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diff --git a/8108.txt b/8108.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9733d1c --- /dev/null +++ b/8108.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6098 @@ +Project Gutenberg's Literary and Social Essays, by George William Curtis + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Literary and Social Essays + +Author: George William Curtis + + +Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8108] +This file was first posted on June 15, 2003 +Last Updated: May 27, 2013 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS *** + + + + +Produced by Eric Eldred, Marc D'Hooghe, Charles Franks, +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team + + + + + + + + +LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS + +By George William Curtis + + + +CONTENTS + + +EMERSON _Homes of American Authors, 1854._ + +HAWTHORNE _Homes of American Authors, 1854._ + +THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE _North American Review_, Vol. XCIX., +1864. + +RACHEL _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. VI., 1855. + +THACKERAY IN AMERICA _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. I., 1853. + +SIR PHILIP SIDNEY Hitherto unpublished. Written in 1857. + +LONGFELLOW HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXV., 1882. + +OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXXXIII., 1891. + +WASHINGTON IRVING Read at Ashfield, 1889. Printed by the Grolier Club, +1892. + + + + +EMERSON + + +The village of Concord, Massachusetts, lies an hour's ride from Boston, +upon the Great Northern Railway. It is one of those quiet New England +towns, whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make but a slight +impression upon the mind of the busy traveller hurrying to or from the +city. As the conductor shouts "Concord!" the busy traveller has scarcely +time to recall "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill" before the town has +vanished and he is darting through woods and fields as solitary as those +he has just left in New Hampshire. Yet as it vanishes he may chance to +"see" two or three spires, and as they rush behind the trees his eyes +fall upon a gleaming sheet of water. It is Walden Pond--or Walden Water, +as Orphic Alcott used to call it--whose virgin seclusion was a +just image of that of the little village, until one afternoon, some +half-dozen or more years since, a shriek, sharper than any that had +rung from Walden woods since the last war-whoop of the last Indians +of Musketaquid, announced to astonished Concord, drowsing in the river +meadows, that the nineteenth century had overtaken it. Yet long before +the material force of the age bound the town to the rest of the world, +the spiritual force of a single mind in it had attracted attention to +it, and made its lonely plains as dear to many widely scattered minds as +the groves of the Academy or the vineyards of Vaucluse. + +Except in causing the erection of the railway buildings and several +dwellings near it, steam has not much changed Concord. It is yet one of +the quiet country towns whose charm is incredible to all but those who, +by loving it, have found it worthy of love. The shire-town of the great +agricultural county of Middlesex, it is not disturbed by the feverish +throb of factories, nor by any roar of inexorable toil but the few puffs +of the locomotive. One day, during the autumn, it is thronged with +the neighboring farmers, who hold their high festival--the annual +cattle-show--there. But the calm tenor of Concord life is not varied, +even on that day, by anything more exciting than fat oxen and the +cud-chewing eloquence of the agricultural dinner. The population of the +region is composed of sturdy, sterling men, worthy representatives of +the ancestors who sowed along the Concord shores, with their seed-corn +and rye, the germs of a prodigious national greatness. At intervals +every day the rattle, roar, and whistle of the swift shuttle darting to +and from the metropolitan heart of New England, weaving prosperity upon +the land, remind those farmers in their silent fields that the great +world yet wags and wrestles. And the farmer-boy--sweeping with flashing +scythe through the river meadows, whose coarse grass glitters, apt for +mowing, in the early June morning--pauses as the whistle dies into the +distance, and, wiping his brow and whetting his blade anew, questions +the country-smitten citizen, the amateur Corydon struggling with +imperfect stroke behind him, of the mystic romance of city life. + +The sluggish repose of the little river images the farmer-boy's life. He +bullies his oxen, and trembles at the locomotive. His wonder and fancy +stretch towards the great world beyond the barn-yard and the village +church as the torpid stream tends towards the ocean. The river, in +fact, seems the thread upon which all the beads of that rustic life +are strung--the clew to its tranquil character. If it were an impetuous +stream, dashing along as if it claimed and required the career to +which every American river is entitled, a career it would have. Wheels, +factories, shops, traders, factory-girls, boards of directors, dreary +white lines of boarding-houses, all the signs that indicate the spirit +of the age, and of the American age, would arise upon its margin. +Some shaven magician from State Street would run up by rail, and, from +proposals, maps, schedules of stock, etc., educe a spacious factory as +easily as Aladdin's palace arose from nothing. Instead of a dreaming, +pastoral poet of a village, Concord would be a rushing, whirling, +bustling manufacturer of a town, like its thrifty neighbor Lowell. +Many a fine equipage, flashing along city ways--many an +Elizabethan-Gothic-Grecian rural retreat, in which State Street woos Pan +and grows Arcadian in summer, would be reduced, in the last analysis, +to the Concord mills. Yet if these broad river meadows grew factories +instead of corn, they might perhaps lack another harvest, of which the +poet's thought is the sickle. + + "One harvest from your field + Homeward brought the oxen strong. + Another crop your acres yield, + Which I gather in a song," + +sings Emerson, and again, as the afternoon light strikes pensive across +his memory, as over the fields below him: + + "Knows he who tills this lonely field, + To reap its scanty corn, + What mystic crops his acres yield, + At midnight and at morn?" + +The Concord River, upon whose winding shores the town has scattered its +few houses--as if, loitering over the plain some fervent day, it had +fallen asleep obedient to the slumberous spell, and had not since +awakened--is a languid, shallow stream, that loiters through broad +meadows, which fringe it with rushes and long grasses. Its sluggish +current scarcely moves the autumn leaves showered upon it by a few +maples that lean over the Assabet--as one of its branches is named. +Yellow lily-buds and leathery lily-pads tessellate its surface, and the +white water-lilies--pale, proud Ladies of Shalott--bare their virgin +breasts to the sun in the seclusion of its distant reaches. Clustering +vines of wild grape hang its wooded shores with a tapestry of the South +and the Rhine. The pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes of flowers +the points where small tributary brooks flow in, and along the dusky +windings of those brooks cardinal-flowers with a scarlet splendor +paint the tropics upon New England green. All summer long, from founts +unknown, in the upper counties, from some anonymous pond or wooded +hillside moist with springs, steals the gentle river through the plain, +spreading at one point above the town into a little lake, called by the +farmers "Fairhaven Bay", as if all its lesser names must share the +sunny significance of Concord. Then, shrinking again, alarmed at its own +boldness, it dreams on towards the Merrimac and the sea. + +The absence of factories has already implied its shallowness and +slowness. In truth it is a very slow river, belonging much more to the +Indian than to the Yankee; so much so, indeed, that until within a very +few years there was an annual visit to its shores from a few sad heirs +of its old masters, who pitched a group of tents in the meadows, and +wove their tidy baskets and strung their beads in unsmiling silence. It +was the same thing that I saw in Jerusalem among the Jews. Every Friday +they repair to the remains of the old temple wall, and pray and wail, +kneeling upon the pavement and kissing the stones. But that passionate +Oriental regret was not more impressive than this silent homage of a +waning race, who, as they beheld the unchanged river, knew that, unlike +it, the last drops of their existence were gradually flowing away, and +that for their tribes there shall be no ingathering. + +So shallow is the stream that the amateur Corydons who embark at morning +to explore its remoter shores will, not infrequently in midsummer, find +their boat as suddenly tranquil and motionless as the river, having +placidly grounded upon its oozy bottom. Or, returning at evening, they +may lean over the edge as they lie at length in the boat, and float +with the almost imperceptible current, brushing the tips of the long +water-grass and reeds below them in the stream--a river jungle, in which +lurk pickerel and trout--with the sensation of a bird drifting upon +soft evening air over the tree-tops. No available or profitable craft +navigate these waters, and animated gentlemen from the city who run up +for "a mouthful of fresh air" cannot possibly detect the final cause of +such a river. Yet the dreaming idler has a place on maps and a name in +history. + +Near the town it is crossed by three or four bridges. One is a massive +structure to help the railroad over. The stern, strong pile readily +betrays that it is part of good, solid stock, owned in the right +quarter. Close by it is a little arched stone bridge, auxiliary to a +great road leading to some vague region of the world called Acton upon +guide-posts and on maps. Just beyond these bridges the river bends and +forgets the railroad, but it is grateful to the graceful arch of the +little stone bridge for making its curve more picturesque, and, as it +muses towards the Old Manse, listlessly brushing the lilies, it wonders +if Ellery Channing, who lives beyond, upon a hill-side sloping to the +shore, wrote his poem of "The Bridge" to that particular one. There +are two or three wooden bridges also, always combining well with the +landscape, always making and suggesting pictures. + +The Concord, as I said, has a name in history. Near one of the wooden +bridges you turn aside from the main road, close by the Old Mause--whose +mosses of mystic hue were gathered by Hawthorne, who lived there for +three years--and a few steps bring you to the river and to a small +monument upon its brink. It is a narrow, grassy way; not a field nor a +meadow, but of that shape and character which would perplex the animated +stranger from the city, who would see, also, its unfitness for a +building-lot. The narrow, grassy way is the old road, which in the month +of April, 1775, led to a bridge that crossed the stream at this spot. +And upon the river's margin, upon the bridge and the shore beyond, took +place the sharp struggle between the Middlesex farmers and the scarlet +British soldiers known in tradition as "Concord fight". The small +monument records the day and the event. When it was erected Emerson +wrote the following hymn for the ceremony: + +APRIL 19, 1836. + + "By the rude bridge that arched the flood, + Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, + Here once the embattled farmers stood, + And fired the shot heard round the world. + + "The foe long since in silence slept; + Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; + And Time the ruined bridge has swept + Down the dark stream that seaward creeps. + + "On this green bank, by this soft stream, + We see to-day a votive stone, + That memory may their deed redeem, + When, like our sires, our sons are gone. + + "Spirit that made these heroes dare + To die, or leave their children free, + Bid Time and Nature gently spare + The shaft we raise to them and Thee." + +Close under the rough stone wall at the left, which separates it from +the little grassy orchard of the Manse, is a small mound of turf and a +broken stone. Grave and headstone shrink from sight amid the grass and +under the wall, but they mark the earthly bed of the first victims of +that first fight. A few large trees overhang the ground, which Hawthorne +thinks have been planted since that day, and he says that in the river +he has seen mossy timbers of the old bridge, and on the farther bank, +half hidden, the crumbling stone abutments that supported it. In an old +house upon the main road, nearly opposite the entrance to this grassy +way, I knew a hale old woman who well remembered the gay advance of the +flashing soldiers, the terrible ring and crack of fire-arms, and the +panic-stricken retreat of the regulars, blackened and bloody. But the +placid river has long since overborne it all. The alarm, the struggle, +the retreat, are swallowed up in its supreme tranquillity. The summers +of more than seventy years have obliterated every trace of the road +with thick grass, which seeks to bury the graves, as earth buried the +victims. Let the sweet ministry of summer avail. Let its mild iteration +even sap the monument and conceal its stones as it hides the abutment in +foliage; for, still on the sunny slopes, white with the May blossoming +of apple-orchards, and in the broad fields, golden to the marge of +the river, and tilled in security and peace, survives the imperishable +remembrance of that day and its results. + +The river is thus the main feature of the Concord landscape. It is +surrounded by a wide plain, from which rise only three or four low +hills. One is a wooded cliff over Fairhaven Bay, a mile from the town; +one separates the main river from the Assabeth; and just beyond the +battle-ground one rises, rich with orchards, to a fine wood which crowns +it. The river meadows blend with broad, lonely fields. A wide horizon, +like that of the prairie or the sea, is the grand charm of Concord. At +night the stars are seen from the roads crossing the plain, as from a +ship at sea. The landscape would be called tame by those who think +no scenery grand but that of mountains or the sea-coast. But the wide +solitude of that region is not so accounted by those who live there. To +them it is rich and suggestive, as Emerson shows, by saying in the essay +upon "Nature", "My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and +on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of +our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the +village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages +and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and +moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate +and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our +hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and +forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal-revel, the proudest, most +heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste ever +decked and enjoyed, establishes itself upon the instant". And again, as +indicating where the true charm of scenery lies: "In every landscape the +point to astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and +that is seen from the first hillock, as well as from the top of the +Alleghanies. The stars stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, +with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna or +on the marble deserts of Egypt." He is speaking here, of course, of the +spiritual excitement of Beauty, which crops up everywhere in nature, +like gold in a rich region; but the quality of the imagery indicates the +character of the scenery in which the essay was written. + +Concord is too far from Boston to rival in garden cultivation its +neighbors, West Cambridge, Lexington, and Waltham; nor can it boast, +with Brookline, Dorchester, and Cambridge, the handsome summer homes of +city wealth. But it surpasses them all, perhaps, in a genuine country +freshness and feeling, derived from its loneliness. If not touched by +city elegance, neither is it infected by city meretriciousness; it is +sweet, wholesome country. By climbing one of the hills, your eye sweeps +a wide, wide landscape, until it rests upon graceful Wachuset, or, +farther and mistier, Moriadnoc, the lofty outpost of New Hampshire +hills. Level scenery is not tame. The ocean, the prairie, the desert, +are not tame, although of monotonous surface. The gentle undulations +which mark certain scenes--a rippling landscape, in which all sense of +space, of breadth, and of height is lost--that is tame. It may be made +beautiful by exquisite cultivation, as it often is in England and on +parts of the Hudson shores, but it is, at best, rather pleasing than +inspiring. For a permanent view the eye craves large and simple forms, +as the body requires plain food for its best nourishment. + +The town of Concord is built mainly upon one side of the river. In +its centre is a large open square, shaded by fine elms. A white wooden +church, in the most classical style of Yankee-Greek, stands upon +the square. The Court-house is upon one of the corners. In the old +Courthouse, in the days when I knew Concord, many conventions were +held for humane as well as merely political objects. One summer day I +especially remember, when I did not envy Athens its forum, for Emerson +and William Henry Channing spoke. In the speech of both burned the +sacred fire of eloquence, but in Emerson it was light, and in Channing +heat. + +From this square diverge four roads, like highways from a forum. One +leads by the Courthouse and under stately sycamores to the Old Manse and +the battle-ground, another goes directly to the river, and a third is +the main avenue of the town. After passing the shops this third divides, +and one branch forms a fair and noble street, spaciously and loftily +arched with elms, the houses standing liberally apart, each with its +garden-plot in front. The fourth avenue is the old Boston road, also +dividing, at the edge of the village, into the direct route to the +metropolis and the Lexington turnpike. + +The house of Mr. Emerson stands opposite this junction. It is a plain, +square white dwelling-house, yet it has a city air and could not +be mistaken for a farm-house. A quiet merchant, you would say, +unostentatious and simple, has here hidden himself from town. But a +thick grove of pine and fir trees, almost brushing the two windows upon +the right of the door, and occupying the space between them and the +road, suggests at least a peculiar taste in the retired merchant, or +hints the possibility that he may have sold his place to a poet or +philosopher--or to some old East India sea-captain, perhaps, who +cannot sleep without the sound of waves, and so plants pines to rustle, +surf-like, against his chamber window. + +The fact, strangely enough, partly supports your theory. In the year +1828 Charles Coolidge, a brother of J. Templeman Coolidge, a merchant of +repute in Boston and grandson of Joseph Coolidge, a patriarchal denizen +of Bowdoin Square in that city, came to Concord and built this house. +Gratefully remembering the lofty horse-chestnuts which shaded the city +square, and which, perhaps, first inspired him with the wish to be a +nearer neighbor of woods and fields, he planted a row of them along his +lot, which this year ripen their twenty-fifth harvest. With the liberal +hospitality of a New England merchant he did not forget the spacious +cellars of the city, and, as Mr. Emerson writes, "he built the only good +cellar that had then been built in Concord". + +Mr. Emerson bought the house in the year 1835. He found it a plain, +convenient, and thoroughly built country residence. An amiable neighbor +of Mr. Coolidge had placed a miserable old barn irregularly upon the +edge of that gentleman's lot, which, for the sake of comeliness, he was +forced to buy and set straight and smooth into a decent dependence of +the mansion house. The estate, upon passing into Mr. Emerson's hands, +comprised the house, barn, and two acres of land. He has enlarged house +and barn, and the two acres have grown to nine. Our author is no farmer, +except as every country gentleman is, yet the kindly slope from the +rear of the house to a little brook, which, passing to the calm Concord +beyond, washes the edge of his land, yields him at least occasional +beans and pease--or some friend, agriculturally enthusiastic and +an original Brook-Farmer, experiments with guano in the garden, and +produces melons and other vines with a success that relieves Brook Farm +from every slur of inadequate practical genius. Mr. Emerson has shaded +his originally bare land with trees, and counts near a hundred apple and +pear trees in his orchard. The whole estate is quite level, inclining +only towards the little brook, and is well watered and convenient. + +The Orphic Alcott--or Plato Skimpole, as Aspasia called him--well known +in the transcendental history of New England, designed and with his own +hands erected a summer-house, which gracefully adorns the lawn, if I may +so call the smooth grass-plot at the side of the house. Unhappily, this +edifice promises no longer duration, not being "technically based and +pointed". This is not a strange, although a disagreeable fact, to Mr. +Emerson, who has been always the most faithful and appreciative of the +lovers of Mr. Alcott. It is natural that the Orphic Alcott should build +graceful summer-houses. There are even people who declare that he has +covered the pleasant but somewhat misty lawns of ethical speculation +with a thousand such edifices, which need only to be a little more +"technically based and pointed" to be quite perfect. At present they +whisper, the wind blows clean through them, and no figures of flesh and +blood are ever seen there, but only pallid phantoms with large, calm +eyes, eating uncooked grain, out of baskets, and discoursing in a +sublime shibboleth of which mortals have no key. But how could Plato +Skimpole, who goes down to Hingham on the sea, in a New England January, +clad only in a suit of linen, hope to build immortal summer-houses? + +Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon entering +the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the +den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat +of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not +in architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a few choice +engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael +Angelo's "Fates", which, properly enough, imparted that grave serenity +to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what is +written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's published +writings, the essays, orations, and poems, date from this room, as much +as they date from any place or moment. The villagers, indeed, fancy +their philosophical contemporary affected by the novelist James's +constancy of composition. They relate, with wide eyes, that he has +a huge manuscript book, in which he incessantly records the ends of +thoughts, bits of observation and experience, and facts of all kinds--a +kind of intellectual and scientific ragbag, into which all shreds and +remnants of conversations and reminiscences of wayside reveries are +incontinently thrust. This work goes on, they aver, day and night, and +when he travels the rag-bag travels too, and grows more plethoric +with each mile of the journey. And a story, which will one day be a +tradition, is perpetuated in the village, that one night, before his +wife had become completely accustomed to his habits, she awoke suddenly, +and hearing him groping about the room, inquired anxiously, + +"My dear, are you unwell?" + +"No, my love, only an idea." + +The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower of a +poet. The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply sunk +in learned lore or soaring upon the daring speculations of an intrepid +philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the philosopher's +stone, and sing of the springs of poetry. + +The site of the house is not memorable. There is no reasonable ground to +suppose that so much as an Indian wigwam ever occupied the spot; nor has +Henry Thoreau, a very faithful friend of Mr. Emerson's and of the woods +and waters of his native Concord, ever found an Indian arrowhead upon +the premises. Henry Thoreau's instinct is as sure towards the facts of +nature as the witch-hazel towards treasure. If every quiet country town +in New England had a son who, with a lore like Selborne's and an eye +like Buffon's, had watched and studied its landscape and history, and +then published the result, as Thoreau has done, in a book as redolent of +genuine and perceptive sympathy with nature as a clover-field of honey, +New England would seem as poetic and beautiful as Greece. Thoreau lives +in the berry pastures upon a bank over Walden Pond, and in a little +house of his own building. One pleasant summer afternoon a small party +of us helped him raise it--a bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook +Farm. Elsewhere in the village he turns up arrowheads abundantly, +and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau initiated him into the mystery of +finding them. But neither the Indians nor nature nor Thoreau can invest +the quiet residence of our author with the dignity or even the suspicion +of a legend. History stops short in that direction with Charles +Coolidge, Esq., and the year 1828. + +There is little prospect from the house. Directly opposite a low bluff +overhangs the Boston road and obstructs the view. Upon the other +sides the level land stretches away. Towards Lexington it is a broad, +half-marshy region, and between the brook behind and the river good +farms lie upon the outskirts of the town. Pilgrims drawn to Concord by +the desire of conversing with the man whose written or spoken eloquence +has so profoundly charmed them, and who have placed him in some pavilion +of fancy, some peculiar residence, find him in no porch of philosophy +nor academic grove, but in a plain white house by the wayside, ready +to entertain every comer as an ambassador from some remote Cathay of +speculation whence the stars are more nearly seen. But the familiar +reader of our author will not be surprised to find the "walking +eye-ball" simply sheltered, and the "endless experimenter with no past +at my back" housed without ornament. Such a reader will have felt the +Spartan severity of this intellect, and have noticed that the realm of +this imagination is rather sculpturesque than pictorial, more Greek than +Italian. Therefore he will be pleased to alight at the little gate, and +hear the breezy welcome of the pines and the no less cordial salutation +of their owner. For if the visitor knows what he is about, he has come +to this plain for bracing mountain air. These serious Concord reaches +are no vale of Cashmere. Where Plato Skimpole is architect of the +summer-house, you may imagine what is to be expected in the mansion +itself. It is always morning within those doors. If you have nothing +to say, if you are really not an envoy from some kingdom or colony of +thought and cannot cast a gem upon the heaped pile, you had better pass +by upon the other side. For it is the peculiarity of Emerson's mind to +be always on the alert. He eats no lotus, but for-ever quaffs the waters +which engender immortal thirst. + +If the memorabilia of his house could find their proper Xenophon, the +want of antecedent arrowheads upon the premises would not prove very +disastrous to the interest of the history. The fame of the philosopher +attracts admiring friends and enthusiasts from every quarter, and +the scholarly grace and urbane hospitality of the gentleman send them +charmed away. Friendly foes, who altogether differ from Emerson, come to +break a lance with him upon the level pastures of Concord, with all the +cheerful and appreciative zeal of those who longed + + "To drink delight of battle with their peers + Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy." + +It is not hazardous to say that the greatest questions of our day and +of all days have been nowhere more amply discussed, with more poetic +insight or profound conviction, than in the comely, square white house +upon the edge of the Lexington turnpike. There have even been attempts +at something more formal and club-like than the chance conversations of +occasional guests, one of which will certainly be nowhere recorded but +upon these pages. + +It was in the year 1845 that a circle of persons of various ages, and +differing very much in everything but sympathy, found themselves in +Concord. Towards the end of the autumn Mr. Emerson suggested that they +should meet every Monday evening through the winter in his library. +"Monsieur Aubepine", "Miles Coverdale", and other phantoms, since +generally known as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who then occupied the Old Manse; +the inflexible Henry Thoreau, a scholastic and pastoral Orson, then +living among the blackberry pastures of Walden Pond; Plato Skimpole, +then sublimely meditating impossible summer-houses in a little house +upon the Boston road; the enthusiastic agriculturist and Brook-Farmer +already mentioned, then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, who added +the genial cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of the natural +gentleman; a sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his weary +way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New +England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well +of her country; two city youths, ready for the fragments from the feast +of wit and wisdom; and the host himself, composed this club. Ellery +Channing, who had that winter harnessed his Pegasus to the New York +_Tribune_, was a kind of corresponding member. The news of this world +was to be transmitted through his eminently practical genius, as the +club deemed itself competent to take charge of tidings from all other +spheres. + +I went, the first Monday evening, very much as Ixion may have gone +to his banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a +constrained but very amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a +tacit inquiry, seeming to ask, "Who will now proceed to say the +finest thing that has ever been said?" It was quite involuntary and +unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without +which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one +hand, and of curious listeners upon the other. I vaguely remember that +the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn "saying", +to which, after due pause, the honorable member for blackberry pastures +responded by some keen and graphic observation; while the Olympian host, +anxious that so much good material should be spun into something, beamed +smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the conversation became more +and more staccato. Miles Coverdale, a statue of night and silence, sat, +a little removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing imperturbably upon +the group; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit +of sables made him, in that society, the black thread of mystery +which he weaves into his stories, while the shifting presence of the +Brook-Farmer played like heat-lightning around the room. + +I recall little else but a grave eating of russet apples by the erect +philosophers, and a solemn disappearance into night. The club struggled +through three Monday evenings. Plato was perpetually putting apples of +gold in pictures of silver; for such was the rich ore of his thoughts, +coined by the deep melody of his voice. Orson charmed us with the +secrets won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods; while +Emerson, with the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild waters, sought +to bind the wide-flying embroidery of discourse into a web of clear +sweet sense. But still in vain. The oracular sayings were the unalloyed +saccharine element; and every chemist knows how much else goes to +practical food--how much coarse, rough, woody fibre is essential. The +club struggled on valiantly, discoursing celestially, eating apples, +and disappearing in the dark, until the third evening it vanished +altogether. But I have since known clubs of fifty times its number, +whose collective genius was not more than that of either one of the +Dii Majores of our Concord coterie. The fault was its too great +concentration. It was not relaxation, as a club should be, but tension. +Society is a play, a game, a tournament; not a battle. It is the easy +grace of undress; not an intellectual full-dress parade. + +I have already hinted this unbending intellectual alacrity of our +author. His sport is serious--his humor is earnest. He stands like a +sentinel. His look and manner and habit of thought cry "Who goes there?" +and if he does not hear the countersign, he brings the intruder to +a halt. It is for this surprising fidelity and integrity that his +influence has been so deep and sure and permanent upon the intellectual +life of the young men of New England; and of old England, too, where, in +Manchester, there were regular weekly meetings at which his works were +read. What he said long ago in his preface to the American edition of +Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, that they were papers which had spoken to the +young men of the time "with an emphasis that hindered them from sleep", +is strikingly true of his own writings. His first slim, anonymous +duodecimo, _Nature_, was as fair and fascinating to the royal young +minds who met it in the course of their reading, as Egeria to Numa +wandering in the grove. The essays, orations, and poems followed, +developing and elaborating the same spiritual and heroic philosophy, +applying it to life, history, and literature, with a vigor and richness +so supreme that not only do many account him our truest philosopher, but +others acknowledge him as our most characteristic poet. + +It would be a curious inquiry how much and what kind of influence the +placid scenery of Concord has exercised upon his mind. "I chide society, +I embrace solitude," he says; "and yet I am not so ungrateful as not +to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time +they pass my gate." It is not difficult to understand his fondness for +the spot. He has been always familiar with it, always more or less a +resident of the village. Born in Boston upon the spot where the Chauncey +Place Church now stands, part of his youth was passed in the Old Manse, +which was built by his grandfather and in which his father was born; and +there he wrote _Nature_. From the magnificent admiration of ancestral +England he was glad to return two years since to quiet Concord and to +acres which will not yield a single arrowhead. The Swiss sigh for their +mountains; but the Nubians, also, pine for their desert plains. Those +who are born by the sea long annually to return and to rest their eyes +upon its living horizon. Is it because the earliest impressions, made +when the mind is most plastic, are most durable? or because youth is +that golden age bounding the confines of memory and floating forever--an +alluring mirage as we recede farther from it? + +The imagination of the man who roams the solitary pastures of Concord, +or floats, dreaming, down its river, will easily see its landscape upon +Emerson's pages. "That country is fairest," he says, "which is inhabited +by the noblest minds". And although that idler upon the river may have +leaned over the Mediterranean from Genoese and Neapolitan villas, or +have glanced down the steep green valley of Sicilian Enna, seeking +"herself the fairest flower", or walked the shores where Cleopatra and +Helen walked, yet the charm of a landscape which is felt rather than +seen will be imperishable. "Travelling is a fool's paradise," says +Emerson. But he passed its gates to learn that lesson. His writings, +however, have no imported air. If there be something Oriental in his +philosophy and tropical in his imagination, they have yet the strong +flavor of his mother earth--the underived sweetness of the open Concord +sky, and the spacious breadth of the Concord horizon. + + + + +HAWTHORNE + + +Hawthorne has himself drawn the picture of the Old Manse in Concord. He +has given to it that quiet richness of coloring which ideally belongs +to an old country mansion. It seemed so fitting a residence for one +who loves to explore the twilight of antiquity--and the gloomier +the better--that the visitor, among the felicities of whose life was +included the freedom of the Manse, could not but fancy that our author's +eyes first saw the daylight enchanted by the slumberous orchard behind +the house, or tranquillized into twilight by the spacious avenue in +front. The character of his imagination, and the golden gloom of its +blossoming, completely harmonize with the rusty, gable-roofed old house +upon the river-side, and the reader of his books would be sure that his +boyhood and youth knew no other friends than the dreaming river and the +melancholy meadows and drooping foliage of its vicinity. + +Since the reader, however, would greatly mistake if he fancied this, +in good sooth, the ancestral halls of the Hawthornes--the genuine +Hawthorne-den--he will be glad to save the credit of his fancy by +learning that it was here our author's bridal tour--which commenced in +Boston, then three hours away--ended, and his married life began. Here, +also, his first child was born, and here those sad and silver mosses +accumulated upon his fancy, from which he heaped so soft a bed for our +dreaming. "Between two tall gate-posts of rough hewn stone (the gate +itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld +the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue +of black-ash trees." It was a pleasant spring day in the year 1843, +and as they entered the house nosegays of fresh flowers, arranged by +friendly hands, welcomed them to Concord and summer. + +The dark-haired man, who led his wife along the avenue that afternoon, +had been recently an officer of the customs in Boston, before which he +had led a solitary life in Salem. Graduated with Longfellow at Bowdoin +College, in Maine, he had lived a hermit in respectable Salem, an +absolute recluse even from his own family, walking out by night and +writing wild tales by day, most of which were burnt in his bachelor +fire, and some of which, in newspapers, magazines, and annuals, led a +wandering, uncertain, and mostly unnoticed life. + +Those tales among this class which were attainable he collected into a +small volume, and apprizing the world that they were "twice-told", sent +them forth anew to make their own way, in the year 1841. But he piped to +the world, and it did not sing. He wept to it, and it did not mourn. The +book, however, as all good books do, made its way into various hearts. +Yet the few penetrant minds which recognized a remarkable power and a +method of strange fascination in the stories did not make the public nor +influence the public mind. "I was," he says in the last edition of these +tales, "the most unknown author in America". Full of glancing wit, of +tender satire, of exquisite natural description, of subtle and strange +analysis of human life, darkly passionate and weird, they yet floated +unhailed barks upon the sea of publicity--unhailed, but laden and +gleaming at every crevice with the true treasure of Cathay. Bancroft, +then Collector in Boston, prompt to recognize and to honor talent, made +the dreaming story-teller a surveyor in the custom-house, thus opening +to him a new range of experience. From the society of phantoms he +stepped upon Long Wharf and plumply confronted Captain Cuttle and Dirk +Hatteraick. It was no less romance to our author. There is no greater +error of those who are called "practical men" than the supposition that +life is, or can be, other than a dream to a dreamer. Shut him up in a +counting-room, barricade him with bales of merchandise, and limit his +library to the ledger and cash-book and his prospect to the neighboring +signs; talk "Bills receivable" and "Sundries Dr. to cash" to him +forever, and you are only a very amusing or very annoying phantom to +him. The merchant-prince might as well hope to make himself a poet, as +the poet a practical or practicable man. He has laws to obey not at +all the less stringent because men of a different temperament refuse +to acknowledge them, and he is held to a loyalty quite beyond their +conception. + +So Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick were as pleasant figures to our +author in the picture of life as any others. He went daily upon the +vessels, looked and listened and learned, was a favorite of the sailors +as such men always are, did his work faithfully, and, having dreamed his +dream upon Long Wharf, was married and slipped up to the Old Manse and +a new chapter in the romance. It opened in "the most delightful little +nook of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion to a scholar". Of +the three years in the Old Manse the prelude to the _Mosses_ is the +most perfect history, and of the quality of those years the _Mosses_ +themselves are sufficient proof. They were mostly written in the little +study, and originally published in the _Democratic Review_, then edited +by Hawthorne's friend O'Sullivan. + +To the inhabitants of Concord, however, our author was as much a phantom +and a fable as the old pastor of the parish, dead half a century before, +and whose faded portrait in the attic was gradually rejoining its +original in native dust. The gate, fallen from its hinges in a remote +antiquity, was never rehung. "The wheel-track leading to the door" +remained still overgrown with grass. No bold villager ever invaded the +sleep of "the glimmering shadows" in the avenue. At evening no lights +gleamed from the windows. Scarce once in many months did the single old +knobby-faced coachman at the railroad bring a fare to "Mr. Hawthorne's". +"_Is_ there anybody in the old house?" sobbed the old ladies in despair, +imbibing tea of a livid green. That knocker, which everybody had enjoyed +the right of lifting to summon the good old pastor, no temerity now +dared to touch. Heavens! what if the figure in the mouldy portrait +should peer, in answer, over the eaves, and shake solemnly its decaying +surplice! Nay, what if the mysterious man himself should answer the +summons and come to the door! It is easy to summon spirits--but if they +come? Collective Concord, moving in the river meadows, embraced the +better part of valor and left the knocker untouched. A cloud of romance +suddenly fell out of the heaven of fancy and enveloped the Old Manse: + + "In among the bearded barley + The reaper reaping late and early" + +did not glance more wistfully towards the island of Shalott and its +mysterious lady than the reapers of Concord rye looked at the Old Manse +and wondered over its inmate. + +Sometimes in the forenoon a darkly clad figure was seen in the little +garden-plot putting in corn or melon seed, and gravely hoeing. It was +a brief apparition. The farmer passing towards town and seeing the +solitary cultivator, lost his faith in the fact and believed he had +dreamed when, upon returning, he saw no sign of life, except, possibly, +upon some Monday, the ghostly skirt of a shirt flapping spectrally in +the distant orchard. Day dawned and darkened over the lonely house. +Summer with "buds and bird-voices" came singing in from the South, and +clad the old ash-trees in deeper green, the Old Manse in profounder +mystery. Gorgeous autumn came to visit the story-teller in his little +western study, and, departing, wept rainbows among his trees. Winter +impatiently swept down the hill opposite, rifling the trees of each +last clinging bit of summer, as if thrusting aside opposing barriers and +determined to search the mystery. But his white robes floated around +the Old Manse, ghostly as the decaying surplice of the old pastor's +portrait, and in the snowy seclusion of winter the mystery was as +mysterious as ever. + +Occasionally Emerson or Ellery Channing or Henry Thoreau--some poet, as +once Whittier, journeying to the Merrimac, or an old Brook-Farmer who +remembered Miles Coverdale with Arcadian sympathy--went down the avenue +and disappeared in the house. Sometimes a close observer, had he been +ambushed among the long grasses of the orchard, might have seen the host +and one of his guests emerging at the back door and, sauntering to the +river-side, step into the boat, and float off until they faded in the +shadow. The spectacle would not have lessened the romance. If it were +afternoon--one of the spectrally sunny afternoons which often bewitch +that region--he would be only the more convinced that there was +something inexplicable in the whole matter of this man whom nobody knew, +who was never once seen at town-meeting, and concerning whom it was +whispered that he did not constantly attend church all day, although he +occupied the reverend parsonage of the village and had unmeasured acres +of manuscript sermons in his attic, besides the nearly extinct portrait +of an utterly extinct clergyman. Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis were +nothing to this, and the awe-stricken observer, if he could creep safely +out of the long grass, did not fail to do so quietly, fortifying his +courage by remembering stories of the genial humanity of the last old +pastor who inhabited the Manse, and who for fifty years was the bland +and beneficent Pope of Concord. A genial, gracious old man, whose memory +is yet sweet in the village, and who, wedded to the grave traditions of +New England theology, believed of his young relative Waldo Emerson, as +Miss Flite, touching her forehead, said of her landlord, that he was +"_m_, quite _m_", but was proud to love in him the hereditary integrity +of noble ancestors. + +This old gentleman--an eminent figure in the history of the Manse and in +all reminiscences of Concord--partook sufficiently of mundane weaknesses +to betray his mortality. Hawthorne describes him watching the battle +of Concord from his study window. But when the uncertainty of that +dark moment had so happily resulted, and the first battle-ground of the +Revolution had become a spot of hallowed and patriotic consideration, +it was a pardonable pride in the good old man to order his servant, +whenever there was company, to assist him in reaping the glory due +to the owner of a spot so sacred. Accordingly, when some reverend or +distinguished guest sat with the pastor in his little parlor, or, of +a summer evening, at the hospitable door under the trees, Jeremiah or +Nicodemus, the cow-boy, would deferentially approach and inquire, + +"Into what pasture shall I turn the cow tonight, sir?" + +And the old gentleman would audibly reply: + +"Into the battle-field, Nicodemus, into the battle-field." + +Then naturally followed wonder, inquiry, a walk in the twilight to the +river-bank, the old gentleman's story, the corresponding respect of the +listening visitor, and the consequent quiet complacency and harmless +satisfaction in the clergyman's bosom. That throb of pride was the +one drop of peculiar advantage which the pastor distilled from the +Revolution. He could not but fancy that he had a hand in so famous +a deed accomplished upon land now his own, and demeaned himself +accordingly with continental dignity. + +The pulpit, however, was his especial sphere. There he reigned supreme; +there he exhorted, rebuked, and advised, as in the days of Mather. There +he inspired that profound reverence of which he was so proud, and which +induced the matrons of the village, when he was coming to make a visit, +to bedizen the children in their Sunday suits, to parade the best +teapot, and to offer the most capacious chair. In the pulpit he +delivered everything with the pompous cadence of the elder New England +clergy, and a sly joke is told at the expense of his even temper, that +on one occasion, when loftily reading the hymn, he encountered a blot +upon the page quite obliterating the word; but without losing the +cadence, although in a very vindictive tone at the truant word, or the +culprit who erased it, he finished the reading as follows: + + "He sits upon His throne above, + Attending angels bless, + While Justice, Mercy, Truth--and another word + which is blotted out-- + Compose His princely dress." + +We linger around the Old Manse and its occupants as fondly as Hawthorne, +but no more fondly than all who have been once within the influence of +its spell. There glimmer in my memory a few hazy days, of a tranquil and +half-pensive character, which I am conscious were passed in and around +the house, and their pensiveness I know to be only that touch of +twilight which inhered in the house and all its associations. Beside the +few chance visitors I have named there were city friends occasionally, +figures quite unknown to the village, who came preceded by the +steam-shriek of the locomotive, were dropped at the gate-posts, and were +seen no more. The owner was as much a vague name to me as to any one. + +During Hawthorne's first year's residence in Concord I had driven up +with some friends to an aesthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the +winter, and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There +were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened +attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time +scarcely aware of a man who sat upon the edge of the circle, a little +withdrawn, his head slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his +bright eyes clearly burning under his black brow. As I drifted down the +stream of talk, this person, who sat silent as a shadow, looked to me as +Webster might have looked had he been a poet--a kind of poetic Webster. +He rose and walked to the window, and stood quietly there for a long +time, watching the dead white landscape. No appeal was made to him, +nobody looked after him, the conversation flowed steadily on as if every +one understood that his silence was to be respected. It was the same +thing at table. In vain the silent man imbibed aesthetic tea. Whatever +fancies it inspired did not flower at his lips. But there was a light +in his eye which assured me that nothing was lost. So supreme was his +silence that it presently engrossed me to the exclusion of everything +else. There was very brilliant discourse, but this silence was much more +poetic and fascinating. Fine things were said by the philosophers, but +much finer things were implied by the dumbness of this gentleman with +heavy brows and black hair. When he presently rose and went, Emerson, +with the "slow, wise smile" that breaks over his face, like day over the +sky, said, "Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night." + +Thus he remained in my memory, a shadow, a phantom, until more than a +year afterwards. Then I came to live in Concord. Every day I passed his +house, but when the villagers, thinking that perhaps I had some clew to +the mystery, said, "Do you know this Mr. Hawthorne?" I said "No," and +trusted to time. + +Time justified my confidence, and one day I, too, went down the avenue +and disappeared in the house. I mounted those mysterious stairs to that +apocryphal study. I saw "the cheerful coat of paint, and golden-tinted +paper-hangings, lighting up the small apartment; while the shadow of a +willow-tree, that swept against the overhanging eaves, attempered the +cheery western sunshine." I looked from the little northern window +whence the old pastor watched the battle, and in the small dining-room +beneath it, upon the first floor, there were + + "Dainty chicken, snow-white bread," + +and the golden juices of Italian vineyards, which still feast insatiable +memory. + +Our author occupied the Old Manse for three years. During that time he +was not seen, probably, by more than a dozen of the villagers. His walks +could easily avoid the town, and upon the river he was always sure of +solitude. It was his favorite habit to bathe every evening in the river, +after nightfall, and in that part of it over which the old bridge +stood, at which the battle was fought. Sometimes, but rarely, his +boat accompanied another up the stream, and I recall the silent and +preternatural vigor with which, on one occasion, he wielded his paddle +to counteract the bad rowing of a friend who conscientiously considered +it his duty to do something and not let Hawthorne work alone; but who, +with every stroke, neutralized all Hawthorne's efforts. I suppose he +would have struggled until he fell senseless, rather than ask his +friend to desist. His principle seemed to be, if a man cannot understand +without talking to him, it is quite useless to talk, because it is +immaterial whether such a man understands or not. His own sympathy was +so broad and sure that although nothing had been said for hours his +companion knew that not a thing had escaped his eye, nor had a single +pulse of beauty in the day or scene or society failed to thrill his +heart. In this way his silence was most social. Everything seemed to +have been said. It was a Barmecide feast of discourse, from which a +greater satisfaction resulted than from an actual banquet. + +When a formal attempt was made to desert this style of conversation, the +result was ludicrous. Once Emerson and Thoreau arrived to pay a call. +They were shown into the little parlor upon the avenue, and Hawthorne +presently entered. Each of the guests sat upright in his chair like a +Roman senator. "To them" Hawthorne, like a Dacian king. The call went +on, but in a most melancholy manner. The host sat perfectly still, or +occasionally propounded a question which Thoreau answered accurately, +and there the thread broke short off. Emerson delivered sentences that +only needed the setting of an essay to charm the world; but the whole +visit was a vague ghost of the Monday-evening club at Mr. Emerson's--it +was a great failure. Had they all been lying idly upon the river brink, +or strolling in Thoreau's blackberry pastures, the result would have +been utterly different. But imprisoned in the proprieties of a parlor, +each a wild man in his way, with a necessity of talking inherent in the +nature of the occasion, there was only a waste of treasure. This was the +only "call" in which I ever knew Hawthorne to be involved. + +In Mr. Emerson's house, I said, it seemed always morning. But +Hawthorne's black-ash trees and scraggy apple-boughs shaded + + "a land + In which it seemed always afternoon." + +I do not doubt that the lotus grew along the grassy marge of the Concord +behind his house, and it was served, subtly concealed, to all his +guests. The house, its inmates, and its life lay, dream-like, upon the +edge of the little village. You fancied that they all came together +and belonged together, and were glad that at length some idol of your +imagination, some poet whose spell had held you and would hold you +forever, was housed as such a poet should be. + +During the lapse of the three years since the bridal tour of twenty +miles ended at the "two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone", a little +wicker wagon had appeared at intervals upon the avenue, and a placid +babe, whose eyes the soft Concord day had touched with the blue of its +beauty, lay looking tranquilly up at the grave old trees, which sighed +lofty lullabies over her sleep. The tranquillity of the golden-haired +Una was the living and breathing type of the dreamy life of the Old +Manse. Perhaps, that being attained, it was as well to go. Perhaps our +author was not surprised nor displeased when the hints came, "growing +more and more distinct, that the owner of the old house was pining for +his native air". One afternoon I entered the study, and learned from its +occupant that the last story he should ever write there was written. The +son of the old pastor yearned for his homestead. The light of another +summer would seek its poet in the Old Manse, but in vain. + +While Hawthorne had been quietly writing in the "most delightful little +nook of a study", Mr. Polk had been elected President, and Mr. Bancroft, +in the cabinet, did not forget his old friend, the surveyor in the +custom-house. There came suggestions and offers of various attractions. +Still loving New England, would he tarry there, or, as inspector of +woods and forests in some far-away island of the southern sea, some +hazy strip of distance seen from Florida, would he taste the tropics? +He meditated all the chances, without immediately deciding. Gathering up +his household gods, he passed out of the Old Manse as its heir entered, +and before the end of summer was domesticated in the custom-house of his +native town of Salem. This was in the year 1846. Upon leaving the +Old Manse he published the _Mosses_, announcing that it was the +last collection of tales he should put forth. Those who knew him and +recognized his value to our literature trembled lest this was the last +word from one who spoke only pearls and rubies. It was a foolish fear. +The sun must shine, the sea must roll, the bird must sing, and the +poet write. During his life in Salem, of which the introduction to _The +Scarlet Letter_ describes the official aspect, he wrote that romance. +It is inspired by the spirit of the place. It presents more vividly than +any history the gloomy picturesqueness of early New England life. There +is no strain in our literature so characteristic or more real than that +which Hawthorne had successfully attempted in several of his earlier +sketches, and of which _The Scarlet Letter_ is the great triumph. It +became immediately popular, and directly placed the writer of stories +for a small circle among the world's masters of romance. + +Times meanwhile changed, and presidents with them. General Taylor was +elected, and the Salem collector retired. It is one of the romantic +points of Hawthorne's quiet life that its changes have been so +frequently determined by political events, which, more than all others, +are the most entirely foreign to his tastes and habits. He retired +to the hills of Berkshire, the eye of the world now regarding his +movements. There he lived a year or two in a little red cottage upon the +"Stockbridge Bowl", as a small lake near that town is called. In this +retreat he wrote _The House of the Seven Gables_, which more deeply +confirmed the literary position already acquired for him by the first +romance. The scene is laid in Salem, as if he could not escape a strange +fascination in the witch-haunted town of our early history. It is the +same black canvas upon which plays the rainbow-flash of his fancy, +never, in its brightest moment, more than illuminating the gloom. This +marks all his writings. They have a terrible beauty, like the siren, and +their fascination is as sure. + +After six years of absence Hawthorne returned to Concord, where he +purchased a small house formerly occupied by Orphic Alcott. When that +philosopher came into possession it was a miserable little house of +two peaked gables. But the genius which recreated itself in devising +graceful summer-houses, like that for Mr. Emerson, already noticed, soon +smoothed the new residence into some kind of comeliness. It was an old +house when Mr. Alcott entered it, but his tasteful finger touched it +with picturesque grace. + +Not like a tired old drudge of a house, rusting into unhonored decay, +but with a modest freshness that does not belie the innate sobriety of +a venerable New England farm-house, the present residence of our author +stands, withdrawn a few yards from the high-road to Boston, along which +marched the British soldiers to Concord bridge. It lies at the foot of a +wooded hill, a neat house of a "rusty olive hue", with a porch in +front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end. The genius for +summer-houses has had full play upon the hill behind. Here, upon the +homely steppes of Concord, is a strain of Persia. Mr. Alcott built +terraces and arbors and pavilions of boughs and rough stems of trees, +revealing--somewhat inadequately, perhaps--the hanging gardens of +delight that adorn the Babylon of his orphic imagination. The hill-side +is no unapt emblem of his intellectual habit, which garnishes the arid +commonplaces of life with a cold poetic aurora, forgetting that it is +the inexorable law of light to deform as well as adorn. Treating life as +a grand epic poem, the philosophic Alcott forgets that Homer must nod +or we should all fall asleep. The world would not be very beautiful nor +interesting if it were all one huge summit of Mont Blanc. + +Unhappily, the terraced hill-side, like the summer-house upon Mr. +Emerson's lawn, "lacks technical arrangement", and the wild winds play +with these architectural toys of fancy, like lions with humming-birds. +They are gradually falling, shattered, and disappearing. Fine +locust-trees shade them and ornament the hill with perennial beauty. +The hanging gardens of Semiramis were not more fragrant than Hawthorne's +hill-side during the June blossoming of the locusts. A few young elms, +some white-pines and young oaks, complete the catalogue of trees. A +light breeze constantly fans the brow of the hill, making harps of the +tree-tops and singing to our author, who, "with a book in my hand, or +an unwritten book in my thoughts", lies stretched beneath them in the +shade. + +From the height of the hill the eye courses, unrestrained, over the +solitary landscape of Concord, broad and still, broken only by the +slight wooded undulations of insignificant hillocks. The river is not +visible, nor any gleam of lake. Walden Pond is just behind the wood in +front, and not far away over the meadows sluggishly steals the river. It +is the most quiet of prospects. Eight acres of good land lie in front of +the house, across the road, and in the rear the estate extends a little +distance over the brow of the hill. + +This latter is not good garden-ground, but it yields that other crop +which the poet "gathers in a song". Perhaps the world will forgive +our author that he is not a prize farmer, and makes but an indifferent +figure at the annual cattle-show. We have seen that he is more nomadic +than agricultural. He has wandered from spot to spot, pitching a +temporary tent, then striking it for "fresh fields and pastures new". +It is natural, therefore, that he should call his house "The Wayside"--a +bench upon the road where he sits for a while before passing on. If +the wayfarer finds him upon that bench he shall have rare pleasure in +sitting with him, yet shudder while he stays. For the pictures of our +poet have more than the shadows of Rembrandt. If you listen to his +story, the lonely pastures and dull towns of our dear old homely New +England shall become suddenly as radiant with grace and terrible with +tragedy as any country and any time. The waning afternoon in Concord, +in which the blue-frocked farmers are reaping and hoeing, shall set +in pensive glory. The woods will forever after be haunted with strange +forms. You will hear whispers and music "i' the air". In the softest +morning you will suspect sadness; in the most fervent noon a nameless +terror. It is because the imagination of our author treads the almost +imperceptible line between the natural and the supernatural. We are all +conscious of striking it sometimes. But we avoid it. We recoil and hurry +away, nor dare to glance over our shoulders lest we should see phantoms. +What are these tales of supernatural appearances, as well authenticated +as any news of the day--and what is the sphere which they imply? What is +the more subtle intellectual apprehension of fate and its influence +upon imagination and life? Whatever it is, it is the mystery of the +fascination of these tales. They converse with that dreadful realm as +with our real world. The light of our sun is poured by genius upon the +phantoms we did not dare to contemplate, and lo! they are ourselves, +unmasked, and playing our many parts. An unutterable sadness seizes the +reader as the inevitable black thread appears. For here genius assures +us what we trembled to suspect, but could not avoid suspecting, that the +black thread is inwoven with all forms of life, with all development of +character. + +It is for this peculiarity, which harmonizes so well with ancient +places, whose pensive silence seems the trance of memory musing over the +young and lovely life that illuminated its lost years--that Hawthorne is +so intimately associated with the Old Manse. Yet that was but the tent +of a night for him. Already, with the _Blithedale Romance_, which +is dated from Concord, a new interest begins to cluster around "The +Wayside". + +I know not how I can more fitly conclude these reminiscences of Concord +and Hawthorne, whose own stories have always a saddening close, than by +relating an occurrence which blighted to many hearts the beauty of +the quiet Concord river, and seemed not inconsistent with its lonely +landscape. It has the further fitness of typifying the operation of our +author's imagination: a tranquil stream, clear and bright with sunny +gleams, crowned with lilies and graceful with swaying grass, yet doing +terrible deeds inexorably, and therefore forever after of a shadowed +beauty. + +Martha was the daughter of a plain Concord farmer, a girl of delicate +and shy temperament, who excelled so much in study that she was sent +to a fine academy in a neighboring town, and won all the honors of +the course. She met at the school, and in the society of the place, +a refinement and cultivation, a social gayety and grace, which were +entirely unknown in the hard life she had led at home, and which by +their very novelty, as well as because they harmonized with her own +nature and dreams, were doubly beautiful and fascinating. She enjoyed +this life to the full, while her timidity kept her only a spectator; +and she ornamented it with a fresher grace, suggestive of the woods and +fields, when she ventured to engage in the airy game. It was a sphere +for her capacities and talents. She shone in it, and the consciousness +of a true position and general appreciation gave her the full use of +all her powers. She admired and was admired. She was surrounded by +gratifications of taste, by the stimulants and rewards of ambition. The +world was happy, and she was worthy to live in it. But at times a cloud +suddenly dashed athwart the sun--a shadow stole, dark and chill, to the +very edge of the charmed circle in which she stood. She knew well what +it was and what it foretold, but she would not pause nor heed. The sun +shone again; the future smiled; youth, beauty, and all gentle hopes and +thoughts bathed the moment in lambent light. + +But school-days ended at last, and with the receding town in which they +had been passed the bright days of life disappeared, and forever. It +is probable that the girl's fancy had been fed, perhaps indiscreetly +pampered, by her experience there. But it was no fairy-land. It was an +academy town in New England, and the fact that it was so alluring is a +fair indication of the kind of life from which she had emerged, and to +which she now returned. What could she do? In the dreary round of petty +details, in the incessant drudgery of a poor farmer's household, with no +companions of any sympathy--for the family of a hard-working New England +farmer are not the Chloes and Clarissas of pastoral poetry, nor are +cow-boys Corydons--with no opportunity of retirement and cultivation, +for reading and studying--which is always voted "stuff" under such +circumstances--the light suddenly quenched out of life, what was she to +do? + +"Adapt herself to her circumstances. Why had she shot from her sphere in +this silly way?" demands unanimous common-sense in valiant heroics. + +The simple answer is, that she had only used all her opportunities, and +that, although it was no fault of hers that the routine of her life +was in every way repulsive, she did struggle to accommodate herself to +it--and failed. When she found it impossible to drag on at home, she +became an inmate of a refined and cultivated household in the village, +where she had opportunity to follow her own fancies, and to associate +with educated and attractive persons. But even here she could not escape +the feeling that it was all temporary, that her position was one of +dependence; and her pride, now grown morbid, often drove her from the +very society which alone was agreeable to her. This was all genuine. +There was not the slightest strain of the _femme incomprise_ in her +demeanor. She was always shy and silent, with a touching reserve which +won interest and confidence, but left also a vague sadness in the mind +of the observer. After a few months she made another effort to rend the +cloud which was gradually darkening around her, and opened a school for +young children. But although the interest of friends secured for her a +partial success, her gravity and sadness failed to excite the sympathy +of her pupils, who missed in her the playful gayety always most winning +to children. Martha, however, pushed bravely on, a figure of tragic +sobriety to all who watched her course. The farmers thought her a +strange girl, and wondered at the ways of a farmer's daughter who was +not content to milk cows and churn butter and fry pork, without further +hope or thought. The good clergyman of the town, interested in her +situation, sought a confidence she did not care to bestow, and so, +doling out a, b, c, to a wild group of boys and girls, she found that +she could not untie the Gordian knot of her life, and felt, with terror, +that it must be cut. + +One summer evening she left her father's house and walked into the +fields alone. Night came, but Martha did not return. The family became +anxious, inquired if any one had noticed the direction in which she +went, learned from the neighbors that she was not visiting, that +there was no lecture or meeting to detain her, and wonder passed into +apprehension. Neighbors went into the adjacent woods and called, but +received no answer. Every instant the awful shadow of some dread event +solemnized the gathering groups. Every one thought what no one dared +whisper, until a low voice suggested "the river". Then, with the +swiftness of certainty, all friends, far and near, were roused, and +thronged along the banks of the stream. Torches flashed in boats that +put off in the terrible search. Hawthorne, then living in the Old Manse, +was summoned, and the man whom the villagers had only seen at morning +as a musing spectre in his garden, now appeared among them at night +to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their service. The boats +drifted slowly down the stream--the torches flared strangely upon +the black repose of the water, and upon the long, slim grasses that, +weeping, fringed the marge. Upon both banks silent and awe-stricken +crowds hastened along, eager and dreading to find the slightest trace of +what they sought. Suddenly they came upon a few articles of dress, heavy +with the night-dew. No one spoke, for no one had doubted the result. It +was clear that Martha had strayed to the river and quietly asked of its +stillness the repose she sought. The boats gathered around the spot. +With every implement that could be of service the melancholy search +began. Long intervals of fearful silence ensued, but at length, towards +midnight, the sweet face of the dead girl was raised more placidly to +the stars than ever it had been to the sun. + + "Oh! is it weed or fish or floating hair-- + A tress o' golden hair, + O' drowned maiden's hair, + Above the nets at sea? + Was never salmon yet that shone so fair + Among the stakes on Dee." + +So ended a village tragedy. The reader may possibly find in it the +original of the thrilling conclusion of the _Blithedale Romance_, and +learn anew that dark as is the thread with which Hawthorne weaves his +spells, it is no darker than those with which tragedies are spun, even +in regions apparently so torpid as Concord. + + + + +THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE + + +The traveller by the Eastern Railroad, from Boston, reaches in less than +an hour the old town of Salem, Massachusetts. It is chiefly composed +of plain wooden houses, but it has a quaint air of past provincial +grandeur, and has indeed been an important commercial town. The first +American ship for Calcutta and China sailed from this port; and Salem +ships opened our trade with New Holland and the South Seas. But its +glory has long since departed, with that of its stately and respectable +neighbors, Newburyport and Portsmouth. There is still, however, a +custom-house in Salem, there are wharves and chandlers' shops and a +faint show of shipping and an air of marine capacity which no apparent +result justifies. It sits upon the shore like an antiquated sea-captain, +grave and silent, in tarpaulin and duck trousers, idly watching the +ocean upon which he will never sail again. + +But this touching aspect of age and lost prosperity merely serves to +deepen the peculiar impression of the old city, which is not derived +from its former commercial importance, but from other associations. +Salem village was a famous place in the Puritan annals. The tragedy of +the witchcraft tortures and murders has cast upon it a ghostly spell, +from which it seems never to have escaped; and even the sojourner of +to-day, as he loiters along the shore in the sunniest morning of June, +will sometimes feel an icy breath in the air, chilling the very marrow +of his bones. Nor is he consoled by being told that it is only the east +wind; for he cannot help believing that an invisible host of Puritan +spectres have breathed upon him, revengeful, as he poached upon their +ancient haunts. + +The Puritan spirit was neither gracious nor lovely, but nothing softer +than its iron hand could have done its necessary work. The Puritan +character was narrow, intolerant, and exasperating. The forefathers were +very "sour" in the estimation of Morton and his merry company at Mount +Wollaston. But for all that, Bradstreet and Carver and Winthrop were +better forefathers than the gay Morton, and the Puritan spirit is +doubtless the moral influence of modern civilization, both in Old and +New England. By the fruit let the seed be judged. The State to whose +rough coast the _Mayflower_ came, and in which the Pilgrim spirit +has been most active, is to-day the chief of all human societies, +politically, morally, and socially. It is the community in which the +average of well-being is higher than in any State we know in history. +Puritan though it be, it is more truly liberal and free than any large +community in the world. But it had bleak beginnings. The icy shore, +the sombre pines, the stealthy savages, the hard soil, the unbending +religious austerity, the Scriptural severity, the arrogant virtues, the +angry intolerance of contradiction--they all made a narrow strip of sad +civilization between the pitiless sea and the remorseless forests. The +moral and physical tenacity which is wrestling with the Rebellion +was toughened among these flinty and forbidding rocks. The fig, the +pomegranate, and the almond would not grow there, nor the nightingale +sing; but nobler men than its children the sun never shone upon, nor has +the heart of man heard sweeter music than the voices of James Otis and +Samuel Adams. Think of Plymouth in 1620, and of Massachusetts to-day! +Out of strength came forth sweetness. + +With some of the darkest passages in Puritan history this old town of +Salem, which dozes apparently with the most peaceful conscience in the +world, is identified, and while its Fourth of July bells were joyfully +ringing sixty years ago Nathaniel Hathorne was born. He subsequently +chose to write the name Hawthorne, because he thought he had discovered +that it was the original spelling. In the introduction to _The Scarlet +Letter_, Hawthorne speaks of his ancestors as coming from Europe in the +seventeenth century, and establishing themselves in Salem, where they +served the State and propitiated Heaven by joining in the persecution +of Quakers and witches. The house known as the Witch House is still +standing on the corner of Summer and Essex streets. It was built in 1642 +by Captain George Corwin, and here in 1692 many of the unfortunates who +were palpably guilty of age and ugliness were examined by the Honorable +Jonathan Curwin, Major Gedney, Captain John Higginson, and John Hathorn, +Esquire. + +The name of this last worthy occurs in one of the first and most famous +of the witch trials, that of "Goodwife Gory", in March, 1692, only a +month after the beginning of the delusion at the house of the minister +Parris. Goodwife Gory was accused by ten children, of whom Elizabeth +Parris was one; they declared that they were pinched by her and +strangled, and that she brought them a book to sign. "Mr. Hathorn, +a magistrate of Salem", says Robert Calef, in _More Wonders of the +Invisible World_, "asked her why she afflicted these children. She said +she did not afflict them. He asked her who did then. She said, I do not +know; how should I know? She said they were poor, distracted creatures, +and no heed ought to be given to what they said. Mr. Hathorn and Mr. +Noyes replied, that it was the judgment of all that were there present +that they were bewitched, and only she (the accused) said they were +distracted. She was accused by them that the _black man_ whispered to +her in her ear now (while she was upon examination), and that she had a +yellow bird that did use to suck between her fingers, and that the said +bird did suck now in the assembly." John Hathorn and Jonathan +Curwin were "the Assistants" of Salem village, and held most of the +examinations and issued the warrants. Justice Hathorn was very swift in +judgment, holding every accused person guilty in every particular. +When poor Jonathan Gary of Charlestown attended his wife charged with +witchcraft before Justice Hathorn, he requested that he might hold one +of her hands, "but it was denied me. Then she desired me to wipe the +tears from her eyes and the sweat from her face, which I did; then she +desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she should faint. +Justice Hathorn replied, she had strength enough to torment these +persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I speaking +something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be +silent, or else I should be turned out of the room". What a piteous +picture of the awful colonial inquisition and the village Torquemada! +What a grim portrait of an ancestor to hang in your memory, and to trace +your kindred to! + +Hawthorne's description of his ancestors in the Introduction to _The +Scarlet Letter_ is very delightful. As their representative, he declares +that he takes shame to himself for their sake, on account of these +relentless persecutions; but he thinks them earnest and energetic. +"From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; +a gray-headed ship-master, in each generation, retiring from the +quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the +hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the +gale, which had blustered against his sire and grand-sire. The boy +also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a +tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings, to grow +old, and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Not all, +however, for the last of the line of sailors, Captain Nathaniel +Hathorne, who married Elizabeth Clarke Manning, died at Calcutta after +the birth of three children, a boy and two girls. The house in which +the boy was born is still standing upon Union Street, which leads to the +Long Wharf, the chief seat of the old foreign trade of Salem. The next +house, with a back entrance on Union Street, is the Manning house, where +many years of the young Hawthorne's life were spent in the care of his +uncle, Robert Manning. He lived often upon an estate belonging to his +mother's family, in the town of Raymond, near Sebago Lake, in Maine. The +huge house there was called Manning's Folly, and is now said to be used +as a meeting-house. His uncle sent Hawthorne to Bowdoin College, where +he graduated in 1825. A correspondent of the Boston _Daily Advertiser_, +writing from Bowdoin at the late commencement, says that he had recently +found "in an old drawer" some papers which proved to be the manuscript +"parts" of the students at the Junior exhibition of 1824; among them was +Hawthorne's "De Patribus Conscriptis Romanorum". "It is quite brief," +writes the correspondent, "but is really curious as perhaps the only +college exercise in existence of the great tragic writer of our day +(has there been a greater since Shakespeare?). The last sentence is +as follows (note the words which I put in italics): 'Augustus equidem +antiquam magnificentiam patribus reddidit, _sed fulgor tantum fuit +sine fervore_. Nunquam in republica senatoribus potestas recuperata, +postremum species etiam amissa est.' On the same occasion Longfellow had +the salutatory oration in Latin--'Oratio Latina; Anglici Poetae.'" + +Hawthorne has given us a charming glimpse of himself as a college boy +in the letter to his fellow-student, Horatio Bridge, of the Navy, whose +_Journal of an African Cruiser_ he afterwards edited. "I know not whence +your faith came; but while we were lads together at a country college, +gathering blueberries, in study-hours, under those tall academic pines; +or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the +Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or +bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trouts in that shadowy +little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the +forest--though you and I will never cast a line in it again--two idle +lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred +things that the faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse +for us,--still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he +was to be a writer of fiction." From this sylvan university Hawthorne +came home to Salem; "as if," he wrote later, "Salem were for me the +inevitable centre of the universe." + +The old witch-hanging city had no weirder product than this dark-haired +son. He has certainly given it an interest which it must otherwise have +lacked; but he speaks of it with small affection, considering that his +family had lived there for two centuries. "An unjoyous attachment," he +calls it. And, to tell the truth, there was evidently little love lost +between the little city and its most famous citizen. Stories still float +in the social gossip of the town, which represent the shy author +as inaccessible to all invitations to dinner and tea; and while +the pleasant circle awaited his coming in the drawing-room, the +impracticable man was--at least so runs the tale--quietly hobnobbing +with companions to whom his fame was unknown. Those who coveted him as +a phoenix could never get him, while he gave himself freely to those +who saw in him only a placid barn-door fowl. The sensitive youth was a +recluse, upon whose imagination had fallen the gloomy mystery of Puritan +life and character. Salem was the inevitable centre of his universe +more truly than he thought. The mind of Justice Hathorn's descendant +was bewitched by the fascination of a certain devilish subtlety working +under the comeliest aspects in human affairs. It overcame him with +strange sympathy. It colored and controlled his intellectual life. + +Devoted all day to lonely reverie and musing upon the obscurer spiritual +passages of the life whose monuments he constantly encountered, that +musing became inevitably morbid. With the creative instinct of the +artist, he wrote the wild fancies into form as stories, many of which, +when written, he threw into the fire. Then, after nightfall, stealing +out from his room into the silent streets of Salem, and shadowy as the +ghosts with which to his susceptible imagination the dusky town was +thronged, he glided beneath the house in which the witch-trials were +held, or across the moonlit hill upon which the witches were hung, until +the spell was complete. Nor can we help fancying that, after the murder +of old Mr. White in Salem, which happened within a few years after +his return from college, which drew from Mr. Webster his most famous +criminal plea, and filled a shadowy corner of every museum in New +England, as every shivering little man of that time remembers, with an +awful reproduction of the scene in wax-figures, with real sheets on the +bed, and the murderer, in a glazed cap, stooping over to deal the fatal +blow--we cannot help fancying that the young recluse who walked by +night, the wizard whom as yet none knew, hovered about the house, gazing +at the windows of the fatal chamber, and listening in horror for the +faint whistle of the confederate in another street. + +Three years after he graduated, in 1828, he published anonymously a +slight romance with the motto from Southey, "Wilt thou go with me?" +Hawthorne never acknowledged the book, and it is now seldom found; but +it shows plainly the natural bent of his mind. It is a dim, dreamy tale, +such as a Byron-struck youth of the time might have written, except for +that startling self-possession of style and cold analysis of passion, +rather than sympathy with it, which showed no imitation, but remarkable +original power. The same lurid gloom overhangs it that shadows all his +works. It is uncanny; the figures of the romance are not persons, they +are passions, emotions, spiritual speculations. So the _Twice-told +Tales_ that seem at first but the pleasant fancies of a mild recluse, +gradually hold the mind with a Lamia-like fascination; and the author +says truly of them, in the Preface of 1851, "Even in what purport to be +pictures of actual life, we have allegory not always so warmly dressed +in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's +mind without a shiver." There are sunny gleams upon the pages, but a +strange, melancholy chill pervades the book. In "The Wedding Knell", +"The Minister's Black Veil", "The Gentle Boy", "Wakefield", "The +Prophetic Pictures", "The Hollow of the Three Hills", "Dr. Heidegger's +Experiment", "The Ambitious Guest", "The White Old Maid", "Edward +Fane's Rose-bud", "The Lily's Quest"--or in the "Legends of the Province +House", where the courtly provincial state of governors and ladies +glitters across the small, sad New England world, whose very baldness +jeers it to scorn--there is the same fateful atmosphere in which Goody +Cloyse might at any moment whisk by upon her broomstick, and in which +the startled heart stands still with unspeakable terror. + +The spell of mysterious horror which kindled Hawthorne's imagination +was a test of the character of his genius. The mind of this child +of witch-haunted Salem loved to hover between the natural and the +supernatural, and sought to tread the almost imperceptible and doubtful +line of contact. He instinctively sketched the phantoms that have the +figures of men, but are not human; the elusive, shadowy scenery which, +like that of Gustave Dore's pictures, is Nature sympathizing in her +forms and aspects with the emotions of terror or awe which the tale +excites. His genius broods entranced over the evanescent phantasmagoria +of the vague debatable land in which the realities of experience blend +with ghostly doubts and wonders. + +But from its poisonous flowers what a wondrous perfume he distilled! +Through his magic reed, into what penetrating melody he blew that +deathly air! His relentless fancy seemed to seek a sin that was +hopeless, a cruel despair that no faith could throw off. Yet his naive +and well-poised genius hung over the gulf of blackness, and peered into +the pit with the steady nerve and simple face of a boy. The mind of +the reader follows him with an aching wonder and admiration, as the +bewildered old mother forester watched Undine's gambols. As Hawthorne +describes Miriam in _The Marble Faun_, so may the character of his +genius be most truly indicated. Miriam, the reader will remember, turns +to Hilda and Kenyon for sympathy. "Yet it was to little purpose that +she approached the edge of the voiceless gulf between herself and them. +Standing on the utmost verge of that dark chasm, she might stretch out +her hand and never clasp a hand of theirs; she might strive to call out +'Help, friends! help!' but, as with dreamers when they shout, her voice +would perish inaudibly in the remoteness that seemed such a little way. +This perception of an infinite, shivering solitude, amid which we cannot +come close enough to human beings to be warmed by them, and where they +turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results +of any accident, misfortune, crime, or peculiarity of character, that +puts an individual ajar with the world." + +Thus it was because the early New England life made so much larger +account of the supernatural element than any other modern civilized +society, that the man whose blood had run in its veins instinctively +turned to it. But beyond this alluring spell of its darker and obscurer +individual experience, it seems neither to have touched his imagination +nor even to have aroused his interest. To Walter Scott the romance of +feudalism was precious for the sake of feudalism itself, in which +he believed with all his soul, and for that of the heroic old feudal +figures which he honored. He was a Tory in every particle of his +frame, and his genius made him the poet of Toryism. But Hawthorne had +apparently no especial political, religious, or patriotic affinity +with the spirit which inspired him. It was solely a fascination of the +intellect. And although he is distinctively the poet of the Puritans, +although it is to his genius that we shall always owe that image of them +which the power of The Scarlet Letter has imprinted upon literature, +and doubtless henceforth upon historical interpretation, yet what an +imperfect picture of that life it is! All its stern and melancholy +romance is there--its picturesque gloom and intense passion; but upon +those quivering pages, as in every passage of his stories drawn from +that spirit, there seems to be wanting a deep, complete, sympathetic +appreciation of the fine moral heroism, the spiritual grandeur, which +overhung that gloomy life, as a delicate purple mist suffuses in summer +twilights the bald crags of the crystal hills. It is the glare of the +scarlet letter itself, and all that it luridly reveals and weirdly +implies, which produced the tale. It was not beauty in itself nor +deformity, not virtue nor vice, which engaged the author's deepest +sympathy. It was the occult relation between the two. Thus while the +Puritans were of all men pious, it was the instinct of Hawthorne's +genius to search out and trace with terrible tenacity the dark and +devious thread of sin in their lives. + +Human life and character, whether in New England two hundred years ago +or in Italy to-day, interested him only as they were touched by this +glamour of sombre spiritual mystery; and the attraction pursued him in +every form in which it appeared. It is as apparent in the most perfect +of his smaller tales, _Rappaccini's Daughter_, as in _The Scarlet +Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables_, and _The +Marble Faun_. You may open almost at random, and you are as sure to find +it as to hear the ripple in Mozart's music, or the pathetic minor in a +Neapolitan melody. Take, for instance, The _Birth-Mark_, which we might +call the best of the smaller stories, if we had not just said the +same thing of _Rappaccini's Daughter_--for so even and complete is +Hawthorne's power, that, with few exceptions, each work of his, like +Benvenuto's, seems the most characteristic and felicitous. In this +story, a scholar marries a beautiful woman, upon whose face is a mark +which has hitherto seemed to be only a greater charm. Yet in one so +lovely the husband declares that, although it is the slightest possible +defect, it is yet the mark of earthly imperfection, and he proceeds to +lavish all the resources of science to procure its removal. But it +will not disappear; and at last he tells her that the crimson hand "has +clutched its grasp" into her very being, and that there is mortal danger +in trying the only means of removal that remains. She insists that +it shall be tried. It succeeds; but it removes the stain and her life +together. So in _Rappaccini's Daughter_. The old philosopher nourishes +his beautiful child upon the poisonous breath of a flower. She loves, +and her lover is likewise bewitched. In trying to break the spell, +she drinks an antidote which kills her. The point of interest in both +stories is the subtile connection, in the first, between the beauty +of Georgiana and the taint of the birth-mark; and, in the second, the +loveliness of Beatrice and the poison of the blossom. + +This, also, is the key of his last romance, _The Marble Faun_, one of +the most perfect works of art in literature, whose marvellous spell +begins with the very opening words: "Four individuals, in whose fortunes +we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one +of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome." When +these words are read, the mind familiar with Hawthorne is already +enthralled. "What a journey is beginning, not a step of which is +trodden, and yet the heart palpitates with apprehension! Through what +delicate, rosy lights of love, and soft, shimmering humor, and hopes and +doubts and vanishing delights, that journey will proceed, on and on into +utter gloom." And it does so, although "Hilda had a hopeful soul, and +saw sunlight on the mountain-tops". It does so, because Miriam and +Donatello are the figures which interest us most profoundly, and they +are both lost in the shadow. Donatello, indeed, is the true centre of +interest, as he is one of the most striking creations of genius. But the +perplexing charm of Donatello, what is it but the doubt that does not +dare to breathe itself, the appalled wonder whether, if the breeze +should lift those clustering locks a little higher, he would prove to be +faun or man? It never does lift them; the doubt is never solved, but +it is always suggested. The mystery of a partial humanity, morally +irresponsible but humanly conscious, haunts the entrancing page. It +draws us irresistibly on. But as the cloud closes around the lithe +figure of Donatello, we hear again from its hidden folds the words of +"The Birth-Mark": "Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth exult in +its invariable triumph over the immortal essence, which, in this dim +sphere of half-development, demands the completeness of a higher state". +Or still more sadly, the mysterious youth, half vanishing from our +sympathy, seems to murmur, with Beatrice Rappaccini, "And still as she +spoke, she kept her hand upon her heart,--'Wherefore didst thou inflict +this miserable doom upon thy child?'" + +We have left the story of Hawthorne's life sadly behind. But his +life had no more remarkable events than holding office in the Boston +Customhouse under Mr. Bancroft as collector; working for some time +with the Brook--Farmers, from whom he soon separated, not altogether +amicably; marrying and living in the Old Manse at Concord; returning +to the Custom-house in Salem as surveyor; then going to Lenox, in +Berkshire, where he lived in what he called "the ugliest little old +red farm-house that you ever saw", and where the story is told of his +shyness, that, if he saw anybody coming along the road whom he must +probably pass, he would jump over the wall into the pasture, and so give +the stranger a wide berth; back again to Concord; then to Liverpool as +consul; travelling in Europe afterwards, and home at last and forever, +to "The Wayside" under the Concord hill. "The hillside," he wrote to a +friend in 1852, "is covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into +luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, +intermixed with a few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks, +the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is +some very good shade to be found there; I spend delectable hours there +in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length with +a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost +always a breeze stirring along the side or the brow of the hill." + +It is not strange, certainly, that a man such as has been described, of +a morbid shyness, the path of whose genius diverged always out of +the sun into the darkest shade, and to whom human beings were merely +psychological phenomena, should have been accounted ungenial, +and sometimes even hard, cold, and perverse. From the bent of his +intellectual temperament it happens that in his simplest and sweetest +passages he still seems to be studying and curiously observing, rather +than sympathizing. You cannot help feeling constantly that the author is +looking askance both at his characters and you, the reader; and many a +young and fresh mind is troubled strangely by his books, as if it +were aware of a half-Mephistophelean smile upon the page. Nor is this +impression altogether removed by the remarkable familiarity of his +personal disclosures. There was never a man more shrinkingly retiring, +yet surely never was an author more naively frank. He is willing that +you should know all that a man may fairly reveal of himself. The great +interior story he does not tell, of course, but the Introduction to the +_Mosses from an Old Manse_, the opening chapter of _The Scarlet Letter_, +and the _Consular Experiences_, with much of the rest of _Our Old Home_, +are as intimate and explicit chapters of autobiography as can be found. +Nor would it be easy to find anywhere a more perfect idyl than that +introductory chapter of the _Mosses_. Its charm is perennial and +indescribable; and why should it not be, since it was written at a +time in which, as he says, "I was happy?" It is, perhaps, the most +softly-hued and exquisite work of his pen. So the sketch of "The +Custom-house", although prefatory to that most tragically powerful of +romances, + +_The Scarlet Letter_, is an incessant play of the shyest and most airy +humor. It is like the warbling of bobolinks before a thunder-burst. How +many other men, however unreserved with the pen, would be likely to +dare to paint, with the fidelity of Teniers and the simplicity of Fra +Angelico, a picture of the office and the companions in which and with +whom they did their daily work? The surveyor of customs in the port of +Salem treated the town of Salem, in which he lived and discharged his +daily task, as if it had been, with all its people, as vague and remote +a spot as the town of which he was about to treat in the story. He +commented upon the place and the people as modern travellers in Pompeii +discuss the ancient town. It made a great scandal. He was accused of +depicting with unpardonable severity worthy folks, whose friends were +sorely pained and indignant. But he wrote such sketches as he wrote his +stories. He treated his companions as he treated himself and all the +personages in history or experience with which he dealt, merely as +phenomena to be analyzed and described, with no more private malice or +personal emotion than the sun, which would have photographed them, warts +and all. + +Thus it was that the great currents of human sympathy never swept him +away. The character of his genius isolated him, and he stood aloof from +the common interests. Intent upon studying men in certain aspects, he +cared little for man; and the high tides of collective emotion among +his fellows left him dry and untouched. So he beholds and describes the +generous impulse of humanity with sceptical courtesy rather than with +hopeful cordiality. + +He does not chide you if you spend effort and life itself in the ardent +van of progress, but he asks simply, "Is six so much better than half +a dozen?" He will not quarrel with you if you expect the millennium +to-morrow. He only says, with that glimmering smile, "So soon?" Yet in +all this there was no shadow of spiritual pride. Nay, so far from this, +that the tranquil and pervasive sadness of all Hawthorne's writings, the +kind of heartache that they leave behind, seem to spring from the fact +that his nature was related to the moral world, as his own Donatello was +to the human. "So alert, so alluring, so noble", muses the heart as +we climb the Apennines towards the tower of Monte Beni; "alas! is he +human?" it whispers, with a pang of doubt. + +How this directed his choice of subjects, and affected his treatment of +them, when drawn from early history, we have already seen. It is +not, therefore, surprising, that the history into which he was born +interested him only in the same way. + +When he went to Europe as consul, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was already +published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved +its life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No +author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing +a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no +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." Is crime never romantic, then, until distance +ennobles it? Or were the tragedies of Puritan life so terrible that the +imagination could not help kindling, while the pangs of the plantation +are superficial and commonplace? Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and +Thackeray were able to find a shadow even in "merrie England". But +our great romancer looked at the American life of his time with these +marvellous eyes, and could see only monotonous sunshine. That the devil, +in the form of an elderly man clad in grave and decent attire, should +lead astray the saints of Salem village, two centuries ago, and confuse +right and wrong in the mind of Goodman Brown, was something that excited +his imagination, and produced one of his weirdest stories. But that the +same devil, clad in a sombre sophism, was confusing the sentiment of +right and wrong in the mind of his own countrymen he did not even +guess. The monotonous sunshine disappeared in the blackest storm. The +commonplace prosperity ended in tremendous war. What other man of equal +power, who was not intellectually constituted precisely as Hawthorne +was, could have stood merely perplexed and bewildered, harassed by the +inability of positive sympathy, in the vast conflict which tosses us all +in its terrible vortex? + +In political theories and in an abstract view of war men may differ. But +this war is not to be dismissed as a political difference. Here is an +attempt to destroy the government of a country, not because it oppressed +any man, but because its evident tendency was to secure universal +justice under law. It is, therefore, a conspiracy against human nature. +Civilization itself is at stake; and the warm blood of the noblest youth +is everywhere flowing in as sacred a cause as history records--flowing +not merely to maintain a certain form of government, but to vindicate +the rights of human nature. Shall there not be sorrow and pain, if a +friend is merely impatient or confounded by it--if he sees in it only +danger or doubt, and not hope for the right--or if he seem to insinuate +that it would have been better if the war had been avoided, even at +that countless cost to human welfare by which alone the avoidance was +possible? + +Yet, if the view of Hawthorne's mental constitution which has been +suggested be correct, this attitude of his, however deeply it may be +regretted, can hardly deserve moral condemnation. He knew perfectly well +that if a man has no ear for music he had better not try to sing. But +the danger with such men is that they are apt to doubt if music itself +be not a vain delusion. This danger Hawthorne escaped. There is none of +the shallow persiflage of the sceptic in his tone, nor any affectation +of cosmopolitan superiority. Mr. Edward Dicey, in his interesting +reminiscences of Hawthorne, published in _Macmillan's Magazine_, +illustrates this very happily. + + "To make his position intelligible, let me repeat an anecdote which + was told me by a very near friend of his and mine, who had heard it + from President Pierce himself. Frank Pierce had been, and was to the + day of Hawthorne's death, one of the oldest of his friends. At the + time of the Presidential election of 1856, Hawthorne, for once, took + part in politics, wrote a pamphlet in favor of his friend, and took + a most unusual interest in his success. When the result of the + nomination was known, and Pierce was President-elect, Hawthorne was + among the first to come and wish him joy. He sat down in the room + moodily and silently, as he was wont when anything troubled him; then, + without speaking a word, he shook Pierce warmly by the hand, and at + last remarked, 'Ah, Frank, what a pity!' The moment the victory was + won, that timid, hesitating mind saw the evils of the successful + course--the advantages of the one which had not been followed. So it + was always. Of two lines of action, he was perpetually in doubt which + was the best; and so, between the two, he always inclined to letting + things remain as they are. + + "Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet the + difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed constantly + upon his mind. He told me once that, while he had been consul at + Liverpool, a vessel arrived there with a number of negro sailors, who + had been brought from slave States, and would, of course, be enslaved + again on their return. He fancied that he ought to inform the men of + the fact, but then he was stopped by the reflection--who was to + provide for them if they became free? and, as he said, with a sigh, + 'while I was thinking, the vessel sailed.' So, I recollect, on the old + battle-field of Manassas, in which I strolled in company with + Hawthorne, meeting a batch of runaway slaves--weary, foot-sore, + wretched, and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine, + some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train going + northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me with the + remark, 'I am not sure we were doing right after all. How can these + poor beings find food and shelter away from home?' Thus this ingrained + and inherent doubt incapacitated him from following any course + vigorously. He thought, on the whole, that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd + Garrison and the Abolitionists were in the right, but then he was + never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after all; so that + his advocacy of their cause was of a very uncertain character. He saw + the best, to alter slightly the famous Horatian line, but he never + could quite make up his mind whether he altogether approved of its + wisdom, and therefore followed it but falteringly. + + "'Better to bear those ills we have, + Than fly to others that we know not of,' + + "expressed the philosophy to which Hawthorne was thus borne + imperceptibly. Unjustly, but yet not unreasonably, he was looked upon + as a pro-slavery man, and suspected of Southern sympathies. In + politics he was always halting between two opinions; or, rather, + holding one opinion, he could never summon up his courage to adhere + to it and it only." + +The truth is that his own times and their people and their affairs were +just as shadowy to him as those of any of his stories, and his mind +held the same curious, half-wistful poise among all the conflicts of +principle and passion around him, as among those of which he read and +mused. If you ask why this was so--how it was that the tragedy of an old +Italian garden, or the sin of a lonely Puritan parish, or the crime of +a provincial judge, should so stimulate his imagination with romantic +appeals and harrowing allegories, while either it did not see a Carolina +slave-pen, or found in it only a tame prosperity--you must take your +answer in the other question, why he did not weave into any of his +stories the black and bloody thread of the Inquisition. His genius +obeyed its law. When he wrote like a disembodied intelligence of +events with which his neighbors' hearts were quivering--when the same +half-smile flutters upon his lips in the essay _About War Matters_, +sketched as it were upon the battle-field, as in that upon _Fire +Worship_, written in the rural seclusion of the mossy Manse--ah me! it +is Donatello, in his tower of Monte Beni, contemplating with doubtful +interest the field upon which the flower of men are dying for an idea. +Do you wonder, as you see him and hear him, that your heart, bewildered, +asks and asks again, "Is he human? Is he a man?" + +Now that Hawthorne sleeps by the tranquil Concord, upon whose shores the +Old Manse was his bridal bower, those who knew him chiefly there revert +beyond the angry hour to those peaceful days. How dear the Old Manse was +to him he has himself recorded; and in the opening of the _Tanglewood +Tales_ he pays his tribute to that placid landscape, which will always +be recalled with pensive tenderness by those who, like him, became +familiar with it in happy hours. "To me," he writes, "there is a +peculiar, quiet charm in these broad meadows and gentle eminences. They +are better than mountains, because they do not stamp and stereotype +themselves into the brain, and thus grow wearisome with the same strong +impression, repeated day after day. A few summer weeks among mountains, +a lifetime among green meadows and placid slopes, with outlines forever +new, because continually fading out of the memory, such would be my +sober choice." He used to say, in those days--when, as he was fond of +insisting, he was the obscurest author in the world, because, although +he had told his tales twice, nobody cared to listen--that he never +knew exactly how he contrived to live. But he was then married, and the +dullest eye could not fail to detect the feminine grace and taste that +ordered the dwelling, and perceive the tender sagacity that made all +things possible. + +Such was his simplicity and frugality that, when he was left alone for a +little time in his Arcadia, lie would dismiss "the help", and, with some +friend of other days who came to share his loneliness, he cooked the +easy meal, and washed up the dishes. No picture is clearer in the memory +of a certain writer than that of the magician, in whose presence he +almost lost his breath, looking at him over a dinner-plate which he was +gravely wiping in the kitchen, while the handy friend, who had been a +Western settler, scoured the kettle at the door. Blithedale, where their +acquaintance had begun, had not allowed either of them to forget how to +help himself. It was amusing to one who knew this native independence of +Hawthorne, to hear, some years afterwards, that he wrote the "campaign" +_Life of Franklin Pierce_ for the sake of getting an office. That such a +man should do such a work was possibly incomprehensible to those who did +not know him upon any other supposition, until the fact was known +that Mr. Pierce was an old and constant friend. Then it was explained. +Hawthorne asked simply how he could help his friend, and he did the only +thing he could do for that purpose. But although he passed some years +in public office, he had neither taste nor talent for political life. +He owed his offices to works quite other than political. His first and +second appointments were virtually made by his friend Mr. Bancroft, and +the third by his friend Mr. Pierce. His claims were perceptible enough +to friendship, but would hardly have been so to a caucus. + +In this brief essay we have aimed only to indicate the general character +of the genius of Hawthorne, and to suggest a key to his peculiar +relation to his time. The reader will at once see that it is rather the +man than the author who has been described; but this has been designedly +done, for we confess a personal solicitude, shared, we are very sure, by +many friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that there shall not be wanting to +the future student of his works such light as acquaintance with the +man may throw upon them, as well as some picture of the impression his +personality made upon his contemporaries. + +Strongly formed, of dark, poetic gravity of aspect, lighted by the deep, +gleaming eye that recoiled with girlish coyness from contact with your +gaze; of rare courtesy and kindliness in personal intercourse, yet +so sensitive that his look and manner can be suggested by the word +"glimmering;" giving you a sense of restrained impatience to be away; +mostly silent in society, and speaking always with an appearance of +effort, but with a lambent light of delicate humor playing over all he +said in the confidence of familiarity, and firm self-possession under +all, as if the glimmering manner were only the tremulous surface of the +sea, Hawthorne was personally known to few, and intimately to very few. +But no one knew him without loving him, or saw him without remembering +him; and the name Nathaniel Hawthorne, which, when it was first written, +was supposed to be fictitious, is now one of the most enduring facts of +English literature. + + + + +RACHEL + + +One evening in Paris, we were strolling through that most Parisian +spot the Palais Royal, or, as it was called at that moment, the Palais +National. It was after the revolution of February; but, although the +place was full of associations with French revolutions, it seemed to +have no special sympathy with the trouble of the moment, and was as gay +as the youngest imagination conceives Paris to be. There was a constant +throng loitering along the arcades; the cafes were lighted and crowded; +men were smoking, sipping coffee, playing billiards, reading the +newspapers, discussing the debates in the Chamber and the coming +"Prophete" of Meyerbeer at the opera; women were chatting together in +the boutiques, pretty grisettes hurrying home; little blanchisseuses, +with their neatly-napkinned baskets, tripping among the crowd; strangers +watched the gay groups, paused at the windows of tailors and jewellers, +and felt the fascination of Paris. It was the moment of high-tide of +Parisian life. It was an epitome of Paris, and Paris is an epitome of +the time and of the world. + +At the corner of the Palais Royal is the Comedie Francaise, and to that +we were going. There Rachel was playing. There she had recently recited +the "Marseillaise" to frenzied Paris; and there, in the vestibule, +genius of French comedy, of French intellect, and of French life, sits +the wonderful Voltaire of Houdon, the statue which, for the first time, +after the dreadful portraits which misrepresent him, gives the spectator +some adequate idea of the personal appearance and impression of the man +who moulded an age. You can scarcely see the statue without a shudder. +It is remorseless intellect laid bare. The cold sweetness of the aspect, +the subtle penetration of the brow, the passionless supremacy of +a figure which is neither manly nor graceful, fill your mind with +apprehension and with the conviction that the French Revolution you have +seen is not the last. + +The curtain rises, and Paris and France roll away. A sad, solitary +figure, like a dream of tragic Greece, glides across the scene. The air +grows cold and thin, with a sense of the presence of lost antiquity. +The feeling of fate, vast, resistless, and terrible, rises like a +suffocating vapor; and the hopeless woe of the face, the pathetic +dignity of the form, assure you, before she speaks, that this is indeed +Rachel. The scenery is poor and hard; but its severe outlines and its +conventional character serve to suggest Greece. The drapery which hangs +upon Rachel is exquisitely studied from the most perfect statue. There +is not a fold which is not Greek and graceful, and which does not seem +obedient to the same law which touches her face with tragedy. As she +slowly opens her thin lips, your own blanch; and from her melancholy +eyes all smiles and possibility of joy have utterly passed away. Rachel +stands alone, a solitary statue of fate and woe. + +When she speaks, the low, thrilling, distinct voice seems to proceed +rather from her eyes than her mouth. It has a wan sound, if we may say +so. It is the very tone you would have predicted as coming from that +form, like the unearthly music which accompanies the speech of the +Commendatore's statue in "Don Giovanni". That appearance and that voice +are the key of the whole performance. Before she has spoken, you are +filled with the spirit of an age infinitely remote, and only related +to human sympathy now by the grandeur of suffering. The rest merely +confirms that impression. The whole is simple and intense. It is +conceived and fulfilled in the purest sense of Greek art. + +Of the early career and later life of Rachel such romantic stories are +told and believed that only to see the heroine of her own life would +be attraction enough to draw the world to Paris. Dr. Vernon, in his +_Memoires d'un Bourgeois_, has described her earliest appearance upon +the Boulevards--her studies, her trials, and her triumph. That triumph +has been unequalled in stage annals for enthusiasm and permanence. Other +actors have achieved single successes as brilliant; but no other has +held for so long the most fickle and fastidious nation thrall to her +powers; owning no rival near the throne, and ruling with a sway whose +splendor was only surpassed by its sternness. + +For Rachel has never sought to ally her genius to goodness, and has +rather despised than courted the aid of noble character. Not a lady +by birth or breeding, she is reported to have surpassed Messalina +in debauchery and Semiramis in luxury. Paris teems with tales of her +private life, which, while they are undoubtedly exaggerated, yet serve +to show the kind of impression her career has produced. Those modern +Sybarites, the princes and nobles of Russia, are the heroes of her +private romances; and her sumptuous apartments, if not a Tour de Nesle, +are at least a bower of Rosamond. + +As if to show the independent superiority of her art, she has been +willing to appear, or she really is, avaricious, mean, jealous, +passionate, false; and then, by her prodigious power, she has swayed the +public that so judged her as the wind tosses a leaf. There has, alas, +been disdain in her superiority. Perhaps Paris has found something +fascinating in her very contempt, as in the _Memoires du Diable_ the +heroine confesses that she loved the ferocity of her lover. Nor is it +a traditional fame that she has enjoyed; but whenever Rachel plays, the +theatre is crowded, and the terror and the tears are what they were when +she began. + +Rachel is the greatest of merely dramatic artists. Others are more +beautiful; others are more stately and imposing; others have been fitted +by external gifts of nature to personify characters of very marked +features; others are more graceful and lovely and winning; most others +mingle their own personality with the characters they assume, but Rachel +has this final evidence of genius, that she is always superior to +what she does; her mind presides over her own performances. It is the +perfection of art. In describing this peculiar supremacy of genius, a +scholar, in whose early death a poet and philosopher was lost, says of +Shakespeare: "He sat pensive and alone above the hundred-handed play +of his imagination." And Fanny Kemble, in her journal, describes a +conversation upon the stage, in the tomb-scene of "Romeo and Juliet", +where she, as Juliet, says to Mr. Romeo Keppel, "Where the devil is your +dagger?" while all the tearful audience are lost in the soft woe of the +scene. + +This is very much opposed to the general theory of acting, and the +story is told with great gusto of a boy who was sent to see Garrick, +we believe, and who was greatly delighted with the fine phrasing +and swagger of a supernumerary, but could not understand why people +applauded such an ordinary bumpkin as Garrick, who did not differ a whit +from all the country boobies he had ever seen. It is insisted that the +actor must persuade the spectator that he is what he seems to be, and +this is gravely put as the first and final proof of good acting. + +This is, however, both a false view of art and a false interpretation +and observation of experience. Shakespeare, through the mouth of +Hamlet, tells the players to "hold the mirror up to nature"--that is, to +represent nature. For what is the dramatic art, like all other arts, but +a representation? If it aims to deceive the eye--if it tries to juggle +the senses of the spectator--it is as trivial as if a painter should +put real gold upon his canvas instead of representing gold by means of +paint; or as if a sculptor should tinge the cheeks of his statue to make +it more like a human face. We have seen tin pans so well represented in +painting that the result was atrocious. For, if the object intended +is really a tin pan, and not the pleasure produced by a conscious +representation of one, then why not insert the veritable pan in the +picture at once? If art is only a more or less successful imitation of +natural objects, with a view to cheat the senses, it is an amusing game, +but it is not a noble pursuit. + +It is an equally false observation of experience; because, if the +spectator were really deceived, if the actor became, in the mind of the +audience, truly identical with the character he represents, then, when +that character was odious, the audience would revolt. If we cannot +quietly sit and see one dog tear another, without interfering, could we +gravely look on and only put our handkerchiefs to our eyes, when Othello +puts the pillow to the mouth of Desdemona? If we really supposed him +to be a murderous man, how instantly we should leap upon the stage and +rescue "the gentle lady". The truth is, to state it boldly, we know the +roaring lion to be only Snug, the joiner. + +All works of art must produce pleasure. Even the sternest and most +repulsive subjects must be touched by art into a pensive beauty, or they +fail to reach the height of great works. Goethe has shown this in the +_Laocoon_, and every man feels it in constant experience. One of the +grand themes of modern painting is the great tragedy of history, the +Crucifixion. Materially it is repulsive, as the spectacle of a man in +excruciating bodily torture; spiritually it is overwhelming, as the +symbolized suffering of God for sin. If, now, the pictures which treat +this subject were indeed only imitations of the scene, so that the +spectator listened for the groans of agony and looked to see the blood +drop from the brow crowned with thorns, how hideous and insupportable +the sight would be! The mind is conscious as it contemplates the picture +that it is a representation, and not a fact. The mere force of actuality +is, therefore, destroyed, and thought busies itself with the moral +significance of the scene. In the same way, in the tragedy of "Othello", +conscious that there is not the actual physical suffering which there +seems to be, the mind contemplates the real meaning which underlies that +appearance, and curses jealousy and the unmanly passions. + +Even in a very low walk of art the same principle is manifested. A man +might not care to adorn his parlor with the carcass of an ox or a hog, +nor invite to his table boors muzzy with beer. But the most elegant +of nations prizes the pictures of Teniers at extraordinary prices, and +hangs its galleries with works minutely representing the shambles. Here, +again, the explanation is this: that the mind, rejecting any idea of +actuality in the picture, is charmed with the delicacy of detail, with +lovely color, with tone, with tenderness, and all these are qualities +inseparable from the picture, and do not belong by any necessity to the +actual carcasses of animals. In the shambles, the sense of disgust and +repulsion overcomes any pleasure in light and color. In the parlor, if +the spectator were persuaded by the picture to hold his nose, the thing +would be as unlovely as it is in nature. Imitation pleases only so +far as it is known to be imitation. If deception by imitation were the +object of art, then the material of the sculptor should be wax, and not +marble. Every visitor mistakes the sitting figure of Cobbett, in Madame +Tussaud's collection of wax-works, for a real man, and will very likely, +as we did, speak to it. But who would accost the Moses of Michael +Angelo, or believe the sitting Medici in his chapel to have speech? + +There is something unhandsomely derogatory to art in this common view. +It is forgotten that art is not subsidiary nor auxiliary to nature, but +it is a distinct ministry, and has a world of its own. They are not in +opposition, nor do they clash. The cardinal fact of imitation in +works of art is evident enough. The exquisite charm of art lies in the +perfection of the imitation, coexisting with the consciousness of an +absolute difference, so that the effect produced is not at all that +which the object itself produces, but is an intellectual pleasure +arising from the perception of the mingling of rational intention with +the representation of the natural object. We can illustrate this by +supposing a child bringing in a fresh rose, and a painter his picture of +a rose. The pleasure derived from the picture is surely something better +than wonder at the skill with which the form and color of the flower are +imitated. Since imitation can never attain to the dignity and worth +of the original, and since we live in the midst of nature, it would be +folly to claim for its more or less successful copy the position and +form of a great mental and moral influence. + +Of course we are not unmindful of the inevitable assertion that if +certain forms are to be used for the expression of certain truths, the +first condition is that those forms shall be accurately rendered. Hence +arises the great stress laid by the modern schools upon a rigorous +imitation of nature, and hence what is called the pre-Raphaelite spirit, +with its marvellous detail. But mere imitation does not come any +nearer to great art by being perfect. If it is not informed by a great +intention, sculpture is only wax-work and painting a juggle. + +It is by her instinctive recognition of these fundamental principles +that Rachel shows herself to be an artist. She is fully persuaded of the +value of the modern spirit, and she belongs to the time by nothing more +than by her instinctive and hearty adaptation of the principles of art +which are illustrated in all other departments. There is nothing in +Millais's or Hunt's paintings more purely pre-Raphaelite than Rachel's +acting in the last scenes of "Adrienne Lecouvreur". It is the perfection +of detail. It was studied, gasp by gasp, and groan by groan, in the +hospital wards of Paris, where men were dying in agony. It is terrible, +but it is true. We have seen a crowded theatre hanging in a suspense +almost suffocating over that fearful scene. Men grew pale, women +fainted, a spell of silence and awe held us enchanted. But it was all +pure art. The actor was superior to the scene. It was the passion +with which she threw herself into the representation, with a distinct +conception of the whole, and a thorough knowledge of the means necessary +to produce its effect, that secured the success. There was a sublimity +of self-control in the spectacle, for, if she had allowed herself to be +overwhelmed by the excitement, the play must have paused; real feeling +would have invaded that which was represented, and we should, by a rude +shock, have been staring in wonder at the weeping woman Rachel, instead +of thrilling with the woes of the dying, despairing Adrienne. She seems +to be what we know she is not. + +Rachel's earlier triumphs were in the plays of Racine. Certainly nothing +could show the essential worth of the old Greek dramatic material more +than the fact that it could be rendered into French rhyme without +losing all its dignity. If a man should know Homer only through Pope's +translations, he could hardly understand the real greatness and peculiar +charm of Homer. And as most of us know him in no other way, we all +understand that the eminence of Homer is conceded upon the force of +tradition and the feeling of those who have read him in the original. +So, to the reader of Racine, it is his knowledge of the outline of the +grand old Greek stories that prevents their loss of charm and loftiness +when they masquerade in French rhyme. They have lost their sublimity, so +far as treatment can effect it, while they retain their general form of +interest. But it is the splendid triumph of Rachel that she restores the +original Greek grandeur to the drama. We no longer wonder at Racine's +idea of Phedre, but we are confronted with Phedre herself. From the +moment she appears, through every change and movement of the scene until +the catastrophe, a sense of fate, the grim, remorseless, and inexorable +destiny that presides over Greek story, is stamped upon every look and +nod and movement of Rachel. It is stated that, since the enthusiasm +produced in Paris by Ristori, Rachel's Italian rival, the sculptor +Schlesinger has declared that his statue of Rachel which he had called +Tragedy was only Melodrama after all. If the report be true, it does not +prove that Rachel, but Schlesinger, is not a great artist. + +It is this simplicity and grandeur that make the excellence of Rachel in +the characters of Racine. They cease to be French and become Greek. As +a victim of fate, she moves, from the first scene to the last, as by a +resistless impulse. Her voice has a low concentrated tone. Her movement +is not vehement, but intense. If she smiles, it is a wan gleam of +sadness, not of joy, as if the eyes that lighten for a moment saw all +the time the finger of fate pointing over her shoulder. The thin form, +graceful with intellectual dignity, not rounded with the ripeness of +young womanhood, the statuesque simplicity and severity of the drapery, +the pale cheek, the sad lips, the small eyes--these are accessory to the +whole impression, the melancholy ornaments of the tragic scene. Her fine +instinct avoids the romantic and melodramatic touches which, however +seductive to an actor who aims at effect, would destroy at once that +breadth and unity which characterize her best impersonations. Wherever +the idea of fate inspires the tragedy, or can properly be introduced +as the motive, there Rachel is unsurpassed and unapproachable. Her +stillness, her solemnity, her intensity; the want of mouthing, of +ranting, of all extravagance; the slight movement of the arms, and the +subtle inflections of the voice which are more expressive than gestures, +haunt the memory and float through the mind afterwards as the figure of +Francesca di Rimini, in the exquisite picture of Ary Scheffer, sweeps, +full of woe, which every line suggests, across the vision of Dante and +his guide. + +There was, naturally, the greatest curiosity and a good deal of +scepticism about Rachel's power in the modern drama, the melodrama of +Victor Hugo, and the social drama of Scribe. But her appearance in the +"Angelo" of Victor Hugo and in "Adrienne Lecouvreur" of Scribe satisfied +the curiosity and routed the scepticism. It was pleasant after the vast +and imposing forms, the tearless tragedy of Greek story, to see the +mastery of this genius in the conditions of a life and spirit with +which we were more familiar and sympathetic. It was clear that the same +passionate intensity which, united with the most exquisite perceptions, +enabled her so perfectly to restore the Greek spirit to the Greek form, +would as adequately represent the voluptuous southern life. If in the +old drama she was sculpture, so in the modern she was painting, not only +with the flowing outline, but with all the purple, palpitating hues of +passion. + +This is best manifested in the "Angelo", of which the scene is laid in +old Padua and is, therefore, full of the mysterious spirit of mediaeval +Italian, and especially Venetian life. Miss Cushman has played in an +English version of this drama, called the "Actress of Padua". But it is +hardly grandiose enough in its proportions to be very well adapted to +the talent of Miss Cushman. It was remarkable how perfectly the genius +which had, the evening before, adequately represented Phedre, could +impersonate the ablest finesse of Italian subtilty. The old Italian +romances were made real in a moment. The dim chambers, the dusky +passages, the sliding doors, the vivid contrast of gayety and gloom, the +dance in the palace and the duel in the garden, the smile on the lip and +the stab at the heart, the capricious feeling, the impetuous action, the +picturesque costume of life and society--all the substance and the form +of our ideas of characteristic Italian life, are comprised in Rachel's +Thisbe and Angelo. + +There is one scene in that play not to be forgotten. The curtain rises +and shows a vast, dim chamber in the castle, with a heavily-curtained +bed, and massive carved furniture, and a deep bay-window. It is night; a +candle burns upon the table, feebly flickering in the gloom of the great +chamber. Angelo, whom Thisbe loves, and who pretends to love her, is +sitting uneasily in the chamber with his mistress, whose name we have +forgotten, but whom he really loves. Thisbe is suspicious of his want of +faith, and burns with jealousy, but has had no proof. + +A gust of wind, the rustle of the tapestry, the creak of a bough in the +garden, the note of a night bird, any slightest sound makes the lovers +start and quiver, as if they stood upon the verge of an imminent peril. +Suddenly they both start at a low noise, apparently in the wall. Angelo +rises and looks about, his mistress shivers and shrinks, but they +discover nothing. The night deepens around them. The sense of calamity +and catastrophe rises in the spectator's mind. They start again. This +time they hear a louder noise, and glance helplessly around and feebly +try to scoff away their terror. The sound dies away, and they converse +in appalled and fragmentary whispers. But again a low, cautious, sliding +noise arrests them. Angelo springs up, runs for his hat and cloak, blows +out the candle upon the table, and escapes from the room, while his +mistress totters to the bed and throws herself upon it, feigning sleep. +The stage is left unoccupied, while the just-extinguished candle still +smokes upon the table, and the sidelights and footlights, being lowered, +wrap the vast chamber in deeper gloom. + +At this moment a small secret door in the wall at the bottom of the +stage slips aside, and Thisbe, still wearing her ball-dress, and with +a head-dress of gold sequins flashing in her black hair, is discovered +crouching in the aperture, holding an antique lamp in one hand, a little +raised, and with the other softly putting aside the door, while, bending +forward with a cat-like stillness, she glares around the chamber with +eager eyes, that flash upon everything at once. The picture is perfect. +The light falls from the raised lamp upon this jewelled figure crouching +in the darkness at the bottom of the stage. Judith was not more +terrible; Lucrezia Borgia not more superb. But, magnificent as it is, +it is a moment of such intense interest that applause is suspended. The +house is breathless, for it is but the tiger's crouch that precedes +the spring. The next instant she is upon the floor of the chamber, and, +still bending slightly forward to express the eager concentration of +her mind, she glances at the bed and the figure upon it with a scornful +sneer, that indicates how clearly she sees the pretence of sleep, and +how evidently somebody has been there, or something has happened which +justifies all her suspicion, and then, with panther-like celerity, she +darts about the chamber to find some trace of the false lover--a hat, +a glove, a plume, a cloak--to make assurance doubly sure. But there +is nothing upon the floor, nothing upon the table, nothing in the +bay-window, nothing upon the sofa, nor in the huge carved chairs; there +is nothing that proves the treachery she suspects. But her restless eye +leads her springing foot from one corner of the chamber to the other. +Speed increases with the lessening chance of proof; the eye flashes +more and more fiercely; the breast heaves; the hand clinches; the cheek +burns, until, suddenly, in the very moment of despair, having as yet +spoken no word, she comes to the table, sees the candle, which still +smokes, and drawing herself up with fearful calmness, her cheeks grow +pallid, the lips livid, the hands relax, the eye deadens as with a +blow, and, with the despairing conviction that she is betrayed, her +heart-break sighs itself out in a cold whisper, "_Elle fume encore_". + +In this she is as purely dramatic as in other plays she is classical. +But neither in the one nor the other is there a look, or a gesture, or +a word, which is not harmonious with the spirit of the style and the +character of the person represented. + +This is pure passion as the other is implacable fate. There is something +so tearfully human in it that you are touched as by a picture of the +Magdalen. Every representation of Rachel is preserved in your memory +with the first sights of the great statues and the famous pictures. + +In the French translation of Schiller's "Mary Stuart", a character which +may be supposed especially to interest Americans and English, Rachel is +not less excellent. The sad grace, the tender resignation, the poetic +enthusiasm, the petulant caprice, the wilful, lovely womanliness of the +lovely queen, are made tragically real by her representation. Perhaps it +is not the Mary of Mignet nor of history. But Mary Queen of Scots is one +of the characters which the imagination has chosen to take from history +and decorate with immortal grace. It cares less for what the woman +Mary was, than to have a figure standing upon the fact of history, but +radiant with the beauty of poetry. It has invested her with a loveliness +that is perhaps unreal, with a tenderness and sweetness that were +possibly foreign to her character, and with a general fascination and +good intention which a contemporary might not have discovered. + +It has made her the ideal of unfortunate womanhood. For it seemed that a +fate so tragic deserved a fame so fair. Perhaps the weakness which Mary +had, and which Lady Jane Grey had not, have been the very reasons why +the unfortunate, unhappy Queen Mary is dearer to our human sympathies +than the unfortunate Lady Jane. Perhaps because it was a woman +who pursued her, the instinct of men has sought to restore, by the +canonization of Mary, the womanly ideal injured by Elizabeth. + +But, whatever be the reason, there is no question that we judge Mary +Queen of Scots more by the imagination than by historical rigor; and it +is Mary, as the mind insists upon having her, that Rachel represents. +She conspires with the imagination to complete the ideal of Mary. It is +a story told in sad music to which we listen; it is a mournful panorama, +unfolding itself scene by scene, upon which we gaze. Lost in soft +melancholy, the figures of the drama move before us as in a tragic +dream. But after seeing Rachel's Mary we can see no other. If we meet +her in history or romance, it is always that figure, those pensive eyes, +forecasting a fearful doom, that voice whose music is cast in a hopeless +minor. It is thus that dramatic genius creates, and poetry disputes with +history. + +Jules Janin says that Rachel is best in those parts of this play where +the anger of the Queen is more prominent than the grief of the woman. + +This is true to a certain extent. It was not difficult to see that the +fierceness was more natural than the tenderness to the woman Rachel, and +that, therefore, those parts had a reality which the tenderness had not. +But the performance was symmetrical, and, so far as the mere acting was +concerned, the woman was as well rendered as the Queen. The want of the +spectacle was this, and it is, we fully grant, the defect of all her +similar personations: you felt that it was only intellect feigning +heart, though with perfect success. The tenderness and caprice of the +woman, and the pride and dignity of the Queen, are all there. She would +not be the consummate artist she is if she could not give them. But even +through your tears you see that it is art. It is, indeed, concealed +by its own perfection, but it is not lost in the loveliness of the +character it suggests, as might be the case with a greatly inferior +artist. You are half sure, as you own the excellence, that much of the +tender effect arises from your feeling that Rachel, as she represents a +woman so different from herself, regards her role with sad longing and +vague regret. When we say that she is the ideal Mary, we mean strictly +the artistic ideal. + +The late Charlotte Bronte, in her novel of _Villette_, has described +Rachel with a splendor of rhetoric that is very unusual with the author +of _Jane Eyre_. But in the style of the description it is very easy +to see the influence of the thing described. It has a picturesque +stateliness, a grave grace and musical pomp, which all belong to the +genius of Rachel. Even the soft gloom of her eyes is in it; a gloom +and a fire which no one could more subtly feel than Miss Bronte. Her +description is the best that we have seen of what is, in its nature, +after all indescribable. + +As the fame of an actor or singer is necessarily traditional, and +rapidly perishes, it is not easy to compare one with another when they +are not contemporaries, for you find yourself only comparing vague +impressions and reports. Of Roscius and Betterton we must accept the +names and allow the fame. We can see Reynolds's pictures, we can hear +Handel's music, we can read Goldsmith's and Johnson's books; but of +Garrick what can we have but a name, and somebody's account of what he +thought of Garrick? The touch of Shakespeare we can feel as well as did +our ancestors, and our great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren will +feel it as fully as we. But the voice of Malibran lingers in only a few +happy memories, and we know Mrs. Siddons better by Sir Joshua's portrait +than by her own glories. + +It is, therefore, impossible to decide what relative rank among +actresses Rachel occupies. Mrs. Jameson, in her _Common-Place Book of +Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies_, says some sharp things of her, and +Mrs. Jameson is a critic of too delicate a mind not to be heeded. The +general view she takes of Rachel is, that she is not a great artist in +the true sense of the word. She is a finished actress, but not an artist +fine enough to conceal her art. The last scene of "Adrienne Lecouvreur" +seems to Mrs. Jameson a mistake and a failure--so beyond the limits +of art, a mere imitation of a repulsive physical fact; and finally +she pronounces that Rachel has talent but not genius; while it is the +"entire absence of the high poetic element which distinguishes Rachel +as an actress, and places her at such an immeasurable distance from Mrs. +Siddons, that it shocks me to hear their names together". + +It may be fairly questioned, whether a woman so refined and cultivated +as Mrs. Jameson may not have judged Rachel rather by her wants as a +woman than by her excellence as an artist. That the terrible last scene +of "Adrienne" is a harrowing imitation of nature we have conceded. The +play is, in truth, a mere melodrama. It is a vaudeville of costume, +with a frightful catastrophe appended. But as an artist she seems to us +perfectly to render the part. She does not make it more than it is, but +she makes it just what it is--a proud, injured, and betrayed actress. +Whether the accuracy of her imitation is not justified by the intention, +which alone can redeem imitation, will remain a question to each +spectator. Mrs. Jameson also insists that Rachel's power is extraneous, +and excites only the senses and the intellect, and that she has become a +hard mannerist. + +In our remarks upon this celebrated actress we have viewed her simply +as an artist, and not as a woman. She appeals to the public only in that +way. Perhaps the sinister stories that are told of her private career +only serve to confirm and deepen the feeling of the intensity of her +nature, she so skilfully represents the most fearful passions, not +from the perception of genius alone, but from the knowledge of actual +experience. Certainly no woman's character has been more freely +discussed, and no public performer of any kind ever sought so little +to propitiate her audience. She has seemed to scorn the world she +fascinated; and like a superb snake, with glittering eyes and cold +crest, to gloat over the terror which held her captives thrall. Hence it +is not surprising to one who has seen her a great deal, and has felt the +peculiarity of her power, to find in Lehmann's portrait of her--which +is, perhaps, the most characteristic of all that have been taken--a +subtle resemblance to a serpent, which is at once fascinating and +startling. Mrs. Jameson mentions that when she first saw her in +Hermione, she was reminded of a Lamia, or serpent nature in woman's +form. As you look at Lehmann's portrait this feeling is irresistible. +The head bends slightly forward, with a darting, eager movement, yet +with a fine, lithe grace. The keen, bright eyes glance a little askance, +with a want of free confidence. There are a slim smoothness, a silent +alertness, in the general impression--a nervous, susceptible intentness, +united with undeniable beauty, that recall the deadly nightshade among +flowers and Keats's "Lamia" among poems. The portrait would fully +interpret the poem, She looked the lovely Lamia upon the verge of +flight, at the instant when she felt the calm, inexorable eye of +criticism and detection. In a moment, while you gaze, that form will be +prone, those bright, cold eyes malignant, that wily grace will undulate +into motion and glide away. You feel that there is no human depravity +that Rachel could not adequately represent. Perhaps you doubt if she +could be Desdemona or Imogen. + +Rachel is great, but there is something greater. It is not an entirely +satisfactory display of human power, even in its own way. Her triumph +is that of an actress. It is only an intellectual success. For however +subtly dramatic genius may seize and represent the forms of human +emotion, yet the representation is most perfect--not, indeed, as art, +but as a satisfaction of the heart--when the personal character of the +artist interests those emotions to himself, and thus sympathetically +affects the audience. Rachel's Mary is a perfect portrait of Mary; +but it is only a picture, after all, that expresses the difference in +feeling between the impression of her personation and that which will +be derived from another woman. The fiercer and darker passions of human +nature are depicted by her with terrible force-power. They throb with +reality; but in the soft, superior shades you still feel that it is +emotion, intellectually discerned. + +Such facts easily explain the present defection of Paris from Rachel. +Ristori has come up from Italy, and with one woman's smile, "full of the +warm South", she has lured Paris to her feet. There is no more sudden +and entire desertion of a favorite recorded in all the annals of popular +caprice. The feuilletonists, who are a power in Paris, have gone over in +a body to the beautiful Italian. They describe her triumphs precisely as +they described Rachel's. The old ecstasies are burnished up for the new +occasion. In a country like ours, where there is no theatre, and where +the dramatic differences only creep into an advertisement, such an +excitement as Paris feels, from such a cause and at such a time, is +simply incredible. It is, possibly, as real and dignified an excitement +as that which New York experienced upon the decease of the late lamented +William Poole. + +There are various explanations of this fall of Rachel, without resorting +to the theory of superior genius in Ristori. Undoubtedly Paris loves +novelty, and has been impatient of the disdainful sway of Rachel. Her +reputed avarice and want of courtesy and generosity, her total failure +to charm as a woman while she fascinated as an artist, have, naturally +enough, after many years, fatigued the patience and disappointed +the humane sympathies of a public whose mere curiosity had been long +satisfied. Rachel seemed only more Parisian than Paris. + +But when over the Alps came Ristori, lovely as a woman and eminent as +an artist, then there was a new person who could make Paris weep at her +greatness upon the stage, and her goodness away from it; who, in the +plenitude of her first success, could shame the reported avarice of her +fallen rival by offers of the sincerest generosity. When Ristori came, +who seemed to have a virtue for every vice of Rachel, Paris, with one +accord, hurried with hymns and incense to the new divinity. We regard it +as a homage to the woman no less than a tribute to the artist. We regard +it as saying to Rachel that if, being humane and lovely, she chose, from +pride, to rule by scornful superiority, she has greatly erred; or if, +being really unlovely, she has held this crown only by her genius, she +has yet to see human nature justify itself by preferring a humane to an +inhuman power. The most splendid illustration of this kind of homage was +the career of Jenny Lind in America. It was rather the fashion among +the _dilettanti_ to undervalue her excellence as an artist. A popular +superficial criticism was fond of limiting her dramatic power to +inferior roles. She was denied passion and great artistic skill; she was +accused of tricks. But, even had these things been true, what a career +it was! It was unprecedented, and can never be repeated. Yet it was, +at bottom, the success of a saint rather than that of a singer. Had she +been a worse or better artist the homage would have been the same. If +the public--and it is a happy fact--can love the woman even more than it +admires the artist, her triumph is assured. + +We look upon the enthusiasm for Ristori by no means as an unmingled +tribute to superior genius. We make no question of her actual womanly +charms. Even if appearance of generosity, of simplicity, and sweetness +were only deep Italian wile, and assumed, upon profound observation and +consideration of human nature and the circumstances of Rachel's position +in Paris, merely for the purpose of exciting applause, that applause +would still be genuine, and would prove the loyalty of the public mind +to what is truly lovely. It was our good-fortune to see Ristori in +Italy, where, for the last ten years, she has been accounted the first +Italian actress. She has there been seen by all the travelling world of +Europe and America. It is not possible that so great a talent, as the +Parisians consider it, could have been so long overlooked. We well +remember Ristori as a charming, natural, simple actress; but of the +surpassing power which Paris has discovered probably very few of us +retain any recollection. + + + + +THACKERAY IN AMERICA + + +Mr. Thackeray's visit at least demonstrates that if we are unwilling +to pay English authors for their books, we are ready to reward them +handsomely for the opportunity of seeing and hearing them. If Mr. +Dickens, instead of dining at other people's expense, and making +speeches at his own, when he came to see us, had devoted an evening +or two in the week to lecturing, his purse would have been fuller, his +feelings sweeter, and his fame fairer. It was a Quixotic crusade, that +of the Copyright, and the excellent Don has never forgiven the windmill +that broke his spear. + +Undoubtedly, when it was ascertained that Mr. Thackeray was coming, the +public feeling on this side of the sea was very much divided as to his +probable reception. "He'll come and humbug us, eat our dinners, +pocket our money, and go home and abuse us, like that unmitigated snob +Dickens," said Jonathan, chafing with the remembrance of that grand ball +at the Park Theatre and the Boz tableaux, and the universal wining and +dining, to which the distinguished Dickens was subject while he was our +guest. + +"Let him have his say," said others, "and we will have our look. We will +pay a dollar to hear him, if we can see him at the same time; and as +for the abuse, why, it takes even more than two such cubs of the roaring +British Lion to frighten the American Eagle. Let him come, and give him +fair play." + +He did come, and had fair play, and returned to England with a +comfortable pot of gold holding $12.000, and with the hope and promise +of seeing us again in September, to discourse of something not less +entertaining than the witty men and sparkling times of Anne. We think +there was no disappointment with his lectures. Those who knew his books +found the author in the lecturer. Those who did not know his books +were charmed in the lecturer by what is charming in the author--the +unaffected humanity, the tenderness, the sweetness, the genial play of +fancy, and the sad touch of truth, with that glancing stroke of satire +which, lightning-like, illumines while it withers. The lectures were +even more delightful than the books, because the tone of the voice and +the appearance of the man, the general personal magnetism, explained and +alleviated so much that would otherwise have seemed doubtful or unfair. +For those who had long felt in the writings of Thackeray a reality quite +inexpressible, there was a secret delight in finding it justified in +his speaking; for he speaks as he writes--simply, directly, without +flourish, without any cant of oratory, commending what he says by its +intrinsic sense, and the sympathetic and humane way in which it was +spoken. Thackeray is the kind of "stump orator" that would have pleased +Carlyle. He never thrusts himself between you and his thought. If his +conception of the time and his estimate of the men differ from your +own, you have at least no doubt what his view is, nor how sincere and +necessary it is to him. Mr. Thackeray considers Swift a misanthrope; +he loves Goldsmith and Steele and Harry Fielding; he has no love +for Sterne, great admiration for Pope, and alleviated admiration for +Addison. How could it be otherwise? How could Thackeray not think Swift +a misanthrope and Sterne a factitious sentimentalist? He is a man of +instincts, not of thoughts: he sees and feels. He would be Shakespeare's +call-boy, rather than dine with the Dean of St. Patrick's. He would take +a pot of ale with Goldsmith, rather than a glass of burgundy with the +"Reverend Mr. Sterne", and that simply because he is Thackeray. He +would have done it as Fielding would have done it, because he values one +genuine emotion above the most dazzling thought; because he is, in fine, +a Bohemian, "a minion of the moon", a great, sweet, generous heart. + +We say this with more unction now that we have personal proof of it in +his public and private intercourse while he was here. + +The popular Thackeray-theory, before his arrival, was of a severe +satirist, who concealed scalpels in his sleeves and carried probes in +his waistcoat pockets; a wearer of masks; a scoffer and sneerer, and +general infidel of all high aims and noble character. Certainly we are +justified in saying that his presence among us quite corrected this +idea. We welcomed a friendly, genial man; not at all convinced that +speech is heaven's first law, but willing to be silent when there is +nothing to say; who decidedly refused to be lionized--not by sulking, +but by stepping off the pedestal and challenging the common sympathies +of all he met; a man who, in view of the thirty-odd editions of Martin +Farquhar Tupper, was willing to confess that every author should "think +small-beer of himself". Indeed, he has this rare quality, that his +personal impression deepens, in kind, that of his writings. The quiet +and comprehensive grasp of the fact, and the intellectual impossibility +of holding fast anything but the fact, is as manifest in the essayist +upon the wits as in the author of _Henry Esmond_ and _Vanity Fair_. +Shall we say that this is the sum of his power, and the secret of +his satire? It is not what might be, nor what we or other persons of +well-regulated minds might wish, but it is the actual state of things +that he sees and describes. How, then, can he help what we call satire, +if he accept Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's invitation and describe her party? +There was no more satire in it, so far as he is concerned, than in +painting lilies white. A full-length portrait of the fair Lady Beatrix, +too, must needs show a gay and vivid figure, superbly glittering across +the vista of those stately days. Then, should Dab and Tab, the eminent +critics, step up and demand that her eyes be a pale blue, and her +stomacher higher around the neck? Do Dab and Tab expect to gather pears +from peach-trees? Or, because their theory of dendrology convinces +them that an ideal fruit-tree would supply any fruit desired upon +application, do they denounce the non-pear-bearing peach-tree in the +columns of their valuable journal? This is the drift of the fault found +with Thackeray. He is not Fenelon, he is not Dickens, he is not Scott; +he is not poetical, he is not ideal, he is not humane; he is not Tit, +he is not Tat, complain the eminent Dabs and Tabs. Of course he is not, +because he is Thackeray--a man who describes what he sees, motives as +well as appearances--a man who believes that character is better +than talent--that there is a worldly weakness superior to worldly +wisdom--that Dick Steele may haunt the ale-house and be carried home +muzzy, and yet be a more commendable character than the reverend Dean +of St. Patrick's, who has genius enough to illuminate a century, but not +sympathy enough to sweeten a drop of beer. And he represents this in +a way that makes us see it as he does, and without exaggeration; for +surely nothing could be more simple than his story of the life of +"honest Dick Steele". If he allotted to that gentleman a consideration +disproportioned to the space he occupies in literary history, it only +showed the more strikingly how deeply the writer-lecturer's sympathy was +touched by Steele's honest humanity. + +An article in our April number complained that the tendency of his view +of Anne's times was to a social laxity, which might be very exhilarating +but was very dangerous; that the lecturer's warm commendation of +fermented drinks, taken at a very early hour of the morning in +tavern-rooms and club houses, was as deleterious to the moral health of +enthusiastic young readers disposed to the literary life as the beverage +itself to their physical health. + +But this is not a charge to be brought against Thackeray. It is a +quarrel with history and with the nature of literary life. Artists and +authors have always been the good fellows of the world. That mental +organization which predisposes a man to the pursuit of literature +and art is made up of talent combined with ardent social sympathy, +geniality, and passion, and leads him to taste every cup and try every +experience. There is certainly no essential necessity that this class +should be a dissipated and disreputable class, but by their very +susceptibility to enjoyment they will always be the pleasure lovers and +seekers. And here is the social compensation to the literary man for the +surrender of those chances of fortune which men of other pursuits enjoy. +If he makes less money, he makes more juice out of what he does make. If +he cannot drink Burgundy he can quaff the nut-brown ale; while the most +brilliant wit, the most salient fancy, the sweetest sympathy, the most +genial culture, shall sparkle at his board more radiantly than a silver +service, and give him the spirit of the tropics and the Rhine, whose +fruits are on other tables. The golden light that transfigures talent +and illuminates the world, and which we call genius, is erratic and +erotic; and while in Milton it is austere, and in Wordsworth cool, +and in Southey methodical, in Shakespeare it is fervent, with all the +results of fervor; in Raphael lovely, with all the excesses of love; in +Dante moody, with all the whims of caprice. The old quarrel of Lombard +Street with Grub Street is as profound as that of Osiris and Typho--it +is the difference of sympathy. The Marquis of Westminster will take good +care that no superfluous shilling escapes. Oliver Goldsmith will still +spend his last shilling upon a brave and unnecessary banquet to his +friends. + +Whether this be a final fact of human organization or not, it is +certainly a fact of history. Every man instinctively believes that +Shakespeare stole deer, just as he disbelieves that Lord-mayor +Whittington ever told a lie; and the secret of that instinct is the +consciousness of the difference in organization. "Knave, I have the +power to hang ye," says somebody in one of Beaumont and Fletcher's +plays. "And I do be hanged and scorn ye," is the airy answer. "I had a +pleasant hour the other evening," said a friend to us, "over my cigar +and a book." "What book was that?" "A treatise conclusively proving +the awful consequences of smoking." De Quincey came up to London and +declared war upon opium; but during a little amnesty, in which he lapsed +into his old elysium, he wrote his best book depicting its horrors. + +Our readers will not imagine that we are advocating the claims of +drunkenness nor defending social excess. We are only recognizing a fact +and stating an obvious tendency. The most brilliant illustrations of +every virtue are to be found in the literary guild, as well as the +saddest beacons of warning; yet it will often occur that the last in +talent and the first in excess of a picked company will be a man around +whom sympathy most kindly lingers. We love Goldsmith more at the head of +an ill-advised feast than Johnson and his friends leaving it, thoughtful +and generous as their conduct was. The heart despises prudence. + +In the single-hearted regard we know that pity has a larger share. +Yet it is not so much that pity is commiseration for misfortune +and deficiency, as that which is recognition of a necessary worldly +ignorance. The literary class is the most innocent of all. The contempt +of practical men for the poets is based upon a consciousness that they +are not bad enough for a bad world. To a practical man nothing is so +absurd as the lack of worldly shrewdness. The very complaint of the +literary life that it does not amass wealth and live in palaces is the +scorn of the practical man, for he cannot understand that intellectual +opacity which prevents the literary man from seeing the necessity of the +different pecuniary condition. It is clear enough to the publisher who +lays up fifty thousand a year why the author ends the year in debt. +But the author is amazed that he who deals in ideas can only dine upon +occasional chops, while the man who merely binds and sells ideas sits +down to perpetual sirloin. If they should change places, fortune would +change with them. The publisher turned author would still lay up his +thousands; the publishing author would still directly lose thousands. It +is simply because it is a matter of prudence, economy, and knowledge of +the world. Thomas Hood made his ten thousand dollars a year, but if +he lived at the rate of fifteen thousand he would hardly die rich. Mr. +Jerdan, a gentleman who, in his _Autobiography_, advises energetic youth +to betake themselves to the highway rather than to literature, was, we +understand, in the receipt of an easy income, and was a welcome guest in +pleasant houses; but living in a careless, shiftless, extravagant way, +he was presently poor, and, instead of giving his memoirs the motto, +_peccavi_, and inditing a warning, he dashes off a truculent defiance. +Practical publishers and practical men of all sorts invest their +earnings in Michigan Central or Cincinnati and Dayton instead, in steady +works and devoted days, and reap a pleasant harvest of dividends. Our +friends the authors invest in prime Havanas, Rhenish, in oyster suppers, +love and leisure, and divide a heavy percentage of headache, dyspepsia, +and debt. + +This is as true a view, from another point, as the one we have already +taken. If the literary life has the pleasures of freedom, it has also +its pains. It may be willing to resign the queen's drawing-room, with +the illustrious galaxy of stars and garters, for the chamber with a +party nobler than the nobility. The author's success is of a wholly +different kind from that of the publisher, and he is thoughtless who +demands both. Mr. Roe, who sells sugar, naturally complains that Mr. +Doe, who sells molasses, makes money more rapidly. But Mr. Tennyson, +who writes poems, can hardly make the same complaint of Mr. Moxon, who +publishes them, as was very fairly shown in a number of the _Westminster +Review_, when noticing Mr. Jordan's book. + +What we have said is strictly related to Mr. Thackeray's lectures, which +discuss literature. All the men he commemorated were illustrations and +exponents of the career of letters. They all, in various ways, showed +the various phenomena of the temperament. And when in treating of them +the critic came to Steele, he found one who was one of the most striking +illustrations of one of the most universal aspects of literary life--the +simple-hearted, unsuspicious, gay gallant and genial gentleman; +ready with his sword or his pen, with a smile or a tear, the fair +representative of the social tendency of his life. It seems to us that +the Thackeray theory--the conclusion that he is a man who loves to +depict madness, and has no sensibilities to the finer qualities of +character--crumbled quite away before that lecture upon Steele. We know +that it was not considered the best; we know that many of the delighted +audience were not sufficiently familiar with literary history fully to +understand the position of the man in the lecturer's review; but, as a +key to Thackeray, it was, perhaps, the most valuable of all. We know in +literature of no more gentle treatment; we have not often encountered in +men of the most rigorous and acknowledged virtue such humane tenderness; +we have not often heard from the most clerical lips words of such +genuine Christianity. Steele's was a character which makes weakness +amiable: it was a weakness, if you will, but it was certainly +amiability, and it was a combination more attractive than many +full-panoplied excellences. It was not presented as a model. Captain +Steele in the tap-room was not painted as the ideal of virtuous manhood; +but it certainly was intimated that many admirable things were consonant +with a free use of beer. It was frankly stated that if, in that +character, virtue abounded, cakes and ale did much more abound. Captain +Richard Steele might have behaved much better than he did, but we should +then have never heard of him. A few fine essays do not float a man into +immortality, but the generous character, the heart sweet in all excesses +and under all chances, is a spectacle too beautiful and too rare to be +easily forgotten. A man is better than many books. Even a man who is not +immaculate may have more virtuous influence than the discreetest saint. +Let us remember how fondly the old painters lingered round the story of +Magdalen, and thank Thackeray for his full-length Steele. + +We conceive this to be the chief result of Thackeray's visit, that he +convinced us of his intellectual integrity; he showed us how impossible +it is for him to see the world and describe it other than he does. He +does not profess cynicism, nor satirize society with malice; there is no +man more humble, none more simple; his interests are human and concrete, +not abstract. We have already said that he looks through and through at +the fact. It is easy enough, and at some future time it will be done, to +deduce the peculiarity of his writings from the character of his mind. +There is no man who masks so little as he in assuming the author. +His books are his observations reduced to writing. It seems to us as +singular to demand that Dante should be like Shakespeare as to quarrel +with Thackeray's want of what is called ideal portraiture. Even if you +thought, from reading his _Vanity Fair_, that he had no conception +of noble women, certainly after the lecture upon Swift, after all the +lectures, in which every allusion to women was so manly and delicate and +sympathetic, you thought so no longer. It is clear that his sympathy +is attracted to women--to that which is essentially womanly, feminine. +Qualities common to both sexes do not necessarily charm him because +he finds them in women. A certain degree of goodness must always be +assumed. It is only the rare flowering that inspires special praise. +You call Amelia's fondness for George Osborne foolish, fond idolatry. +Thackeray smiles, as if all love were not idolatry of the fondest +foolishness. What was Hero's--what was Francesco di Rimini's--what was +Juliet's? They might have been more brilliant women than Amelia, and +their idols of a larger mould than George, but the love was the same old +foolish, fond idolatry. The passion of love and a profound and sensible +knowledge, regard based upon prodigious knowledge of character and +appreciation of talent, are different things. What is the historic and +poetic splendor of love but the very fact, which constantly appears +in Thackeray's stories, namely, that it is a glory which dazzles and +blinds. Men rarely love the women they ought to love, according to the +ideal standards. It is this that makes the plot and mystery of life. Is +it not the perpetual surprise of all Jane's friends that she should +love Timothy instead of Thomas? and is not the courtly and accomplished +Thomas sure to surrender to some accidental Lucy without position, +wealth, style, worth, culture--without anything but heart? This is the +fact, and it reappears in Thackeray, and it gives his books that air of +reality which they possess beyond all modern story. + +And it is this single perception of the fact which, simple as it is, is +the rarest intellectual quality that made his lectures so interesting. +The sun rose again upon the vanished century, and lighted those historic +streets. The wits of Queen Anne ruled the hour, and we were bidden to +their feast. Much reading of history and memoirs had not so sent the +blood into those old English cheeks, and so moved those limbs in proper +measure, as these swift glances through the eyes of genius. It was +because, true to himself, Thackeray gave us his impression of those wits +as men rather than authors. For he loves character more than thought. +He is a man of the world, and not a scholar. He interprets the author +by the man. When you are made intimate with young Swift, Sir William +Temple's saturnine secretary, you more intelligently appreciate the Dean +of St. Patrick's. When the surplice of Mr. Sterne is raised a little, +more is seen than the reverend gentleman intends. Hogarth, the bluff +Londoner, necessarily depicts a bluff, coarse, obvious morality. The +hearty Fielding, the cool Addison, the genial Goldsmith, these are the +figures that remain in memory, and their works are valuable as they +indicate the man. + +Mr. Thackeray's success was very great. He did not visit the West, nor +Canada. He went home without seeing Niagara Falls. But wherever he +did go he found a generous and social welcome, and a respectful and +sympathetic hearing. He came to fulfil no mission, but he certainly knit +more closely our sympathy with Englishmen. Heralded by various romantic +memoirs, he smiled at them, stoutly asserted that he had been always +able to command a good dinner, and to pay for it; nor did he seek to +disguise that he hoped his American tour would help him to command and +pay for more. He promised not to write a book about us, but we hope he +will, for we can ill spare the criticism of such an observer. At least, +we may be sure that the material gathered here will be worked up in some +way. He found that we were not savages nor bores. He found that there +were a hundred here for every score in England who knew well and loved +the men of whom he spoke. He found that the same red blood colors all +the lips that speak the language he so nobly praised. He found friends +instead of critics. He found those who, loving the author, loved the man +more. He found a quiet welcome from those who are waiting to welcome him +again and as sincerely. + + + + +SIR PHILIP SIDNEY + + +Wearied of the world and saddened by the ruin of his fortunes, the +Italian Count Maddalo turned from the street, which rang with tales of +disaster and swarmed with melancholy faces, into his palace. Perplexed +and anxious, he passed through the stately rooms in which hung the +portraits of generations of ancestors. The day was hot; his blood was +feverish, but the pictures seemed to him cool and remote in a holy calm. +He looked at them earnestly; he remembered the long history of which +his fathers were parts, he recalled their valor and their patience, and +asked himself whether, after all, their manhood was not their patent of +nobility; and stretching out his hands towards them, exclaimed: "Let me +feel that I am indeed your son by sharing that manhood which made you +noble." + +We Americans laugh at ancestors; and if the best of them came back +again, we should be as likely to laugh at his wig as listen to his +wisdom. And in our evanescent houses and uneasy life we would no more +have ancient ranges of family pictures than Arabs in their tents. Yet +we are constantly building and visiting the greatest portrait gallery of +all in the histories we write and read; and the hour is never lost which +we give to it. It may teach a maid humility to know that her mother was +fairer. It may make a youth more modest to know that his grandsire was +braver. For if the pictures of history show us that deformity is as +old as grace, and that virtue was always martyred, they also show that +crime, however prosperous for a time, is at last disastrous, and that +there can be no permanent peace without justice and freedom. + +Those pictures teach us also that character is inherited like name +and treasure, and that all of us may have famous or infamous ancestors +perhaps without knowing it. The melancholy poet, eating his own heart +out in a city garret, is the child of Tasso. Grinding Ralph Nickleby, +the usurer, is Shylock's grandson. The unjust judge, who declares that +some men have no rights which others are bound to respect, is a later +Jeffries on his bloody assizes, or dooming Algernon Sidney to the block +once more for loving liberty; while he whose dull heart among the new +duties of another time is never quickened with public spirit, and who +as a citizen aims only at his own selfish advantage, is a later Benedict +Arnold whom every generous heart despises. + +From this lineage of character arises this great convenience--that as it +is bad manners to criticise our neighbors by name, we may hit them many +a sly rap over the shoulders of their ancestors who wore turbans, or +helmets, or bagwigs, and lived long ago in other countries. The Church +especially finds great comfort in this resource, and the backs of the +whole Hebrew race must be sore with the scorings they get for the sins +of Christian congregations. The timid Peter, the foolish Virgins, the +wicked Herod, are pilloried every Sunday in the pulpit, to the great +satisfaction of the Peters, Virgins, and Herods dozing in the pews. But +when some ardent preacher, heading out of his metaphors, and jumping +from Judea and the first century into the United States and the +nineteenth, disturbs Peter's enjoyment of his ancestor's castigation by +saying vehemently to his face with all the lightning of the law in his +eye, and its thunders in his voice, "Thou art the man!" Peter recoils +with decorous horror, begs his pastor to remember that he and Herod +are sheep who were to be led by still waters; warns him not to bring +politics into the pulpit, to talk not of living people, but of old +pictures. So the poor shepherd is driven back to his pictures, and +cudgels Peter once more from behind a metaphor. + +But the fairest use of these old pictures is to make us feel our common +humanity, and to discover that what seems to us a hopelessly romantic +ideal of character is a familiar fact of every day. Heroism is always +the same, however the fashion of a hero's clothes may alter. Every hero +in history is as near to a man as his neighbor, and if we should tell +the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry. +Sir Philip Sidney wore doublet and hose, and died in Flanders three +hundred years ago. His name is the synonym of manly honor, of generous +scholarship, of the finest nobility, of the spiritual light that most +irradiates human nature. Look at his portrait closely; it is no stranger +that you see; it is no far-off Englishman. It is your friend, your son, +your brother, your lover. Whoever knew Wendell Phillips knew Philip +Sidney. It is the same spirit in a thousand forms; a perpetual presence, +a constant benediction: Look at his portrait and + + "The night shall be filled with music, + And the cares that infest the day + Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, + And as silently steal away." + +The gray walls, the red and peaked roof of the old house of Penshurst, +stand in the pleasant English valley of the Medway, in soft and showery +Kent. Kent is all garden, and there, in November, 1554, Philip Sidney +was born. His father, Sir Henry Sidney, was a wise and honest man. Bred +at court, his sturdy honor was never corrupted. King Edward died in his +arms, and Queen Mary confirmed all his honors and offices three weeks +before the birth of his oldest son, whom, in gratitude, he named Philip, +for the queen's new Spanish husband. Philip's mother was Mary Dudley, +daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, sister of the famous Earl of +Leicester, sister also of Lord Guildford Dudley and sister-in-law of +Lady Jane Grey. The little Philip was born into a sad household. Within +fifteen months his grandfather and uncle had been beheaded for treason; +and his sorrowing mother, a truly noble and tender woman, had been the +victim of small-pox, and hid her grieving heart and poor scarred face in +the silence and seclusion of Penshurst. On the south side of the house +was the old garden or plaisance, sloping down to the Medway, where, in +those English summers of three hundred years ago, when the cruel fires +of Mary were busily burning at Smithfield, the lovely boy Philip, +fair-featured, with a high forehead and ruddy brown hair, almost +red--the same color as that of his nephew Algernon--walked with his shy +mother, picking daisies and chasing butterflies, and calling to her in +a soft, musical voice; while within the house the grave father, when he +was not away in Wales, of which he was lord-president, mused upon great +events that were stirring in Europe--the abdication of Charles V., the +fall of Calais, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the throne of +England. The lordly banqueting-hall, in which the politics of three +centuries ago were discussed at Penshurst, is still standing. You may +still sit upon the wooden benches where Burleigh, Spenser, Ben Jonson, +James I., and his son Prince Charles have sat, and where, a little +later, the victim of Prince Charles's cruel son, Algernon Sidney, +dreamed of noble manhood and went forth a noble man; while in those +shady avenues of beech and oak outside, smooth Edmund Waller bowed and +smirked, and sighed compliments to his Sacharissa, as he called Dorothy +Sidney, Algernon's sister. + +At the age of eleven Master Sidney was put to school at Shrewsbury, on +the borders of Wales, of which country his father was lord-president. +His fond friend, Fulke Greville, who was here at school with him, and +afterwards wrote his life, says that even the masters found something in +him to observe and learn. Study probably cost him little effort and +few tears. We may be sure he stood at the head of his class, and was a +grave, good boy--not good as calves and blanc-mange are, but like wine +and oak saplings. "My little Philip," as his mother tenderly calls him, +was no Miss Nancy. When he was older he wrote to his brother Robert, +then upon his travels, that "if there were any good wars he should go +to them". So, at Shrewsbury he doubtless went to all the good wars among +his school-mates, while during the short intervals of peace he mastered +his humanities, and at last, when not yet fifteen years old, he was +entered at Christ Church, Oxford. + +Great good-fortune is the most searching test of character. If a man +have fine friends, fine family, fine talents, and fine prospects, they +are very likely to be the sirens in whose sweet singing he forgets +everything but the pleasure of listening to it. If most of us had come +of famous ancestry--if our father were a vice-regal governor--if the +sovereign's favorite were our uncle, who intended us for his heir--if +a marriage were proposed with the beautiful daughter of the +prime-minister, and we were ourselves young, handsome, and +accomplished--and all this were three hundred years ago, before the +rights of men and the dignity of labor had been much discussed, we +should probably have come up to Oxford, of which our famous uncle was +chancellor, in a state of what would be called at Oxford to-day extreme +bumptiousness. But Philip Sidney was too true a gentleman not to be +a simple-hearted man; and although he was even then one of the most +accomplished as well as fortunate youths in England, he writes to +Lord Burleigh to confess with "heavy grief" that in scholarship he can +neither satisfy Burleigh's expectation nor his own desire. + +In the month of May, 1572, Philip Sidney left Oxford, and after staying +a short time with his parents, following the fashion of young gentlemen +of rank, he crossed over into France in the train of the Earl of +Lincoln, who was Queen Elizabeth's extraordinary ambassador upon the +subject of her marriage with the brother of Charles IX. of France. The +young king immediately made Sidney a gentleman of the bedchamber, and +Henry of Navarre found him a fit companion for a future king. The Paris +that Sidney saw had then twice as many inhabitants as Boston has to-day. +Montaigne called it the most beautiful city in the world, and it had +a delusive air of peace. But the witch Catherine de' Medici sat in the +smooth-tongued court like a spider in its web, spinning and spinning the +meshes in which the hope of liberty was to be entangled. The gay city +filled and glittered with the wedding guests of Henry and the king's +sister Margaret--among others, the hero of St. Quentin, + +Admiral Coligny. Gayer and gayer grew the city--smoother and smoother +the court--faster and faster spun the black Italian spider--until on the +23d of August, the Eve of St. Bartholomew, the bloodiest deed in all +the red annals of that metropolis was done, and the young Sidney looked +shuddering from Walsingham House upon the streets reeking with the blood +of his fellow Huguenots. + +That night made Philip Sidney a man. He heard the applause of the +Romish party ring through Europe--he heard the commendation of Philip of +Spain--he knew that the most eloquent orator of the Church, Muretus, had +congratulated the pope upon this signal victory of the truth. He knew +that medals were stamped in commemoration of the brutal massacre, and +he remembered that the same spirit that had struck at the gray head of +Coligny had also murdered Egmont and Home in the Netherlands; had calmly +gazed in the person of Philip upon De Sezo perishing in the fire, and by +the hand of Philip had denounced death against all who wrote, sold, or +read Protestant books; and he knew that the same spirit, in the most +thriving and intelligent country of Europe, the Netherlands, was +blotting out prosperity in blood, and had driven at least a hundred +thousand exiles into England. + +Pondering these things, Sidney left Paris, and at Frankfort met Hubert +Languet. Languet was not only a Protestant, but, at heart, a Republican. +He was the friend of Melanethon and of William of Orange, in whose +service he died. One of the most accomplished scholars and shrewdest +statesmen in Europe, honored and trusted by all the Protestant leaders, +this wise man of fifty-four was so enamoured of the English youth of +eighteen that they became life-long friends with the ardor of lovers, +and Languet left his employment, as Fulke Greville says, "to become a +nurse of knowledge to this hopeful young gentleman". + +As they travelled by easy stages across Germany, where the campaign of +Protestantism had begun, they knew that the decisive battle was yet to +be fought. Europe was silent. The tumult of Charles V.'s reign was +over, and that great monarch marched and countermarched no more from the +Baltic to the Mediterranean. Charles had been victorious so long as he +fought kings with words of steel. But the monk Martin Luther drew the +sword of the spirit, and the conqueror quailed. Luther challenged the +Church of Rome at its own door. The Vatican rained anathemas. It might +as well have tried to blow out the stars; and all the fires of the +furious popes who followed Leo were not sharp enough to consume the +colossal heresy of free thought. But king and emperor and pope fed +the fire. The reign of terror blasted the Netherlands, and when it had +succeeded there, when Italy, Austria, and Holland surrounded the states +of Germany, Philip knew it would be the smothering coil of the serpent +around the cradle of religious liberty. But the young Hercules of free +thought throttled the serpent, and leaped forth to win his victorious +and immortal race. + +We can see it now, but Sidney could not know it. To him the future was +as inscrutable as our own to the eyes of thirty years ago. Yet he and +Languet must have discussed the time with curious earnestness as they +passed through Germany until they reached Vienna. There Sidney devoted +himself to knightly games, to tennis, to music, and especially to +horsemanship, which he studied with Pagliono, who, in praise of the +horse, became such a poet that in the _Defence of Poesy_ Sidney says +that if he had not been a piece of a logician before he came to him, +Pagliono would have persuaded him to wish himself a horse. + +At Vienna Philip parted with Languet, and arrived in Venice in the year +1573. The great modern days of Italy were passed. The golden age of +the Medici was gone. Lorenzo the Magnificent had died nearly a century +before, in the same year that Columbus had discovered America. His son, +Pope Leo X., had eaten his last ortolan, had flown his last falcon, had +listened to his last comedy, and hummed his last tune, in the frescoed +corridors of the Vatican. Upon its shining walls the fatal finger of +Martin Luther, stretching out of Germany, had written "Mene, Mene." +Beneath the terrible spell the walls were cracking and the earth was +shaking, but the splendid pope, in his scarlet cloud of cardinals, saw +only the wild beauty of Raphael's Madonnas and the pleasant pages of the +recovered literature of pagan Greece. When Sidney stepped for the first +time into his gondola at Venice, the famous Italian cathedrals and +stately palaces were already built, and the great architects were gone. +Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, who had created Italian literature, lived +about as long before Sidney as we live after him. Cimabue and Giotto had +begun; Raphael and Michel Angelo had perfected that art in which they +have had no rivals--and they were gone. Andrea Doria steered the galleys +of Genoa no more, and since the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope and +the West Indies, the spices of the Indian sea were brought by Portuguese +ships into the Baltic instead of the Adriatic. The glory of the +Lombards, who were the first merchants of Europe, had passed away to the +descendants of their old correspondents of Bruges and Ghent, until, with +its five hundred ships daily coming and going, and on market days eight +and nine hundred; with its two thousand heavy wagons creaking every week +through the gates from France and Germany and Lorraine, Antwerp reigned +in the place of Venice, and the long twilight that has never been broken +was settling upon the Italy that Sidney saw. + +But the soft splendor of its decline was worthy its prime. The +universities of Bologna and Padua, of Salerno and Pisa, had fallen from +the days when at Bologna alone there were twenty thousand students; but +they were still thronged with pupils, and taught by renowned professors. +When the young Sidney came to Venice, Titian was just tottering into the +grave, nearly a hundred years old, but still holding the pencil which +Charles V. had picked up and handed to him in his studio. Galileo was a +youth of twenty, studying mathematics at Pisa. The melancholy Tasso +was completing his _Jerusalem Delivered_ under the cypress trees of the +Villa d'Este. Palestrina was composing the masses which reformed church +music, and the Christian charity of Charles Borromeo was making him a +saint before he was canonized. Clad in the silk and velvet of Genoa, +the young Englishman went to study geometry at Padua, where twenty years +later Galileo would have been his teacher, and Sidney writes to Languet +that he was perplexed whether to sit to Paul Veronese or to Tintoretto +for his portrait. + +But he had a shrewd eye for the follies of travellers, and speaks of +their tendency to come home "full of disguisements not only of apparel +but of our countenances, as though the credit of a traveller stood all +upon his outside". He then adds a curious prophecy, which Shakespeare +made haste to fulfil to the very letter. Sidney says, writing in 1578, +"I think, ere it be long, like the mountebanks in Italy, we travellers +shall be made sport of in comedies." Twenty years afterwards, +Shakespeare makes Rosalind say in "As You Like It", "Farewell, Monsieur +Traveller. Look you; lisp, and wear strange suits. Disable all the +benefits of your own country. Be out of love with your nativity, and +almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will +scarce think you have swam in a gondola." + +But in all the gayeties and graces of his travel, Philip Sidney was not +content to be merely an elegant lounger. He never forgot for a moment +that all his gifts and accomplishments were only weapons to be kept +burnished for his country's service. He was a boy of twenty, but +his boy's warmth was tempered by the man's wisdom. "You are not over +cheerful by nature," Languet writes to him; and when Sidney sat to +Paul Veronese, and sent his friend the portrait, Languet replies: "The +painter has represented you sad and thoughtful." + +He had reason to be so. He had seen the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, +as many a young Sidney among ourselves saw the horrors of Kansas thirty +years ago. He did not believe that a little timely patting on the back +was statesmanship. If Spain were crushing the Netherlands, and hung upon +the southern horizon of Europe a black and threatening cloud, he did not +believe that the danger would be averted by gagging those who said the +storm was coming. He did not hold the thermometer responsible for the +weather. "I cannot think," he wrote in May, 1574, "there is any man +possessed of common understanding who does not see to what these rough +storms are driving by which all Christendom has been agitated now these +many years." He did not suppose, as so many of us in our ignoble days, +that while men were the same, the tragical differences which had been +washed out with blood in all other ages could be drowned in milk and +water in his own. + +In 1575 Sidney returned to England. Every author who writes of this +period breaks out into the most glowing praises of him. Indeed, he is +the choice darling of English history. The only discordant note in the +chorus of praise came long afterwards in the voice of the pedantic dandy +Horace Walpole, who called Goldsmith "an inspired idiot". This is not +surprising, for the earnestness and heroic simplicity of Sidney were as +incomprehensible to the affected trifler of Strawberry Hill as the +fresh enthusiasm of his nephew Arthur to Major Pendennis. The Earl of +Leicester, who seemed to love his nephew more than anything except his +own ambition, presented his brilliant young relative to the queen, who +made him her cup-bearer. Sidney was now twenty-one years old--the finest +gentleman, and one of the most accomplished scholars in England. His +learning was mainly in the classics and in languages; yet he confesses +that he could never learn German, which was then hardly worth learning, +and in his correspondence with Languet is very distrustful of the Latin, +in which language they wrote. But in urging him to grapple with the +German, Languet says to him, and it is a striking proof of the exquisite +finish of Sidney's accomplishment, "I have watched you closely when +speaking my own language (he was a Burgundian), but I hardly ever +detected you pronouncing a single syllable wrongly." + +In Sidney's time the classics had few rivals. After reading Dante, +Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, with Sanazzaro's _Arcadia_, in Italian; +Rabelais, Froissart, and Comines, in French; Chaucer, Gower, and the +_Mirror for Magistrates_ in English, what remained for an ardent young +student to devour? When Sidney came home, Montaigne--whom he probably +saw at the French court--was just writing his _Essays_ at his chateau +in the Gironde. The Portuguese Camoens had only just published his great +poem, to which his own country would not listen, and of which no other +had heard. The Italian Tasso's _Jerusalem_ was still in manuscript, and +the Spanish Ponce de Leon was little known to Europe. All was yet +to come. In Spain, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon; in France, +Corneille and Racine and Moliere, Fenelon and Bossuet, Rousseau and +Voltaire; in Germany, everything except the Niebelungen and Hans Sachs's +rhymes. When Philip Sidney kissed Elizabeth's hand as her cup-bearer, +William Shakespeare, a boy of eleven, was grinding out his trousers +on the restless seats of the free grammar-school at Stratford; young +Francis Bacon, a youth of sixteen, was studying in France; a poor +scholar at Cambridge, Edmund Spenser was just finishing his studies, +and the younger brother of an old Devonshire family, Walter Raleigh, had +just returned from campaigning in France; indeed, all the literature +of modern times was subsequent to Philip Sidney. The young man shone at +court, fascinating men and women, courtiers, scholars, and divines; and +in a few months was made special ambassador to condole with the Austrian +emperor upon the death of his father. Upon this embassy he departed in +great state. His mission, was supposed to be purely complimentary; +but he was really the beautiful eye with which England and Elizabeth, +becoming the head of the Protestant movement, watched the disposition +of the Protestant princes. On his way home, Sidney passed into the Low +Countries to see William of Orange. He came, resplendent with chivalric +magnificence, accompanied by the flower of English nobility, and met the +grave William, who had been the richest citizen in the Netherlands, clad +in an old serge cloak, and surrounded by plain Dutch burghers. But +it was a meeting of men of one mind and heart in the great cause, and +neither was disturbed by the tailoring of the other. The interview was +the beginning of a faithful friendship, and among all the compliments +Sidney received, none is so lofty and touching as that of William, the +greatest man in Europe, who called him in their correspondence, "Philip, +my master." + +In 1577 Sidney was home again. He had a right to expect conspicuous +advancement, but he got nothing. This was the more disagreeable, +because living at Elizabeth's court was an expensive luxury for a poor +gentleman's son who had magnificent tastes. His father, Lord Henry +Sidney, was lord-deputy of Ireland, but he was also an honest man, and, +like most honest men in high public office, he was not rich. He wrote to +Philip, begging him to remember whose son, not whose nephew, he was; for +Philip's companions, the golden youth of the court, blazed in silks +and velvets and jewels, until the government had to impose laws, as the +subjects had brought luxury from Venice, and Elizabeth, who died the +happy owner of three thousand dresses, issued a solemn proclamation +against extravagance in dress. + +At such a time, the brilliant nephew of Uncle Leicester would have been +a quickly ruined man if he had not been Philip Sidney. He bowed and +flirted at court, but he chafed under inaction. A marriage was planned +for him with Penelope Devereux, sister of the famous Earl of Essex, one +of the thousand fair and unfortunate women who flit across the page of +history leaving only a name, and that written in tears. But Philip's +father grew cool in the negotiation, and Philip himself was perfectly +passive. Yet when a few years afterwards the lady was married to Lord +Rich, who abused her, Sidney loved her, and wrote the sonnets to Stella, +which are his best poetry, and which Charles Lamb so affectionately +praised. + +But while he loitered at court, beating all the courtiers with their +own weapons in wit, in riding, in games, at tournament, the tales of +American discovery shed a wondrous glamour upon the new continent. +Nothing was too beautiful for belief, and the fiery feet of youth +burned the English soil with eagerness to tread the unutterable Tropics. +Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth to follow Magellan around the +world, and he went in a manner consonant with the popular fancy of the +countless riches that rewarded such adventures. His cooking-vessels were +of silver; his table-plate of exquisite workmanship. The queen knighted +him, gave him a sword, and said, "Whoever striketh at you, Drake, +striketh at us." A band of musicians accompanied the fleet, and the +English sailor went to circumnavigate the globe with the same nonchalant +magnificence with which in other days the gorgeous Alcibiades, with +flutes and soft recorders blowing under silken sails, came idling home +from victory. + +Philip Sidney, his heart alive to all romance, and longing to be his +companion, saw him sail away. But he turned and saw the black Italian +spider, whose sting he had seen on Bartholomew's Eve in Paris, still +weaving her stealthy web, and seeking to entangle Elizabeth into a match +with the Duke of Anjou. The queen was forty-six, and Mounseer, as the +English called him, twenty-three; and while she was coaxing herself to +say the most fatal yes that ever woman said--when Burleigh, Leicester, +Walsingham, all the safe, sound, conservative old gentlemen and +counsellors were just ceasing to dissuade her--Philip Sidney, a youth of +twenty-five, who knew that he had a country as well as a queen, that the +hope of that country lay in the triumph of Protestantism, and that +to marry Mounseer was to abandon that hope, and for the time betray +mankind--Philip Sidney, a youth who did not believe that he could +write gravely of sober things because he had written gayly of ladies' +eyebrows, knowing as the true-hearted gentleman always knows that to-day +it may be a man's turn to sit at a desk in an office, or bend over a +book in college, or fashion a horseshoe at the forge, or toss flowers to +some beauty at her window, and to-morrow to stand firm against a +cruel church or a despotic court, a brutal snob or an ignorant public +opinion--this youth, this immortal gentleman, wrote the letter which +dissuaded her from the marriage, and which was as noble a triumph for +Protestantism and human liberty as the defeat of the Spanish Armada. + +I cannot follow this lovely life in detail, nor linger, as I would, upon +his literary retirement. + +The very name of Sidney's _Arcadia_ is aromatic in the imagination, and +its traditional place in our literature is unquestioned. In our day it +is very little read, nor is it a very interesting story. But under its +quaint and courtly conceit its tone is so pure and lofty, its courtesy +and appreciation of women so hearty and honorable; it has so fine +a moral atmosphere, such noble thoughts, such stately and beautiful +descriptions, that to read it is like conversing with a hero. So there +is no better reading than the _Defence of Poesy_, that noble hymn of +loyalty to intellectual beauty. Hallam well calls Sidney "the first +good prose writer" in our language, and scarcely had he finished in his +_Defence_ an exquisite criticism of English poetry to that time than the +full choir of Elizabethan poets burst into + + "the songs that fill + The spacious times of great Elizabeth + With sounds that echo still." + +In 1582 Philip Sidney married the daughter of Walsingham, but in his +retirement, whether steadfastly watching the great struggle upon the +Continent or listening to the alluring music of far-off seas, he knew +that the choice days of his life were passing, and if a career were not +opened for him by the queen, he must make one for himself. William of +Orange had been murdered; Elizabeth promptly succeeded him as the active +head of the Protestant world; Philip of Spain was the great enemy. +Strike him at home, said Sidney; strike him at sea, but strike him +everywhere; and he arranged with Drake a descent upon Spanish America. +He hurried privately to Plymouth to embark, but at the last moment a +peer of the realm arrived from the queen forbidding his departure. The +loyal gentleman bowed and obeyed. + +But two months after his fleet sailed, on the 7th of November, 1585 +(about the time that William Shakespeare first came to London), +Elizabeth appointed Sidney governor of Flushing, in the Netherlands. He +went thither gladly on the 18th, with three thousand men, to strike for +the cause in which he believed. He had already told the queen that the +spirit of the Netherlands was the spirit of God, and was invincible. His +uncle, the Earl of Leicester, followed him as commander-in-chief. The +earl was handsome at tournaments, but not fit for battle-fields, +and Sidney was annoyed by his uncle's conduct; but he writes to his +father-in-law, Walsingham, in a strain full of the music of a noble +soul, and fitly precluding his end: "I think a wise and constant man +ought never to grieve while he doth play, as a man may say, his own part +truly." + +For that he was always ready. In the misty dawn of the 22d of September, +1586, a force of three thousand Spaniards stole silently along to +the relief of Zutphen, on the river Isel. Sidney, at the head of five +hundred cavalry, rode forward to meet them. In the obscurity the battle +was sharp and confused. Seeing his friend Lord Willoughby in special +danger, Sidney spurred to the rescue. His horse was shot under him and +fell. Springing upon another, he dashed forward again and succored his +friend, but at the instant a shot struck him below the knee, glancing +upward. His furious horse became unmanageable, and Sir Philip was +obliged to leave the field. But as he passed slowly along to the rear of +the soldiers, he felt faint with bleeding, and called for water. A cup +was brought to him, but as he was lifting it to his month he saw a dying +soldier staring at it with burning eyes. Philip Sidney paused before +tasting it, leaned from the saddle, and handed it to the soldier, saying +to him in the same soft, musical voice with which the boy called to his +mother in the sunny garden at Penshurst, "Friend, thy necessity is yet +greater than mine." + +He was borne on to Araheim, and lived in suffering for twenty-six days. +He conversed pleasantly and called for music, and said at last to his +brother, whom he had loved as brothers seldom love: "Love my memory; +cherish my friends. Their faith to me may assure you they are honest. +But, above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word +of your Creator, in me beholding the end of this world with all her +vanities." "And so," says old Stowe, with fond particularity, "he died, +the 17th day of October, between two and three of the clock in the +afternoon." + + "The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, + And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, + Await alike the inevitable hour. + The paths of glory lead but to the grave." + +This is the story of Philip Sidney. A letter, a book, a battle. How +little to justify his unique fame! How invisible his performance among +the illustrious events of his prodigious age! Yet is not the instinct of +the human heart true; and in the stately society of his time, if Bacon +were the philosopher, Shakespeare the poet, Burleigh the counsellor, +Raleigh the soldier, Drake the sailor, Hooker the theologian, Essex +the courtier, and Gresham the merchant, was not Philip Sidney as +distinctively the gentleman? Heroes stood beside him in clusters, poets +in constellations; all the illustrious men of the age achieved more +tangible results than he, yet none of them has carved his name upon +history more permanently and with a more diamond point; for he had +that happy harmony of mind and temper, of enthusiasm and good sense, of +accomplishment and capacity, which is described by that most exquisite +and most abused word, gentleman. His guitar hung by a ribbon at +his side, but his sword hung upon leather beneath it. His knee bent +gallantly to the queen, but it knelt reverently also to his Maker. And +it was the crown of the gentleman that he was neither ashamed of the +guitar nor of the sword; neither of the loyalty nor the prayer. For a +gentleman is not an idler, a trifler, a dandy; he is not a scholar only, +a soldier, a mechanic, a merchant; he is the flower of men, in whom the +accomplishment of the scholar, the bravery of the soldier, the skill +of the mechanic, the sagacity of the merchant, all have their part +and appreciation. A sense of duty is his main-spring, and like a watch +crusted with precious stones, his function is not to look prettily, but +to tell the time of day. Philip Sidney was not a gentleman because his +grandfather was the Duke of Northumberland and his father lord-deputy of +Ireland, but because he was himself generous, simple, truthful, noble, +refined. He was born with a gold spoon in his mouth, but the gold is +only the test. In the mouths of the base it becomes brass and iron. +George IV., called with bitter irony the first gentleman in Europe, was +born with the gold spoon, but his acrid humors turned it to the basest +metal, betraying his mean soul. George Stephenson was born with the +pewter spoon in his mouth, but the true temper of his soul turned it +into pure gold. The test of a gentleman is his use, not his uselessness; +whether that use be direct or indirect, whether it be actual service or +only inspiring and aiding action. "To what purpose should our thoughts +be directed to various kinds of knowledge," wrote Philip Sidney in 1578, +"unless room be afforded for putting it into practice so that public +advantage may be the result?" And Algernon Sidney said, nearly a century +later: "I have ever had it in my mind that when God cast me into such a +condition as that I cannot save my life but by doing an indecent thing, +he shows me the time has come wherein I should resign it." And when that +time came he did resign it; for every gentleman instinctively serves +justice and liberty. He feels himself personally disgraced by an insult +to humanity, for he, too, is only a man; and however stately his house +may be and murmurous with music, however glowing with pictures and +graceful with statues and reverend with books--however his horses may +out-trot other horses, and his yachts outsail all yachts--the gentleman +is king and master of these and not their servant; he wears them +for ornament, like the ring upon his finger or the flower in his +button-hole, and if they go the gentleman remains. He knows that all +their worth came from human genius and human training; and loving man +more than the works of man, he instinctively shuns whatever in the shape +of man is degraded, outraged, and forsaken. He does not make the poverty +of others the reason for robbing them; he does not make the oppression +of others the reason for oppressing them, for his gentility is his +religion; and therefore with simple truth and tender audacity the old +English dramatist Dekkar calls Him who gave the name to our religion, +and who destroyed the plea that might makes right, "the first true +gentleman, that ever breathed". + +But not only is Philip Sidney's story the poem of a gentleman, it is +that of a young man. It was the age of young men. No man was thought +flippant, whatever his years, who could say a good thing well, or do a +brave thing successfully, or give the right advice at the right moment. +The great men of the day were all young. At sixteen Bacon had already +sketched his _Philosophy_. At seventeen Walter Raleigh had gone to find +some good wars. At seventeen Edmund Spenser had first published. Before +he was twenty, Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, and the greatest +general of Sidney's time, had revealed his masterly genius. At +twenty-one Don John of Austria had been commander-in-chief against the +Moors. The Prince of Conde and Henry of Navarre were leaders while they +were yet boys. At twenty Francis Drake sailed, a captain, with John +Hawkins; and at twenty-one the Washington of European history, to whom +an American has for the first time paid just homage with an enthusiasm +and eloquence of Sidney describing his friend--at twenty-one William of +Orange commanded an army of Charles V. + +When England wanted leaders in those tremendous days that shaped her +destiny, it did just what America did in those recent perilous hours +that determined hers--she sent young men with faith in their hearts +and fire in their veins--not old men with feathers in their hats; and +everywhere it is the young men who have made history. At thirty-two +Alexander wept for another world to conquer. On his thirty-seventh +birthday Raphael lay dead beneath his last picture. At thirty-six Mozart +had sung his swan-song. At twenty-five Hannibal was commander-in-chief +of the Carthaginian armies. At thirty-three Turenne was marshal of +France. At twenty-seven Bonaparte was triumphant in Italy. At forty-five +Wellington had conquered Bonaparte, and at forty-eight retired from +active military service. At forty-three Washington was chief of the +Continental army. On his forty-fifth birthday Sherman was piercing the +heart of the American Rebellion; and before he was forty-three Grant had +"fought it out on this line" to perfect victory. Young men! Of course +they were young men. Youth is the main-spring of the world. The +experience of age is wise in action only when it is electrified by the +enthusiasm of youth. Show me a land in which the young men are cold and +sceptical and prematurely wise; which in polite indifference is called +political wisdom, contempt for ideas common-sense, and honesty in +politics Sunday-school statesmanship--show me a land in which the young +men are more anxious about doing well than about doing right--and I will +show you a country in which public corruption and ruin overtakes private +infidelity and cowardice, and in which, if there were originally a hope +for mankind, a faith in principle, and a conquering enthusiasm, that +faith, hope, and enthusiasm are expiring like the deserted camp-fires of +a retiring army. "Woe to a man when his heart grows old! Woe to a nation +when its young men shuffle in the gouty shoes and limp on the untimely +crutches of age, instead of leaping along the course of life with +the jubilant spring of their years and the sturdy play of their own +muscles!" Sir Philip Sidney's was the age of young men: and wherever +there are self-reliance, universal human sympathy, and confidence in +God, there is the age of youth and national triumph; just as whenever +Joan of Arc leads the army, or Molly Stark dares to be a widow, or Rosa +Bonheur paints, or Hattie Hosmer carves, or Jenny Lind sings, or Mrs. +Patten steers the wrecked ship to port, or Florence Nightingale walks +the midnight hospital--these are the age and the sphere of woman. Queen +Elizabeth's was the age of young men; but so it is always when there are +young men who can make an age. + +And ours is such an age. We live in a country which has been saved by +its young men. Before us opens a future which is to be secured by the +young men. I have not held up Sir Philip Sidney as a reproach, but only +for his brothers to admire--only that we may scatter the glamour of the +past and of history, and understand that we do not live in the lees of +time and the world's decrepitude. There is no country so fair that ours +is not fairer; there is no age so heroic that ours is not as noble; +there is no youth in history so romantic and beloved that in a thousand +American homes you may not find his peer to-day. It is the Sidneys we +have known who interpret this Philip of three hundred years ago. Dear, +noble gentleman! he does not move alone in our imaginations, for our own +memories supply his splendid society. We too have seen, how often +and how often, the bitter fight of the misty morning on the Isel--the +ringing charge, the fatal fall. A thousand times we saw the same +true Sidney heart that, dying, gave the cup of cold water to a +fellow-soldier. And we, for whom the Sidneys died, let us thank God for +showing us in our own experience, as in history, that the noblest traits +of human character are still spanned by the rainbow of perfect beauty; +and that human love and faith and fidelity, like day and night, like +seed-time and harvest, shall never, never fail. + + + + +LONGFELLOW + + +In the school readers of half a century ago there were two poems which +every boy and girl read and declaimed and remembered. How much of that +old literature has disappeared! How much that stirred the hearts and +touched the fancies of those boys and girls, their children have never +heard of! Willis's "Saturday Afternoon" and "Burial of Arnold" have +floated away, almost out of sight, with Pierpont's "Bunker Hill" and +Sprague's Fourth-of-July oration. The relentless winds of oblivion +incessantly blow. Scraps of verse and rhetoric once so familiar are +caught up, wafted noiselessly away, and lodged in neglected books and +in the dark corners of fading memories, gradually vanish from familiar +knowledge. But the two little poems of which we speak have survived. One +of them was Bryant's "March", and the other was Longfellow's "April", +and the names of the two poets singing of spring were thus associated +in the spring-time of our poetry, as the fathers of which they will be +always honored. + +Both poems originally appeared in the _United States Literary Gazette_, +and were included in the modest volume of selections from that journal +which was published in Boston in 1826. The chief names in this little +book are those of Bryant, Longfellow, Percival, Mellen, Dawes, and +Jones. Percival has already become a name only; Dawes, and Greenville +Mellen, who, like Longfellow, was a son of Maine, are hardly known +to this generation, and Jones does not even appear in Duyckinck's +Cyclopaedia. But in turning over the pages it is evident that Time has +dealt justly with the youthful bards, and that the laurel rests upon the +heads of the singers whose earliest strains fitly preluded the music +of their prime. Longfellow was nineteen years old when the book was +published. He had graduated at Bowdoin College the year before, and the +verses had been written and printed in the _Gazette_ while he was still +a student. + +The glimpses of the boy that we catch through the recollections of +his old professor, Packard, and of his college mates, are of the same +character as at every period of his life. They reveal a modest, refined, +manly youth, devoted to study, of great personal charm and gentle +manners. It is the boy that the older man suggested. To look back upon +him is to trace the broad and clear and beautiful river far up the green +meadows to the limpid rill. + +His poetic taste and faculty were already apparent, and it is related +that a version of an ode of Horace which he wrote in his Sophomore +year so impressed one of the members of the examining board that when +afterwards a chair of modern languages was established in the college, +he proposed as its incumbent the young Sophomore whose fluent verse he +remembered. The impression made by the young Longfellow is doubtlessly +accurately described by one of his famous classmates, Hawthorne, for the +class of '25 is a proud tradition of Bowdoin. In "P.'s Correspondence", +one of the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, a quaint fancy of a letter from +"my unfortunate friend P.", whose wits were a little disordered, there +are grotesque hints of the fate of famous persons. P. talks with Burns +at eighty-seven; Byron, grown old and fat, wears a wig and spectacles; +Shelley is reconciled to the Church of England; Coleridge finishes +"Christabel"; Keats writes a religious epic on the millennium; and +George Canning is a peer. On our side of the sea, Dr. Channing had just +published a volume of verses; Whittier had been lynched ten years before +in South Carolina; and, continues P., "I remember, too, a lad just from +college, Longfellow by name, who scattered some delicate verses to +the winds, and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of intense +application, at the University of Goettingen." Longfellow, in turn, +recalled his classmate Hawthorne--a shy, dark-haired youth flitting +across the college grounds in a coat with bright buttons. + +Among these delicate verses was the poem to "An April Day". As the work +of a very young man it is singularly restrained and finished. It has the +characteristic elegance and flowing melody of his later verse, and its +half-pensive tone is not excessive nor immature. It is not, however, for +this that it is most interesting, but because, with Bryant's "March", +it is the fresh and simple note of a truly American strain. Perhaps the +curious reader, enlightened by the observation of subsequent years, may +find in the "March" a more vigorous love of nature, and in the "April" +a tenderer tone of tranquil sentiment. But neither of the poems is the +echo of a foreign music, nor an exercise of remembered reading. They +both deal with the sights and sounds and suggestions of the American, +landscape in the early spring. In Longfellow's "April" there are none of +the bishops' caps and foreign ornament of illustration to which Margaret +Fuller afterwards objected in his verse. But these early associated +poems, both of the younger and of the older singer, show an original +movement of American literary genius, and, like the months which they +celebrate, they foretold a summer. + +That summer bad been long awaited. In 1809, Buckminster said in his Phi +Beta Kappa oration at Harvard College: "Oar poets and historians, our +critics and orators, the men of whom posterity are to stand in awe, and +by whom they are to be instructed, are yet to appear among us." Happily, +however, the orator thought that he beheld the promise of their coming, +although he does not say where. But even as he spoke they were at +hand. Irving's _Knickerbocker_ was published in 1809, and Bryant's +"Thanatopsis" was written in 1812. The _North American Review_, an +enterprise of literary men in Boston and Cambridge, was begun in 1815, +and Bryant and Longfellow were both contributors. But it was in the year +1821, the year in which Longfellow entered college, that the beginning +of a distinctive American literature became most evident. There were +signs of an independent intellectual movement both in the choice of +subjects and in the character of treatment. This was the year of the +publication of Bryant's first slim volume, and of Cooper's _Spy_, and +of Dana's _Idle Man_. Irving's _Sketch Book_ was already finished, Miss +Sedgwick's _Hope Leslie_ and Percival's first volume had been issued, +and Halleck's and Drake's "Croakers" were already popular. In these +works, as in all others of that time, there was indeed no evidence of +great creative genius. + +The poet and historian whom Buckminster foresaw, and who were to strike +posterity with awe, had not yet appeared, but in the same year the +voice of the orator whom he anticipated was heard upon Plymouth Rock in +cadences massive and sonorous as the voice of the sea. In the year 1821 +there was the plain evidence of an awakening original literary activity. + +Longfellow was the youngest of the group in which he first appeared. His +work was graceful, tender, pensive, gentle, melodious, the strain of a +troubadour. When he went to Europe in 1826 to fit himself more fully +for his professorship, he had but "scattered some delicate verses to +the winds". When he returned, and published in 1833 his translations of +"Coplas de Manrique" and other Spanish poems, he had apparently done +no more. There was plainly shown an exquisite literary artist, a very +Benvenuto of grace and skill. But he would hardly have been selected +as the poet who was to take the strongest hold of the hearts of his +countrymen, the singer whose sweet and hallowing spell was to be so deep +and universal that at last it would be said in another country that to +it also his death was a national loss. + +The qualities of these early verses, however, were never lost. The +genius of the poet steadily and beautifully developed, flowering +according to its nature. The most urbane and sympathetic of men, never +aggressive, nor vehement, nor self-asserting, he was yet thoroughly +independent, and the individuality of his genius held its tranquil way +as surely as the river Charles, whose placid beauty he so often sang, +wound through the meadows calm and free. When Longfellow came to +Cambridge, the impulse of Transcendentalism in New England was deeply +affecting scholarship and literature. It was represented by the most +original of American thinkers and the typical American scholar, Emerson, +and its elevating, purifying, and emancipating influences are memorable +in our moral and intellectual history. Longfellow lived in the very +heart of the movement. Its leaders were his cherished friends. He too +was a scholar and a devoted student of German literature, who had drunk +deeply also of the romance of German life. Indeed, his first important +works stimulated the taste for German studies and the enjoyment of its +literature more than any other impulse in this country. But he remained +without the charmed Transcendental circle, serene and friendly and +attentive. There are those whose career was wholly moulded by the +intellectual revival of that time. But Longfellow was untouched by it, +except as his sympathies were attracted by the vigor and purity of its +influence. His tastes, his interests, his activities, his career, would +have been the same had that great light never shone. If he had been the +ductile, echoing, imitative nature that the more ardent disciples of the +faith supposed him to be, he would have been absorbed and swept away by +the flood. But he was as untouched by it as Charles Lamb by the wars of +Napoleon. + +It was in the first flush of the Transcendental epoch that Longfellow's +first important works appeared. In 1839, his prose-romance of _Hyperion_ +was published, following the sketches of travel, called _Outre-Mer_. He +was living in Cambridge, in the famous house in which he died, and in +which _Hyperion_ and all of his familiar books were written. Under +the form of a slight love tale, _Hyperion_ is the diary of a poet's +wandering in a storied and picturesque land, the hearty, home-like +genius of whose life and literature is peculiarly akin to his own. The +book bubbles and sings with snatches of the songs of the country; +it reproduces the tone and feeling of the landscape, the grandeur of +Switzerland, the rich romance of the Rhine; it decorates itself with a +quaint scholarship, and is so steeped in the spirit of the country, so +glowing with the palpitating tenderness of passion, that it is still +eagerly bought at the chief points which it commemorates, and is +cherished by young hearts as no prose romance was ever cherished before. + +_Hyperion_, indeed, is a poet's and lover's romance. It is full of deep +feeling, of that intense and delighted appreciation of nature in her +grander forms, and of scenes consecrated by poetic tradition, which +belongs to a singularly fine, sensitive, and receptive nature, when +exalted by pure and lofty affection; and it has the fulness and swing of +youth, saddened by experience indeed, yet rising with renewed hope, like +a field of springing grain in May bowed by the west wind, and touched +with the shadow of a cloud, but presently lifting itself again to +heaven. A clear sweet humor and blitheness of heart blend in this +romance. What is called its artificial tone is not insincerity; it is +the play of an artist conscious of his skill and revelling in it, even +while his hand and his heart are deeply in earnest. _Werther_ is a +romance, Disraeli's _Wondrous Tale of Alroy_ is a romance, but they +belong to the realm of Beverley and Julia in Sheridan's _Rivals_. In +_Hyperion_, with all its elaborate picturesqueness, its spicy literary +atmosphere, and imaginative outline, there is a breezy freshness and +simplicity and healthiness of feeling which leaves it still unique. + +In the same year with _Hyperion_ came the _Voices of the Night_, +a volume of poems which contained the "Coplas de Manrique" and the +translations, with a selection from the verses of the _Literary +Gazette_, which the author playfully reclaims in a note from +their vagabond and precarious existence in the corners of +newspapers--gathering his children from wanderings in lanes and alleys, +and introducing them decorously to the world. A few later poems were +added, and these, with the _Hyperion_, showed a new and distinctive +literary talent. In both of these volumes there is the purity of spirit, +the elegance of form, the romantic tone, the airy grace, which +were already associated with Longfellow's name. But there are other +qualities. The boy of nineteen, the poet of Bowdoin, has become a +scholar and a traveller. The teeming hours, the ample opportunities of +youth, have not been neglected or squandered, but, like a golden-banded +bee, humming as he sails, the young poet has drained all the flowers +of literature of their nectar, and has built for himself a hive of +sweetness. More than this, he had proved in his own experience the truth +of Irving's tender remark, that an early sorrow is often the truest +benediction for the poet. + +Through all the romantic grace and elegance of the _Voices of the Night_ +and _Hyperion_, however, there is a moral earnestness which is even more +remarkable in the poems than in the romance. No volume of poems ever +published in the country was so popular. Severe critics indeed, while +acknowledging its melody and charm, thought it too morally didactic, the +work of a student too fondly enamoured of foreign literatures. But while +they conceded taste and facility, two of the poems at least--the "Psalm +of Life" and the "Footsteps of Angels"--penetrated the common heart at +once, and have held it ever since. A young Scotchman saw them reprinted +in some paper or magazine, and, meeting a literary lady in London, +repeated them to her, and then to a literary assembly at her house; and +the presence of a new poet was at once acknowledged. If the "Midnight +Mass for the Dying Year" in its form and phrase and conception recalled +a land of cathedrals and a historic religious ritual, and had but a +vague and remote charm for the woodman in the pine forests of Maine and +the farmer on the Illinois prairie, yet the "Psalm of Life" was the very +heart-beat of the American conscience, and the "Footsteps of Angels" was +a hymn of the fond yearning of every loving heart. + +During the period of more than forty years from the publication of the +_Voices of the Night_ to his death, the fame of Longfellow constantly +increased. It was not because his genius, like that of another scholarly +poet, Gray, seldom blossomed in song, so that his renown rested upon +a few gem-like verses. He was not intimidated by his own fame. During +those forty years he wrote and published constantly. Other great fames +arose around him. New poets began to sing. Popular historians took +their places. But still with Bryant the name of Longfellow was always +associated at the head of American singers, and far beyond that of any +other American author was his name known through all the reading world. +The volume of _Voices of the Night_ was followed by similar collections, +then by _The Spanish Student_, _Evangeline_, _The Golden Legend_, +_Hiawatha_, _The Courtship of Miles Standish_, _The Tales of a Wayside +Inn_, _The New England Tragedies_, _The Masque of Pandora_, _The Hanging +of the Crane_, the _Morituri Salutarnus_, the _Keramos_. But all of +these, like stately birds + + "Sailing with supreme dominion + Through the upper realms of air," + +were attended by shorter poems, sonnets, "birds of passage", as the poet +called his swallow flights of song. In all these larger poems, while +the characteristics of the earlier volumes were more amply developed +and illustrated, and the subtle beauty of the skill became even more +exquisite, the essential qualities of the work remain unchanged, and the +charm of a poet and his significance in the literature and development +of his country were never more readily defined. + +Child of New England, and trained by her best influences; of a +temperament singularly sweet and serene, and with the sturdy rectitude +of his race; refined and softened by wide contact with other lands +and many men; born in prosperity, accomplished in all literatures, and +himself a literary artist of consummate elegance, he was the fine +flower of the Puritan stock under its changed modern conditions. Out of +strength had come forth sweetness. The grim iconoclast, "humming a surly +hymn", had issued in the Christian gentleman. Captain Miles Standish +had risen into Sir Philip Sidney. The austere morality that relentlessly +ruled the elder New England reappeared in the genius of this singer in +the most gracious and captivating form. The grave nature of Bryant +in his early secluded life among the solitary hills of Western +Massachusetts had been tinged by them with their own sobriety. There +was something of the sombre forest, of the gray rocky face of stern New +England in his granitic verse. But what delicate wild-flowers nodded in +the clefts! What scent of the pine-tree, what music of gurgling water, +filled the cool air! What bird high poised upon its solitary way through +heaven-taught faith to him who pursued his way alone! + +But while the same moral tone in the poetry both of Bryant and of +Longfellow shows them to be children of the same soil and tradition, and +shows also that they saw plainly, what poets of the greatest genius have +often not seen at all, that in the morality of human life lies its true +beauty, the different aspect of Puritan development which they displayed +was due to difference of temperament and circumstance. The foundations +of our distinctive literature were largely laid in New England, and they +rest upon morality. Literary New England had never a trace of literary +Bohemia. The most illustrious group, and the earliest, of American +authors and scholars and literary men, the Boston and Cambridge group of +the last generation--Channing, the two Danas, Sparks, Everett, Bancroft, +Ticknor, Prescott, Norton, Ripley, Palfrey, Emerson, Parker, Hawthorne, +Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Agassiz, Lowell, Motley--have been all +sober and industrious citizens of whom Judge Sewall would have approved. +Their lives as well as their works have ennobled literature. They have +illustrated the moral sanity of genius. + +Longfellow shares this trait with them all. It is the moral purity of +his verse which at once charms the heart, and in his first most famous +poem, the "Psalm of Life", it is the direct inculcation of a moral +purpose. Those who insist that literary art, like all other art, should +not concern itself positively with morality, must reflect that the +heart of this age has been touched as truly by Longfellow, however +differently, as that of any time by its master-poet. This, indeed, is +his peculiar distinction. Among the great poetic names of the century +in English literature, Burns, in a general way, is the poet of love; +Wordsworth, of lofty contemplation of nature; Byron, of passion; +Shelley, of aspiration; Keats, of romance; Scott, of heroic legend; +and not less, and quite as distinctively, Longfellow, of the domestic +affections. He is the poet of the household, of the fireside, of the +universal home feeling. The infinite tenderness and patience, the +pathos, and the beauty of daily life, of familiar emotion, and the +common scene, these are the significance of that verse whose beautiful +and simple melody, softly murmuring for more than forty years, made the +singer the most widely beloved of living men. + +Longfellow's genius was not a great creative force. It burst into no +tempests of mighty passion. It did not wrestle with the haughtily veiled +problems of fate and free-will absolute. It had no dramatic movement and +variety, no eccentricity and grotesqueness and unexpectedness. It +was not Lear, nor Faust, nor Manfred, nor Romeo. A carnation is not a +passion-flower. Indeed, no poet of so universal and sincere a popularity +ever sang so little of love as a passion. None of his smaller poems are +love poems; and _Evangeline_ is a tale, not of fiery romance, but of +affection "that hopes and endures and is patient", of the unwasting +"beauty and strength of woman's devotion", of the constantly tried and +tested virtue that makes up the happiness of daily life. No one has +described so well as Longfellow himself the character and influence of +his own poetry: + + "Come read to me some poem, + Some simple and heart-felt lay, + That shall soothe this restless feeling, + And banish the thoughts of day. + + "Hot from the grand old masters, + Not from the bards sublime, + Whose distant footsteps echo + Through the corridors of Time. + + * * * * * + + "Such songs have power to quiet + The restless pulse of care, + And come like the benediction + That follows after prayer." + +This was the office of Longfellow in literature, and how perfectly it +was fulfilled! It was not a wilful purpose, but he carefully guarded the +fountain of his song from contamination or diversion, and this was its +natural overflow. During the long period of his literary activity there +were many "schools" and styles and fashions of poetry. The influence +first of Byron, then of Keats, is manifest in the poetry of the last +generation, and in later days a voluptuous vagueness and barbaric +splendor, as of the lower empire in literature, have corroded the vigor +of much modern verse. But no perfumed blandishment of doubtful goddesses +won Longfellow from his sweet and domestic Muse. The clear thought, the +true feeling, the pure aspiration, is expressed with limpid simplicity: + + "Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full." + +The most delightful picture in Goldsmith's life is that of the youth +wandering through rural Europe, stopping at the little villages in the +peaceful summer sunset, and sweetly playing melodies upon his flute +for the lads and lasses to dance upon the green. Who that reads "The +Traveller" and "The Deserted Village" does not hear in their pensive +music the far-away fluting of that kind-hearted wanderer, and see the +lovely idyl of that simple life? So sings this poet to the young men and +maidens in the soft summer air. They follow his measures with fascinated +hearts, for they hear in them their own hearts singing; they catch +the music of their dearest hope, of their best endeavor; they hear +the voices of the peaceful joy that hallows faithful affection, of the +benediction that belongs to self-sacrifice and devotion. And now that +the singer is gone, and his voice is silent, those hushed hearts recall +the words of Father Felicien, Evangeline's pastor: + + "Forty years of my life have I labored among you, and + taught you + Not in word alone, but in deed, to love one another." + +It is this fidelity of his genius to itself, the universal feeling +to which he gives expression, and the perfection of his literary +workmanship, which is sure to give Longfellow a permanent place in +literature. His poems are apples of gold in pictures of silver. There +is nothing in them excessive, nothing overwrought, nothing strained into +turgidity, obscurity, and nonsense. There is sometimes, indeed, a fine +stateliness, as in the "Arsenal at Springfield", and even a resounding +splendor of diction, as in "Sandalphon". But when the melody is most +delicate it is simple. The poet throws nothing into the mist to make it +large. How purely melodious his verse can be without losing the thought +or its most transparent expression is seen in "The Evening Star" and +"Snow-Flakes". + +The literary decoration of his style, the aroma and color and richness, +so to speak, which it derives from his ample accomplishment in +literature, are incomparable. His verse is embroidered with allusions +and names and illustrations wrought with a taste so true and a skill so +rare that the robe, though it be cloth of gold, is as finely flexible as +linen, and still beautifully reveals, not conceals, the living form. + +This scholarly allusion and literary tone were at one time criticised as +showing that Longfellow's genius was really an exotic grown under glass, +or a smooth-throated mocking-bird warbling a foreign melody. A recent +admirable paper in the _Evening Post_ intimates that the kindly poet +took the suggestion in good part, and modified his strain. But there +was never any interruption or change in the continuity of his work. +_Evangeline_ and _Hiawatha_ and _The Courtship of Miles Standish_ +blossom as naturally out of his evident and characteristic taste and +tendency as _The Golden Legend_ or the _Masque of Pandora_. In the +_Tales of a Wayside Inn_ the "Ride of Paul Revere" is as natural a +play of his power as "King Robert of Sicily". The various aspect and +character of nature upon the American continent is nowhere so fully, +beautifully, and accurately portrayed as in _Evangeline_. The scenery +of the poem is the vast American landscape, boundless prairie and wooded +hill, brimming river and green valley, sparkling savanna and broad +bayou, city and village, camp and wigwam, peopled with the children +of many races, and all the blended panorama seen in the magic light +of imagination. So, too, the poetic character of the Indian legend is +preserved with conscientious care and fit monotony of rippling music in +_Hiawatha_. But this is an accident and an incident. It is not the theme +which determines the poet. All Scotland, indeed, sings and glows in the +verse of Burns, but very little of England is seen or heard in that of +Byron. + +In no other conspicuous figure in literary history are the man and the +poet more indissolubly blended than in Longfellow. The poet was the man, +and the man the poet. What he was to the stranger reading in distant +lands, by + + "The long wash of Australasian seas," + +that he was to the most intimate of his friends. His life and character +were perfectly reflected in his books. There is no purity or grace or +feeling or spotless charm in his verse which did not belong to the man. +There was never an explanation to be offered for him; no allowance was +necessary for the eccentricity or grotesqueness or wilfulness or humor +of genius. Simple, modest, frank, manly, he was the good citizen, the +self-respecting gentleman, the symmetrical man. + +He lived in an interesting historic house in a venerable university +town, itself the suburb of a great city; the highway running by his gate +and dividing the smooth grass and modest green terraces about the house +from the fields and meadows that sloped gently to the placid Charles, +and the low range of distant hills that made the horizon. Through the +little gate passed an endless procession of pilgrims of every degree and +from every country to pay homage to their American friend. Every +morning came the letters of those who could not come in person, and +with infinite urbanity and sympathy and patience the master of the +house received them all, and his gracious hospitality but deepened the +admiration and affection of the guests. His nearer friends sometimes +remonstrated at his sweet courtesy to such annoying "devastators of +the day". But to an urgent complaint of his endless favor to a flagrant +offender, Longfellow only answered, good-humoredly, "If I did not speak +kindly to him, there is not a man in the world who would." On the day +that he was taken ill, six days only before his death, three schoolboys +came out from Boston on their Saturday holiday to ask his autograph. The +benign lover of children welcomed them heartily, showed them a hundred +interesting objects in his house, then wrote his name for them, and for +the last time. + +Few men had known deeper sorrow. But no man ever mounted upon his sorrow +more surely to higher things. Blessed and beloved, the singer is gone, +but his song remains, and its pure and imperishable melody is the song +of the lark in the morning of our literature: + + "Type of the wise who soar but never roam, + True to the kindred points of heaven and home." + + + + +OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES + + +In 1817 Bryant's "Thanatopsis" was published in the _North American +Review_. Richard Henry Dana, the elder, who was then one of the editors, +said that it could not be an American poem, for there was no American +who could have written it. But it does not seem to have produced a +remarkable impression upon the public mind. The planet rose silently and +unobserved. Ten years afterwards, in 1827, Dana's own "Buccaneer" was +published, and Christopher North, in _Blackwood_, saluted it as "by far +the most original and powerful of American poetical compositions". But +it produced in this country no general effect which is remembered. Nine +years later, in 1836, Holmes's "Metrical Essay" was delivered before the +Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, and was as distinct an event +in literary circles as Edward Everett's oration before the same society +in 1824, or Ralph Waldo Emerson's in 1837, or Horace Bushnell's in 1848, +or Wendell Phillips's in 1881. Holmes was then twenty-seven years old, +and had just returned from his professional studies in Europe, where, as +in his college days at Cambridge, where he was born, he had toyed with +many Muses, yet still, with native Yankee prudence, held fast the hand +of Aesculapius. His poem, like the address of Emerson in the next +year, showed how completely the modern spirit of refined and exquisite +literary cultivation and of free and undaunted thought had superseded +the uncouth literary form and stern and rigid Calvinism of the Mathers +and early Boston. + +The melody and grace of Goldsmith's line, but with a fresh local spirit, +have not been more perfectly reproduced, nor with a more distinct +revelation of a new spirit, than in this poem. It is retrospective and +contemplative, but it is also full of the buoyancy of youth, of the +consciousness of poetic skill, and of blithe anticipation. Its tender +reminiscence and occasional fond elegiac strain are but clouds of the +morning. Its literary form is exquisite, and its general impression is +that of bright, elastic, confident power. It was by no means, however, a +first work, nor was the poet unknown in his own home. But the "Metrical +Essay" introduced him to a larger public, while the fugitive pieces +already known were the assurance that the more important poem was not +a happy chance, but the development of a quality already proved. Seven +years before, in 1829, the year he graduated at Harvard, Holmes began to +contribute to _The Collegian_, a college magazine. Two years later, in +1831, appeared the _New England Magazine_, in which the young writer, +as he might himself say, took the road with his double team of verse +and prose, holding the ribbons with unsurpassed lightness and grace +and skill, now for two generations guiding those fleet and well-groomed +coursers, which still show their heels to panting rivals, the prancing +team behind which we have all driven and are still driving with constant +and undiminished delight. + +Mr. F. B. Sanborn, whose tribute to Holmes on his eightieth birthday +shows how thorough was his research for that labor of love, tells us +that his first contribution to the _New England Magazine_ was published +in the third or September number of the first year, 1831. It was a copy +of verses of an unpromising title--"To an Insect". But that particular +insect, seemingly the creature of a day, proved to be immortal, for it +was the katydid, whose voice is perennial: + + "Thou sayest an undisputed thing + In such a solemn way." + +In the contributions of the young graduate the high spirits of a +frolicsome fancy effervesce and sparkle. But their quality of a new +literary tone and spirit is very evident. The ease and fun of these +bright prolusions, without impudence or coarseness, the poetic touch and +refinement, were as unmistakable as the brisk pungency of the gibe. The +stately and scholarly Boston of Channing, Dana, Everett, and Ticknor +might indeed have looked askance at the literary claims of such lines +as these "Thoughts in Dejection" of a poet wondering if the path to +Parnassus lay over Charlestown or Chelsea bridge: + + "What is a poet's fame? + Sad hints about his reason, + And sadder praise from gazetteers, + To be returned in season. + + "For him the future holds + No civic wreath above him; + Nor slated roof nor varnished chair, + Nor wife nor child to love him. + + "Maid of the village inn, + Who workest woe on satin, + The grass in black, the graves in green, + The epitaph in Latin, + + "Trust not to them who say + In stanzas they adore thee; + Oh, rather sleep in church-yard clay, + With maudlin cherubs o'er thee!" + +The lines to the katydid, with "L'Inconnue"-- + + "Is thy name Mary, maiden fair?"-- + +published in the magazine at about the same time, disclose Holmes's +natural melody and his fine instinct for literary form. But his +lyrical fervor finds its most jubilant expression at this time in "Old +Ironsides", written at the turning-point in the poet's life, when he had +renounced the study of the law, and was deciding upon medicine as his +profession. The proposal to destroy the frigate Constitution, fondly and +familiarly known as "Old Ironsides", kindled a patriotic frenzy in the +sensitive Boston boy, which burst forth into the noble lyric, + + "Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!" + +There had been no American poetry with a truer lilt of song than these +early verses, and there has been none since. Two years later, in 1833, +Holmes went to complete his medical studies in Paris, and the lines to a +grisette-- + + "Ah, Clemence, when I saw thee last + Trip down the Rue de Seine!"-- + +published upon his return in his first volume of verse, are a charming +illustration of his lyrical genius. His limpid line never flowed more +clearly than in this poem. It has the pensive tone of all his best poems +of the kind, but it is the half-happy sadness of youth. + +All these early verses have an assured literary form. The scope and +strain were new, but their most significant quality was not melody nor +pensive grace, but humor. This was ingrained and genuine. Sometimes it +was rollicking, as in "The Height of the Ridiculous" and "The September +Gale". Sometimes it was drolly meditative, as in "Evening, by a Tailor". +Sometimes it was a tearful smile of the deepest feeling, as in the most +charming and perfect of these poems, "The Last Leaf", in which delicate +and searching pathos is exquisitely fused with tender gayety. The +haunting music and meaning of the lines, + + "The mossy marbles rest + On the lips that he has pressed + In their bloom, + And the names he loved to hear + Have been carved for many a year + On the tomb", + +lingered always in the memory of Lincoln, whose simple sincerity and +native melancholy would instinctively have rejected any false note. It +is in such melody as that of the "Last Leaf" that we feel how truly the +grim old Puritan strength has become sweetness. + +To this poetic grace and humor and music, which at that time were +unrivalled, although the early notes of a tuneful choir of awakening +songsters were already heard, the young Holmes added the brisk and crisp +and sparkling charm of his prose. From the beginning his coursers were +paired, and with equal pace they have constantly held the road. In the +_New England Magazine_ for November in the same year, 1831, a short +paper was published called the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table". The +tone of placid dogmatism and infallible finality with which the bulls of +the domestic pope are delivered is delightfully familiar. This earliest +one has perhaps more of the cardinal's preliminary scarlet than of the +mature papal white, but in its first note the voice of the Autocrat is +unmistakable: + + "Somebody was rigmarolling the other day about the artificial + distinctions of society. + 'Madam,' said I, 'society is the same in all large places. I divide + it thus: + 1. People of cultivation who live in large houses. + 2. People of cultivation who live in small houses. + 3. People without cultivation who live in large houses. + 4. People without cultivation who live in small houses. + 5. Scrubs.' + An individual at the upper end of the table turned pale and left the + room as I finished with the monosyllable." + +"'Tis sixty years since", but that drop is of the same characteristic +transparency and sparkle as in the latest Tea-Cup. + +The time in which the _New England Magazine_ was published, and these +firstlings of Holmes's muse appeared, was one of prophetic literary +stir in New England. There were other signs than those in letters of +the breaking-up of the long Puritan winter. A more striking and extreme +reaction from the New England tradition could not well be imagined +than that which was offered by Nathaniel Parker Willis, of whom Holmes +himself says "that he was at the time something between a remembrance of +Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde". Willis was a kindly +saunterer, the first Boston dandy, who began his literary career with +grotesque propriety as a sentimentalizer of Bible stories, a performance +which Lowell gayly called inspiration and water. In what now seems a +languid, Byronic way, he figured as a Yankee Pelham or Vivian Grey. Yet +in his prose and verse there was a tacit protest against the old order, +and that it was felt is shown by the bitterness of ridicule and taunt +and insult with which, both publicly and privately, this most amiable +youth was attacked, who, at that time, had never said an ill-natured +word of anybody, and who was always most generous in his treatment of +his fellow authors. + +The epoch of Willis and the _New England Magazine_ is very notable in +the history of American literature. The traditions of that literature +were grave and even sombre. Irving, indeed, in his Knickerbocker and Rip +Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, and in the general gayety of his literary +touch, had emancipated it from strict allegiance to the solemnity of its +precedents, and had lighted it with a smile. He supplied a quality +of grace and cheerfulness which it had lacked, and without unduly +magnifying his charming genius, it had a natural, fresh, and smiling +spirit, which, amid the funereal, theologic gloom, suggests the +sweetness and brightness of morning. In its effect it is a breath of +Chaucer. When Knickerbocker was published, Joel Barlow's "Hasty-Pudding" +was the chief achievement of American literary humor. Mark Twain and +Charles Dudley Warner were not yet "the wits of Hartford". Those +who bore that name held it by brevet. Indeed, the humor of our early +literature is pathetic. In no State was the ecclesiastical dominance +more absolute than in Connecticut, and nothing shows more truly how +absolute and grim it was than the fact that the performances of the +"wits" in that State were regarded--gravely, it must have been--as +humor. + +For a long time there was no vital response in New England to the chord +touched by Irving. Yet Boston was then unquestionably the chief seat of +American letters. Dennie had established his _Portfolio_ in Philadelphia +in 1801, but in 1805 the _Monthly Anthology_, which was subsequently +reproduced in the _North American Review_, appeared in Boston, and +was the organ or illustration of the most important literary and +intellectual life of the country at that time. The opening of the +century saw the revolt against the supremacy of the old Puritan Church +of New England--a revolt within its own pale. This clerical protest +against the austere dogmas of Calvinism in its ancient seat was +coincident with the overthrow in the national government of Federalism +and the political triumph of Jefferson and his party. Simultaneously +also with the religious and political disturbance was felt the new +intellectual and literary impulse of which the _Anthology_ was the +organ. But the religious and literary movements were not in sympathy +with the political revolution, although they were all indications +of emancipation from the dominance of old traditions, the mental +restlessness of a people coming gradually to national consciousness. + +Mr. Henry Adams, in remarking upon this situation in his history of +Madison's administration, points out that leaders of the religious +protest which is known as the Unitarian Secession in New England were +also leaders in the intellectual and literary awakening of the time, but +had no sympathy with Jefferson or admiration of France. Bryant's father +was a Federalist; the club that conducted the _Anthology_ and the +_North American Review_ was composed of Federalists; and the youth +whose "Thanatopsis" is the chief distinction of the beginning of that +_Review_, and the morning star of American poetry, was, as a boy of +thirteen, the author of the "Embargo", a performance in which the +valiant Jack gave the giant Jefferson no quarter. The religious +secession took its definite form in Dr. Channing's sermon at the +ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819, which powerfully +arraigned the dominant theology of the time. This was the year in which +Irving's _Sketch Book_ was published. Bryant's first volume followed a +year or two later, and our distinctive literary epoch opened. + +Ten years afterwards, when Bryant had left New England, Dr. Channing +was its most dignified and characteristic name in literature. But he was +distinctively a preacher, and his serene and sweet genius never unbent +into a frolicsome mood. As early as 1820 a volume of Robert Burns's +poems fell into Whittier's hands like a spark into tinder, and the +flame that has so long illuminated and cheered began to blaze. It was, +however, a softened ray, not yet the tongue of lyric fire which it +afterwards became. But none of the poets smiled as they sang. The Muse +of New England was staid and stately--or was she, after all, not a true +daughter of Jove, but a tenth Muse, an Anne Bradstreet? The rollicking +laugh of Knickerbocker was a solitary sound in the American air until +the blithe carol of Holmes returned a kindred echo. + +Willis was the sign of the breaking spell. But his light touch could not +avail. The Puritan spell could be broken only by Puritan force, and +it is the lineal descendants of Puritanism, often the sons of +clergymen--Emerson and Holmes and Longfellow and Hawthorne and +Whittier--who emancipated our literature from its Puritan subjection. +In 1829 Willis, as editor of _Peter Parley's Token_ and the _American +Monthly Magazine_, was aided by Longfellow and Hawthorne and Motley and +Hildreth and Mrs. Child and Mrs. Sigourney, and the elder Bishop Doane, +Park Benjamin and George B. Cheever, Albert Pike and Rufus Dawes, as +contributors. Willis himself was a copious writer, and in the _American +Monthly_ first appeared the titles of "Inkling of Adventure" and +"Pencillings by the Way", which he afterwards reproduced for some of his +best literary work. The _Monthly_ failed, and in 1831, the year that the +_New England Magazine_ began, it was merged in the New York _Mirror_, of +which Willis became associate editor, leaving his native city forever, +and never forgiving its injustice towards him. In the heyday of his +happy social career in England he wrote to his mother, "The mines of +Golconda would not tempt me to return and live in Boston." + +This was the literary situation when Holmes was preluding in the +magazine. The acknowledged poets in Boston were Dana, Sprague, and +Pierpont. Are these names familiar to the readers of this essay? How +much of their poetry can those readers repeat? No one knows more surely +than he who writes of a living author how hard it is to forecast fame, +and how dangerous is prophecy. When Edward Everett saluted Percival's +early volume as the harbinger of literary triumphs, and Emerson greeted +Walt Whitman at "the opening of a great career", they generalized a +strong personal impression. They identified their own preference with +the public taste. On the other hand, Hawthorne says truly of himself +that he was long the most obscure man of letters in America. Yet he had +already published the _Twice-told Tales_ and the _Mosses from an Old +Manse_, the two series of stories in which the character and quality +of his genius are fully disclosed. But although Longfellow hailed the +publication of the first collection as the rising of a new star, the +tone of his comment is not that of the discoverer of a planet shining +for all, but of an individual poetic pleasure. The prescience of fame is +very infrequent. The village gazes in wonder at the return of the famous +man who was born on the farm under the hill, and whose latent greatness +nobody suspected; while the youth who printed verses in the corner of +the county paper, and drew the fascinated glances of palpitating maidens +in the meetinghouse, and seemed to the farmers to have associated +himself at once with Shakespeare and Tupper and the great literary or +"littery folks", never emerges from the poet's department in the paper +in which unconsciously and forever he has been cornered. It would be a +grim Puritan jest if that department had been named from the corner of +the famous dead in Westminster Abbey. + +If the Boston of sixty years ago had ventured to prophesy for itself +literary renown, it is easy to see upon what reputations of the time +it would have rested its claims. But if the most familiar names of +that time are familiar no longer, if Kettell and poems from the _United +States Gazette_ seem to be cemeteries of departed reputations, the fate +of the singers need not be deplored as if Fame had forgotten them. Fame +never knew them. Fame does not retain the name of every minstrel +who passes singing. But to say that Fame does not know them is not +dispraise. They sang for the hearers of their day, as the players +played. Is it nothing to please those who listen, because those who +are out of hearing do not stop and applaud? If we recall the names most +eminent in our literature, whether they were destined for a longer or +shorter date, we shall see that they are undeniably illustrations of the +survival of the fittest. Turning over the noble volumes of Stedman +and Miss Hutchinson, in which, as on a vast plain, the whole line of +American literature is drawn up for inspection and review, and marches +past like the ghostly midnight columns of Napoleon's grand army, we +cannot quarrel with the verdict of time, nor feel that injustice has +been done to Thamis or to Cawdor. There are singers of a day, but not +less singers because they are of a day. The insect that flashes in the +sunbeam does not survive like the elephant. The splendor of the most +gorgeous butterfly does not endure with the faint hue of the hills that +gives Athens its Pindaric name. And there are singers who do not sing. +What says Holmes, with eager sympathy and pity, in one of his most +familiar and most beautiful lyrics?-- + + "We count the broken lyres that rest + Where the sweet waiting singers slumber, + But o'er their silent sister's breast + The wild flowers who will stoop to number? + A few can touch the magic string, + And noisy fame is proud to win them; + Alas, for those that never sing, + And die with all their music in them!" + +But as he says also that the capacities of listeners at lectures differ +widely, some holding a gallon, others a quart, and others only a pint or +a gill, so of the singers who are not voiceless, their voices differ in +volume. Some are organs that fill the air with glorious and continuous +music; some are trumpets blowing a ringing peal, then sinking into +silence; some are harps of melancholy but faint vibration; still others +are flutes and pipes, whose sweet or shrill note has a dying fall. Some +are heard as the wind or sea is heard; some like the rustle of leaves; +some like the chirp of birds. Some are heard long and far away; others +across the field; others hardly across the street. Fame is perhaps +but the term of a longer or shorter fight with oblivion; but it is the +warrior who "drinks delight of battle with his peers", and holds his +own in the fray, who finally commands the eye and the heart. There were +poets pleasantly singing to our grandfathers whose songs we do not hear, +but the unheeded voice of the youngest songster of that time is a voice +we heed to-day. Holmes wrote but two "Autocrat" papers in the _New +England Magazine_--one in November, 1831, and the other in February, +1832. The year after the publication of the second paper he went to +Paris, where for three years he studied medicine, not as a poet, but +as a physician, and he returned in 1836 an admirably trained and highly +accomplished professional man. But the Phi Beta Kappa poem of that year, +like the tender lyric to Clemence upon leaving Paris, shows not +only that the poet was not dead, but that he did not even sleep. The +"Metrical Essay" was the serious announcement that the poet was not +lost in the man of science, an announcement which was followed by the +publication in the same year (1836) of his first volume of poems. This +was three years before the publication of Longfellow's first volume of +verses, _The Voices of the Night_. + +Holmes's devotion to the two Muses of science and letters was uniform +and untiring, as it was also to the two literary forms of verse and +prose. But although a man of letters, like the other eminent men of +letters in New England, he had no trace of the Bohemian. Willis was the +only noted literary figure that ever mistook Boston for a seaport in +Bohemia, and he early discovered his error. The fraternity which has +given to Boston its literary primacy has been always distinguished +not only for propriety of life and respectability in its true sense +of worthiness and respect, but for the possession of the virtues of +fidelity, industry, and good sense, which have carried so far both +the influence and the renown of New England. Nowhere has the Bohemian +tradition been more happily and completely shattered than in the circle +to which Holmes returned from his European studies to take his place. +American citizenship in its most attractive aspect has been signally +illustrated in that circle, and it is not without reason that +the government has so often selected from it our chief American +representatives in other countries. + +Dr. Holmes, as he was now called, and has continued to be called, +practised his profession in Boston; but whether because of some lurking +popular doubt of a poet's probable skill as a physician, or from some +lack of taste on his part for the details of professional practice, like +his kinsman, Wendell Phillips, and innumerable other young beginners, he +sometimes awaited a professional call longer than was agreeable. But he +wrote medical papers, and was summoned to lecture to the medical school +at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and later at Pittsfield in +Massachusetts, while his unfailing charm as an occasional poet gave +him a distinctive name. Holmes's felicity in occasional poems is +extraordinary. The "Metrical Essay" was the first and chief of the long +series of such verses, among which the songs of '29, the poems +addressed year after year to his college classmates of that year, have a +delightful and endless grace, tenderness, wit, and point. Pegasus +draws well in harness the triumphant chariot of '29, in which the lucky +classmates of the poet move to a unique and happy renown. + +As a reader, Holmes was the permanent challenge of Mrs. Browning's +sighing regret that poets never read their own verses to their worth. +Park Benjamin, who heard the Phi Beta Kappa poem, said of its delivery: +"A brilliant, airy, and _spirituelle_ manner varied with striking +flexibility to the changing sentiment of the poem, now deeply +impassioned, now gayly joyous and nonchalant, and anon springing up into +almost an actual flight of rhapsody, rendered the delivery of this poem +a rich, nearly a dramatic entertainment." This was no less true in later +years when he read some of his poems in New York at Bishop Potter's, +then rector of Grace Church, or of the reading of the poem at the +doctors' dinner given to him by the physicians of New York a little +later. + +Holmes's readings were like improvisations. The poems were expressed and +interpreted by the whole personality of the poet. The most subtle +touch of thought, the melody of fond regret, the brilliant passage +of description, the culmination of latent fun exploding in a keen and +resistless jest, all these were vivified in the sensitive play of manner +and modulation of tone of the reader, so that a poem by Holmes at the +Harvard Commencement dinner was one of the anticipated delights which +never failed. This temperament implied an oratorical power which +naturally drew the poet into the lecture lyceum when it was in its +prime, in the decade between 1850 and 1860. During that time the popular +lecture was a distinct and effective public force, and not the least +of its services was its part in instructing and training the public +conscience for the great contest of the Civil War. + +The year 1831, in which Holmes's literary activity began, was also +the year on whose first day the first number of Garrison's _Liberator_ +appeared, and the final period of the slavery controversy opened. But +neither this storm of agitation nor the transcendental mist that a few +years later overhung intellectual New England greatly affected the poet. + +In the first number of the "Autocrat" there is a passage upon puns, +which, crackling with fun, shows his sensitive scepticism. The +"Autocrat" says: "In a case lately decided before Miller, J., Doe +presented Roe a subscription paper, and urged the claims of suffering +humanity. Roe replied by asking when charity was like a top. It was in +evidence that Doe preserved a dignified silence. Roe then said, 'When +it begins to hum.' There are temperaments of a refined suspiciousness +to which, when the plea of reform is urged, the claims of suffering +humanity at once begin to hum. The very word reform irritates a peculiar +kind of sensibility, as a red flag stirs the fury of a bull. A noted +party leader said, with inexpressible scorn, 'When Dr. Johnson defined +the word patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he had not +learned the infinite possibilities of the word refa-a-r-m.'" + +The acridity of this jest is wholly unknown to the "Autocrat", who +has moved always with reform, if not always with reformers, and whose +protest against bigotry is as searching as it is sparkling. Not only has +his ear been quick to detect the hum of Mr. Honeythunder's loud appeal, +but his eye to catch the often ludicrous aspect of honest whimsey. +During all the early years of his literary career he flew his flashing +darts at all the "isms", and he fell under the doubt and censure of +those earnest children of the time whom the gay and clever sceptics +derided as apostles of the newness. When Holmes appeared upon the +lecture platform it was to discourse of literature or science, or to +treat some text of social manners or morals with a crisp Poor Richard +sense and mother wit, and a brilliancy of illustration, epigram, and +humor that fascinated the most obdurate "come-outer". Holmes's lectures +on the English poets at the Lowell Institute were among the most noted +of that distinguished platform, and everywhere the poet was one of +the most popular of "attractions". There were not wanting those who +maintained that his use of the platform was the correct one, and that +the orators who, often by happy but incisive indirection, fought the +good fight of the hour abused their opportunity. + +It was while Holmes was still a professor, but still also touching the +lyre and writing scientific essays and charming the great audiences of +the lecture lyceum, that in the first number of the _Atlantic Monthly_, +in November, 1857, the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" remarked, +"I was just going to say, when I was interrupted," and resumed the +colloquies of the _New England Magazine_. He had been interrupted +twenty-two years before. But as he began again it was plain that it was +the same voice, yet fuller, stronger, richer, and that we were listening +to one of the wisest of wits and sharpest of observers. Emerson warns us +that superlatives are to be avoided. But it will not be denied that the +"Autocrat" belongs in the highest rank of modern magazine or periodical +literature, of which the essays of "Elia" are the type. The form of the +"Autocrat"--a semi-dramatic, conversational, descriptive monologue--is +not peculiar to Holmes's work, but the treatment of it is absolutely +original. The manner is as individual and unmistakable as that of Elia +himself. It would be everywhere recognized as the Autocrat's. During +the intermission of the papers the more noted Macaulay flowers of +literature, as the Autocrat calls them, had bloomed; Carlyle's _Sartor +Resartus_ and reviews, Christopher North's _Noctes_ (now fallen into +ancient night), Thackeray's _Roundabout Papers_, Lowell's _Hosea +Biglow_--a whole library of magazine and periodical literature of the +first importance had appeared. But the Autocrat began again, after a +quarter of a century, musical with so rich a chorus, and his voice was +clear, penetrating, masterful, and distinctively his own. + +The cadet branch of English literature--the familiar colloquial +periodical essay, a comment upon men and manners and life--is a +delightful branch of the family, and traces itself back to Dick Steele +and Addison. Hazlitt, who belonged to it, said that he preferred the +_Tatler_ to the _Spectator_; and Thackeray, who consorted with it +proudly, although he was of the elder branch, restored Sir Richard, +whose habits had cost him a great deal of his reputation, to general +favor. The familiar essay is susceptible, as the eighteenth and +nineteenth centuries show, of great variety and charm of treatment. What +would the Christian Hero, writing to his Prue that he would be with her +in a pint of wine's time, have said to "Blakesmoor" and "Oxford in the +Vacation"? Yet Lamb and Steele are both consummate masters of the essay, +and Holmes, in the "Autocrat", has given it a new charm. The little +realm of the Autocrat, his lieges of the table, the persons of +the drama, are at once as definitely outlined as Sir Roger's club. +Unconsciously and resistlessly we are drawn within the circle; we are +admitted _ad eundem_, and become the targets of the wit, the irony, +the shrewd and sharp epigram, the airy whim, the sparkling fancy, +the curious and recondite thought, the happy allusion, the felicitous +analogy, of the sovereign master of the feast. + +The index of the _Autocrat_ is in itself a unique work. It reveals the +whimsical discursiveness of the book; the restless hovering of that +brilliant talk over every topic, fancy, feeling, fact; a humming-bird +sipping the one honeyed drop from every flower; or a huma, to use its +own droll and capital symbol of the lyceum lecturer, the bird that never +lights. There are few books that leave more distinctly the impression of +a mind teeming with riches of many kinds. It is, in the Yankee phrase, +thoroughly wideawake. There is no languor, and it permits none in the +reader, who must move along the page warily, lest in the gay profusion +of the grove, unwittingly defrauding himself of delight, he miss +some flower half hidden, some gem chance-dropped, some darting bird. +Howells's _Letters_ was called a chamber-window book, a book supplying +in solitude the charm of the best society. We could all name a few such +in our own literature. Would any of them, or many, take precedence of +the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table?_ + +It is in this book that the value of the scientific training to the +man of letters is illustrated, not only in furnishing noble and strong +analogies, but in precision of observation and accuracy of statement. In +Holmes's style, the definiteness of form and the clearness of expression +are graces and virtues which are due to his exact scientific study, as +well as to the daylight quality of his mind. + +The delicate apprehension of the finer and tenderer feelings which +is disclosed in the little passages of narrative in the record of the +Autocrat and of his legitimate brothers, the Professor and the Poet, +at the Breakfast Table, gives a grace and a sweetness to the work which +naturally flow into the music of the poems with which the diary of a +conversation often ends. These traits in the Autocrat suggested that he +would yet tell a distinct story, which indeed came while the trilogy +of the Breakfast Table was yet proceeding. _Elsie_ _Venner_ and the +_Guardian Angel_, the two novels of Holmes's, are full of the same +briskness and acuteness of observation, the same effusiveness of humor +and characteristic Americanism, as the _Autocrat_. Certain aspects +of New England life and character are treated in these stories with +incomparable vivacity and insight. Holmes's picture is of a later New +England than Hawthorne's, but it is its lineal descendant. It is another +facet of the Puritan diamond which flashes with different light in the +genius of Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and +Judd in _Margaret_. For, with all his lyrical instinct and rollicking +humor, Holmes is essentially a New-Englander, and one of the most +faithful and shrewd interpreters of New England. + +The colloquial habit of the Autocrat is not lost in the stories, and it +is so marked generally in Holmes's writings as to be called distinctive. +It is a fascinating gift, when it is so restrained by taste and +instinctive refinement as not to become what is known as bumptiousness. +Thackeray, even in his novels, is apt to drop into this vein, to talk +about the persons of his drama with his reader, instead of leaving them +to play out their part alone. This trait offends some of Thackeray's +audience, to whom it seems like the manager's hand thrust into the +box to help out the play of the puppets. They resent not "the damnable +faces" of the actors, but the damnable sermonizing of the author, and +exhort him to permit the play to begin. Thackeray frankly acknowledged +his tendency to preach, as he called it. But it was part of the man. +Without the private personal touch of the essayist in his stories they +would not be his. This colloquial habit is very winning when governed by +a natural delicacy and an exquisite literary instinct. It is the quality +of all the authors who are distinctly beloved as persons by their +readers, and it is to this class that Holmes especially belongs. + +It is not a quality which is easily analyzed, but it blends a power of +sympathetic observation and appreciation both of the thing observed and +the reader to whom the observation is addressed. The Autocrat, as he +converses, brightens with his own clear thought, with the happy quip, +the airy fancy. He is sure of your delight, not only in the thought, but +in its deft expression. He in turn is delighted with your delight. He +warms to the responsive mind and heart, and feels the mutual joy. The +personal relation is established, and the Autocrat's audience become +his friends, to whom he describes with infinite glee the effect of his +remarks upon his lieges at table. No other author takes the reader into +his personal confidence more closely than Holmes, and none reveals his +personal temperament more clearly. This confidential relation becomes +even more simple and intimate as time chastens the eagerness of youth +and matures the keen brilliancy of the blossom into the softer bloom of +the fruit. The colloquies of the Autocrat under the characteristic +title of "Over the Tea-Cups" are full of the same shrewd sense and wise +comment and tender thought. The kindly mentor takes the reader by the +button or lays his hand upon his shoulder, not with the rude familiarity +of the bully or the boor, but with the courtesy of Montaigne, the +friendliness of John Aubrey, or the wise cheer of Selden. The reader +glows with the pleasure of an individual greeting, and a wide diocese +of those whom the Autocrat never saw plume themselves proudly upon his +personal acquaintance. + +In this discursive talk about one of the American authors who have +vindicated the position of American letters in the literature of the +language we have not mentioned all his works. It is the quality rather +than the quantity with which we are concerned, the upright, honorable, +pure quality of the poet, the wit, the scholar, for whom the most +devoted reader is called to make no plea, no apology. The versatility of +his power is obvious, but scarcely less so the uniformity of his work. + +It is a power which was early mature. For many a year he has dwelt upon +a high table-land where the air is equable and inspiring, yet, as we +have hinted, ever softer and sweeter. The lyric of today glows with the +same ardor as the fervent apostrophe to "Old Ironsides" or the tripping +salutation to the remembered and regretted Clemence; it is only less +eager. The young Autocrat who remarked that the word "scrub" dismissed +from table a fellow-boarder who turned pale, now with the same smiling +acuteness remarks the imprudent politeness which tries to assure him +that it is no matter if he is a little older. Did anybody say so? The +easy agility with which he cleared "the seven-barred gate" has carried +him over the eight bars, and we are all in hot pursuit. For just sixty +years since his first gay and tender note was heard, Holmes has been +fulfilling the promise of his matin song. He has become a patriarch of +our literature, and all his countrymen are his lovers. + + + + +WASHINGTON IRVING + + +Forty years ago, upon a pleasant afternoon, you might have seen tripping +with an elastic step along Broadway, in New York, a figure which even +then would have been called quaint. It was a man of about sixty-six or +sixty-seven years old, of a rather solid frame, wearing a Talma, as a +short cloak of the time was called, that hung from the shoulders, and +low shoes, neatly tied, which were observable at a time when boots were +generally worn. The head was slightly declined to one side, the face was +smoothly shaven, and the eyes twinkled with kindly humor and shrewdness. +There was a chirping, cheery, old-school air in the whole appearance, +an undeniable Dutch aspect, which, in the streets of New Amsterdam, +irresistibly recalled Diedrich Knickerbocker. The observer might easily +have supposed that he saw some later descendant of the renowned Wouter +Van Twiller refined into a nineteenth-century gentleman. The occasional +start of interest as the figure was recognized by some one in the +passing throng, the respectful bow, and the sudden turn to scan him more +closely, indicated that he was not unknown. Indeed, he was the American +of his time universally known. This modest and kindly man was the +creator of Diedrich Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle. He was the father +of our literature, and at that time its patriarch. He was Washington +Irving. + +At the same time you might have seen another man, of slight figure and +rustic aspect, with an air of seriousness, if not severity, moving with +the crowd, but with something remote and reserved in his air, as if in +the city he bore with him another atmosphere, and were still secluded +among solitary hills. In the bright and busy street of the city which +was always cosmopolitan, and in which there lingers a tradition, +constantly renewed, of good-natured banter of the losel Yankee, this +figure passed like the grave genius of New England. By a little play of +fancy the first figure might have seemed the smiling spirit of genial +cheerfulness and humor, of kindly sympathy even with the foibles and +weaknesses of poor human nature; and the other the mentor of its earnest +endeavor and serious duty. For he was the first of our poets, whose +"Thanatopsis" was the hymn of his meditations among the primeval forests +of his native hills, and who, in his last years, sat at the door of his +early home and looked across the valley of the Westfield to the +little town of Plainfield upon the wooded heights beyond, whose chief +distinction is that there he wrote the "Waterfowl"; for this graver +figure was the poet Bryant. + +If in the same walk you had passed those two figures, you would have +seen not only the first of our famous prose writers and the first of our +acknowledged poets, but also the representatives of the two fundamental +and distinctive qualities of our American literature, as of all +literature--its grave, reflective, earnest character, and its sportive, +genial, and humorous genius. + +At the time of which I speak another figure also was familiar in +Broadway, but less generally recognized as it passed than either of the +others, although, perhaps, even more widely known to fame than they. +This was Cooper, who gave us so many of the heroes of our childhood's +delight, but who at this time was himself the hero of innumerable +lawsuits, undertaken to chastise the press for what he believed to be +unjust and libelous comments upon himself. Now that the uproar of that +litigation is silent, and its occasion forgotten, it seems comical that +a man for whom fame had already rendered a favorable judgment should +be busily seeking the opinion of local courts upon transitory newspaper +opinions of him-self and his writings. It is as if Dickens, when the +whole English-reading world--judges on the bench and bishops in their +studies, cobblers in their stalls and grooms in the stables--were all +laughing over Pickwick, should have sued the _Eatanswill Gazette_ for +calling him a clown. Thackeray pronounces Cooper's Long Tom Coffin +one of the prizemen of fiction. That is a final judgment by the +chief-justice. But who knows what was the verdict in Cooper's lawsuits +to vindicate himself, and who cares? When Cooper died there was a great +commemorative meeting in New York. Daniel Webster presided, and praised +the storyteller; Bryant read a discourse upon him, while Irving sat by +his side. One of the triumvirate of our early literature was gone, and +two remained to foresee their own future in the honors paid to him. +Indeed, it was to see them, quite as much as to hear of their dead +comrade, that the multitude assembled that evening; and the one who was +seen with the most interest was Irving, the one in whom the city of New +York naturally feels a peculiar right and pride, as the most renowned of +her children. + +If I say that he made personally the same impression that his works +make, you can easily see the man. As you read the story of his life you +feel its constant gayety and cheerfulness. It was the life of a literary +man and a man of society--a life without events, or only the events +of all our lives, except that it lacks the great event of marriage. In +place of it there is a tender and pathetic romance. Irving lived to be +seventy-six years old. At twenty-six he was engaged to a beautiful girl, +who died. He never married; but after his death, in a little box of +which he always kept the key, was found the miniature of a lovely girl, +and with it a braid of fair hair, and a slip of paper on which was +written the name Matilda Hoffman, with some pages upon which the writing +was long since faded. That fair face Irving kept all his life in a more +secret and sacred shrine. It looks out, now and then, with unchanged +loveliness from some pensive passage, which he seems to write with +wistful melancholy of remembrance. That fond and immortal presence +constantly renewed the gentle humanity, the tenderness of feeling, the +sweet healthfulness and generous sympathy which never failed in his life +and writings. + +He was born in the city of New York in 1783, the year in which the +Revolution ended in the acknowledgment of American independence. The +British army marched out of the city, and the American army, with +Washington at the head, marched in. "The patriot's work is ended just as +my boy is born," said the patriotic mother, "and the boy shall be named +Washington". Six years later, when Washington returned to New York to be +inaugurated President, he was one day going into a shop when the boy's +Scotch nurse democratically stopped the new republican chief magistrate +and said to him, "Please your honor, here's a bairn was named for you". +The great man turned and looked kindly on his little namesake, laid his +hand upon his head, and blessed his future biographer. + +The name of no other American has been so curiously confused with +Washington's as that of Irving. Many a young fellow puzzles over the +connection which the name seems vaguely to imply, and in other lands the +identity of the men is confounded. When Irving first went to Europe, a +very young man, well-educated, courteous, with great geniality of manner +and charm of conversation, he was received by Prince Torlonia, the +banker, in Rome, with unusual and flattering civility. His travelling +companion, who had been treated by the prince with entire indifference, +was perplexed at the warmth of Irving's welcome. Irving laughingly said +that it only proved the prince's remarkable discrimination. But the +young travellers laughed still more when the prince unconsciously +revealed the secret of his attentions by taking his guest aside, and +asking him how nearly he was related to General Washington. + +Many years afterwards, when he had become famous, an English lady and +her daughter paused in an Italian gallery before a bust of Washington. +"And who was Washington, mamma?" asked the daughter. "Why, my dear, I am +surprised at your ignorance," answered the mother, "he was the author of +the _Sketch Book_." Long ago in Berlin I was talking with some American +friends one evening at a cafe, and observed a German intently listening +to our conversation as if trying his ability to understand the language. +Presently he said to me, politely, "You are English, no?" But when +I replied "No, we are Americans"--"Americans!" he exclaimed +enthusiastically, grasping my hand and shaking it warmly, "Americans, +ach! we all know your great General Washington Irving." + +Irving's father was a Presbyterian deacon, in whose heart the sterner +traditions of the Covenanters lingered. He tried hard to teach his son +to contemn amusement, and to impale his youth upon the five points of +Calvinism, rather than to play ball. But it was John Knox trying to curb +the tricksy Ariel. Perhaps from some bright maternal ancestor the boy +had derived his sweet gayety of nature which nothing could repress. +His airy spirits bubbled like a sunny fountain in that somewhat arid +household. He read at ten a translation of the _Orlando Furioso_, and +his father's yard, doubtless trim and well kept as beseemed a deacon's +yard, became at once a field of chivalry. Candles were forbidden him in +his chamber, but when he made the acquaintance of _Robinson Crusoe_ +and _Sindbad the Sailor_, he secreted lights to illuminate his innocent +revels with those immortal playmates. + +The amusements which were permitted were of too depressing a character +to be tolerated by the healthy boy, who, like the duck taking to the +water from under the wing of the astonished hen, sometimes escaped from +the serious house at night by dropping from a window, and with a delight +that must have torn his father's heart with anguish had he known it, +tasted the forbidden fruit of the theatre. It was a Presbyterian boy +who tasted it then; but in the same city many years afterwards it was a +Quaker boy whom I knew who was also enamoured of the play. "John," said +his grieved father, "is this dreadful thing true that I hear of thee? +Has thee ever been to see the play-actress Frances Kemble?" "Yes, +father," answered the heroic John. "I hope thee has not been more than +once, John," said the afflicted father. "Yes, father," replied John, +resolved to make a clean breast of his sins, "more than thirty times." +It is useless to try to prevent blue-birds from flying in the spring. +The blithe creatures made to soar and sing will not be restrained. +The same kind Providence that made Calvin made Shakespeare. The sun +is higher than the clouds, and smiles are as heaven-born as tears. In +Emerson's poem the squirrel says to the mountain: + + "You're not so small as I, + And not half so spry; + + * * * * * + + "If I cannot carry forests on my back + Neither can you crack a nut." + + +It was in vain to try to thwart the young Irving's genius. Yet the +boy who a little later was to light with rosy cheer the air which, as +Wendell Phillips said, was still black with sermons; who was to give to +our literature its first distinctly humorous strain, and innocently to +amuse the world, was somehow or other, as he said, "taught to feel that +everything pleasant was wicked". + +If that were so, what a sinner Washington Irving was! If to make life +easier by making it pleasanter, if to outwit trouble by gay banter, +if with satire that smiles but never stings to correct foibles and to +quicken good impulses; if to deepen and strengthen human sympathy, is +not to be a human benefactor, what makes one? When Dr. Johnson said of +Garrick that his death eclipsed the gayety of nations, he did not mean +merely that the player would no longer make men laugh, but that he +could no longer make them better. "If, however," said Irving--and Willis +selected the words for the motto of his second volume of verse published +in 1827--"I can by a lucky chance, in these days of evil, rub out one +wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment +of sadness; if I can, now and then, penetrate the gathering film of +misanthropy, prompt a benevolent view of human nature, and make my +reader more in good-humor with his fellow-beings and himself, surely, +surely I shall not then have written entirely in vain." + +That cannot be said to have been the spirit of any American author +before Irving. Our colonial literature was mainly political and +theological. You have only to return to the early New England days in +the stories of Hawthorne, the magician who restores with a shuddering +spell that old, sombre life, to understand the character of its reading. +The books that were not treatises upon special topics all seemed to say +with one of the grim bards of Calvinism: + + "My thoughts on awful subjects roll, + Damnation and the dead." + +Literature, in its proper sense, there was none. There was no +imaginative creation, no play of fancy and humor, no subtle charm of the +ideal life, no grace and delight of expression, which are essential to +literature. The perpetual twilight and chill of the New England Puritan +world were an arctic winter in which no flower of poesy bloomed and +no bird sang. One of the French players who came to this country with +Rachel says, in his journal, with a startled air, as if he had remarked +in Americans a universal touch of lunacy, that he was invited to take a +pleasure-drive to Greenwood Cemetery. Evidently he was not familiar with +Froissart's epigram nor with the annals of the Puritan fathers, or he +would have known that their favorite pleasure-ground was the graveyard. +Judge Sewell's Journal, the best picture of daily New England life in +the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a portrait framed in black +and hung with thick crape. It is a register of funerals--a book which +seems to require a suit of sables for its proper reading. + +The early Christians dwelt so often and so long in the catacombs that +when they emerged, accustomed to associate life with the tomb, they +doubtless regarded the whole world as a cemetery. The American Puritans +inherited the disposition from their early confessors, and so powerful +was the tendency that it laid its sombre spirit upon the earliest +enduring poem in our literature, and the fresh and smiling nature of the +new world was first depicted by our literary art as a tomb: + + "The hills, + Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales + Stretching in pensive quietness between; + The venerable woods; rivers that move + In majesty; and the complaining brooks + That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, + Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste, + Are but the solemn decorations all + Of the great tomb of man." + +"Thanatopsis" is the swan-song of Puritanism. Indeed, when New England +Puritanism could sing, as for the first time it did in the verse of +Bryant, the great change was accomplished. Out of strength had come +forth sweetness. I am not decrying the Puritans. They were the stern +builders of the modern world, the unconscious heralds of wider liberty, +and a kindlier future for mankind. But + + "God works in a mysterious way + His wonders to perform," + +and never more mysteriously than when he chose as the pioneers of +religious liberty in the New World those who hung Quakers, and as the +founders of civil equality those who permitted only members of their own +Church to vote. + +Irving was not a studious boy. He did not go to college. He read some +law at sixteen, but he read much more literature, and sauntered in the +country about New York with his gun and fishing-rod. He sailed up the +Hudson, and explored for the first time the realm that was presently to +be his forever by the right of eminent domain of the imagination. New +York was a snug little city in those days. At the beginning of the +century it was all below the present City Hall, and the young fellow, +who was born a cosmopolitan, greatly enjoyed the charms of the modest +society in which the Dutch and the English circles were still somewhat +separated, and in which such literary cultivation as there was was +necessarily foreign. But while he enjoyed he observed, and his literary +instinct began to stir. + +Under the name of "Jonathan Oldstyle", the young Irving printed in his +brother's newspaper essays in the style of the _Spectator_, discussing +topics of the town, and the modest theatre in John Street and its chance +actors, as if it had been Drury Lane with Garrick and Mrs. Siddons. The +little town kindly smiled upon the lively efforts of the Presbyterian +deacon's son; and its welcome of his small essays, the provincial echo +of the famous Queen Anne's men in London, is a touching revelation of +our scant and spare native literary talent. The essays are forgotten +now, but they were enough to bring Charles Brockden Brown to find the +young author, and to tempt him, but in vain, to write for _The Literary +Magazine and American Register_, which the novelist was just beginning +in Philadelphia, a pioneer of American literary magazines, which Brown +sustained for five years. + +The youthful Addison of New Amsterdam was a delicate lad, and when he +came of age he sailed for France and the Mediterranean, and passed two +years in travelling. Napoleon Bonaparte was emperor, and at war with +England, and the young American, despite his passport, was everywhere +believed to be an Englishman. Travelling was hard work in those days of +war, but the cheery youth proved the truth of the proverb that a light +heart and a whole pair of breeches go round the world. At Messina, in +Sicily, he saw Nelson's fleet pass through the strait, looking for the +French ships; and before the year ended the famous battle of Trafalgar +had been fought, and at Greenwich in England Irving saw the body of the +great sailor lying in state, wrapped in his flag of victory. At Rome he +made the acquaintance of Washington Allston, and almost resolved to be a +painter. In Paris he saw Madame de Stael, who overwhelmed him with eager +questions about his remote and unknown country, and in London he was +enchanted by Mrs. Siddons. Some years afterwards, when the _Sketch Book_ +had made him famous, he was presented to Mrs. Siddons, and the great +actress said to him, in her deepest voice and with her stateliest +manner, "You've made me weep." The modest young author was utterly +abashed, and could say nothing. After the publication of his +_Bracebridge_ Hall he was once more presented to her, and again with +gloomy grandeur she said to him, "You've made me weep again." This time +Irving received the solemn salute with more composure, and doubtless +retorted with a compliment magnificent enough even for the sovereign +Queen of Tragedy, who, as her niece Mrs. Fanny Kemble said of her, never +laid aside her great manner, and at the dinner-table brandished her fork +and stabbed the potatoes. + +Irving returned from this tour with established health--a refined, +agreeable, exceedingly handsome and charming gentleman; with a confirmed +taste for society, and a delightful store of interesting recollection +and anecdote. With a group of cultivated and lively friends of his own +age he dined and supped and enjoyed the town, and a little anecdote +which he was fond of telling shows that the good old times were not +unlike the good new times: One morning, after a gay dinner, Irving met +one of his fellow-revellers, who told him that on the way home, after +draining the parting bumper, he had fallen through a grating in the +sidewalk, which had been carelessly left open, into the vault beneath. +It was impossible to climb out, and at first the solitude was rather +dismal, he said; but several of the other guests fell in, in the course +of the evening, and, on the whole, they had quite a pleasant time of it. + +In the midst of this frolicking life, and growing out of it, Irving's +real literary career began. With his brother William, and his friend +James K. Paulding, who afterwards wrote the _Dutchman's Fireside_, and +was one of the recognized American authors of fifty years ago, he issued +every fortnight a periodical, which ran for twenty numbers, and stopped +in the midst of its success. It was modelled upon the _Spectator_ and +Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_, describing and criticising the +manners and morals of the town with extravagant humor and pungency, +and a rollicking independence which must have been both startling and +stimulating. + +Perhaps, also, the town was secretly pleased to discover that it was +sufficiently important to be worthy of such bright raillery and humorous +reproof. _Salmagundi_ was only a lively _jeu d'esprit_, and Irving was +never proud of it. "I know," said Paulding, writing to him in later +life, "you consider old Sal as a sort of saucy, flippant trollope, +belonging to nobody, and not worth fathering." But, nevertheless, +Irving's genius was trying its wings in it, and pluming itself for +flight. _Salmagundi_ undoubtedly, to a later taste, is rather crude and +cumbrous fun, but it is interesting as the immediate forerunner of our +earliest work of sustained humor, and of the wit of Holmes and Lowell at +a later date. When it was discontinued, at the beginning of 1808, Irving +and his brother began the _History of New York_, which was originally +designed to be a parody of a particular book. But the work was +interrupted by the business difficulties of the brother, and at last +Irving resumed it alone, recast it entirely, and as he finished it the +engagement with Matilda Hoffman ended with her death, and the long arid +secret romance of his life began. + +Knickerbocker's _History_ was published just before Christmas, 1809, +and made a merry Christmas for our grandfathers and grandmothers eighty +years ago. The fun began before the book was published. In October the +curiosity of the town of eighty thousand inhabitants was awakened by +a series of skilful paragraphs in the _Evening Post_. The art of +advertising was never more ingeniously illustrated. Mr. Fulkerson +himself would have paid homage to the artist. One day the quid-nuncs +found this paragraph in the paper, It was headed, + + "DISTRESSING. + + "Left his lodgings, some time since, and has not since been heard + of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and + cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons + for believing that he is not entirely in his right mind, and, as + great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concerning + him left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street, or at the + office of this paper, will be thankfully received. + + "P. S.--Printers of newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity + by giving an insertion to the above. + + "_October 25th._" + +This was followed within a fortnight by another ingenious lure: + + "_To the Editor of the Evening Post:_ + + "Sir,--Having read in your paper of the 26th October last a paragraph + respecting an old gentleman by the name of Knickerbocker, who was + missing from his lodgings, if it would be any relief to his friends, + or furnish them with any clue to discover where he is, you may inform + them that a person answering the description was seen by the passengers + of the Albany stage early in the morning, about four or five weeks ago, + resting himself by the side of the road, a little above Kingsbridge. + He had in his hands a small bundle, tied in a red bandana handkerchief. + He appeared to be travelling northward, and was very much fatigued and + exhausted. + + "_November 6._ A Traveller." + +Ten days after came a letter signed by Seth Handaside, landlord of the +Independent Handaside: + + "Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street. + + "Sir,--You have been kind enough to publish in your paper a paragraph + about Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, who was missing so strangely from his + lodgings some time since. Nothing satisfactory has been heard from the + old gentleman since, but a very curious written Book has been found in + his room in his own handwriting. Now, I wish you to notice him, if he + is still alive, that if he does not return and pay off his bill for + board and lodging, I shall have to dispose of his Book to satisfy me + for the same." + +This is very simple jesting, but at that time it was very effective in +a town that enjoyed the high spirits of _Salmagundi_. Moreover, the book +which was announced in this lively strain was as unprecedented as the +announcement. It was a very serious time and country, and the work of +the small elderly gentleman who carried a little bundle tied in a +red bandana handkerchief appeared in the midst of the sober and dry +effusions of our Puritan literature, and of an eager and energetic life +still engrossed with the subjection of a continent and the establishment +of a new nation. It was the work of a young man of twenty-six, who lived +fifty years afterwards with constantly increasing fame, making many +and admirable contributions to literature. But nothing that followed +surpassed the joyous brilliancy and gay felicity of his first book, +which was at once acknowledged as the wittiest book that America had +produced. + +Knickerbocker's _History_ is a prolonged and elaborate and audacious +burlesque of the early annals of New Amsterdam. The undaunted Goth of +the legend who plucked the Roman senator by the beard was not a more +ruthless iconoclast than this son of New Amsterdam, who drew its grave +ancestors from venerable obscurity by flooding them with the cheerful +light of blameless fun. To pass the vague and venerable traditions of +the austere and heroic founders of the city through the alembic of +a youth's hilarious creative humor, and to turn them out in forms +resistlessly grotesque, but with their identity unimpaired, was a stroke +as daring as it was successful. But the skill and power with which this +is done can be best appreciated by those who are most familiar with the +history which the gleeful genius burlesques. + +Irving follows the actual story closely, and the characters that +he develops faithfully, although with rollicking caricature, are +historical. Indeed, the fidelity is so absolute that the fiction is +welded with the fact. The days of the Dutch ascendency in New York are +inextricably associated with this ludicrous narrative. It is impossible +not to think of the forefathers of New Amsterdam as Knickerbocker +describes them. The Wouter Van Twiller, the Wilhemus Kieft, the Peter +Stuyvesant, who are familiarly and popularly known, are not themselves, +but the figures drawn by Diedrich Knickerbocker. In comical despair, +the historian Grahame, whose _Colonial History_ is still among the +best, says of Knickerbocker: "If Sancho Panza had been a real governor, +misrepresented by the wit of Cervantes, his future historian would have +found it no easy matter to bespeak a grave attention to the annals of +his administration." + +The gayety of this blithe genius bursting in upon our staid literature +is irresistible. Irving's temperament, his travels, his humor, gave him +a cosmopolitan point of view; and his little native city, with its local +sense of importance, and its droll aristocratic traditions springing +from Dutch burgomasters and traders, impressed his merry genius like +a complacent Cranford or Tarascon taking itself with a provincial +seriousness, which, to his sympathetic fancy, was an exhaustless +fountain of fun. Part of the fun to us, and perhaps to Irving, was the +indignation with which it was received by the descendants of the Dutch +families in the city and State. The excited drawing-rooms denounced +it as scandalous satire and ridicule. Even Irving's friend, Gulian +Verplanck, nine years afterwards, deepening the comedy of his remark by +his evident unconsciousness of the drollery of his gravity, grieved that +the author's exuberance of genuine humor should be wasted on a coarse +caricature. Irving, who was then in Europe, saw Verplanck's strictures +just as he had written _Rip Van Winkle_, and he wrote to a friend at +home that he could not help laughing at Verplanck's outburst of filial +feeling for his ancestors, adding, in the true Knickerbocker vein, +"Remember me heartily to him, and tell him that I mean to grow wiser +and better and older every day, and to lay the castigation he has given +seriously to heart." + +The success of Knickerbocker's _History_ was immediate, and it was the +first American work of literature which arrested attention in Europe. + +Sir Walter Scott, who was then the most famous of English poets, and was +about to publish the first of the Waverley Novels, was delighted with a +humor which he thought recalled Swift's, and a sentiment that seemed +to him as tender as Sterne's. He wrote a generous acknowledgment to +the American friend who had sent him the book, and in later years he +welcomed Diedrich Knickerbocker at Abbotsford, and the American has +given a charming and vivid picture of Scott's home and its master. + +But the success of his book did not at once determine Irving's choice +of a career. He was still a gilded youth who enjoyed the gay idleness of +society, and who found in writing only another and pleasant recreation. +He had been bred in the conservative tradition which looked upon +livelihood by literature as the deliberate choice of Grub Street, and +the wretchedness of Goldsmith as the necessary and natural fate of +authors; but it is droll that, although he recoiled from the uncertainty +of support by literary labor, he was willing to try the very doubtful +chances of office-holding as a means of securing leisure for literary +pursuits. He offered himself as a candidate for appointment as the clerk +of a court in the city. By tradition and sympathy he was a Federalist, +but he had taken no active part in politics, and his chance was slight. +He went to Albany, however, and in a lively letter he paints a familiar +picture of the crowd of office-hunters who, he says, "like a cloud of +locusts, have descended upon the city to devour every plant and herb and +every green thing." He was sick with a cold, and stifled in rooms heated +by stoves, and was utterly disgusted, as he says, "by the servility +and duplicity and rascality I have witnessed among the swarms of scrub +politicians who crawl about the great metropolis of our State like so +many vermin about the head of the body politic." + +Again the good old times were apparently very much like the good new +times. Thirty-nine years after Irving's discomfiture in trying to get a +public office, Hawthorne was turned out of one that he held, and wrote +to a friend: "It seems to me that an inoffensive man of letters, having +obtained a pitiful little office on no other plea than his pitiful +little literature, ought not to be left at the mercy of these +thick-skulled and no-hearted ruffians." The language is strong, but the +epithets are singularly well-chosen. The distinctive qualities of the +ringleaders, whether of high or low degree, in the degradation of public +trusts into private and party spoils, have never been more accurately +or effectively described than by the words "thick-skulled" and +"no-hearted". + +The story of the sturdy beggar who asked General Jackson to give him the +mission to France, and finally came down to a request for an old coat, +well illustrates a system which regards public office not as a public +trust, but as private alms. The service of the State, whether military +or civil, is an object of high and generous ambition, because it +involves the leadership of men. But if Irving and Hawthorne thought +that what is called office-seeking is disgusting, it was not because +the public service is not noble and dignified, but because we choose to +allow it to be so often dependent, not upon fitness and character, +but upon the personal or political favor of the "thick-skulled" and +"no-hearted". + +But the problem of a career was soon solved. In the year 1810 Irving +formed a business connection with two of his brothers, and the next five +years were passed in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, forming +various literary plans, looking out for his business interests, +sparkling in society; and when war with England began, serving upon the +governor's military staff as Colonel Washington Irving. In the spring +of 1815 he sailed to roam again through Europe, but the illness of his +brother compelled him to remain in England in charge of the business. +"London," as a shrewd and celebrated American recently said, "was then +as it is now, the social centre of the world." Irving saw famous men and +women, and his charming sweetness and humor opened all doors and hearts. +But the business fell into distress, then into disaster, and in the +beginning of 1818 the house failed. He was now thrown wholly upon his +literary resources, which did _not_ fail, and in the spring of 1819, +when he was thirty-six years old, the first number of the _Sketch Book_ +was issued in New York. + +The merry, exuberant, satirical Diedrich Knickerbocker was transformed +into the genial, urbane, and tender-hearted Geoffrey Crayon. Our fathers +and grandfathers knew him well. They had been bred upon Addison and +Goldsmith, the essayists and the poets of the eighteenth century, and +in Geoffrey Crayon they recognized and welcomed another member of that +delightful literary society. He was all the more welcome that he was an +American--one of themselves. The bland and courteous Geoffrey, indeed, +had few rivals among his countrymen. In our little American world of +letters at that time he came and conquered. Bryant's "Thanatopsis", had +been published only two years before; Halleck's and Drake's lively but +strictly local "Croakers" were still appearing, and Edward Everett had +just hailed Percival's first volume as authorizing great expectations. + +But prophecy is always dangerous. The year before, Sydney Smith had +said, in the _Edinburgh Review_, "Literature the Americans have none--no +native literature we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin, +indeed, and may afford to live half a century on his fame. There is, +or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his baptismal name was +Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia by Jefferson, and +an epic poem by Mr. Joel Barlow, and some pieces of pleasantry by Mr. +Irving. But why should Americans write books, when a six weeks' passage +brings them, in their own tongue, _our_ sense, science, and genius, on +bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steamboats, grist-mills are their natural +objects for centuries to come. Then, when they have got to the Pacific +Ocean, epic poems, plays, pleasures of memory, and all the elegant +gratifications of an ancient people who have tamed the wild earth, +and sat down to amuse themselves. This is the natural march of human +affairs." As the sarcastic Yorkshire canon, sitting on the Edinburgh +Olympus, wiped his pen, the _Sketch Book_ was published. The good canon +was right as to our small literary product, but even an _Edinburgh +Review_ could not wisely play the prophet. + +This Mr. Everett also discovered, for his "great expectations" of +Percival were not fulfilled. A desponding student of our poetry recently +sighs that Percival is a forgotten poet, and then, seizing a promiscuous +assortment of names, exclaims that Charles Sprague, William Wirt, +Washington Irving, and Jack Downing may be referred to as forgotten +authors. But this is the luxury of woe. Why should not Percival be a +forgotten poet? That is to say, what is there in the verse of Percival +that should command interest and attention to-day? He was a remarkably +accomplished man and a most excellent gentleman, and his name is very +familiar in the reading-books of the time when grandfathers of to-day +were going to school. But he was a noted poet not because he took rank +with his contemporaries--with Byron and Scott and Keats and Shelley and +Coleridge and Wordsworth--but because there were very few Americans who +wrote verses, and our fathers patriotically stood by them. + +Yet because the note of a singer of another day is not heard by us, it +does not follow that he did not touch the heart of his time. Grenville +Mellen is a forgotten poet also, and Rufus Dawes and John Neal and James +G. Eastburn. If the gentle reader will turn to the pages of Kettell, +or any early American anthology, he will seem to himself to be walking +among tombs. Upon each page might be suitably inscribed, "Sacred to the +memory" of almost every one of the singers. But can we say with honest +reproach, "forgotten poets"? The loiterer in the wood hears the song +of the wood-thrush, but is the hermit-bird wronged, or is his song less +sweet, because it is not echoed round the world? Is Fame to be held +responsible for not retaining the name of every minstrel who loiters by +and touches his harp lightly, and sings a sweet song as he passes on? Is +it a hard fate to give pleasure to those who listen because those out of +hearing do not applaud? + +Many an author may have a tone and a touch which please the ear and +taste of his own day, and which, as characteristic of a time, may be +only curious to a later taste, like the costumes and dances of our +great-grandmothers. But young America, sauntering at the club and at +Newport, would not willingly wear the boots of Beau Nash, nor even the +cloak of Beau Brummel. The law which provides that nothing shall be +lost is equally observable in the realm of literary fame. Is anything of +literature lost that deserves longer remembrance? or, more properly, can +it be lost? A fair answer to the question can be found in the reply to +another, whether delving in Kettell, or in any other anthology, reveals +treasures dropped by Fame as precious as those she carries. + +There are two ways in which authors survive: one by the constant reading +of his works, the other by his name. Is Milton a forgotten author? But +how much is he read, compared with the contemporary singers? Is Plato +forgotten? Yet how many know him except by name? Irving thus far holds +both. Time, like a thrifty husbandman, winnows its wheat, blowing away +much chaff, but the golden grain remains. This is true not only of the +whole multitude of authors, but of the works of each author. How many +of them really survive in the anthology only? _Astoria_ and _Captain +Bonneville_ and _Mahomet_ and other books of Irving will disappear; but +_Knickerbocker_ and _Rip Van Winkle_ still buffet the relentless wave of +oblivion, and their buoyancy is undiminished. + +As for Sprague--a mild, genial, charming gentleman, who carried his +simple freshness of nature and of manner to the end, and about whose +venerable head in State Street always shone the faint halo of early +poetic renown--his literary talent was essentially for a day, not for +all time. But what then? On Christmas Eve we hear the passing music +in the street that supplies for us the song of the waits. Distant and +melodious, it pensively recalls the days and the faces and the voices +that are no more. But the singers are not the same waits that we heard +long ago; still less are they those that the youth of a century ago +heard with the same musing melancholy. But the substance of the +song, and the emotion which it awakens, and the tender pathos of +association--these are all the same. Sprague was a wait of yesterday, of +last year, of fifty years ago. Others sing in the street the song that +he sang, and, singing, they pass on, and the sweet strain grows fainter, +softer, and fainter and fainter, and the echoes answer, "Dying, dying, +dying," and it is gone. + +See how tenderly Mr. Stedman speaks of the troubadours who are singing +for us now, whose names are familiar, who trill and twitter in the +magazines, and in tasteful and delicate volumes, which seem to tempt +the stream of time to suffer such light and graceful barks to slip along +unnoted to future ages. But the kindly critic's tone forecasts the fate +of the sparkling ventures. + +Moore tells us of the Indian maids upon the banks of the Ganges who +light a tiny taper, and, on a frail little chip, set it afloat upon the +river. It twinkles and dwindles, and flashes and expires. Mr. Stedman +watches the minor poets trimming their tapers and carefully launching +their chips upon the brimming river. "Pleasant journey," he cries +cheerily from the shore, as if he were speaking to hearty Captain Cook +going up the side of his great ship, and shaking out his mighty canvas +to circumnavigate the globe. "Pleasant journey," cries the cheery +critic; but there is a wistful something in his tone that betrays a +consciousness of the swift extinction of the pretty perfumed flickering +flame. + +So scant, indeed, was the blossom of our literature when the _Sketch +Book_ was published, that even twenty years later, when Emerson +described the college Commencement Day as the only tribute of a +country too busy to give to letters any more, Geoffrey Crayon, with the +exception of Cooper, had really no American competitors. Long afterwards +I met Mr. Irving one morning at the office of Mr. Putnam, his publisher, +and in his cordial way, with a twinkle in his eye, and in his pleasant +husky voice, he said, "You young literary fellows to-day have a harder +time than we old fellows had. You trip over each other's heels; there +are so many of you. We had it all our own way. But the account is +square, for you can make as much by a lecture as we made by a book." +Then, laughing slyly, he added, "A pretty figure I should make lecturing +in this voice." Indeed, his modesty forbade him to risk that voice in +public addresses. + +Irving, I think, made but one speech. It was at the dinner given to +him upon his return from Europe in 1832, after his absence of seventeen +years. Like other distinguished Americans who have felt the fascination +of the old home of their ancestors, and who have not thought that a +narrow heart and a barbaric disdain of everything foreign attested the +truest patriotism, he was suspected of some alienation from his country. +His speech was full of emotion, and his protestation of love for his +native land was received with boundless acclamation. But he could not +overcome his aversion to speech-making. When Dickens came, and the great +dinner was given to him in New York, Irving was predestined to preside. +Nobody else could be even mentioned. He was himself conscious of it, and +was filled with melancholy forebodings. Professor Felton, of Harvard, +compared Irving's haunting terror and dismay at the prospect of this +speech to that of Mr. Pickwick at the prospect of leading that dreadful +horse all day. + +Poor Irving went about muttering, "I shall certainly break down. I know +I shall break down." At last the day, the hour, and the very moment +itself arrived, and he rose to propose the health of Dickens. He began +pleasantly and smoothly in two or three sentences, then hesitated, +stammered, smiled, and stopped; tried in vain to begin again, then +gracefully gave it up, announced the toast--"Charles Dickens, the +guest of the nation"--then sank into his chair amid immense applause, +whispering to his neighbor, "There, I told you I should break down, and +I've done it." + +When Thackeray came, Irving consented to preside at a dinner if speeches +were absolutely forbidden. The condition was faithfully observed, but it +was the most extraordinary instance of American self-command on record. +Whenever two or three Americans are gathered together, somebody must +make a speech; and no wonder, because somebody always speaks so well. +The custom is now so confirmed that it is foolish and useless to oppose +it. + +I remember a few years since that a dinner was given to a famous +American artist long resident abroad, and, as the condition of the +attendance of a distinguished guest whose presence was greatly desired, +the same agreement was made that Irving required at the Thackeray +dinner. It was a company of exceedingly clever and brilliant men, but +the gayety of the feast was extinguished by the general consciousness +that the situation was abnormal. It was a fruit without flavor, a flower +without fragrance, a symphony without melody, a dinner without speeches. +But the dinner of which I speak, when the condition of Irving's presence +was that there should be no speeches, was the great exception. It was +the only dinner of the kind that I have ever known. But Irving's cheery +anecdote and gayety, the songs and banter of the company, the happy chat +and sparkling wit, took the place of eloquence, and I recall no dinner +more delightful. + +However scant was our literature when the _Sketch Book_ appeared, it is +a mistake to suppose that Irving owes his success to English admiration. +That was, undoubtedly, very agreeable to him and to his countrymen. But +it is well to correct a misapprehension which is still cherished. Many +years ago an English critic said that Irving was much more relished +and admired in England than in his own country, and added: "It is only +recently critics on the lookout for a literature have elevated him +to his proper and almost more than his proper place. This docility to +English guidance in the case of their best, or almost their best, prose +writer, may perhaps be followed by a similar docility in the case of +their best, or almost their best, poet, Poe, whom also England had +preceded the United States in recognizing." This comical patron is all +the more amusing from his comparative estimate of Poe. + +If it were true that Irving's countrymen had not recognized and honored +him from the first, it might be suspected that it was because they were +descendants of the people who showed little contemporaneous appreciation +of Shakespeare. But it is certainly creditable to the literary England +which was busy idolizing Scott and Byron, that it recognized also the +charming genius of Irving, and that Leslie, the painter, could truly +write of him, "Geoffrey Crayon is the most fashionable fellow of the +day." + +But while the English appreciation of Irving is very creditable to +England, English conceit must not go so far as to suppose that it was +that appreciation which commended him to his own countrymen. At the time +when Sydney Smith wrote the article from which we have quoted there +was apparently an almost literary sterility in this country, and +the professional critics of the critical journals were, as Professor +Lounsbury says in his admirable _Life of Cooper_, undoubtedly greatly +affected by English opinion. But there was an American reading public +independent of the few literary periodicals, as was shown when Cooper's +_Spy_ was published at the end of 1821, the year in which Bryant's first +volume of poems and Dana's _Idle Man_ appeared. Cooper had published +his _Precaution_ in 1819, a book which Professor Lounsbury is one of the +very few men who are known to have read. He was an unknown author. But +the _Spy_ was instantly successful. Some of the timid English journals +awaited the English opinion, for Murray had declined, upon Gifford's +advice, to publish the book. But a publisher was found, and England +and Europe followed America in their approval. Cooper always said, +and truly, that it was to his countrymen alone that he owed his first +success, and his biographer concedes that the success of the _Spy_ was +determined before the opinion of Europe was known. + +Nearly three years before, in May, 1819, the first number of Irving's +_Sketch Book_ was published. He sent the manuscript to his brother, who +had regretted Irving's refusal of a government place in the Navy Board, +and to whom he wrote, "My talents are merely literary, and all my habits +of thinking, reading, etc., have been in a different direction from that +required for the active politician.... In fact, I consider myself at +present as making a literary experiment, in the course of which I only +care to be kept in bread and cheese. Should it not succeed--should my +writings not acquire critical applause--I am content to throw up the +pen, and that to any commonplace employment. But if they should succeed, +it would repay me for a world of care and privation to be placed among +the established authors of my country, and to win the affection of my +countrymen." + +The first number of the _Sketch Book_ was published simultaneously +in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Its success was +immediate. In September, 1819, Irving wrote: "The manner in which the +work has been received, and the eulogiums that have been passed upon it +in the American papers and periodical works, have quite overwhelmed me +... I feel almost appalled by such success." The echo of the acclamation +reached England. Murray at first declined to publish it, as he had at +first declined Cooper's _Spy_. But when England ascertained that the +American judgment was correct, and that it was a popular work, Murray +was willing to publish it. + +The delightful genius which his country had recognized with joy it never +ceased proudly and tenderly to honor. When, in 1832, he returned to his +native land, as his latest biographer, Mr. Warner, records, "America +greeted her most famous literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love +and admiration." It was in his own country that he had published his +works. It was his own countrymen whose applause apprised England of the +charm of the new author; and it is a humorous mentor who now teaches us +that it was our happy docility to English guidance which enabled us to +recognize and honor him. + +Was it docility to the same beneficent guidance which enabled us to +perceive the genius of Carlyle, whose works we first collected, and +taught England to read and admire? Did it enable us, also, to inform +England that in Robert Browning she had another poet? Was it the +same docility which enabled us to reveal to England one of her most +philosophic observers in Herbert Spencer, and to offer to Darwin his +most appreciative correspondents and interpreters in Chauncey Wright, +John Fiske, and Professors Gray and Wyman? There are many offences to +be scored against us, but failure to know our own literary genius is not +one of them. + +Indeed, there is not one great literary fame in America that was not +first recognized here. Not to one of them has docility to English +literary opinion conducted us, as is often believed. Bryant and Cooper +and Irving, Bancroft and Prescott and Motley, Emerson and Channing, +Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes were authors whom +we were content to admire and love without knowing or asking whether +England had heard of them, or what she thought of them. The "greatness" +of Poe England may have preceded us in recognizing. That is an assertion +which we are not disposed to dispute. But Walter Scott was not more +immediately popular and beloved in England than was Washington Irving +in America; and American guidance led England to Scott quite as much as +English guidance drew America to Irving. + +The first number of the _Sketch Book_ contained the tale of _Rip Van +Winkle_, one of the most charming and suggestive of legends, whose hero +is an exceedingly pathetic creation. It is, indeed, a mere sketch, a +hint, a suggestion; but the imagination readily completes it. It is the +more remarkable and interesting because, although the first American +literary creation, it is not in the least characteristic of American +life, but, on the contrary, is a quiet and delicate satire upon it. The +kindly vagabond asserts the charm of loitering idleness in the sweet +leisure of woods and fields against the characteristic American +excitement of the overflowing crowd and crushing competition of the +city, its tremendous energy and incessant devotion to money-getting. + +It is not necessary to defend poor Rip, or to justify the morality of +his example. It is the imagination that interprets him; and how soothing +to those who give their lives to the furious accumulation of the means +of living to behold that figure stretched by the brook, or finding nuts +with the children, or sauntering homeward at sunset! Later figures of +our literature allure us--Hester Prynne, wrapped in her cloak of Nersus, +the Scarlet Letter, Hosea Biglow, Evangeline, Uncle Tom, and Topsy--but +the charm of this figure is unfading. The new writers introduce us to +their worlds, and with pleasure we make the acquaintance of new friends. +The new standards of another literary spirit are raised, a fresh +literary impulse surrounds us; but it is not thunder that we hear in +the Kaatskills on a still summer afternoon it is the distant game of +Hendrick Hudson and his men; and on the shore of our river, rattling +and roaring with the frenzied haste and endless activity of prosperous +industry, still Rip Van Winkle lounges idly by, an unwasted figure of +the imagination, the constant and unconscious satirist of American life. + +He seems to me peculiarly congenial with the temperament of Irving. He, +too, was essentially a loiterer. He had the same freshness of sympathy, +the same gentleness of nature, the same taste for leisure and repose. +His genius was reminiscent, and, as with all humorists, its climate +was that of April. The sun and the shower chased each other. Irving's +intellectual habit was emotional rather than thoughtful. In politics +and public affairs he took no part, although office was often urged +upon him, as when the friends of General Jackson wished him to go as +representative to Congress, or President Van Buren offered him the +secretaryship of the navy, or Tammany Hall, in New York, unanimously and +vociferously nominated him for mayor, an incident in the later annals +of the city which transcends the most humorous touch in _Knickerbocker's +History_. He was appointed secretary of legation in England in 1829, and +in 1842, when Daniel Webster was secretary of state, minister to Spain. + +But what we call practical politics was always distasteful to him. The +spirit which I once heard laugh at a young man new in politics because +he treated "the boys" with his own good cigars instead of buying bad +ones at the saloon--the spirit which I once heard assure a man of public +ability and fitness that he could never reach political office unless +he pushed himself, and paid agents to buy votes, because no man could +expect an office to be handed to him on a gold plate--the spirit which, +to my knowledge, displayed a handful of bank-notes in the anteroom of +a legislature, and exclaimed, "That's what makes the laws!"--this was a +spirit which, like other honorable men and patriotic Americans, Irving +despised. + +He was a gentleman of manly feeling and of moral refinement, who had had +glimpses of what is called "the inside" of politics; and, as he believed +these qualities would make participation in politics uncomfortable, he +abstained. To those of us who are wiser than he, who know that simple +honesty and public spirit and self-respect and contempt of sneaking +and fawning and bribery and crawling are the conditions of political +preferment, Irving, in not perceiving this, must naturally seem to be a +queer, wrong-headed, and rather super-celestial American, who had +lived too much in the heated atmosphere of European aristocracies and +altogether too little in the pure and bracing air of American ward +politics and caucuses and conventions. To use an old New York phrase, +Irving preferred to stroll and fish and chat with Rip Van Winkle rather +than to "run wid der machine". + +The _Sketch Book_ made Irving famous, and with its predecessor, +_Knickerbocker_, and its successor, _Bracebridge Hall_, disclosed the +essential quality of his genius. But all these books performed another +and greater service than that of winning the world to read an American +book: this was the restoration of a kindlier feeling between the two +countries which, by all ties, should be the two most friendly countries +on the globe. The books were written when our old bitterness of feeling +against England had been renewed by the later war. In the thirty years +since the Revolution ended we had patriotically fostered the quarrel +with John Bull. Our domestic politics had turned largely upon that +feeling, and the game of French and English was played almost as +fiercely upon our side of the ocean as upon their own. + +The great epoch of our extraordinary material development and prosperity +had not opened, and, even had John Bull been friendlier than he was, it +would have been the very flattery of falsehood had he complimented our +literature, our science, our art. Sydney Smith's question, "Who reads +an American book?" was contemptuous and exasperating. But here was an +American who wrote books which John Bull was delighted to read, and +was compelled to confess that they depicted-the most characteristic and +attractive aspects of his own life with more delicate grace than that of +any living Englishman. + +It was Irving who recalled the old English Christmas. It was his cordial +and picturesque description of the great holiday of Christendom which +preceded and stimulated Dickens's _Christmas Carols_ and Thackeray's +_Holiday Tales_. It was the genial spirit of Christmas, native to his +gentle heart and his happy temperament, which made Irving, as Thackeray +called him, a peacemaker between the mother-country and her proud and +sensitive offspring of the West. He showed John Bull that England is +ours as well as his. + +"Old fellow," he said, "you cannot help yourself. It is the same blood +that flows in our veins, the same language that we speak, the same +traditions that we cherish. If you love liberty, so do we; if you will +see fair play, so will we. It is natural to you, so it is to us. We +cannot escape our blood. Shakespeare is not your poet more than ours. +If your ancestors danced round the Maypole, so did our ancestors in your +ancestors' shoes. If Old England cherished Christmas and New England did +not, Bradford and Endicott and Cotton were Englishmen, not Americans. If +old English life and customs and traditions are dear to you, listen +to my story, and judge whether they are less dear to us." Then, with +a merry smile, the young stranger holds out his hand to John Bull, and +exclaims, "Behold, here is my arm! I bare it before your eyes, and here +it is--it is the strawberry-mark; come to my bosom, I am your long-lost +brother." + +It was an incalculable service which Irving rendered in renewing a +common feeling between England and America. It was involuntary, because +in writing he had no such purpose. He was only following the bent of his +own taste, and his works reflected only his individual sympathies. But +it was this very fact--it was the English instinct in the American, the +appreciation native in the heart of the Western stranger of the true +poetic charm of England--which was the spell of the magician. Irving had +the same imaginative enthusiasm for traditional and poetic England that +Burke had for political England. Indeed, it is an England which never +actually existed except in the English and American imagination. The +coarse, mercenary, material England which Lecky photographs in his +history of the eighteenth century was the same England in which Burke +lived, and which his glowing imagination exalted into the magnificent +image of constitutional liberty before which he bowed his great head. So +with the old England that Irving drew. He saw with poetic fancy a +rural Arcadia, and reproduced the vision with airy grace and called it +England. No wonder that John Bull was delighted with an artist who could +paint so fascinating a picture, and write under it John Bull's portrait. + +To change a word in Marvell's noble lines, when Irving was in England + + "He nothing common saw or mean + Upon that memorable scene." + +Only an American could have seen England as he described it, and +invested it with an enchantment which the mass of Englishmen had +neither suspected nor perceived. Irving's instinct was that of Hawthorne +afterwards, who called England "Our Old Home". There is a foolish +American habit growing patriotically out of our old contentions with +England, and politically out of our desire to conciliate the Irish vote +in this country, of branding as servile and un-American the natural +susceptibility of people of English descent, but natives of another +land, to the charm of their ancestral country. But the American is +greatly to be pitied who thinks to prove the purity of his patriotism by +flouting the land in which he has a legitimate right, the land of Alfred +and Runnymede, of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, of Hampden and +Cromwell, of Newton and Bunyan, of Somers and Chatham and Edmund Burke, +the cradle of constitutional liberty and parliamentary government. If +the great body of the literature of our language in which we delight, +if the sources of our law and politics, if the great exploits of +contemporary scholarship and science, are largely beyond our boundaries, +yet are legitimately ours as well as all that we have ourselves +achieved, why should we spurn any of our just and hereditary share in +the great English traditions of civilization and freedom? + +Irving returned to America in 1832, and here he afterwards remained, +except during his absence as minister in Spain. In an earlier visit +to that country he had felt the spell of its romantic history, and +had written the _Life of Columbus_, the _Conquest of Granada_, and the +_Chronicles of the Alhambra_. During all his later years he was busy +with his pen, and, while the modest author had risen to the chief place +in American literature, its later constellation was rising into the +heavens. + +But his intrinsic modesty never disappeared either from the works or the +character of the benign writer. In the height of his renown there was no +kind of presumption or conceit in his simple and generous breast. Some +time after his return from his long absence in Europe, and before Putnam +became his publisher, Irving found some disinclination upon the part of +publishers to issue new editions of his books, and he expressed, with +entire good humor, the belief that he had had his day. + +It is doubtless true, as _Blackwood_ remarked, with what we may call +_Blackwood_ courtesy, when Mr. Lowell was American minister in England, +that Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Pope, and so many more "will +not be replaced by Mr. Washington Irving and Mr. Lowell". But it is +equally true that, since Swift, _Blackwood_ cannot find in English +literature political satire more trenchant, humorous, forcible, and +effective than the _Biglow Papers_, and nothing in Swift more original. +It is said that it is ludicrous to compare the mild humor of Rip +Van Winkle with the "robustious fun of Swift". But this is a curious +"derangement of epitaphs". Swift has wit, and satiric power, and burning +invective, and ribaldry, and caustic, scornful humor; but fun, in any +just sense, he has not. He is too fierce to be funny. The tender and +imaginative play of Rip Van Winkle are wholly beyond the reach of Swift. + +Irving and other American writers are not the rivals of their British +associates in the literature of the English language--they are worthy +comrades. Wordsworth and Byron are not Shakespeare and Milton, but they +are nevertheless Wordsworth and Byron, and their place is secure. So the +brows of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant and Longfellow, and of Lowell, of +Emerson and Hawthorne do not crave the laurels of any other master. The +perturbed spirit of _Blackwood_ may rest in the confident assurance that +no generous and intelligent student of our literature admires Gibbon +less because he enjoys Macaulay, or depreciates Bacon because he +delights in Emerson, or denies the sting of Gulliver because he feels +the light touch of Knickerbocker. It is with good fame as with true +love: + + "True love in this differs from gold and clay, + That to divide is not to take away." + +In the year that Irving published the _Sketch Book_, Cooper published +his first novel, and two years before Bryant's _Thanatopsis_ had been +published. When, forty years afterwards, in the last year of his life, +the last volume of the _Life of Washington_ was issued, Irving and +Bryant and Cooper were no longer the solitary chiefs of our literature. +An illustrious company had received the torch unextinguished from +their hands--Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, +Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Mrs. Stowe, had all taken their +places, yet all gladly and proudly acknowledged Irving as the patriarch. +It is our happy fortune that these names, of which we are all proud, are +not those of men of letters only, but of typical American citizens. +The old traditions of the literary life, the mad roystering, the +dissipation, Grub Street, the sponging-house, the bailiff, the garret, +and the jail, genius that fawns for place and flatters for hire, the +golden talent wrapped in a napkin, and often a dirty and ragged +napkin, have vanished in our American annals of letters. Pure, upright, +faithful, industrious, honorable, and honored, there is scarcely one +American author of eminence who may not be counted as a good and +useful citizen of the Republic of the Union, and a shining light of the +Republic of Letters. + +Of Washington Irving, as of so many of this noble company, it is +especially true that the author was the man. The healthy fun and merry +satire of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the sweet humor and quick sympathy +and simple pathos of Geoffrey Crayon, were those of the modest master +of Sunnyside. Every literary man of Irving's time, whether old or +young, had nothing but affectionate praise of his artless urbanity and +exhaustless good-nature. These qualities are delightfully reflected in +Thackeray's stories of him in the _Roundabout Papers_ upon Irving and +Macaulay, "the Goldsmith and the Gibbon of our time". + +"He came to one of my lectures in Washington," Thackeray says, "and the +retiring President, Mr. Fillmore, and his successor, Mr. Pierce, were +present. 'Two kings of Brentford smelling at one rose,' said Irving, +with his good-natured smile. In his little bower of a home at Sunnyside +he was always accessible. One English newspaper man came and introduced +himself, and partook of luncheon with the family, and, while the host +fell into a little doze, as was his habit, the wary Englishman took +a swift inventory of everything in the house, and served up the +description to the British public, including the nap of his entertainer. +At another time, Irving said, 'Two persons came to me, and one held me +in conversation while the other miscreant took my portrait.'" Thackeray +tells these little stories with admiring sympathy. His manly heart +always grew tender over his fellow-authors who had no acrid drop in +their humor, and Irving's was as sweet as dew. + +It is late for a fresh compliment to be paid to him, but the London +_Spectator_ paid it in 1883, the year of his centenary, by saying, +"Since the time of Pope more than one hundred essayists have attempted +to excel or to equal the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_. One alone, in a +few of his best efforts, may be said to have rivalled them, and he is +Washington Irving." The _Spectator_ adds that one has surpassed them, +"the incomparable Elia". + +Irving's temperament, however, was much more congenial with that of the +early essayists than Charles Lamb's, and his pictures of English country +life in _Bracebridge Hall_ have just the delicate, imaginative touch +of the sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley. But in treating distinctively +English topics, however airy and vivid his touch may be, Irving is +manifestly enthralled by his admiration for the literary masters of +the Anne time, and by the spirit of their writing. It is in the +Knickerbocker world that he is characteristically at home. Indeed, it is +his humorous and graphic fancy more than the sober veracity of history +which has given popular and perpetual form to the early life of New +York, and it is Irving who has enriched it with romantic tradition such +as suffuses the story of no other State. + +The bay, the river, the city, the Kaatskill Mountains, as Choate said +of Faneuil Hall and Webster, breathe and burn of him. He has charmed the +Hudson with a peculiar spell. The quaint life of its old Dutch villages, +the droll legend of Sleepy Hollow, the pathetic fate of Rip Van Winkle, +the drowsy wisdom of Communipaw, the marvellous municipality of New +Amsterdam, and the Nose of Anthony guarding the Highlands, with the +myriad sly and graphic allusions and descriptions strewn all through his +books, have made the river Irving's river, and the state Irving's state, +and the city Irving's city, so that the first instinctive question of +every lover of Irving from beyond the state, as he enters Central Park +and beholds its memorial statues, is, "Where is the statue of Irving?" + +Unhappily, echo, and not the park guide-book, answers. There is, indeed, +a bust, and, in a general sense, "Si monumentum" may serve for a reply. +From that point of view, indeed, Westminster Abbey, as the monument of +English heroes in letters and arms, in the Church and the State, would +be superfluous. But the abbey is a shrine of pilgrimage because of the +very fact that it is the burial-place of famous Englishmen. The Central +Park, in New York, is already a Walhalla of famous men, and the statue +that would first suggest itself as peculiarly fitting for the Park is +of the New-Yorker who first made New York distinctively famous in +literature--the New-Yorker whose kindly genius first made American +literature respected by the world. + +Reversing the question, "Where be the bad people buried?" the wondering +pilgrim in the Park asks, "Where be Irving and Bryant and Cooper?" They +were not Americans only, but, by birth or choice, New-Yorkers, and the +three distinctive figures of our early literature. It was very touching +to see the venerable Bryant, in the soft May sunshine, when the statue +of Halleck was unveiled, standing with bare head and speaking of his old +friend and comrade. But who that listened could not see, through tender +mists of years, the grave and reverend form of the speaker himself, +transformed to marble or bronze, sitting serene forever beneath the +shadowing trees, side by side with the poet of Faust and the worshipper +of Highland Mary? + +But Bryant would have been the first to name Washington Irving as +the most renowned distinctively American man of letters whose figure, +reproduced characteristically and with simple quaintness, should +decorate the Park. To a statue of Washington Irving all the gates should +open, as every heart would open, in welcome. That half-humorous turn of +the head and almost the twinkling eye, that brisk and jaunty air, that +springing step, that modest and gentle and benign presence, all these +could be suggested by the artist, and in their happy combination the +pleased loiterer would perceive old Diedrich Knickerbocker and the +summer dreamer of the Hudson legends, the charming biographer of +Columbus and of Goldsmith, the cheerful gossip of Wolfert's Roost, and +the mellow and courteous Geoffrey Crayon, who first taught incredulous +Europe that beyond the sea there were men also, and that at last all the +world must read an American book. + +Irving was seventy-six years old when he died, late in 1859. Born in the +year in which the Revolution ended, he died on the eve of the civil war. +His life exactly covered the period during which the American republic +was an experiment. It ended just as the invincible power of free +institutions was to be finally demonstrated. His life had been one of +singular happiness, both of temperament and circumstance. His nature +was too simple and gentle to breed rivalries or to tolerate animosities. +Through the sharpest struggles of our politics he passed without +bitterness of feeling and with universal respect, and his eyes happily +closed before seeing a civil war which, although the most righteous of +all wars, would have broken his heart. The country was proud of him: the +older authors knew in him not a rival, but a friend, the younger loved +him as a father. Such love, I think, is better than fame. On the day of +his burial in the ground overlooking the Hudson and the valley of Sleepy +Hollow, unable to reach Tarrytown in time for the funeral, I came down +the shore of the river which he loved and immortalized. As the train +hastened and wound along, I saw the Catskills draped in autumnal +mist, not concealing, but irradiating them with lingering and pathetic +splendor. Far away towards the south the river-bank on which his home +lay was Sunnyside still, for the sky was cloudless and soft with serene +sunshine. I could not but remember his last words to me, more than a +year before, when his book was finished and his health was failing: "I +am getting ready to go; I am shutting up my doors and windows", and +I could not but feel that they were all open now, and bright with the +light of eternal morning. + + + + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary and Social Essays, by +George William Curtis + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS *** + +***** This file should be named 8108.txt or 8108.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/8/1/0/8108/ + +Produced by Eric Eldred, Marc D'Hooghe, Charles Franks, +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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