication comes up for settlement. But to range about unhampered by any
+theories, concerned only to examine all phenomena, and to report
+thereupon, careless of any considerations save those of artistic
+propriety, would have been vanity and striving after wind to Trollope, and
+derivatively so, doubtless, to his readers.
+
+Considered in the abstract, it is a curious question what makes his novels
+interesting. The reader knows, in a sense, just what is in store for him,
+--or, rather, what is not. There will be no astonishment, no curdling
+horror, no consuming suspense. There may be, perhaps, as many murders,
+forgeries, foundlings, abductions, and missing wills, in Trollope's novels
+as in any others; but they are not told about in a manner to alarm us; we
+accept them philosophically; there are paragraphs in our morning paper
+that excite us more. And yet they are narrated with art, and with dramatic
+effect. They are interesting, but not uncourteously--not exasperatingly
+so; and the strangest part of it is that the introductory and intermediate
+passages are no less interesting, under Trollope's treatment, than are the
+murders and forgeries. Not only does he never offend the modesty of
+nature,--he encourages her to be prudish, and trains her to such evenness
+and severity of demeanor that we never know when we have had enough of
+her. His touch is eminently civilizing; everything, from the episodes to
+the sentences, moves without hitch or creak: we never have to read a
+paragraph twice, and we are seldom sorry to have read it once.
+
+Amusingly characteristic of Trollope is his treatment of his villains. His
+attitude toward them betrays no personal uncharitableness or animosity,
+but the villain has a bad time of it just the same. Trollope places upon
+him a large, benevolent, but unyielding forefinger, and says to us:
+"Remark, if you please, how this inferior reptile squirms when pressure is
+applied to him. I will now augment the pressure. You observe that the
+squirmings increase in energy and complexity. Now, if you please, I will
+bear down yet a little harder. Do not be alarmed, madam; the reptile
+undoubtedly suffers, but the spectacle may do us some good, and you may
+trust me not to let him do you any harm. There!--Yes, evisceration by
+means of pressure is beyond question painful; but every one must have
+observed the benevolence of my forefinger during the operation; and I
+fancy even the subject of the experiment (were he in a condition to
+express his sentiments) would have admitted as much. Thank you, ladies and
+gentlemen. I shall have the pleasure of meeting you again very shortly.
+John, another reptile, please!" Upon the whole, it is much to Trollope's
+credit that he wrote somewhere about fifty long novels; and to the credit
+of the English people that they paid him three hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars for these novels--and read them!
+
+But his success as a man of letters was still many years in the future.
+After seven years in the London office, he went to Ireland as assistant
+surveyor, and thenceforward he began to enjoy his business, and to get on
+in it. He was paid sixpence a mile, and he would ride forty miles a day.
+He rode to hounds, incidentally, whenever he got a chance, and he kept up
+the practice, with enthusiasm, to within a few years of his death. "It
+will, I think, be accorded to me," he says, "that I have ridden hard. I
+know very little about hunting; I am blind, very heavy, and I am now old;
+but I ride with a boy's energy, hating the roads, and despising young men
+who ride them; and I feel that life cannot give me anything better than
+when I have gone through a long run to the finish, keeping a place, not of
+glory, but of credit, among my juniors." Riding, working, having a jolly
+time, and gradually increasing his income, he lived until 1842, when he
+became engaged; and he was married on June 11, 1844. "I ought to name that
+happy day," he declares, "as the commencement of my better life." It was
+at about this date, also, that he began and finished, not without delay
+and procrastination, his first novel. Curiously enough, he affirms that he
+did not doubt his own intellectual sufficiency to write a readable novel:
+"What I did doubt was my own industry, and the chances of a market."
+Never, surely, was self-distrust more unfounded. As for the first novel,
+he sent it to his mother, to dispose of as best she could; and it never
+brought him anything, except a perception that it was considered by his
+friends to be "an unfortunate aggravation of the family disease." During
+the ensuing ten years, this view seemed to be not unreasonable, for, in
+all that time, though he worked hard, he earned by literature no more than
+£55. But, between 1857 and 1860, he received for various novels, from £100
+to £1000 each; and thereafter, £3000 or more was his regular price for a
+story in three volumes. As he maintained his connection with the post-
+office until 1867, he was in receipt of an income of £4500, "of which I
+spent two-thirds and put by one." We should be doing an injustice to Mr.
+Trollope to omit these details, which he gives so frankly; for, as he
+early informs us, "my first object in taking to literature was to make an
+income on which I and those belonging to me might live in comfort." Nor
+will he let us forget that novel-writing, to him, was not so much an art,
+or even a profession, as a trade, in which all that can be asked of a man
+is that he shall be honest and punctual, turning out good average work,
+and the more the better. "The great secret consists in"--in what?--why,
+"in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labor similar to those
+which an artisan or mechanic is forced to obey." There may be, however,
+other incidental considerations. "I have ever thought of myself as a
+preacher of sermons, and my pulpit as one I could make both salutary and
+agreeable to my audience"; and he tells us that he has used some of his
+novels for the expression of his political and social convictions. Again--
+"The novelist must please, and he must teach; a good novel should be both
+realistic and sensational in the highest degree." He says that he sees no
+reason why two or three good novels should not be written at the same
+time; and that, for his own part, he was accustomed to write two hundred
+and fifty words every fifteen minutes, by the watch, during his working
+hours. Nor does he mind letting us know that when he sits down to write a
+novel, he neither knows nor cares how it is to end. And finally, one is a
+little startled to hear him say, epigrammatically, that a writer should
+not have to tell a story, but should have a story to tell. Beyond a doubt,
+Anthony Trollope is something of a paradox.
+
+The world has long ago passed its judgment on his stories, but it is
+interesting, all the same, to note his own opinion of them; and though
+never arrogant, he is generally tolerant, if not genial. "A novel should
+be a picture of common life, enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos. I
+have never fancied myself to be a man of genius," he says; but again, with
+strange imperviousness, "A small daily task, if it be daily, will beat the
+labors of a spasmodic Hercules." Beat them, how? Why, in quantity. But how
+about quality? Is the travail of a work of art the same thing as the
+making of a pair of shoes? Emerson tells us that--
+
+  "Ever the words of the gods resound,
+    But the porches of man's ear
+  Seldom, in this low life's round,
+    Are unsealed, that he may hear."
+
+No one disputes, however, that you may hear the tapping of the cobbler's
+hammer at any time.
+
+To the view of the present writer, how much good soever Mr. Trollope may
+have done as a preacher and moralist, he has done great harm to English
+fictitious literature by his novels; and it need only be added, in this
+connection, that his methods and results in novel-writing seem best to be
+explained by that peculiar mixture of separateness and commonplaceness
+which we began by remarking in him. The separateness has given him the
+standpoint whence he has been able to observe and describe the
+commonplaceness with which (in spite of his separateness) he is in vital
+sympathy.
+
+But Trollope the man is the abundant and consoling compensation for
+Trollope the novelist; and one wishes that his books might have died, and
+he lived on indefinitely. It is charming to read of his life in London
+after his success in the _Cornhill Magazine_. "Up to that time I had lived
+very little among men. It was a festival to me to dine at the 'Garrick.' I
+think I became popular among those with whom I associated. I have ever
+wished to be liked by those around me--a wish that during the first half
+of my life was never gratified." And, again, in summing up his life, he
+says: "I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought to me no sorrow. It has
+been the companionship, rather than the habit of smoking that I loved. I
+have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the
+excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill-effects--to
+have the sweet, and to leave the bitter untasted--that has been my study.
+I will not say that I have never scorched a finger; but I carry no ugly
+wounds."
+
+A man who, at the end of his career, could make such a profession as this
+--who felt the need of no further self-vindication than this--such a man,
+whatever may have been his accountability to the muse of Fiction, is a
+credit to England and to human nature, and deserves to be numbered among
+the darlings of mankind. It was an honor to be called his friend; and what
+his idea of friendship was, may be learned from the passage in which he
+speaks of his friend Millais--with the quotation of which this paper may
+fitly be concluded:--
+
+"To see him has always been a pleasure; his voice has always been a sweet
+sound in my ears. Behind his back I have never heard him praised without
+joining the eulogist; I have never heard a word spoken against him without
+opposing the censurer. These words, should he ever see them, will come to
+him from the grave, and will tell him of my regard--as one living man
+never tells another."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+MR. MALLOCK'S MISSING SCIENCE.
+
+
+Before criticising Mr. Mallock's little essay, let us summarize its
+contents. The author begins with an analysis of the aims, the principles,
+and the "pseudo-science" of modern Democracy. Having established the evil
+and destructive character of these things, he sets himself to show by
+logical argument that the present state of social inequality, which
+Democrats wish to disturb, is a natural and wholesome state; that the
+continuance of civilization is dependent upon it; and that it could only
+be overturned by effecting a radical change--not in human institutions,
+but in human character. The desire for inequality is inherent in the human
+character; and in order to prove this statement, Mr. Mallock proceeds to
+affirm that there is such a thing as a science of human character; that of
+this science he is the discoverer; and that the application of this
+science to the question at issue will demonstrate the integrity of Mr.
+Mallock's views, and the infirmity of all others. In the ensuing chapters
+the application is made, and at the end the truth of the proposition is
+declared established.
+
+This is the outline; but let us note some of the details. Mr. Mallock
+asserts (Chap. I.) that the aim of modern Democracy is to overturn "all
+that has hitherto been connected with high-breeding or with personal
+culture"; and that "to call the Democrats a set of thieves and
+confiscators is merely to apply names to them which they have no wish to
+repudiate." He maintains (Chap. II.) that the first and foremost of the
+Democratic principles is "that the perfection of society involves social
+equality"; and that "the luxury of one man means the deprivation of
+another." He credits the Democrats with arguing that "the means of
+producing equality are a series of changes in existing institutions"; that
+"by changing the institutions of a society we are able to change its
+structure"; that "the cause of the distribution of wealth" is "laws and
+forms of government"; and that "the wealthy classes, as such, are
+connected with wealth in no other way but as the accidental appropriators
+of it." In his third chapter he tells us that "the entire theory of modern
+Democracy ... depends on the doctrine that the cause of wealth is labor";
+that Democrats believe we "may count on a man to labor, just as surely as
+we may count on a man to eat"; that "the man who does not labor is
+supported by the man who does"; and that the pseudo-science of modern
+Democracy "starts with the conception of man as containing in himself a
+natural tendency to labor." And here Mr. Mallock's statement of his
+opponent's position ends.
+
+In the fourth chapter we are brought within sight of "The Missing
+Substitute." "A man's character," we are told, "divides into his desires
+on the one hand, and his capacities on the other"; and it is observed that
+"various as are men's desires and capacities, yet if talent and ambition
+commanded no more than idleness and stupidity, all men practically would
+be idle and stupid." "Men's capacities," we are reminded, "are practically
+unequal, because they develop their own potential inequalities; they do
+this because they desire to place themselves in unequal external
+circumstances,--which result the condition of society renders possible."
+
+Coming now to the Science of Human Character itself, we find that it
+"asserts a permanent relationship to exist between human character and
+social inequality"; and the author then proceeds at some length to show
+how near Herbert Spencer, Buckle, and other social and economic
+philosophers, came to stumbling over his missing science, and yet avoided
+doing so. Nevertheless, argues Mr. Mallock, "if there be such a thing as a
+social science, or a science of history, there must be also a science of
+biography"; and this science, though it "cannot show us how any special
+man will act in the future," yet, if "any special action be given us, it
+can show us that it was produced by a special motive; and conversely, that
+if the special motive be wanting, the special action is sure to be wanting
+also." As an example how to distinguish between those traits of human
+character which are available for scientific purposes, and those which are
+not, Mr. Mallock instances a mob, which temporarily acts together for some
+given purpose: the individual differences of character then "cancel out,"
+and only points of agreement are left. Proceeding to the sixth chapter, he
+applies himself to setting to rest the scruples of those who find
+something cynical in the idea that the desire for Inequality is compatible
+with a respectable form of human character. It is true, he says, that man
+does not live by bread alone; but he denies that he means to say "that all
+human activity is motived by the desire for inequality"; he would assert
+that only "of all productive labor, except the lowest." The only actions
+independent of the desire for inequality, however, are those performed in
+the name of art, science, philanthropy, and religion; and even in these
+cases, so far as the actions are not motived by a desire for inequality,
+they are not of productive use; and _vice versâ_. In the remaining
+chapters, which we must dismiss briefly, we meet with such statements as
+"labor has been produced by an artificial creation of want of food, and by
+then supplying the want on certain conditions"; that "civilization has
+always been begun by an oppressive minority"; that "progress depends on
+certain gifted individuals," and therefore social equality would destroy
+progress; that inequality influences production by existing as an object
+of desire and as a means of pressure; that the evils of poverty are caused
+by want, not by inequality; and that, finally, equality is not the goal of
+progress, but of retrogression; that inequality is not an accidental evil
+of civilization, but the cause of its development; the distance of the
+poor from the rich is not the cause of the former's poverty as distinct
+from riches, but of their civilized competence as distinct from barbarism;
+and that the apparent changes in the direction of equality recorded in
+history, have been, in reality, none other than "a more efficient
+arrangement of inequalities."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, let us inquire what all this ingenious prattle about Inequality and
+the Science of Human Character amounts to. What does Mr. Mallock expect?
+His book has been out six months, and still Democracy exists. But does any
+such Democracy as he combats exist, or could it conceivably exist? Have
+his investigations of the human character failed to inform him that one of
+the strongest natural instincts of man's nature is immovably opposed to
+anything like an equal distribution of existing wealth?--because whoever
+owns anything, if it be only a coat, wishes to keep it; and that wish
+makes him aware that his fellow-man will wish to keep, and will keep at
+all hazards, whatever things belong to him. What Democrats really desire
+is to enable all men to have an equal chance to obtain wealth, instead of
+being, as is largely the case now, hampered and kept down by all manner of
+legal and arbitrary restrictions. As for the "desire for Inequality," it
+seems to exist chiefly in Mr. Mallock's imagination. Who does desire it?
+Does the man who "strikes" for higher wages desire it? Let us see. A
+strike, to be successful, must be not an individual act, but the act of a
+large body of men, all demanding the same thing--an increase in wages. If
+they gain their end, no difference has taken place in their mutual
+position; and their position in regard to their employers is altered only
+in that an approach has been made toward greater equality with the latter.
+And so in other departments of human effort: the aim, which the man who
+wishes to better his position sets before himself, is not to rise head and
+shoulders above his equals, but to equal his superiors. And as to the
+Socialist schemes for the reorganization of society, they imply, at most,
+a wish to see all men start fair in the race of life, the only advantages
+allowed being not those of rank or station, but solely of innate capacity.
+And the reason the Socialist desires this is, because he believes, rightly
+or wrongly, that many inefficient men are, at present, only artificially
+protected from betraying their inefficiency; and that many efficient men
+are only artificially prevented from showing their efficiency; and that
+the fair start he proposes would not result in keeping all men on a dead
+level, but would simply put those in command who had a genuine right to be
+there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But this is taxing Mr. Mallock too seriously: he has not written in
+earnest. But, as his uncle, Mr. Froude, said, when reading "The New
+Republic,"--"The rogue is clever!" He has read a good deal, he has an
+active mind, a smooth redundancy of expression, a talent for caricature, a
+fondness for epigram and paradox, a useful shallowness, and an amusing
+impudence. He has no practical knowledge of mankind, no experience of
+life, no commanding point of view, and no depth of insight. He has no
+conception of the meaning and quality of the problems with whose exterior
+aspects he so prettily trifles. He has constructed a Science of Human
+Character without for one moment being aware that, for instance, human
+character and human nature are two distinct things; and that, furthermore,
+the one is everything that the other is not. As little is he conscious of
+the significance of the words "society" and "civilization"; nor can he
+explain whether, or why, either of them is desirable or undesirable, good
+or bad. He has never done, and (judging from his published works) we do
+not believe him capable of doing, any analytical or constructive thinking;
+at most, as in the present volume, he turns a few familiar objects upside
+down, and airily invites his audience to believe that he has thereby
+earned the name of Discoverer, if not of Creator.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+THEODORE WINTHROP'S WRITINGS.
+
+
+On an accessible book-shelf in my library, stand side by side four volumes
+whose contents I once knew by heart, and which, after the lapse of twenty
+years, are yet tolerably distinct in my memory. These are stoutly bound in
+purple muslin, with a stamp, of Persian design apparently, on the centre
+of each cover. They are stained and worn, and the backs have faded to a
+brownish hue, from exposure to the light, and a leaf in one of the volumes
+has been torn across; but the paper and the sewing and the clear bold type
+are still as serviceable as ever. The books seem to have been made to
+last,--to stand a great deal of reading. Contrasted with the aesthetically
+designed covers one sees nowadays, they would be considered inexcusably
+ugly, and the least popular novelist of our time would protest against
+having his lucubrations presented to the public in such plain attire.
+Nevertheless, on turning to the title-pages, you may see imprinted, on the
+first, "Fourteenth Edition"; on the second, "Twelfth Edition"; and on the
+others, indications somewhat less magnificent, but still evidence of very
+exceptional circulation. The date they bear is that of the first years of
+our civil war; and the first published of them is prefaced by a
+biographical memoir of the author, written by his friend George William
+Curtis. This memoir was originally printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_, two
+or three months after the death of its subject, Theodore Winthrop.
+
+For these books,--three novels, and one volume of records of travel,--came
+from his hand, though they did not see the light until after he had passed
+beyond the sphere of authors and publishers. At that time, the country was
+in an exalted and heroic mood, and the men who went to fight its battles
+were regarded with a personal affection by no means restricted to their
+personal acquaintances. Their names were on all lips, and those of them
+who fell were mourned by multitudes instead of by individuals. Winthrop's
+historic name, and the influential position of some of his nearest
+friends, would have sufficed to bring into unusual prominence his brief
+career and his fate as a soldier, even had his intrinsic qualities and
+character been less honorable and winning than they were. But he was a
+type of a young American such as America is proud to own. He was high-
+minded, refined, gifted, handsome. I recollect a portrait of him published
+soon after his death,--a photograph, I think, from a crayon drawing; an
+eloquent, sensitive, rather melancholy, but manly and courageous face,
+with grave eyes, the mouth veiled by a long moustache. It was the kind of
+countenance one would wish our young heroes to have. When, after the
+catastrophe at Great Bethel, it became known that Winthrop had left
+writings behind him, it would have been strange indeed had not every one
+felt a desire to read them.
+
+Moreover, he had already begun to be known as a writer. It was during
+1860, I believe, that a story of his, in two instalments, entitled "Love
+on Skates," appeared in the "Atlantic." It was a brilliant and graphic
+celebration of the art of skating, engrafted on a love-tale as full of
+romance and movement as could be desired. Admirably told it was, as I
+recollect it; crisp with the healthy vigor of American wintry atmosphere,
+with bright touches of humor, and, here and there, passages of sentiment,
+half tender, half playful. It was something new in our literature, and
+gave promise of valuable work to come. But the writer was not destined to
+fulfil the promise. In the next year, from the camp of his regiment, he
+wrote one or two admirable descriptive sketches, touching upon the
+characteristic points of the campaigning life which had just begun; but,
+before the last of these had become familiar to the "Atlantic's" readers,
+it was known that it would be the last. Theodore Winthrop had been killed.
+
+He was only in his thirty-third year. He was born in New Haven, and had
+entered Yale College with the class of '48. The Delta Kappa Epsilon
+Fraternity was, I believe, founded in the year of his admission, and he
+must, therefore, have been among its earliest members. He was
+distinguished as a scholar, and the traces of his classic and
+philosophical acquirements are everywhere visible in his books. During the
+five or six years following his graduation, he travelled abroad, and in
+the South and West; a wild frontier life had great attractions for him, as
+he who reads "John Brent" and "The Canoe and the Saddle" need not be told.
+He tried his hand at various things, but could settle himself to no
+profession,--an inability which would have excited no remark in England,
+which has had time to recognize the value of men of leisure, as such; but
+which seems to have perplexed some of his friends in this country. Be that
+as it may, no one had reason to complain of lack of energy and promptness
+on his part when patriotism revealed a path to Winthrop. He knew that the
+time for him had come; but he had also known that the world is not yet so
+large that all men, at all times, can lay their hands upon the work that
+is suitable for them to do.
+
+Let us, however, return to the novels. They appear to have been written
+about 1856 and 1857, when their author was twenty-eight or nine years old.
+Of the order in which they were composed I have no record; but, judging
+from internal evidence, I should say that "Edwin Brothertoft" came first,
+then "Cecil Dreeme," and then "John Brent." The style, and the quality of
+thought, in the latter is more mature than in the others, and its tone is
+more fresh and wholesome. In the order of publication, "Cecil Dreeme" was
+first, and seems also to have been most widely read; then "John Brent,"
+and then "Edwin Brothertoft," the scene of which was laid in the last
+century. I remember seeing, at the house of James T. Fields, their
+publisher, the manuscripts of these books, carefully bound and preserved.
+They were written on large ruled letter-paper, and the handwriting was
+very large, and had a considerable slope. There were scarcely any
+corrections or erasures; but it is possible that Winthrop made clean
+copies of his stories after composing them. Much of the dialogue,
+especially, bears evidence of having been revised, and of the author's
+having perhaps sacrificed ease and naturalness, here and there, to the
+craving for conciseness which has been one of the chief stumbling-blocks
+in the way of our young writers. He wished to avoid heaviness and
+"padding," and went to the other extreme. He wanted to cut loose from the
+old, stale traditions of composition, and to produce something which
+should be new, not only in character and significance, but in manner of
+presentation. He had the ambition of the young Hafiz, who professed a
+longing to "tear down this tiresome old sky." But the old sky has good
+reasons for being what and where it is, and young radicals finally come to
+perceive that, regarded from the proper point of view, and in the right
+spirit, it is not so tiresome after all. Divine Revelation itself can be
+expressed in very moderate and commonplace language; and if one's thoughts
+are worth thinking, they are worth clothing in adequate and serene attire.
+
+But "culture," and literature with it, have made such surprising advances
+of late, that we are apt to forget how really primitive and unenlightened
+the generation was in which Winthrop wrote. Imagine a time when Mr. Henry
+James, Jr., and Mr. W. D. Howells had not been heard of; when Bret Harte
+was still hidden below the horizon of the far West; when no one suspected
+that a poet named Aldrich would ever write a story called "Marjorie Daw";
+when, in England, "Adam Bede" and his successors were unborn;--a time of
+antiquity so remote, in short, that the mere possibility of a discussion
+upon the relative merit of the ideal and the realistic methods of fiction
+was undreamt of! What had an unfortunate novelist of those days to fall
+back upon? Unless he wished to expatriate himself, and follow submissively
+in the well worn steps of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, the only
+models he could look to were Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Foe, James
+Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Elsie Venner" had scarcely made
+its appearance at that date. Irving and Cooper were, on the other hand,
+somewhat antiquated. Poe and Hawthorne were men of very peculiar genius,
+and, however deep the impression they have produced on our literature,
+they have never had, because they never can have, imitators. As for the
+author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," she was a woman in the first place, and, in
+the second place, she sufficiently filled the field she had selected. A
+would-be novelist, therefore, possessed of ambition, and conscious of not
+being his own father or grandfather, saw an untrodden space before him,
+into which he must plunge without support and without guide. No wonder if,
+at the outset, he was a trifle awkward and ill-at-ease, and, like a raw
+recruit under fire, appeared affected from the very desire he felt to look
+unconcerned. It is much to his credit that he essayed the venture at all;
+and it is plain to be seen that, with each forward step he took, his self-
+possession and simplicity increased. If time had been given him, there is
+no reason to doubt that he might have been standing at the head of our
+champions of fiction to-day.
+
+But time was not given him, and his work, like all other work, if it is to
+be judged at all, must be judged on its merits. He excelled most in
+passages descriptive of action; and the more vigorous and momentous the
+action, the better, invariably, was the description; he rose to the
+occasion, and was not defeated by it. Partly for this reason, "Cecil
+Dreeme," the most popular of his books, seems to me the least meritorious
+of them all. The story has little movement; it stagnates round Chrysalis
+College. The love intrigue is morbid and unwholesome, and the characters
+(which are seldom Winthrop's strong point) are more than usually
+artificial and unnatural. The _dramatis personae_ are, indeed, little more
+than moral or immoral principles incarnate. There is no growth in them, no
+human variableness or complexity; it is "Every Man in his Humor" over
+again, with the humor left out. Densdeth is an impossible rascal; Churm, a
+scarcely more possible Rhadamanthine saint. Cecil Dreeme herself never
+fully recovers from the ambiguity forced upon her by her masculine attire;
+and Emma Denman could never have been both what we are told she was, and
+what she is described as being. As for Robert Byng, the supposed narrator
+of the tale, his name seems to have been given him in order wantonly to
+increase the confusion caused by the contradictory traits with which he is
+accredited. The whole atmosphere of the story is unreal, fantastic,
+obscure. An attempt is made to endow our poor, raw New York with something
+of the stormy and ominous mystery of the immemorial cities of Europe. The
+best feature of the book (morbidness aside) is the construction of the
+plot, which shows ingenuity and an artistic perception of the value of
+mystery and moral compensation. It recalls, in some respects, the design
+of Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance,"--that is, had the latter never been
+written, the former would probably have been written differently. In spite
+of its faults, it is an interesting book, and, to the critical eye, there
+are in almost every chapter signs that indicate the possession of no
+ordinary gifts on the author's part. But it may be doubted whether the
+special circumstances under which it was published had not something to do
+with its wide popularity. I imagine "John Brent" to have been really much
+more popular, in the better sense; it was read and liked by a higher class
+of readers. It is young ladies and school-girls who swell the numbers of
+an "edition," and hence the difficulty in arguing from this as to the
+literary merit of the book itself.
+
+"Edwin Brothertoft," though somewhat disjointed in construction, and jerky
+in style, is yet a picturesque and striking story; and the gallop of the
+hero across country and through the night to rescue from the burning house
+the woman who had been false to him, is vigorously described, and gives us
+some foretaste of the thrill of suspense and excitement we feel in reading
+the story of the famous "Gallop of three" in "John Brent." The writer's
+acquaintance with the history of the period is adequate, and a romantic
+and chivalrous tone is preserved throughout the volume. It is worth noting
+that, in all three of Winthrop's novels, a horse bears a part in the
+crisis of the tale. In "Cecil Dreeme" it is Churm's pair of trotters that
+convey the party of rescuers to the private Insane Asylum in which
+Densdeth had confined the heroine. In "Edwin Brothertoft," it is one of
+Edwin's renowned breed of white horses that carries him through almost
+insuperable obstacles to his goal. In "John Brent," the black stallion,
+Don Fulano, who is throughout the chief figure in the book, reaches his
+apogee in the tremendous race across the plains and down the rocky gorge
+of the mountains, to where the abductors of the heroine are just about to
+pitch their camp at the end of their day's journey. The motive is fine and
+artistic, and, in each of the books, these incidents are as good as, or
+better then, anything else in the narrative.
+
+"John Brent" is, in fact, full enough of merit to more than redeem its
+defects. The self-consciousness of the writer is less noticeable than in
+the other works, and the effort to be epigrammatic, short, sharp, and
+"telling" in style, is considerably modified. The interest is lively,
+continuous, and cumulative; and there is just enough tragedy in the story
+to make the happy ending all the happier. It was a novel and adventurous
+idea to make a horse the hero of a tale, and the manner in which the idea
+is carried out more than justifies the hazard. Winthrop, as we know, was
+an ideal horseman, and knows what he is writing about. He contrives to
+realize Don Fulano for us, in spite of the almost supernatural powers and
+intelligence that he ascribes to the gallant animal. One is willing to
+stretch a point of probability when such a dashing and inspiring end is in
+view. In the present day we are getting a little tired of being brought to
+account, at every turn, by Old Prob., who tyrannizes over literature quite
+as much as over the weather. Theodore Winthrop's inspiration, in this
+instance at least, was strong and genuine enough to enable him to feel
+what he was telling as the truth, and therefore it produces an effect of
+truth upon the reader. How distinctly every incident of that ride remains
+stamped on the memory, even after so long an interval as has elapsed since
+it was written! And I recollect that one of the youthful devourers of this
+book, who was of an artistic turn, was moved to paint three little water-
+color pictures of the Gallop; the first showing the three horses,--the
+White, the Gray, and the Black, scouring across the prairie, towards the
+barrier of mountains behind which the sun was setting; the second
+depicting Don Fulano, with Dick Wade and John Brent on his back, plunging
+down the gorge upon the abductors, one of whom had just pulled the trigger
+of his rifle; while the third gives the scene in which the heroic horse
+receives his death-wound in carrying the fugitive across the creek away
+from his pursuers. At this distance of time, I am unable to bear any
+testimony as to the technical value of the little pictures; I am inclined
+to fancy that they would have to be taken _cum grano amoris_, as they
+certainly were executed _con amore_. But, however that may be, the
+instance (which was doubtless only one of many analogous to it) shows that
+Winthrop possessed the faculty of stimulating and electrifying the
+imagination of his readers, which all our recent improvements in the art
+and artifice of composition have not made too common, and for which, if
+for nothing else, we might well feel indebted to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+EMERSON AS AN AMERICAN.
+
+
+It is not with Americans as with other peoples. Our position is more vague
+and difficult, because it is not primarily related to the senses. I can
+easily find out where England or Prussia is, and recognize an Englishman
+or German when we meet; but we Americans are not, to the same extent as
+these, limited by geographical and physical boundaries. The origin of
+America was not like that of the European nations; the latter were born
+after the flesh, but we after the spirit. It is of the first consequence
+to them that their frontiers should be defended, and their nationality
+kept distinct. But, though I esteem highly all our innumerable square
+miles of East and West, North and South, and our Pacific and Atlantic
+coasts, I cannot help deeming them quite a secondary consideration. If
+America is not a great deal more than these United States, then the United
+States are no better than a penal colony. It is convenient, no doubt, for
+a great idea to find a great embodiment--a suitable incarnation and stage;
+but the idea does not depend upon these things. It is an accidental--or, I
+would rather say, a Providential--matter that the Puritans came to New
+England, or that Columbus discovered the continent in time for them; but
+it has always happened that when a soul is born it finds a body ready
+fitted to it. The body, however, is an instrument merely; it enables the
+spirit to take hold of its mortal life, just as the hilt enables us to
+grasp the sword. If the Puritans had not come to New England, still the
+spirit that animated them would have lived, and made itself a place
+somehow. And, in fact, how many Puritans, for how many ages previous, had
+been trying to find standing-room in the world, and failed! They called
+themselves by many names; their voices were heard in many countries; the
+time had not yet come for them to be born--to touch their earthly
+inheritance; but, meantime, the latent impetus was accumulating, and the
+Mayflower was driven across the Atlantic by it at last. Nor is this all--
+the Mayflower is sailing still between the old world and the new. Every
+day it brings new settlers, if not to our material harbors--to our Boston
+Bay, our Castle Garden, our Golden Gate--at any rate, to our mental ports
+and wharves. We cannot take up a European newspaper without finding an
+American idea in it. It is said that a great many of our countrymen take
+the steamer to England every summer. But they come back again; and they
+bring with them many who come to stay. I do not refer specially to the
+occupants of the steerage--the literal emigrants. One cannot say much
+about them--they may be Americans or not, as it turns out. But England and
+the continent are full of Americans who were born there, and many of whom
+will die there. Sometimes they are better Americans than the New Yorker or
+the Bostonian who lives in Beacon Street or the Bowery and votes in the
+elections. They may be born and reside where they please, but they belong
+to us, and, in the better sense, they are among us. Broadway and
+Washington Street, Vermont and Colorado extend all over Europe. Russia is
+covered with them; she tries to shove them away to Siberia, but in vain.
+We call mountains and prairies solid facts; but the geography of the mind
+is infinitely more stubborn. I dare say there are a great many oblique-
+eyed, pig-tailed New Englanders in the Celestial Empire. They may never
+have visited these shores, or even heard of them; but what of that? They
+think our thought--they have apprehended our idea, and, by and by, they or
+their heirs will cause it to prevail.
+
+It is useless for us to hide our heads in the grass and refuse to rise to
+the height of our occasion. We are here as the realization of a truth--the
+fulfilment of a prophecy; we must attest a new departure in the moral and
+intellectual development of the human race; for whichever of us does not,
+must suffer annihilation. If I deny my birthright as an American, I shall
+disappear and not be missed, for an American will take my place. It is not
+altogether a luxurious position to find yourself in. You cannot sit still
+and hold your hands. All manner of hard and unpleasant things are expected
+of you, which you neglect at your peril. It is like the old fable of the
+mermaid. She loved a mortal youth, and, in order that she might win his
+affection, she prayed that she might have the limbs and feet of a human
+maiden. Her prayer was answered, and she met her prince; but every step
+she took was as if she trod on razors. It is a fine thing to sit in your
+chair and reflect on being an American; but when you have to rise up and
+do an American's duty before the world--how sharp the razors are!
+
+Of course, we do not always endure the test; the flesh and blood on this
+side of the planet is not, so far as I have observed, of a quality
+essentially different from that on the other. Possibly our population is
+too many for us. Out of fifty million people it would be strange if here
+and there one appeared who was not at all points a hero. Indeed, I am
+sometimes tempted to think that that little band of original Mayflower
+Pilgrims has not greatly multiplied since their disembarkation. However it
+may be with their bodily offspring, their spiritual progeny are not
+invariably found in the chair of the Governor or on the floor of the
+Senate. What are these Irish fellow-creatures doing here? Well, Bridget
+serves us in the kitchen; but Patrick is more helpful yet; he goes to the
+legislature, and is the servant of the people at large. It is very
+obliging of him; but turn and turn about is fair play; and it would be no
+more than justice were we, once in a while, to take off our coat and serve
+Patrick in the same way.
+
+When we get into a tight place we are apt to try to slip out of it under
+some plea of a European precedent. But it used to be supposed that it was
+precisely European precedents that we came over here to avoid. I am not
+profoundly versed in political economy, nor is this the time or place to
+discuss its principles; but, as regards protection, for example, I can
+conceive that there may be arguments against it as well as for it. Emerson
+used to say that the way to conquer the foreign artisan was not to kill
+him but to beat his work. He also pointed out that the money we made out
+of the European wars, at the beginning of this century, had the result of
+bringing the impoverished population of those countries down upon us in
+the shape of emigrants. They shared our crops and went on the poor-rates,
+and so we did not gain so much after all. One cannot help wishing that
+America would assume the loftiest possible ground in her political and
+commercial relations. With all due respect to the sagacity and ability of
+our ruling demagogues, I should not wish them to be quoted as typical
+Americans. The domination of such persons has an effect which is by no
+means measurable by their personal acts. What they can do is of
+infinitesimal importance. But the mischief is that they incline every one
+of us to believe, as Emerson puts it, in two gods. They make the morality
+of Wall Street and the White House seem to be a different thing from that
+of our parlors and nurseries. "He may be a little shady on 'change," we
+say, "but he is a capital fellow when you know him." But if he is a
+capital fellow when I know him, then I shall never find much fault with
+his professional operations, and shall end, perhaps, by allowing him to
+make some investments for me. Why should not I be a capital fellow too--
+and a fellow of capital, to boot! I can endure public opprobrium with
+tolerable equanimity so long as it remains public. It is the private cold
+looks that trouble me.
+
+In short, we may speak of America in two senses--either meaning the
+America that actually meets us at the street corners and in the
+newspapers, or the ideal America--America as it ought to be. They are not
+the same thing; and, at present, there seems to be a good deal more of the
+former than of the latter. And yet, there is a connection between them;
+the latter has made the former possible. We sometimes see a great crowd
+drawn together by proclamation, for some noble purpose--to decide upon a
+righteous war, or to pass a just decree. But the people on the outskirts
+of the crowd, finding themselves unable to hear the orators, and their
+time hanging idle on their hands, take to throwing stones, knocking off
+hats, or, perhaps, picking pockets. They may have come to the meeting with
+as patriotic or virtuous intentions as the promoters themselves; nay,
+under more favorable circumstances, they might themselves have become
+promoters. Virtue and patriotism are not private property; at certain
+times any one may possess them. And, on the other hand, we have seen
+examples enough, of late, of persons of the highest respectability and
+trust turning out, all at once, to be very sorry scoundrels. A man changes
+according to the person with whom he converses; and though the outlook is
+rather sordid to-day, we have not forgotten that during the Civil War the
+air seemed full of heroism. So that these two Americas--the real and the
+ideal--far apart though they may be in one sense, may, in another sense,
+be as near together as our right hand to our left. In a greater or less
+degree, they exist side by side in each one of us. But civil wars do not
+come every day; nor can we wish them to, even to show us once more that we
+are worthy of our destiny. We must find some less expensive and quieter
+method of reminding ourselves of that. And of such methods, none, perhaps,
+is better than to review the lives of Americans who were truly great; to
+ask what their country meant to them; what they wished her to become; what
+virtues and what vices they detected in her. Passion may be generous, but
+passion cannot last; and when it is over, we are cold and indifferent
+again. But reason and example reach us when we are calm and passive; and
+what they inculcate is more likely to abide. At least, it will be only
+evil passion that can cast it out.
+
+I have said that many a true American is doubtless born, and lives,
+abroad; but that does not prevent Emerson from having been born here. So
+far as the outward accidents of generation and descent go, he could not
+have been more American than he was. Of course, one prefers that it should
+be so. A rare gem should be fitly set. A noble poem should be printed with
+the fairest type of the Riverside Press, and upon fine paper with wide
+margins. It helps us to believe in ourselves to be told that Emerson's
+ancestry was not only Puritan, but clerical; that the central and vital
+thread of the idea that created us, ran through his heart. The nation, and
+even New England, Massachusetts, Boston, have many traits that are not
+found in him; but there is nothing in him that is not a refinement, a
+sublimation and concentration of what is good in them; and the selection
+and grouping of the elements are such that he is a typical figure. Indeed,
+he is all type; which is the same as saying that there is nobody like him.
+And, mentally, he produces the impression of being all force; in his
+writings, his mind seems to have acted immediately, without natural
+impediment or friction; as if a machine should be run that was not
+hindered by the contact of its parts. As he was physically lean and narrow
+of figure, and his face nothing but so many features welded together, so
+there was no adipose tissue in his thought. It is pure, clear, and
+accurate, and has the fault of dryness; but often moves in forms of
+exquisite beauty. It is not adhesive; it sticks to nothing, nor anything
+to it; after ranging through all the various philosophies of the world, it
+comes out as clean and characteristic as ever. It has numberless
+affinities, but no adhesion; it does not even adhere to itself. There are
+many separate statements in any one of his essays which present no logical
+continuity; but although this fact has caused great anxiety to many
+disciples of Emerson, it never troubled him. It was the inevitable result
+of his method of thought. Wandering at will in the flower-garden of
+religious and moral philosophy, it was his part to pluck such blossoms as
+he saw were beautiful; not to find out their botanical interconnection. He
+would afterward arrange them, for art or harmony's sake, according to
+their color or their fragrance; but it was not his affair to go any
+farther in their classification.
+
+This intuitive method of his, however little it may satisfy those who wish
+to have all their thinking done for them, who desire not only to have
+given to them all the cities of the earth, but also to have straight roads
+built for them from one to the other, carries with it its own
+justification. "There is but one reason," is Emerson's saying; and again
+and again does he prove without proving it. We confess, over and over,
+that the truth which he asserts is indeed a truth. Even his own variations
+from the truth, when he is betrayed into them, serve to confirm the rule.
+For these are seldom or never intuitions at first hand--pure intuitions;
+but, as it were, intuitions from previous intuitions--deductions. The form
+of statement is the same, but the source is different; they are from
+Emerson, instead of from the Absolute; tinted, not colorless. They show a
+mental bias, very slight, but redeeming him back to humanity. We love him
+the more for them, because they indicate that for him, too, there was a
+choice of ways, and that he must struggle and watch to choose the right.
+
+We are so much wedded to systems, and so accustomed to connect a system
+with a man, that the absence of system, either explicit or implicit, in
+Emerson, strikes us as a defect. And yet truth has no system, nor the
+human mind. This philosopher maintains one, that another thesis. Both are
+true essentially, and yet there seems a contradiction between them. We
+cannot bear to be illogical, and so we enlist some under this banner, some
+under that. By so doing we sacrifice to consistency at least the half of
+truth. Thence we come to examine our intuitions, and ask them, not whether
+they are true in themselves, but what are their tendencies. If it turn out
+that they will lead us to stultify some past conclusion to which we stand
+committed, we drop them like hot coals. To Emerson, this behavior appeared
+the nakedest personal vanity. Recognizing that he was finite, he could not
+desire to be consistent. If he saw to-day that one thing was true, and to-
+morrow that its opposite was true, was it for him to elect which of the
+two truths should have his preference? No; to reject either would be to
+reject all; it belonged to God alone to reconcile these contradictious.
+Between infinite and finite can be no ratio; and the consistency of the
+Creator implies the inconsistency of the creature.
+
+Emerson's Americanism, therefore, was Americanism in its last and purest
+analysis, which is giving him high praise, and to America great hope. But
+I do not mean to pay him, who was so full of modesty and humility, the
+ungrateful compliment of holding him up as the permanent American ideal.
+It is his tendencies, his quality, that are valuable, and only in a minor,
+incipient degree his actual results. All human results must be strictly
+limited, and according to the epoch and outlook. Emerson does not solve
+for all time the problem of the universe; he solves nothing; but he does
+what is far more useful--he gives a direction and an impetus to lofty
+human endeavor. He does not anticipate the lessons and the discipline of
+the ages, but he shows us how to deal with circumstances in such a manner
+as to secure the good instead of the evil influence. New conditions, fresh
+discoveries, unexpected horizons opening before us, will, no doubt, soon
+carry us beyond the scope of Emerson's surmise; but we shall not so easily
+improve upon his aim and attitude. In the spaces beyond the stars there
+may be marvels such as it has not entered into the mind of man to
+conceive; but there, as here, the right way to look will still be upward,
+and the right aspiration be still toward humbleness and charity. I have
+just spoken of Emerson's absence of system; but his writings have
+nevertheless a singular coherence, by virtue of the single-hearted motive
+that has inspired them. Many will, doubtless, have noticed, as I have
+done, how the whole of Emerson illustrates every aspect of him.
+
+Whether your discourse be of his religion, of his ethics, of his relation
+to society, or what not, the picture that you draw will have gained color
+and form from every page that he has written. He does not lie in strata;
+all that he is permeates all that he has done. His books cannot be
+indexed, unless you would refer every subject to each paragraph. And so he
+cannot treat, no matter what subject, without incorporating in his
+statement the germs at least of all that he has thought and believed. In
+this respect he is like light--the presence of the general at the
+particular. And, to confess the truth, I find myself somewhat loath to
+diffract this pure ray to the arbitrary end of my special topic. Why
+should I speak of him as an American? That is not his definition. He was
+an American because he was himself. America, however, gives less
+limitation than any other nationality to a generous and serene
+personality.
+
+I am sometimes disposed to think that Emerson's "English Traits" reveal
+his American traits more than anything else he has written. We are
+described by our own criticisms of others, and especially by our
+criticisms of another nation; the exceptions we take are the mould of our
+own figures. So we have valuable glimpses of Emerson's contours throughout
+this volume. And it is in all respects a fortunate work; as remarkable a
+one almost for him to write as a volume of his essays for any one else.
+Comparatively to his other books, it is as flesh and blood to spirit;
+Emersonian flesh and blood, it is true, and semi-translucent; but still it
+completes the man for us: he would have remained too problematical without
+it. Those who have never personally known him may finish and solidify
+their impressions of him here. He likes England and the English, too; and
+that sympathy is beyond our expectation of the mind that evolved "Nature"
+and "The Over-Soul." The grasp of his hand, I remember, was firm and
+stout, and we perceive those qualities in the descriptions and cordiality
+of "English Traits." Then, it is an objective book; the eye looks outward,
+not inward; these pages afford a basis not elsewhere obtainable of
+comparing his general human faculty with that of other men. Here he
+descends from the airy heights he treads so easily and, standing foot to
+foot with his peers, measures himself against them. He intends only to
+report their stature, and to leave himself out of the story; but their
+answers to his questions show what the questions were, and what the
+questioner. And we cannot help suspecting, though he did not, that the
+Englishmen were not a little put to it to keep pace with their clear-
+faced, penetrating, attentive visitor.
+
+He has never said of his own countrymen the comfortable things that he
+tells of the English; but we need not grumble at that. The father who is
+severe with his own children will freely admire those of others, for whom
+he is not responsible. Emerson is stern toward what we are, and arduous
+indeed in his estimate of what we ought to be. He intimates that we are
+not quite worthy of our continent; that we have not as yet lived up to our
+blue china. "In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not."
+And he adds that even our more presentable public acts are due to a money-
+making spirit: "The benefaction derived in Illinois and the great West
+from railroads is inestimable, and vastly exceeding any intentional
+philanthropy on record." He does not think very respectfully of the
+designs or the doings of the people who went to California in 1849, though
+he admits that "California gets civilized in this immoral way," and is
+fain to suppose that, "as there is use in the world for poisons, so the
+world cannot move without rogues," and that, in respect of America, "the
+huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests
+the strength of the constitution." He ridicules our unsuspecting
+provincialism: "Have you seen the dozen great men of New York and Boston?
+Then you may as well die!" He does not spare our tendency to spread-
+eagleism and declamation, and having quoted a shrewd foreigner as saying
+of Americans that, "Whatever they say has a little the air of a speech,"
+he proceeds to speculate whether "the American forest has refreshed some
+weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out?" He finds the foible
+especially of American youth to be--pretension; and remarks, suggestively,
+that we talk much about the key of the age, but "the key to all ages is
+imbecility!" He cannot reconcile himself to the mania for going abroad.
+"There is a restlessness in our people that argues want of character....
+Can we never extract this tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our
+countrymen?" He finds, however, this involuntary compensation in the
+practice--that, practically "we go to Europe to be Americanized," and has
+faith that "one day we shall cast out the passion for Europe by the
+passion for America." As to our political doings, he can never regard them
+with complacency. "Politics is an afterword," he declares--"a poor
+patching. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education." He
+sympathizes with Lovelace's theory as to iron bars and stone walls, and
+holds that freedom and slavery are inward, not outward conditions. Slavery
+is not in circumstance, but in feeling; you cannot eradicate the irons by
+external restrictions; and the truest way to emancipate the slave would be
+to educate him to a comprehension of his inviolable dignity and freedom as
+a human being. Amelioration of outward circumstances will be the effect,
+but can never be the means of mental and moral improvement. "Nothing is
+more disgusting," he affirms, generalizing the theme, "than the crowing
+about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for
+freedom of some paper preamble like a 'Declaration of Independence' or the
+statute right to vote." But, "Our America has a bad name for
+superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and
+buffoons, but perceivers of the terrors of life, and have nerved
+themselves to face it." He will not be deceived by the clamor of blatant
+reformers. "If an angry bigot assumes the bountiful cause of abolition,
+and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say
+to him: 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and
+modest; have that grace, and never varnish your hard, uncharitable
+ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles
+off!'"
+
+He does not shrink from questioning the validity of some of our pet
+institutions, as, for instance, universal suffrage. He reminds us that in
+old Egypt the vote of a prophet was reckoned equal to one hundred hands,
+and records his opinion that it was much underestimated. "Shall we, then,"
+he asks, "judge a country by the majority or by the minority? By the
+minority, surely! 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by
+square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the
+time." The majority are unripe, and do not yet know their own opinion. He
+would not, however, counsel an organic alteration in this respect,
+believing that, with the progress of enlightenment, such coarse
+constructions of human rights will adjust themselves. He concedes the
+sagacity of the Fultons and Watts of politics, who, noticing that the
+opinion of the million was the terror of the world, grouped it on a level,
+instead of piling it into a mountain, and so contrived to make of this
+terror the most harmless and energetic form of a State. But, again, he
+would not have us regard the State as a finality, or as relieving any man
+of his individual responsibility for his actions and purposes. We are to
+confide in God--and not in our money, and in the State because it is guard
+of it. The Union itself has no basis but the good pleasure of the majority
+to be united. The wise and just men impart strength to the State, not
+receive it; and, if all went down, they and their like would soon combine
+in a new and better constitution. Yet he will not have us forget that only
+by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing so weak as an egotist. We are
+mighty only as vehicles of a truth before which State and individual are
+alike ephemeral. In this sense we, like other nations, shall have our
+kings and nobles--the leading and inspiration of the best; and he who
+would become a member of that nobility must obey his heart.
+
+Government, he observes, has been a fossil--it should be a plant; statute
+law should express, not impede, the mind of mankind. In tracing the course
+of human political institutions, he finds feudalism succeeding monarchy,
+and this again followed by trade, the good and evil of which is that it
+would put everything in the market, talent, beauty, virtue, and man
+himself. By this means it has done its work; it has faults and will end as
+the others. Its aristocracy need not be feared, for it can have no
+permanence, it is not entailed. In the time to come, he hopes to see us
+less anxious to be governed, in the technical sense; each man shall govern
+himself in the interests of all; government without any governor will be,
+for the first time, adamantine. Is not every man sometimes a radical in
+politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they
+are most luxurious; conservatism stands on man's limitations, reform on
+his infinitude. The age of the quadruped is to go out; the age of the
+brain and the heart is to come in. We are too pettifogging and imitative
+in our legislative conceptions; the Legislature of this country should
+become more catholic and cosmopolitan than any other. Let us be brave and
+strong enough to trust in humanity; strong natures are inevitable
+patriots. The time, the age, what is that, but a few prominent persons and
+a few active persons who epitomize the times? There is a bribe possible
+for any finite will; but the pure sympathy with universal ends is an
+infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent. The world wants saviors and
+religions; society is servile from want of will; but there is a Destiny by
+which the human race is guided, the race never dying, the individual never
+spared; its law is, you shall have everything as a member, nothing to
+yourself. Referring to the communities of various kinds, which were so
+much in vogue some years ago, he holds such to be valuable, not for what
+they have done, but for the indication they give of the revolution that is
+on the way. They place great faith in mutual support, but it is only as a
+man puts off from himself all external support and stands alone, that he
+is strong and will prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. A
+man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain.
+He must not shun whatever comes to him in the way of duty; the only path
+of escape is--performance. He must rely on Providence, but not in a timid
+or ecclesiastical spirit; it is no use to dress up that terrific
+benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.
+We shall come out well, whatever personal or political disasters may
+intervene. For here in America is the home of man. After deducting our
+pitiful politics--shall John or Jonathan sit in the chair and hold the
+purse?--and making due allowance for our frivolities and insanities, there
+still remains an organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses its
+balance, redresses itself presently, and which offers to the human mind
+opportunities not known elsewhere.
+
+Whenever he touches upon the fundamental elements of social and rational
+life, it is always to enlarge and illuminate our conception of them. We
+are not wont to question the propriety of the sentiment of patriotism, for
+instance. We are to swear by our own _lares_ and _penates_, and stand up
+for the American eagle, right or wrong. But Emerson instantly goes beneath
+this interpretation and exposes its crudity. The true sense of patriotism,
+according to him, is almost the reverse of its popular sense. He has no
+sympathy with that boyish egotism, hoarse with cheering for our side, for
+our State, for our town; the right patriotism consists in the delight
+which springs from contributing our peculiar and legitimate advantages to
+the benefit of humanity. Every foot of soil has its proper quality; the
+grape on two sides of the fence has new flavors; and so every acre on the
+globe, every family of men, every point of climate, has its distinguishing
+virtues. This being admitted, however, Emerson will yield in patriotism to
+no one; his only concern is that the advantages we contribute shall be the
+most instead of the least possible. "This country," he says, "does not lie
+here in the sun causeless, and though it may not be easy to define its
+influence, men feel already its emancipating quality in the careless self-
+reliance of the manners, in the freedom of thought, in the direct roads by
+which grievances are reached and redressed, and even in the reckless and
+sinister politics, not less than in purer expressions. Bad as it is, this
+freedom leads onward and upward to a Columbia of thought and art, which is
+the last and endless end of Columbus's adventure." Nor is this poet of
+virtue and philosophy ever more truly patriotic, from his spiritual
+standpoint, than when he throws scorn and indignation upon his country's
+sins and frailties. "But who is he that prates of the culture of mankind,
+of better arts and life? Go, blind worm, go--behold the famous States
+harrying Mexico with rifle and with knife! Or who, with accent bolder,
+dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer? I found by thee, O rushing
+Contoocook! and in thy valleys, Agiochook! the jackals of the negro-
+holder.... What boots thy zeal, O glowing friend, that would indignant
+rend the northland from the South? Wherefore? To what good end? Boston Bay
+and Bunker Hill would serve things still--things are of the snake. The
+horseman serves the horse, the neat-herd serves the neat, the merchant
+serves the purse, the eater serves his meat; 'tis the day of the chattel,
+web to weave, and corn to grind; things are in the saddle, and ride
+mankind!"
+
+But I must not begin to quote Emerson's poetry; only it is worth noting
+that he, whose verse is uniformly so abstractly and intellectually
+beautiful, kindles to passion whenever his theme is of America. The
+loftiest patriotism never found more ardent and eloquent expression than
+in the hymn sung at the completion of the Concord monument, on the 19th of
+April, 1836. There is no rancor in it; no taunt of triumph; "the foe long
+since in silence slept"; but throughout there resounds a note of pure and
+deep rejoicing at the victory of justice over oppression, which Concord
+fight so aptly symbolized. In "Hamatreya" and "The Earth Song," another
+chord is struck, of calm, laconic irony. Shall we too, he asks, we Yankee
+farmers, descendants of the men who gave up all for freedom, go back to
+the creed outworn of medieval feudalism and aristocracy, and say, of the
+land that yields us its produce, "'Tis mine, my children's, and my
+name's"? Earth laughs in flowers at our boyish boastfulness, and asks "How
+am I theirs if they cannot hold me, but I hold them?" "When I heard 'The
+Earth Song,' I was no longer brave; my avarice cooled, like lust in the
+child of the grave" Or read "Monadnoc," and mark the insight and the power
+with which the significance and worth of the great facts of nature are
+interpreted and stated. "Complement of human kind, having us at vantage
+still, our sumptuous indigence, oh, barren mound, thy plenties fill! We
+fool and prate; thou art silent and sedate. To myriad kinds and times one
+sense the constant mountain doth dispense; shedding on all its snows and
+leaves, one joy it joys, one grief it grieves. Thou seest, oh, watchman
+tall, our towns and races grow and fall, and imagest the stable good for
+which we all our lifetime grope; and though the substance us elude, we in
+thee the shadow find." ... "Thou dost supply the shortness of our days,
+and promise, on thy Founder's truth, long morrow to this mortal youth!" I
+have ignored the versified form in these extracts, in order to bring them
+into more direct contrast with the writer's prose, and show that the
+poetry is inherent. No other poet, with whom I am acquainted, has caused
+the very spirit of a land, the mother of men, to express itself so
+adequately as Emerson has done in these pieces. Whitman falls short of
+them, it seems to me, though his effort is greater.
+
+Emerson is continually urging us to give heed to this grand voice of hills
+and streams, and to mould ourselves upon its suggestions. The difficulty
+and the anomaly are that we are not native; that England is our mother,
+quite as much as Monadnoc; that we are heirs of memories and traditions
+reaching far beyond the times and the confines of the Republic. We cannot
+assume the splendid childlikeness of the great primitive races, and
+exhibit the hairy strength and unconscious genius that the poet longs to
+find in us. He remarks somewhere that the culminating period of good in
+nature and the world is in just that moment of transition, when the
+swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency
+or acidity is got out by ethics and humanity.
+
+It was at such a period that Greece attained her apogee; but our
+experience, it seems to me, must needs be different. Our story is not of
+birth, but of regeneration, a far more subtle and less obvious
+transaction. The Homeric California of which Bret Harte is the reporter
+does not seem to me in the closest sense American. It is a comparatively
+superficial matter--this savage freedom and raw poetry; it belongs to all
+pioneering life, where every man must stand for himself, and Judge Lynch
+strings up the defaulter to the nearest tree. But we are only incidentally
+pioneers in this sense; and the characteristics thus impressed upon us
+will leave no traces in the completed American. "A sturdy lad from New
+Hampshire or Vermont," says Emerson, "who in turn tries all the
+professions--who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches,
+edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in
+successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet--is worth a
+hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no
+shame in not studying a 'profession,' for he does not postpone his life,
+but lives already." That is stirringly said: but, as a matter of fact,
+most of the Americans whom we recognize as great did not have such a
+history; nor, if they had it, would they be on that account more American.
+On the other hand, the careers of men like Jim Fiske and Commodore
+Vanderbilt might serve very well as illustrations of the above sketch. If
+we must wait for our character until our geographical advantages and the
+absence of social distinctions manufacture it for us, we are likely to
+remain a long while in suspense. When our foreign visitors begin to evince
+a more poignant interest in Concord and Fifth Avenue than in the
+Mississippi and the Yellowstone, it may be an indication to us that we are
+assuming our proper position relative to our physical environment. "The
+_land_," says Emerson, "is a sanative and Americanizing influence which
+promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come." Well, when we are
+virtuous, we may, perhaps, spare our own blushes by allowing our
+topography, symbolically, to celebrate us, and when our admirers would
+worship the purity of our intentions, refer them to Walden Pond; or to
+Mount Shasta, when they would expatiate upon our lofty generosity. It is,
+perhaps, true, meanwhile, that the chances of a man's leading a decent
+life are greater in a palace than in a pigsty.
+
+But this is holding our author too strictly to the letter of his message.
+And, at any rate, the Americanism of Emerson is better than anything that
+he has said in vindication of it. He is the champion of this commonwealth;
+he is our future, living in our present, and showing the world, by
+anticipation, as it were, what sort of excellence we are capable of
+attaining. A nation that has produced Emerson, and can recognize in him
+bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh--and, still more, spirit of her
+spirit--that nation may look toward the coming age with security. But he
+has done more than thus to prophesy of his country; he is electric and
+stimulates us to fulfil our destiny. To use a phrase of his own, we
+"cannot hear of personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance,
+without fresh resolution." Emerson, helps us most in provoking us to help
+ourselves. The pleasantest revenge is that which we can sometimes take
+upon our great men in quoting of themselves what they have said of others.
+
+It is easy to be so revenged upon Emerson, because he, more than most
+persons of such eminence, has been generous and cordial in his
+appreciation of all human worth. "If there should appear in the company,"
+he observes, "some gentle soul who knows little of persons and parties, of
+Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these particulars,
+and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player,
+bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any
+conditions of country, or time, or human body, that man liberates me....
+I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods."
+Who can state the mission and effect of Emerson more tersely and aptly
+than those words do it?
+
+But, once more, he does not desire eulogiums, and it seems half ungenerous
+to force them upon him now that he can no longer defend himself. I prefer
+to conclude by repeating a passage characteristic of him both as a man and
+as an American, and which, perhaps, conveys a sounder and healthier
+criticism, both for us and for him, than any mere abject and nerveless
+admiration; for great men are great only in so far as they liberate us,
+and we undo their work in courting their tyranny. The passage runs thus:--
+
+"Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the
+least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I
+pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No
+facts to me are sacred; none are profane. I simply experiment--an endless
+seeker, with no Past at my back!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MODERN MAGIC.
+
+
+Human nature enjoys nothing better than to wonder--to be mystified; and it
+thanks and remembers those who have the skill to gratify this craving. The
+magicians of old knew that truth and conducted themselves accordingly. But
+our modern wonder-workers fail of their due influence, because, not
+content to perform their marvels, they go on to explain them. Merlin and
+Roger Bacon were greater public benefactors than Morse and Edison. Man is
+--and he always has been and will be--something else besides a pure
+intelligence: and science, in order to become really popular, must
+contrive to touch man somewhere else besides on the purely intellectual
+side: it must remember that man is all heart, all hope, all fear, and all
+foolishness, quite as much as he is all brains. Otherwise, science can
+never expect to take the place of superstition, much less of religion, in
+mankind's affection. In order to be a really successful man of science, it
+is first of all indispensable to make one's self master of everything in
+nature and in human nature that science is not.
+
+What must one do, in short, in order to become a magician? I use the term,
+here, in its weightiest sense. How to make myself visible and invisible at
+will? How to present myself in two or more places at once? How answer your
+question before you ask it, and describe to you your most secret thoughts
+and actions? How shall I call spirits from the vasty deep, and make you
+see and hear and feel them? How paralyze your strength with a look, heal
+your wound with a touch, or cause your bullet to rebound harmless from my
+unprotected flesh? How shall I walk on the air, sink through the earth,
+pass through stone walls, or walk, dry-shod, on the floor of the ocean?
+How shall I visit the other side of the moon, jump through the ring of
+Saturn, and gather sunflowers in Sirius? There are persons now living who
+profess to do no less remarkable feats, and to regard them as incidental
+merely to achievements far more important. A school of hierophants or
+adepts is said to exist in Tibet, who, as a matter of daily routine, quite
+transcend everything that we have been accustomed to consider natural
+possibility. What is the course of study, what are the ways and means
+whereby such persons accomplish such results?
+
+The conventional attitude towards such matters is, of course, that of
+unconditional scepticism. But it is pleasant, occasionally, to take an
+airing beyond the bounds of incredulity. For my own part, it is true, I
+must confess my inability to believe in anything positively supernatural.
+The supernatural and the illusory are to my mind convertible terms: they
+cannot really exist or take place. Let us be sure, however, that we are
+agreed as to what supernatural means. If a magician, before my eyes,
+transformed an old man into a little girl, I should call that
+supernatural; and nothing should convince me that my senses had not been
+grossly deceived. But were the magician to leave the room by passing
+through the solid wall, or "go out" like an exploding soap-bubble,--I
+might think what I please, but I should not venture to dogmatically
+pronounce the thing supernatural; because the phenomenon known as "matter"
+is scientifically unknown, and therefore no one can tell what
+modifications it may not be susceptible of:--no one, that is to say,
+except the person who, like the magician of our illustration, professes to
+possess, and (for aught I can affirm to the contrary) may actually possess
+a knowledge unshared by the bulk of mankind. The transformation of an old
+man into a little girl, on the other hand, would be a transaction
+involving the immaterial soul as well as the material body; and if I do
+not know that that cannot take place, I am forever incapable of knowing
+anything. These are extreme examples, but they serve to emphasize an
+important distinction.
+
+The whole domain of magic, in short, occupies that anomalous neutral
+ground that intervenes between the facts of our senses and the truths of
+our intuitions. Fact and truth are not convertible terms; they abide in
+two distinct planes, like thought and speech, or soul and body; one may
+imply or involve the other, but can never demonstrate it. Experience and
+intuition together comprehend the entire realm of actual and conceivable
+knowledge. Whatever contradicts both experience and intuition may,
+therefore, be pronounced illusion. But this neutral ground is the home of
+phenomena which intuition does not deny, and which experience has not
+confirmed. It is still a wide zone, though not so wide as it was a hundred
+years ago, or fifty, or even ten. It narrows every day, as science, or the
+classification of experience, expands. Are we, then, to look for a time
+when the zone shall have dwindled to a mathematical line, and magic
+confess itself to have been nothing but the science of an advanced school
+of investigators? Will the human intellect acquire a power before which
+all mysteries shall become transparent? Let us dwell upon this question a
+little longer.
+
+A mystery that is a mystery can never, humanly speaking, become anything
+else. Instances of such mysteries can readily be adduced. The universe
+itself is built upon them and is the greatest of them. They lie before the
+threshold and at the basis of all existence. For example:--here is a lump
+of compact, whitish, cheese-like substance, about as much as would go into
+a thimble. From this I profess to be able to produce a gigantic, intricate
+structure, sixty feet in height and diameter, hard, solid, and enduring,
+which shall furthermore possess the power of extending and multiplying
+itself until it covers the whole earth, and even all the earths in the
+universe, if it could reach them. Is such a profession as this credible?
+It is entirely credible, as soon as I paraphrase it by saying that I
+propose to plant an acorn. And yet all magic has no mystery which is so
+wonderful as this universal mystery of growth: and the only reason we are
+not lost in amazement at it is that it goes quietly on all the time, and
+perfects itself under uniform conditions. But let me eliminate from the
+phenomenon the one element of time--which is logically the least essential
+factor in the product, unreal and arbitrary, based on the revolution of
+the earth, and conceivably variable to any extent--grant me this, and the
+world would come to see me do the miracle. But, with time or without it,
+the mystery is just as mysterious.
+
+Natural mysteries, then,--the mysteries of life, death, creation, growth,
+--do not fall under our present consideration: they are beyond the
+legitimate domain of magic: and no intellectual development to which we
+may hereafter attain will bring us a step nearer their solution. But with
+the problems proper to magic, the case is different. Magic is
+distinctively not Divine, but human: a finite conundrum, not an Infinite
+enigma. If there has ever been a magician since the world began, then all
+mankind may become magicians, if they will give the necessary time and
+trouble. And yet, magic is not simply an advanced region of the path which
+science is pursuing. Science is concerned with results,--with material
+phenomena; whereas magic is, primarily, the study of causes, or of
+spiritual phenomena; or, to use another definition,--of phenomena which
+the senses perceive, not in themselves, but only in their results. So long
+as we restrict ourselves to results, our activity is confined to analysis;
+but when we begin to investigate causes, we are on the road not only to
+comprehend results, but (within limits) to modify or produce them.
+
+Science, however, blocks our advance in this direction by denying, or at
+least refusing to admit, the existence of the spiritual world, or world of
+causes: because, being spiritual, it is not sensible, or cognizable in
+sense. Science admits only material causes, or the changes wrought in
+matter by itself. If we ask what is the cause of a material cause, we are
+answered that it is a supposed entity called Force, concerning which there
+is nothing further to be known.
+
+At this point, then, argument (on the material plane) comes to an end, and
+speculation or assumption begins. Science answers its own questions, but
+neither can nor will answer any others. And upon what pretence do we ask
+any others? We ask them upon two grounds. The first is that some people,--
+we might even say, most people,--would be glad to believe in supersensuous
+existence, and are always on the alert to examine any plausible hypothesis
+pointing in that direction: and secondly, there exists a vast amount of
+testimony (we need not call it evidence) tending to show that the
+supersensuous world has been discovered, and that it endows its
+discoverers with sundry notable advantages. Of course, we are not obliged
+to credit this testimony, unless we want to: and--for some reason, never
+fully explained--a great many people who accept natural mysteries quite
+amiably become indignant when requested to examine mysteries of a much
+milder order. But it is not my intention to discuss the limits of the
+probable; but to swallow as much as possible first, and endeavor to
+account for it afterwards.
+
+There is, as every reader knows, a class of phenomena--such as hypnotism,
+trance, animal magnetism, and so forth--the occurrence of which science
+has conceded, though failing as yet to offer any intelligent explanation
+of them. It is suggested that they are peculiar states of the brain and
+nerve-centres, physical in their nature and origin, though evading our
+present physical tests. Be that as it may, they afford a capital
+introduction to the study of magic; if, indeed, they, and a few allied
+phenomena, do not comprise the germs of the whole matter. Apropos of this
+subject, a society has lately been organized in London, with branches on
+the Continent and in this country, composed of scientific men, Fellows of
+the Royal Society, members of Parliament, professors, and literary men,
+calling themselves the "Psychical Research Society," and making it their
+business to test and investigate these very marvels, under the most
+stringent scientific conditions. But the capacity to be deceived of the
+bodily senses is almost unlimited; in fact, we know that they are
+incapable of telling us the ultimate truth on any subject; and we are able
+to get along with them only because we have found their misinformation to
+be sufficiently uniform for most practical purposes. But once admit that
+the origin of these phenomena is not on the physical plane, and then, if
+we are to give any weight at all to them, it can be only from a spiritual
+standpoint. In other words, unless we can approach such questions by an _a
+priori_ route, we might as well let them alone. We can reason from spirit
+to body--from mind to matter--but we can never reverse that process, and
+from matter evolve mind. The reason is that matter is not found to contain
+mind, but is only acted upon by it, as inferior by superior; and we cannot
+get out of the bag more than has been put into it. The acorn (to use our
+former figure) can never explain the oak; but the oak readily accounts for
+the acorn. It may be doubted, therefore, whether the Psychical Research
+Society can succeed in doing more than to give a respectable endorsement
+to a perplexing possibility,--so long as they adhere to the inductive
+method. Should they, however, abandon the inductive method for the
+deductive, they will forfeit the allegiance of all consistently scientific
+minds; and they may, perhaps, make some curious contributions to
+philosophy. At present, they appear to be astride the fence between
+philosophy and science, as if they hoped in some way to make the former
+satisfy the latter's demands. But the difference between the evidence that
+demonstrates a fact and the evidence that confirms a truth is, once more,
+a difference less of degree than of kind. We can never obtain sensible
+verification of a proposition that transcends sense. We must accept it
+without material proof, or not at all. We may believe, for instance, that
+Creation is the work of an intelligent Divine Being; or we may disbelieve
+it; but we can never prove it. If we do believe it, innumerable
+confirmations of it meet us at every turn: but no such confirmations, and
+no multiplication of them, can persuade a disbeliever. For belief is ever
+incommunicable from without; it can be generated only from within. The
+term "belief" cannot be applied to our recognition of a physical fact: we
+do not believe in that--we are only sensible of it.
+
+In this connection, a few words will be in order concerning what is called
+Spiritism,--a subject which has of late years been exciting a good deal of
+remark. Its disciples claim for it the dignity of a new and positive
+revelation,--a revelation to sense of spiritual being. Now, the entire
+universe may be described as a revelation to sense of spiritual being--for
+those who happen to believe _a priori_, or from spontaneous inward
+conviction, in spiritual being. We may believe a man's body, for example,
+to be the effect of which his soul is the cause; but no one can reach that
+conviction by the most refined dissection of the bodily tissues. How,
+then, does the spiritists' Positive Revelation help the matter? Their
+answer is that the physical universe is a permanent and orderly phenomenon
+which (setting aside the problem of its First Cause) fully accounts for
+itself; whereas the phenomena of Spiritism, such as rapping, table-
+tipping, materializing, and so forth, are, if not supernatural, at any
+rate extra-natural. They occur in consequence of a conscious effort to
+bring them about; they cease when that effort is discontinued; they abound
+in indications of being produced by independent intelligencies; they are
+inexplicable upon any recognized theory of physics; and, therefore, there
+is nothing for it but to regard them as spiritual. And what then? Then, of
+course, there must be spirits, and a life after the death of the body; and
+the great question of Immortality is answered in the affirmative!
+
+Let us, for the sake of argument, concede that the manifestations upon
+which the Spiritists found their claims are genuine: that they are or can
+be produced without fraud; and let us then enquire in what respect our
+means for the conversion of the sceptic are improved. In the first place
+we find that all the manifestations--be their cause what it may--can occur
+only on the physical plane. However much the origin of the phenomena may
+perplex us, the phenomena themselves must be purely material, in so far as
+they are perceptible at all. "Raps" are audible according to the same laws
+of vibration as other sounds: the tilting table is simply a material body
+displaced by an adequate agency; the materialized hand or face is nothing
+but physical substance assuming form. Plainly, therefore, we have as much
+right to ascribe a spiritual source to such phenomena as we have to
+ascribe a spiritual source to the ordinary phenomena of nature, such as a
+tree or a man's body,--just as much right--and no more! Consequently, we
+are no nearer converting our sceptic than we were at the outset. He admits
+the physical manifestation: there is no intrinsic novelty about that: but
+when we proceed to argue that the manifestations are wrought by spirits,
+he points out to us that this is sheer assumption on our part. "I have not
+seen a spirit," he says: "I have not heard one; I have not felt one; nor
+is it possible that my bodily senses should perceive anything that is not
+at least as physical as they are. I have witnessed certain transactions
+effected by means unknown to me--possibly by the action of a natural law
+not yet fully expounded by science. If there was anything spiritual in the
+affair, it has not been manifest to my apprehension: and I must decline to
+lend my countenance to any such pretensions."
+
+That would be the reply of the sceptic who was equal to the emergency. But
+let us suppose that he is not equal to it: that he is a weak-kneed,
+impressionable person, with a tendency to jump at conclusions; and that he
+is scared or mystified into believing that "spirits" may be at the bottom
+of it. What, then, will be the character of the faith which the Positive
+Revelation has furnished him? He has discovered that existence continues,
+in some fashion, after the death of the body. He has learned that there
+may be such a thing as--not immortality exactly, but--postmortem
+consciousness. He has been saddled with the conviction that the other
+world is full of restless ghosts, who come shuddering back from their cold
+emptiness, and try to warm themselves in the borrowed flesh and blood, and
+with the purblind selfishness and curiosity of us who still remain here.
+"Have faith: be not impatient: the conditions are unfavorable: but we are
+working for you!"--such is the constant burden of the communications. But,
+if there be a God, why must our relations with him be complicated by the
+interference of such forlorn prevaricators and amateur Paracletes as
+these? we do not wish to be "worked for,"--to be carried heavenward on
+some one else's shoulders: but to climb thither by God's help and our own
+will, or to stay where we are. Moreover, by what touchstone shall we test
+the veracity of the self-appointed purveyors of this Positive Revelation?
+Are we to believe what they say, because they have lost their bodies? If
+life teaches us anything, it is that God does above all things respect the
+spiritual freedom of his creatures. He does not terrify and bully us into
+acknowledging Him by ghostly juggleries in darkened rooms, and by vapid
+exhibitions addressed to our outward senses. He approaches each man in the
+innermost sacred audience-chamber of his heart, and there shows him good
+and evil, truth and falsehood, and bids him choose. And that choice, if
+made aright, becomes a genuine and undying belief, because it was made in
+freedom, unbiassed by external threats and cajoleries.
+
+Such belief is, itself, immortality,--something as distinct from post-
+mortem consciousness as wisdom is distinct from mere animal intelligence.
+On the whole, therefore, there seems to be little real worth in Spiritism,
+even accepting it at its own valuation. The nourishment it yields the soul
+is too meagre; and--save on that one bare point of life beyond the grave,
+which might just as easily prove an infinite curse as an infinite
+blessing--it affords no trustworthy news whatever.
+
+But these objections do not apply to magic proper. Magic seems to consist
+mainly in the control which mind may exceptionally exercise over matter.
+In hypnotism, the subject abjectly believes and obeys the operator. If he
+be told that he cannot step across a chalk mark on the floor, he cannot
+step across it. He dissolves in tears or explodes with laughter, according
+as the operator tells him he has cause for merriment or tears: and if he
+be assured that the water he drinks is Madeira wine or Java coffee, he has
+no misgiving that such is not the case.
+
+To say that this state of things is brought about by the exercise of the
+operator's will, is not to explain the phenomenon, but to put it in
+different terms. What is the will, and how does it produce such a result?
+Here is a man who believes, at the word of command, that the thing which
+all the rest of the world calls a chair is a horse. How is such
+misapprehension on his part possible? our senses are our sole means of
+knowing external objects: and this man's senses seem to confirm--at least
+they by no means correct--his persuasion that a given object is something
+very different. Could we solve this puzzle, we should have done something
+towards gaining an insight into the philosophy of magic.
+
+We observe, in the first place, that the _rationale_ of hypnotism, and of
+trance in general, is distinct from that of memory and of imagination, and
+even from that of dreams. It resembles these only in so far as it involves
+a quasi-perception of something not actually present or existent. But
+memory and imagination never mislead us into mistaking their suggestions
+for realities: while in dreams, the dreamer's fancy alone is active; the
+bodily faculties are not in action. In trance, however, the subject may
+appear to be, to all intents and purposes, awake. Yet this state, unlike
+the others, is abnormal. The brain seems to be in a passive, or, at any
+rate, in a detached condition; it cannot carry out or originate ideas, nor
+can it examine an idea as to its truth or falsehood. Furthermore, it
+cannot receive or interpret the reports of its own bodily senses. In
+short, its relations with the external world are suspended: and since the
+body is a part of the external world, the brain can no longer control the
+body's movements.
+
+Bodily movements are, however, to some extent, automatic. Given a certain
+stimulus in the brain or nerve-centres, and certain corresponding muscular
+contractions follow: and this whether or not the stimulus be applied in a
+normal manner. Although, therefore, the entranced brain cannot
+spontaneously control the body, yet if we can apply an independent
+stimulus to it, the body will make a fitting and apparently intelligent
+response. The reader has doubtless seen those ingenious pieces of
+mechanism which are set in motion by dropping into an orifice a coin or
+pellet. Now, could we drop into the passive brain of an entranced person
+the idea that a chair is a horse, for instance,--the person would give
+every sensible indication of having adopted that figment as a fact.
+
+But how (since he can no longer communicate with the world by means of his
+senses) is this idea to be insinuated? The man is magnetized--that is to
+say, insulated; how can we have intercourse with him?
+
+Experiments show that this can be effected only through the magnetizer.
+Asleep towards the rest of the world, towards him the entranced person is
+awake. Not awake, however, as to the bodily senses; neither the magnetizer
+nor any one else can approach by that route. It is true that, if the
+magnetizer speaks to him, he knows what is said: but he does not hear
+physically; because he perceives the unspoken thought just as readily. But
+since whatever does not belong to his body must belong to his soul (or
+mind, if that term be preferable), it follows that the magnetizer must
+communicate with the magnetized on the mental or spiritual plane; that is,
+immediately, or without the intervention of the body.
+
+Let us review the position we have reached:--We have an entranced or
+magnetized person,--a person whose mind, or spirit, has, by a certain
+process, been so far withdrawn from conscious communion with his own
+bodily senses as to disable him from receiving through them any tidings
+from the external world. He is not, however, wholly withdrawn from his
+body, for, in that case, the body would be dead; whereas, in fact, its
+organic or animal life continues almost unimpaired. He is therefore
+neither out of the body nor in it, but in an anomalous region midway
+between the two,--a state in which he can receive no sensuous impressions
+from the physical world, nor be put in conscious communication with the
+spiritual world through any channel--save one.
+
+This one exception is, as we have seen, the person who magnetized him. The
+magnetizer is, then, the one and only medium through which the person
+magnetized can obtain impressions: and these impressions are conveyed
+directly from the mind, or spirit, of the magnetizer to that of the
+magnetized. Let us note, further, that the former is not, like the latter,
+in a semi-disembodied state, but is in the normal exercise of his bodily
+functions and faculties. He possesses, consequently, his normal ability to
+originate ideas and to impart them: and whatever ideas he chooses to
+impart to the magnetized person, the latter is fain passively and
+implicitly to accept. And having so received them, they descend naturally
+into the automatic mechanism of the body, and are by it mechanically
+interpreted or enacted.
+
+So far, the theory is good: but something seems amiss in the working. We
+find that a certain process frequently issues in a certain effect: but we
+do not yet know why this should be the case. Some fundamental link is
+wanting; and this link is manifestly a knowledge of the true relations
+between mind and matter: of the laws to which the mental or spiritual
+world is subject: of what nature itself is: and of what Creation means.
+Let us cast a glance at these fundamental subjects; for they are the key
+without which the secrets of magic must remain locked and hidden.
+
+In common speech we call the realm of the material universe, Creation; but
+philosophy denies its claim to that title. Man alone is Creation:
+everything else is appearance. The universe appears, because man exists:
+he implies the universe, but is not implied by it. We may assist our
+metaphysics, here, by a physical illustration. Take a glass prism and hold
+in the sunlight before a white surface. Let the prism represent man: the
+sun, man's Creator: and the seven-hued ray cast by the prism, nature, or
+the material universe. Now, if we remove the light, the ray vanishes: it
+vanishes, also, if we take away the prism: but so long as the sun and the
+prism--God and man--remain in their mutual relation, so long must the
+rainbow nature appear. Nature, in short, is not God; neither is it man;
+but it is the inevitable concomitant or expression of the creative
+attitude of God towards man. It is the shadow of the elements of which
+humanity or human nature is composed: or, shall we say, it is the
+apparition in sense of the spiritual being of mankind,--not, be it
+observed, of the being of any individual or of any aggregation of
+individuals; but of humanity as a whole. For this reason, also, is nature
+orderly, complete, and permanent,--that it is conditioned not upon our
+frail and faulty personalities, but upon our impersonal, universal human
+nature, in which is transacted the miracle of God's incarnation, and
+through which He forever shines.
+
+Besides Creator and creature, nothing else can be; and whatever else seems
+to be, must be only a seeming. Nature, therefore, is the shadow of a
+shade, but it serves an indispensable use. For since there can be no
+direct communication between finite and Infinite--God and man--a medium or
+common ground is needed, where they may meet; and nature, the shadow which
+the Infinite causes the finite to project, is just that medium. Man,
+looking upon this shadow, mistakes it for real substance, serving him for
+foothold and background, and assisting him to attain self-consciousness.
+God, on the other hand, finds in nature the means of revealing Himself to
+His creature without compromising the creature's freedom. Man supposes the
+universe to be a physical structure made by God in space and time, and in
+some region of which He resides, at a safe distance from us His creatures:
+whereas, in truth, God is distant from us only so far as we remove
+ourselves from our own inmost intuitions of truth and good.
+
+But what is that substance or quality which underlies and gives
+homogeneity to the varying forms of nature, so that they seem to us to own
+a common origin?--what is that logical abstraction upon which we have
+bestowed the name of matter? scientific analysis finds matter only as
+forms, never as itself: until, in despair, it invents an atomic theory,
+and lets it go at that. But if, discarding the scientific method, we
+question matter from the philosophical standpoint, we shall find it less
+obdurate.
+
+Man, considered as a mind or spirit, consists of volition and
+intelligence; or, what is the same, of emotion or affection, and of the
+thoughts which are created by this affection. Nothing can be affirmed of
+man as a spirit which does not fall under one or other of these two parts.
+Now, a creature consisting solely of affections and thoughts must, of
+course, have something to love and to think about. Man's final destiny is
+no doubt to love and consider his Creator; but that can only be after a
+reactionary or regenerative process has begun in him. Meanwhile, he must
+love and consider the only other available object--that is, himself.
+Manifestly, however, in order to bestow this attention upon himself, he
+must first be made aware of his own existence. In order to effect this,
+something must be added to man as spirit, enabling him to discriminate
+between the subject thinking and loving, and the object loved and thought
+of. This additional something, again, in order to fulfill its purpose,
+must be so devised as not to appear an addition: it must seem even more
+truly the man than the man himself. It must, therefore, perfectly
+represent or correspond to the spiritual form and constitution; so that
+the thoughts and affections of the spirit may enter into it as into their
+natural home and continent.
+
+This continent or vehicle of the mind is the human body. The body has two
+aspects,--substance and form, answering to the two aspects of the mind,--
+affection and thought: and affection finds its incarnation or
+correspondence in substance; and thought, in form. The mind, in short,
+realizes itself in terms of its reflection in the body, much as the body
+realizes itself in terms of its reflection in the looking-glass: but it
+does more than this, for it identifies itself with this its image. And how
+is this identification made possible?
+
+It is brought about by the deception of sense, which is the medium of
+communication between the spiritual and the material man. Until this
+miraculous medium is put in action, there can be no conscious relation
+between these two planes, admirably as they are adapted to each other.
+Sense is spiritual on one side and material on the other: but it is only
+on the material side that it gathers its reports: on the spiritual side it
+only delivers them. Every one of the five messengers whereby we are
+apprised of external existence brings us an earthly message only. And
+since these messengers act spontaneously, and since the mind's only other
+source of knowledge is intuition, which cannot be sensuously confirmed,--
+it is little wonder if man has inclined to the persuasion that what is
+highest in him is but an attribute of what is lowest, and that when the
+body dies, the soul must follow it into nothingness.
+
+Creative energy, being infinite, passes through the world of causes to the
+world of effects--through the spiritual to the physical plane. Matter is
+therefore the symbol of the ultimate of creative activity; it is the
+negative of God. As God is infinite, matter is finite; as He is life, it
+is death; as He is real, it is unreal; as He reveals, matter veils. And as
+the relation of God to man's spirit is constant and eternal, so is the
+physical quality of matter fixed and permanent. Now, in order to arrive at
+a comprehension of what matter is in itself, let us descend from the
+general to the specific, and investigate the philosophical elements of a
+pebble, for instance. A pebble is two things: it is a mineral: and it is a
+particular concrete example of mineral. In its mineral aspect, it is out
+of space and time, and is--not a fact, but--a truth; a perception of the
+mind. In so far as it is mineral, therefore, it has no relation to sense,
+but only to thought: and on the other hand, in so far as it is a
+particular concrete pebble, it is cognizable by sense but not by thought;
+for what is in sense is out of thought: the one supersedes the other. But
+if sense thus absorbs matter, so as to be philosophically
+indistinguishable from it, we are constrained to identify matter with our
+sensuous perception of it: and if our exemplary pebble had nothing but its
+material quality to depend upon, it would cease to exist not only to
+thought, but to sense likewise. Its metaphysical aspect, in short, is the
+only reality appertaining to it. Matter, then, may be defined as the
+impact upon sense of that prismatic ray which we have called nature.
+
+To apply this discussion to the subject in hand: Magic is a sort of parody
+of reality. And when we recognize that Creation proceeds from within
+outwards, or endogenously; and that matter is not the objective but the
+subjective side of the universe, we are in a position to perceive that in
+order magically to control matter, we must apply our efforts not to matter
+itself, but to our own minds. The natural world affects us from without
+inwards: the magical world affects us from within outwards: instead of
+objects suggesting ideas, ideas are made to suggest objects. And as, in
+the former case, when the object is removed the idea vanishes; so in the
+latter case, when the idea is removed, the object vanishes. Both objects
+are illusions; but the illusion in the first instance is the normal
+illusion of sense, whereas in the second instance it is the abnormal
+illusion of mind.
+
+The above argument can at best serve only as a hint to such as incline
+seriously to investigate the subject, and perhaps as a touchstone for
+testing the validity of a large and noisy mass of pretensions which engage
+the student at the outset of his enquiry. Many of these pretensions are
+the result of ignorance; many of deliberate intent to deceive; some,
+again, of erroneous philosophical theories. The Tibetan adepts seem to
+belong either to the second or to the last of these categories,--or,
+perhaps, to an impartial mingling of all three. They import a cumbrous
+machinery of auras, astral bodies, and elemental spirits; they divide man
+into seven principles, nature into seven kingdoms; they regard spirit as a
+refined form of matter, and matter as the one absolute fact of the
+universe,--the alpha and omega of all things. They deny a supreme Deity,
+but hold out hopes of a practical deityship for the majority of the human
+race. In short, their philosophy appeals to the most evil instincts of the
+soul, and has the air of being ex-post-facto; whenever they run foul of a
+prodigy, they invent arbitrarily a fanciful explanation of it. But it will
+be found, I think, that the various phases of hypnotism, and a
+systematized use of spiritism, will amply account for every miracle they
+actually bring to pass.
+
+Upon the whole, a certain vulgarity is inseparable from even the most
+respectable forms of magic,--an atmosphere of tinsel, of ostentation, of
+big cry and little wool. A child might have told us that matter is not
+almighty, that minds are sometimes transparent to one another, that love
+and faith can work wonders. And we also know that, in this mortal life,
+our means are exquisitely adapted to our ends; and that we can gain no
+solid comfort or advantage by striving to elbow our way a few inches
+further into the region of the occult and abnormal. Magic, however
+specious its achievements, is only a mockery of the Creative power, and
+exposes its unlikeness to it. "It is the attribute of natural existence,"
+a profound writer has said, "to be a form of use to something higher than
+itself, so that whatever does not, either potentially or actually, possess
+within it this soul of use, does not honestly belong to nature, but is a
+sensational effect produced upon the individual intelligence." [Footnote:
+Henry James, in "Society the Redeemed Form of Man."]
+
+No one can overstep the order and modesty of general existence without
+bringing himself into perilous proximity to subjects more profound and
+sacred than the occasion warrants. Life need not be barren of mystery and
+miracle to any one of us; but they shall be such tender mysteries and
+instructive miracles as the devotion of motherhood, and the blooming of
+spring. We are too close to Infinite love and wisdom to play pranks before
+it, and provoke comparison between our paltry juggleries and its
+omnipotence and majesty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+AMERICAN WILD ANIMALS IN ART.
+
+
+The hunter and the sportsman are two very different persons. The hunter
+pursues animals because he loves them and sympathizes with them, and kills
+them as the champions of chivalry used to slay one another--courteously,
+fairly, and with admiration and respect. To stalk and shoot the elk and
+the grizzly bear is to him what wooing and winning a beloved maiden would
+be to another man. Far from being the foe or exterminator of the game he
+follows, he, more than any one else, is their friend, vindicator, and
+confidant. A strange mutual ardor and understanding unites him with his
+quarry. He loves the mountain sheep and the antelope, because they can
+escape him; the panther and the bear, because they can destroy him. His
+relations with them are clean, generous, and manly. And on the other hand,
+the wild animals whose wildness can never be tamed, whose inmost principle
+of existence it is to be apart and unapproachable,--those creatures who
+may be said to cease to be when they cease to be intractable,--seem, after
+they have eluded their pursuer to the utmost, or fought him to the death,
+to yield themselves to him with a sort of wild contentment--as if they
+were glad to admit the sovereignty of man, though death come with the
+admission. The hunter, in short, asks for his happiness only to be alone
+with what he hunts; the sportsman, after his day's sport, must needs
+hasten home to publish the size of the "bag," and to wring from his
+fellow-men the glory and applause which he has not the strength and
+simplicity to find in the game itself.
+
+But if the true hunter is rare, the union of the hunter and the artist is
+rarer still. It demands not only the close familiarity, the loving
+observation, and the sympathy, but also the faculty of creation--the eye
+which selects what is constructive and beautiful, and passes over what is
+superfluous and inharmonious, and the hand skilful to carry out what the
+imagination conceives. In the man whose work I am about to consider, these
+qualities are developed in a remarkable degree, though it was not until he
+was a man grown, and had fought with distinction through the civil war,
+that he himself became aware of the artistic power that was in him. The
+events of his life, could they be rehearsed here, would form a tale of
+adventure and vicissitude more varied and stirring than is often found in
+fiction. He has spent by himself days and weeks in the vast solitudes of
+our western prairies and southern morasses. He has been the companion of
+trappers and frontiersmen, the friend and comrade of Indians, sleeping
+side by side with them in their wigwams, running the rapids in their
+canoes, and riding with them in the hunt. He has met and overcome the
+panther and the grizzly single-handed, and has pursued the flying cimmaron
+to the snowy summits of the Rocky Mountains, and brought back its crescent
+horns as a trophy. He has fought and slain the gray wolf with no other
+weapons than his hands and teeth; and at night he has lain concealed by
+lonely tarns, where the wild coyote came to patter and bark and howl at
+the midnight moon. His name and achievements are familiar to the dwellers
+in those savage regions, whose estimate of a man is based, not upon his
+social and financial advantages, but upon what he is and can do. Yet he is
+not one who wears his merit outwardly. His appearance, indeed, is
+striking; tall and athletic, broad-shouldered and stout-limbed, with the
+long, elastic step of the moccasined Indian, and something of the Indian's
+reticence and simplicity. But he can with difficulty be brought to allude
+to his adventures, and is reserved almost to the point of ingenuity on all
+that concerns himself or redounds to his credit. It is only in familiar
+converse with friends that the humor, the cultivation, the knowledge, and
+the social charm of the man appear, and his marvellous gift of vivid and
+picturesque narration discloses itself. But, in addition to all this, or
+above it all, he is the only great animal sculptor of his time, the
+successor of the French Barye, and (as any one may satisfy himself who
+will take the trouble to compare their works) the equal of that famous
+artist in scope and treatment of animal subjects, and his superior in
+knowledge and in truth and power of conception. It would be a poor
+compliment to call Edward Kemeys the American Barye; but Barye is the only
+man whose animal sculptures can bear comparison with Mr. Kemeys's.
+
+Of Mr. Kemeys's productions, a few are to be seen at his studio, 133 West
+Fifty-third Street, New York city. These are the models, in clay or
+plaster, as they came fresh from the artist's hand. From this condition
+they can either be enlarged to life or colossal size, for parks or public
+buildings, or cast in bronze in their present dimensions for the
+enrichment of private houses. Though this collection includes scarce a
+tithe of what the artist has produced, it forms a series of groups and
+figures which, for truth to nature, artistic excellence, and originality,
+are actually unique. So unique are they, indeed, that the uneducated eye
+does not at first realize their really immense value. Nothing like this
+little sculpture gallery has been seen before, and it is very improbable
+that there will ever again be a meeting of conditions and qualities
+adequate to reproducing such an exhibition. For we see here not merely,
+nor chiefly, the accurate representation of the animal's external aspect,
+but--what is vastly more difficult to seize and portray--the essential
+animal character or temperament which controls and actuates the animal's
+movements and behavior. Each one of Mr. Kemeys's figures gives not only
+the form and proportions of the animal, according to the nicest anatomical
+studies and measurements, but it is the speaking embodiment of profound
+insight into that animal's nature and knowledge of its habits. The
+spectator cannot long examine it without feeling that he has learned much
+more of its characteristics and genius than if he had been standing in
+front of the same animal's cage at the Zoological Gardens; for here is an
+artist who understands how to translate pose into meaning, and action into
+utterance, and to select those poses and actions which convey the broadest
+and most comprehensive idea of the subject's prevailing traits. He not
+only knows what posture or movement the anatomical structure of the animal
+renders possible, but he knows precisely in what degree such posture or
+movement is modified by the animal's physical needs and instincts. In
+other words, he always respects the modesty of nature, and never yields to
+the temptation to be dramatic and impressive at the expense of truth. Here
+is none of Barye's exaggeration, or of Landseer's sentimental effort to
+humanize animal nature. Mr. Kemeys has rightly perceived that animal
+nature is not a mere contraction of human nature; but that each animal, so
+far as it owns any relation to man at all, represents the unimpeded
+development of some particular element of man's nature. Accordingly,
+animals must be studied and portrayed solely upon their own basis and
+within their own limits; and he who approaches them with this
+understanding will find, possibly to his surprise, that the theatre thus
+afforded is wide and varied enough for the exercise of his best ingenuity
+and capacities. At first, no doubt, the simple animal appears too simple
+to be made artistically interesting, apart from this or that conventional
+or imaginative addition. The lion must be presented, not as he is, but as
+vulgar anticipation expects him to be; not with the savageness and terror
+which are native to him, but with the savageness and terror which those
+who have trembled and fled at the echo of his roar invest him with,--which
+are quite another matter. Zoölogical gardens and museums have their uses,
+but they cannot introduce us to wild animals as they really are; and the
+reports of those who have caught terrified or ignorant glimpses of them in
+their native regions will mislead us no less in another direction. Nature
+reveals her secrets only to those who have faithfully and rigorously
+submitted to the initiation; but to them she shows herself marvellous and
+inexhaustible. The "simple animal" avouches his ability to transcend any
+imaginative conception of him. The stern economy of his structure and
+character, the sureness and sufficiency of his every manifestation, the
+instinct and capacity which inform all his proceedings,--these are things
+which are concealed from a hasty glance by the very perfection of their
+state. Once seen and comprehended, however, they work upon the mind of the
+observer with an ever increasing power; they lead him into a new, strange,
+and fascinating world, and generously recompense him for any effort he may
+have made to penetrate thither. Of that strange and fascinating world Mr.
+Kemeys is the true and worthy interpreter, and, so far as appears, the
+only one. Through difficulty and discouragement of all kinds, he has kept
+to the simple truth, and the truth has rewarded him. He has done a service
+of incalculable value to his country, not only in vindicating American
+art, but in preserving to us, in a permanent and beautiful form, the vivid
+and veracious figures of a wild fauna which, in the inevitable progress of
+colonization and civilization, is destined within a few years to vanish
+altogether. The American bear and bison, the cimmaron and the elk, the
+wolf and the 'coon--where will they be a generation hence? Nowhere, save
+in the possession of those persons who have to-day the opportunity and the
+intelligence to decorate their rooms and parks with Mr. Kemeys's
+inimitable bronzes. The opportunity is great--much greater, I should
+think, than the intelligence necessary for availing ourselves of it; and
+it is a unique opportunity. In other words, it lies within the power of
+every cultivated family in the United States to enrich itself with a work
+of art which is entirely American; which, as art, fulfils every
+requirement; which is of permanent and increasing interest and value from
+an ornamental point of view; and which is embodied in the most enduring of
+artistic materials.
+
+The studio in which Mr. Kemeys works--a spacious apartment--is, in
+appearance, a cross between a barn-loft and a wigwam. Round the walls are
+suspended the hides, the heads, and the horns of the animals which the
+hunter has shot; and below are groups, single figures, and busts, modelled
+by the artist, in plaster, terracotta, or clay. The colossal design of the
+"Still Hunt"--an American panther crouching before its spring--was
+modelled here, before being cast in bronze and removed to its present site
+in Central Park. It is a monument of which New York and America may be
+proud; for no such powerful and veracious conception of a wild animal has
+ever before found artistic embodiment. The great cat crouches with head
+low, extended throat, and ears erect. The shoulders are drawn far back,
+the fore paws huddled beneath the jaws. The long, lithe back rises in an
+arch in the middle, sinking thence to the haunches, while the angry tail
+makes a strong curve along the ground to the right. The whole figure is
+tense and compact with restrained and waiting power; the expression is
+stealthy, pitiless, and terrible; it at once fascinates and astounds the
+beholder. While Mr. Kemeys was modelling this animal, an incident occurred
+which he has told me in something like the following words. The artist
+does not encourage the intrusion of idle persons while he is at work,
+though no one welcomes intelligent inspection and criticism more cordially
+than he. On this occasion he was alone in the studio with his Irish
+factotum, Tom, and the outer door, owing to the heat of the weather, had
+been left ajar. All of a sudden the artist was aware of the presence of a
+stranger in the room. "He was a tall, hulking fellow, shabbily dressed,
+like a tramp, and looked as if he might make trouble if he had a mind to.
+However, he stood quite still in front of the statue, staring at it, and
+not saying anything. So I let him alone for a while; I thought it would be
+time enough to attend to him when he began to beg or make a row. But after
+some time, as he still hadn't stirred, Tom came to the conclusion that a
+hint had better be given him to move on; so he took a broom and began
+sweeping the floor, and the dust went all over the fellow; but he didn't
+pay the least attention. I began to think there would probably be a fight;
+but I thought I'd wait a little longer before doing anything. At last I
+said to him, 'Will you move aside, please? You're in my way.' He stepped
+over a little to the right, but still didn't open his mouth, and kept his
+eyes fixed on the panther. Presently I said to Tom, 'Well, Tom, the cheek
+of some people passes belief!' Tom replied with more clouds of dust; but
+the stranger never made a sign. At last I got tired, so I stepped up to
+the fellow and said to him: 'Look here, my friend, when I asked you to
+move aside, I meant you should move the other side of the door.' He roused
+up then, and gave himself a shake, and took a last look at the panther,
+and said he, 'That's all right, boss; I know all about the door; but--what
+a spring she's going to make!' Then," added Kemeys, self-reproachfully, "I
+could have wept!"
+
+But although this superb figure no longer dominates the studio, there is
+no lack of models as valuable and as interesting, though not of heroic
+size. Most interesting of all to the general observer are, perhaps, the
+two figures of the grizzly bear. These were designed from a grizzly which
+Mr. Kemeys fought and killed in the autumn of 1881 in the Rocky Mountains,
+and the mounted head of which grins upon the wall overhead, a grisly
+trophy indeed. The impression of enormous strength, massive yet elastic,
+ponderous yet alert, impregnable for defence as irresistible in attack; a
+strength which knows no obstacles, and which never meets its match,--this
+impression is as fully conveyed in these figures, which are not over a
+foot in height, as if the animal were before us in its natural size. You
+see the vast limbs, crooked with power, bound about with huge ropes and
+plates of muscle, and clothed in shaggy depths of fur; the vast breadth of
+the head, with its thick, low ears, dull, small eyes, and long up-curving
+snout; the roll and lunge of the gait, like the motion of a vessel
+plunging forward before the wind; the rounded immensity of the trunk, and
+the huge bluntness of the posteriors; and all these features are combined
+with such masterly unity of conception and plastic vigor, that the
+diminutive model insensibly grows mighty beneath your gaze, until you
+realize the monster as if he stood stupendous and grim before you. In the
+first of the figures the bear has paused in his great stride to paw over
+and snuff at the horned head of a mountain sheep, half buried in the soil.
+The action of the right arm and shoulder, and the burly slouch of the
+arrested stride, are of themselves worth a gallery of pseudo-classic
+Venuses and Roman senators. The other bear is lolling back on his
+haunches, with all four paws in the air, munching some grapes from a vine
+which he has torn from its support. The contrast between the savage
+character of the beast and his absurdly peaceful employment gives a touch
+of terrific comedy to this design. After studying these figures, one
+cannot help thinking what a noble embellishment either of them would be,
+put in bronze, of colossal size, in the public grounds of one of our great
+Western cities. And inasmuch as the rich citizens of the West not only
+know what a grizzly bear is, but are more fearless and independent, and
+therefore often more correct in their artistic opinion than the somewhat
+sophisticated critics of the East, there is some cause for hoping that
+this thing may be brought to pass.
+
+Beside the grizzly stands the mountain sheep, or cimmaron, the most
+difficult to capture of all four-footed animals, whose gigantic curved
+horns are the best trophy of skill and enterprise that a hunter can bring
+home with him. The sculptor has here caught him in one of his most
+characteristic attitudes--just alighted from some dizzy leap on the
+headlong slope of a rocky mountainside. On such a spot nothing but the
+cimmaron could retain its footing; yet there he stands, firm and secure as
+the rock itself, his fore feet planted close together, the fore legs rigid
+and straight as the shaft of a lance, while the hind legs pose easily in
+attendance upon them. "The cimmaron always strikes plumb-centre, and he
+never makes a mistake," is Mr. Kemeys's laconic comment; and we can
+recognize the truth of the observation in this image. Perfectly at home
+and comfortable on its almost impossible perch, the cimmaron curves its
+great neck and turns its head upward, gazing aloft toward the height
+whence it has descended. "It's the golden eagle he hears," says the
+sculptor; "they give him warning of danger." It is a magnificent animal, a
+model of tireless vigor in all its parts; a creature made to hurl itself
+head-foremost down appalling gulfs of space, and poise itself at the
+bottom as jauntily as if gravitation were but a bugbear of timid
+imaginations. I find myself unconsciously speaking about these plaster
+models as if they were the living animals which they represent; but the
+more one studies Mr. Kemeys's works, the more instinct with redundant and
+breathing life do they appear.
+
+It would be impossible even to catalogue the contents of this studio, the
+greater part of which is as well worth describing as those examples which
+have already been touched upon; nor could a more graphic pen than mine
+convey an adequate impression of their excellence. But there is here a
+figure of the 'coon, which, as it is the only one ever modelled, ought not
+to be passed over in silence. In appearance this animal is a curious
+medley of the fox, the wolf, and the bear, besides I-know-not-what (as the
+lady in "Punch" would say) that belongs to none of those beasts. As may be
+imagined, therefore, its right portrayal involves peculiar difficulties,
+and Mr. Kemeys's genius is nowhere better shown than in the manner in
+which these have been surmounted. Compact, plump, and active in figure,
+quick and subtle in its movements, the 'coon crouches in a flattened
+position along the limb of a tree, its broad, shallow head and pointed
+snout a little lifted, as it gazes alertly outward and downward. It
+sustains itself by the clutch of its slender-clawed toes on the branch,
+the fore legs being spread apart, while the left hind leg is withdrawn
+inward, and enters smoothly into the contour of the furred side; the
+bushy, fox-like tail, ringed with dark and light bands, curving to the
+left. Thus posed and modelled in high relief on a tile-shaped plaque, Mr.
+Kemeys's coon forms a most desirable ornament for some wise man's
+sideboard or mantle-piece, where it may one day be pointed out as the only
+surviving representative of its species.
+
+The two most elaborate groups here have already attained some measure of
+publicity; the "Bison and Wolves" having been exhibited in the Paris Salon
+in 1878, and the "Deer and Panther" having been purchased in bronze by Mr.
+Winans during the sculptor's sojourn in England. Each group represents one
+of those deadly combats between wild beasts which are among the most
+terrific and at the same time most natural incidents of animal existence;
+and they are of especial interest as showing the artist's power of
+concentrated and graphic composition. A complicated story is told in both
+these instances with a masterly economy of material and balance of
+proportion; so that the spectator's eye takes in the whole subject at a
+glance, and yet finds inexhaustible interest in the examination of
+details, all of which contribute to the central effect without distracting
+the attention. A companion piece to the "Deer and Panther" shows the same
+animals as they have fallen, locked together in death after the combat is
+over. In the former group, the panther, in springing upon the deer, had
+impaled its neck on the deer's right antler, and had then swung round
+under the latter's body, burying the claws of its right fore foot in the
+ruminant's throat. In order truthfully to represent the second stage of
+the encounter, therefore, it was necessary not merely to model a second
+group, but to retain the elements and construction of the first group
+under totally changed conditions. This is a feat of such peculiar
+difficulty that I think few artists in any branch of art would venture to
+attempt it; nevertheless, Mr. Kemeys has accomplished it; and the more the
+two groups are studied in connection with each other, the more complete
+will his success be found to have been. The man who can do this may surely
+be admitted a master, whose works are open only to affirmative criticism.
+For his works the most trying of all tests is their comparison with one
+another; and the result of such comparison is not merely to confirm their
+merit, but to illustrate and enhance it.
+
+For my own part, my introduction to Mr. Kemeys's studio was the opening to
+me of a new world, where it has been my good fortune to spend many days of
+delightful and enlightening study. How far the subject of this writing may
+have been already familiar to the readers of it, I have no means of
+knowing; but I conceive it to be no less than my duty, as a countryman of
+Mr. Kemeys's and a lover of all that is true and original in art, to pay
+the tribute of my appreciation to what he has done. There is no danger of
+his getting more recognition than he deserves, and he is not one whom
+recognition can injure. He reverences his art too highly to magnify his
+own exposition of it; and when he reads what I have set down here, he will
+smile and shake his head, and mutter that I have divined the perfect idea
+in the imperfect embodiment. Unless I greatly err, however, no one but
+himself is competent to take that exception. The genuine artist is never
+satisfied with his work; he perceives where it falls short of his
+conception. But to others it will not be incomplete; for the achievements
+of real art are always invested with an atmosphere and aroma--a spiritual
+quality perhaps--proceeding from the artist's mind and affecting that of
+the beholder. And thus it happens that the story or the poem, the picture
+or the sculpture, receives even in its material form that last indefinable
+grace, that magic light that never was on sea or land, which no pen or
+brush or graving-tool has skill to seize. Matter can never rise to the
+height of spirit; but spirit informs it when it has done its best, and
+ennobles it with the charm that the artist sought and the world desired.
+
+*** Since the above was written, Mr. Kemeys has removed his studio to
+Perth Amboy, N. J.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Confessions and Criticisms, by Julian Hawthorne
+
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