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HOUGHTON, MIFFL1N AND COMPANY,
BOSTON, NEW YORK, AND CHICAGO.
MY STUDY WINDOWS
BY
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, A. M.
PROFESSOR OF BELLES-LETTRES IN HARVARD COLLEGE
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871,
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
Copyright, 1899,
BY MABEL LOWELL BURNETT.
All rights reserved.
FORTY SECOND IMPRESSION
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co.
'
TO
PROFESSOR F. J. CHILD.
MY DEAR CHILD,
You were good enough to like my Essay on Chaucer
(about whom you know so much more than I ), and I shall
accordingly so far presume upon our long friendship as to
inscribe the volume containing it with your name.
Always heartily yours,
J. R. LOWELL.
CAMBRIDGE, Christmas, 1870.
PREFATORY NOTE.
"IV yf~Y former volume of Essays has been so kindly
-L-*J- received that I am emboldened to make an
other and more miscellaneous collection. The papers
here gathered have been written at intervals during the
last fifteen years, and I knew no way so effectual to rid
my mind of them and make ready for a new departure,
as this of shutting them between two covers where
they can haunt me, at least, no more. I should have
preferred a simpler title, but publishers nowadays are
inexorable on this point, and I was too much occupied
for happiness of choice. That which I have desperately
snatched is meant to imply both the books within and
the world without, and perhaps may pass muster in the
case of one who has always found his most fruitful
study in the open air.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 1
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 24
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS . . 54
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER 83
CARLYLE 115
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 150
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL . 178
THOREAU . 193
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 210
CHAUCER 227
LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 290
EMERSON, THE LECTURER 375
POPS 385
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
ONE of the most delightful books in my father's
library was White's Natural History of Selborne.
For me it has rather gained in charm with years. I used
to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure 1
found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of
the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the
book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our
broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially
garrulous Fellow of Oriel and find refreshment instead of
fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him
as he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a
pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird
or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable
Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of
taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton ;
in tenderness toward what he would have called the brute
creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descrip
tions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me
familiar with his neighborhood. Since I first read him,
I have walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I
still see them through his eyes rather than by any recol
lection of actual and personal vision. The book has also
the delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems
never to have had any harder work to do than to study
the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch
the ripening of his peaches on the wall. His volumes are
the journal of Adam in Paradise,
1 A
2 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
" Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade."
It is positive rest only to look into that garden of hie.
It is vastly better than to
" See great Diocletian walk
In the Salonian garden's noble shade,"
for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the
noises of Rome, while here the world has no entrance.
No rumor of the revolt of the American Colonies seems
to have reached him. " The natural term of an hog's
life " has more interest for him than that of an empire.
Burgoyne may surrender and welcome ; of what conse
quence is that compared with the fact that we can explain
the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over
" to scratch themselves with one claw " ? All the couriers
in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr.
White's little Chartreuse ; but the arrival of the house-
martin a day earlier or later than last year is a piece of
news worth sending express to all his correspondents.
Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent
humor, so much the more delicious because unsuspected
by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity in
adding to the list of the British, and still more of the
Selbornian, fauna! I believe he would gladly have con
sented to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that
means the occasional presence within the parish limits of
either of these anthropophagous brutes could have been
established. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a
little elated by " having considerable acquaintance with
a tame brown owl." Most of us have known our share
of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a feathered
one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that
disproportionate importance which is always humorous.
To think of his hands having actually been thought
worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3
a stilted plover, the Cliaradrius himantopus, with no back
toe, and therefore " liable, in speculation, to perpetual
vacillations " ! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians
have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance
in Sussex of " an old family tortoise," which had then
been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he
fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means of
tracing the growth of his passion; but in 1780 we find
him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. " The rattle
and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when
I turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the
bottom of my garden." It reads like a Court Journal :
" Yesterday morning H. R. H. the Princess Alice took an
airing of half an hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle."
This tortoise might have been a member of the Royal
Society, if he could have condescended to so ignoble an
ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface
inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon
took more of the sun's rays. The tortoise had always
known this (though he unostentatiously made no parade
of it), and used accordingly to tilt himself up against the
garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have been more
of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for
nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained,
or the sun was too hot, and to bury himself alive before
frost, a four-footed Diogenes, who carried his tub on
his back.
There are moods in which this kind of history is infi
nitely refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to
look down upon as the drudges of instinct are members
of a commonwealth whose constitution rests on immov
able bases. Never any need of reconstruction there !
They never dream of settling it by vote that eight hours
are equal to ten, or that one creature is as clever as an
other and no more. They do not use their poor wits in
4 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
regulating God's clocks, nor think they cannot go astray
so long as they carry their guide-board about with them,
a delusion we often practise upon ourselves with our
high and mighty reason, that admirable finger-post which
points every way and always right. It is good for us now
and then to converse with a world like Mr. White's, where
Man is the least important of animals. But one who,
like me, has always lived in the country and always on
the same spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sym
pathies. Do we not share his indignation at that stupid
Martin who had graduated his thermometer no lower
than 4 above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest
weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into
the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our
fingers just as they were closing upon it 1 No man, I
suspect, ever lived long in the country without being
bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to
be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed
up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his
neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans espe
cially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated
excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value ther
mometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable
of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The
other day (5th July) I marked 98 in the shade, my high-
water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen
it before. I happened to meet a neighbor ; as we mopped
our brows at each other, he told me that he had just
cleared 100, and I went home a beaten man. I had not
felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of
sunshine ; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vul
garity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity be
came all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect
his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men
are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own) ; but
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 5
it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his
herald Mercury, standing a-tiptoe, could look down on
mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar
weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these
mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that
he had a true country-gentleman's interest in the weather
cock ; that his first question on coming down of a morn
ing was, like Barabas's,
" Into what quarter peers my halcyon's bill? "
It is an innocent and healthful employment of the
mind, distracting one from too continual study of him
self, and leading him to dwell rather upon the indiges
tions of the elements than his own. " Did the wind
back round, or go about with the sun ? " is a rational
question that bears not remotely on the making of hay
and the prosperity of crops. I have little doubt that
the regulated observation of the vane in many different
places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would
put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying
its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At
first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the
lives of those whose single achievement is to record the
wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such
men are doubtless sent into the world for this special
end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate observa
tion, whatever its object, that has not its final use and
value for some one or other. It is even to be hoped
that the speculations of our newspaper editors and their
myriad correspondents upon the signs of the political at
mosphere may also fill their appointed place in a well-reg
ulated universe, if it be only that of supplying so many
more jack-o'-lanterns to the future historian. Nay, the
observations on finance of an M. C. whose sole knowledge
of the subject has been derived from a lifelong success in
getting a living out of the public without paying any
6 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
equivalent therefor, will perhaps be of interest hereafter
to some explorer of our cloaca maxima, whenever it is
cleansed.
For many years I have been in the habit of noting
down some of the leading events of my embowered soli
tude, such as the coming of certain birds and the like,
a kind of memoires pour servir, after the fashion of White,
rather than properly digested natural history. I thought
it not impossible that a few simple stories of my winged
acquaintances might be found entertaining by persons
of kindred taste.
There is a common notion that animals are better
meteorologists than men, and I have little doubt that in
immediate weather-wisdom they have the advantage of
our sophisticated senses (though I suspect a sailor or
shepherd would be their match), but I have seen nothing
that leads me to believe their minds capable of erecting
the horoscope of a whole season, and letting us know be
forehand whether the winter will be severe or the sum
mer rainless. I more than suspect that the clerk of the
weather himself does not always know very long in ad
vance whether he is to draw an order for hot or cold,
dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce likely to be
wiser. I have noted but two days' difference in the
coming of the song-sparrow between a very early and a
very backward spring. This very year I saw the linnets
at work thatching, just before a snow-storm which
covered the ground several inches deep for a number of
days. They struck work and left us for a while, no
doubt in search of food. Birds frequently perish from
sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of
which they had no foreboding. More than thirty years
ago, a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window,
was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of
mingled rain and snow, which probably killed many of
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 7
them. It should seem that their coming was dated by
the height of the sun, which betrays them into unthrifty
matrimony ;
" So nature pricketh hem in their corages " ;
but their going is another matter. The chimney-swal
lows leave us early, for example, apparently so soon as
their latest fledglings are firm enough of wing to at
tempt the long rowing-match that is before them. On
the other hand, the wild-geese probably do not leave the
North till they are frozen out, for I have heard their
bugles sounding southward so late as the middle of
December. What may be called local migrations are
doubtless dictated by the chances of food. I have once
been visited by large flights of cross-bills ; and whenever
the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of
cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat the berries on my
hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the
local, or rather geographical partialities of birds. Never
before this summer (1870) have the king-birds, hand
somest of flycatchers, built in my orchard ; though I
always know where to find them within half a mile.
The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird in
Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here
till last July, when I found a female busy among my
raspberries and surprisingly bold. I hope she was pros
pecting with a view to settlement in our garden. She
seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit, and I
would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win
over so delightful a neighbor.
The return of the robin is commonly announced by
the newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people
to a watering-place, as the first authentic notification of
spring. And such his appearance in the orchard and
garden undoubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of
migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I
8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 de
grees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably with
in, like Emerson's Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The
robin has a bad reputation among people who do not
value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is,
I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather
of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose.
His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main
chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of
the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy
into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are
apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle 's a'
that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that
ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he
has not wholly forfeited that superiority which belongs
to the children of nature. He has a finer taste in fruit
than could be distilled from many successive committees
of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing
gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and freely
exercises his right of eminent domain. His is the earli
est mess of green peas ; his all the mulberries I had
fancied mine. But if he get also the lion's share of the
raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones
in the woods, that solace the pedestrian and give a mo
mentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White
Hills. He keeps a strict eye over one's fruit, and knows
to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long
enough in the sun. During the severe drought a few
years ago, the robins wholly vanished from my garden.
I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. Mean
while a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing,
Beemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming
perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself
with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched them
from day to day till they should have secreted sugar
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 9
enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my
mind that I would celebrate niy vintage the next morn
ing. But the robins too had somehow kept note of
them. They must have sent out spies, as did the Jews
into the promised land, before I was stirring. When I
went with my basket, at least* a dozen of these winged
vintagers bustled out from among the leaves, and alight
ing on the nearest trees interchanged some shrill re
marks about me of a derogatory nature. They had fairly
sacked the vine. Not Wellington's veterans made
cleaner work of a Spanish town ; not Federals or Con
federates were ever more impartial in the confiscation of
neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to
surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them
a profounder secret to her than I had meant. The tat
tered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest-
home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my
basket, as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an
eagle's nest ! I could not help laughing ; and the robins
seemed to join heartily in the merriment. There was a
native grape-vine close by, blue with its less refined
abundance, but my cunning thieves preferred the foreign
flavor. Could I tax them with want of taste 1
The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus,
as, like primitive fire- worshippers, they hail the return
of light and warmth to the world, is imrivalled. There
are a hundred singing like one. They are noisy enough
then, and sing, as poets should, with no afterthought.
But when they come after cherries to the tree near my
window, they muffle their voices, and their faint pip,
pip, pop ! sounds far away at the bottom of the gar
den, where they know 1 shall not suspect them of rob
bing the great black-walnut of its bitter-rinded store.*
* The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the
Mveetest souiiil-; in nature, softens his voice in the same way with th
most beguiling mockery of distance.
10 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how
brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in the
sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green of
the fringe-tree ! After they have pinched and shaken
all the life out of an earthworm, as Italian cooks pound
all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, they
stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red
waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and
outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry.
" Do / look like a bird that knows the flavor of raw-
vermin 1 I throw myself upon a jury of my peers.
Ask any robin if he ever ate anything less ascetic than
the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer that
his vow forbids him." Can such an open bosom cover
such depravity 1 Alas, yes ! I have no doubt his breast
was redder at that very moment with 'the blood of my
raspberries. On the whole, he is a doubtful friend in the
garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries,
and is not averse from early pears. But when we re
member how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in
an incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaust-
less in her invention of new insects hostile to vegetation,
perhaps we may reckon that he does more good than
harm. For my own part, I would rather have his cheer
fulness and kind neighborhood than many berries.
For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer re
gard. Always a good singer, he sometimes nearly equals
the brown thrush, and has the merit of keeping up his
music later in the evening than any bird of my familiar
acquaintance. Ever since I can remember, a pair of
them have built in a gigantic syringa, near our front
door, and I have known the male to sing almost unin
terruptedly during the evenings of early summer till
twilight duskened into dark. They differ greatly in
vocal talent, but all have a delightful way of crooning
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 11
over, and, as it were, rehearsing their song in an under
tone, which makes their nearness always unobtrusive.
Though there is the most trustworthy witness to the
imitative propensity of this bird, I have only once,
during an intimacy of more than forty years, heard him
indulge it. In that case, the imitation was by no means
so close as to deceive, but a free reproduction of the
notes of some other birds, especially of the oriole, as a
kind of variation in his own song. The catbird is as
shy as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his
nest or his fledglings are approached does he become
noisy and almost aggressive. I have known him to
station his young in a thick cornel-bush on the edge of
the raspberry-bed, after the fruit began to ripen, and
feed them there for a week or more. In such cases he
shows none of that conscious guilt which makes the
robin contemptible. On the contrary, he will maintain
his post in the thicket, and sharply scold the intruder
who ventures to steal his berries. After all, his claim is
only for tithes, while the robin will bag your entire crop
if he get a chance.
Dr. Watts's statement that " birds in their little nests
agree," like too many others intended to form the infant
mind, is very far from being true. On the contrary, the
most peaceful relation of the different species to each
other is that of armed neutrality. They are very jealous
of neighbors. A few years ago, I was much interested
in the housebuilding of a pair of summer yellow-birds.
They had chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall
white lilac, within easy eye-shot of a chamber window.
A very pleasant thing it was to see their little home
growing with mutual help, to watch their industrious
skill interrupted only by little flirts and snatches of
endearment, frugally cut short by the common-sense
of the tiny housewife. They had brought their work
12 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
nearly to an end, and had already begun to line it with
fern-down, the gathering of which demanded more dis
tant journeys and longer absences. But, alas ! the
syringa, immemorial manor of the catbirds, was not
more than twenty feet away, and these " giddy neigh
bors " had, as it appeared, been all along jealously watch
ful, though silent, witnesses of what they deemed an
intrusion of squatters. No sooner were the pretty
mates fairly gone for a new load of lining, than
" To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots .
Came stealing."
Silently they flew back and forth, each giving a vengeful
dab at the nest in passing. They did not fall-to and
deliberately destroy it, for they might have been caught
at their mischief. As it was, whenever the yellow-
birds came back, their enemies were hidden in their own
sight-proof bush. Several times their unconscious vic
tims repaired damages, but at length, after counsel taken
together, they gave it up. Perhaps, like other unlet
tered folk, they came to the conclusion that the Devil
was in it, and yielded to the invisible persecutions of
witchcraft.
The robins, by constant attacks and annoyances, have
succeeded in driving off the blue-jays who used to build
in our pines, their gay colors and quaint noisy ways
making them welcome and amusing neighbors. 1 once
had the chance of doing a kindness to a household of
them, which they received with very friendly condescen
sion. I had had my eye for some time upon a nest, and
was puzzled by a constant fluttering of what seemed
full-grown wings in it whenever I drew nigh. At last I
climbed the tree, in spite of angry protests from the
old birds against my intrusion. The mystery had a
very simple solution. In building the nest, a long piece
cf packthread had been somewhat loosely woven in.
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 13
Three of the young had contrived to entangle them
selves in it, and had become full-grown without being
able to launch themselves upon the air. One was un
harmed ; another had so tightly twisted the cord about
its shank that one foot was curled up and seemed para
lyzed ; the third, in its struggles to escape, had sawn
through the flesh of the thigh and so much harmed
itself that I thought it humane to put an end to its
misery. When I took out my knife to cut their hempen
bonds, the heads of the family seemed to divine my
friendly intent. Suddenly ceasing their cries and
threats, they perched quietly within reach of my hand,
and watched me in my work of manumission. This,
owing to the fluttering terror of the prisoners, was an
affair of some delicacy ; but erelong I was rewarded by
seeing one of them fly away to a neighboring tree, while
the cripple, making a parachute of his wings, came light
ly to the ground, and hopped off as well as he could with
one leg, obsequiously waited on by his elders. A week
later I had the satisfaction of meeting him in the pine-
walk, in good spirits, and already so far recovered as to
be able to balance himself with the lame foot. I have
no doubt that in his old age he accounted for his lame
ness by some handsome story of a wound received at
the famous Battle of the Pines, when our tribe, over
come by numbers, was driven from its ancient camping-
ground. Of late years the jays have visited us only at
intervals ; and in winter their bright plumage, set off
by the snow, and their cheerful cry, are especially wel
come. They would have furnished ^Esop with a fable,
for the feathered crest in which they seem to take so
much satisfaction is often their fatal snare. Country
boys make a hole with their finger in the snow-crust
just large enough to admit the jay's head, and, hollow
ing it out somewhat beneath, bait it with a few kernels
14 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
of corn. The crest slips easily into the trap, but refuses
to be pulled out again, and he who came to feast remains
a prey.
Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted a settle
ment in my pines, and twice have the robins, who claim
a right of pre-emption, so successfully played the part
of border-ruffians as to drive them away, to my great
regret, for they are the best substitute we have for
rooks. At Shady Hill (now, alas ! empty of its so long-
loved household) they build by hundreds, and nothing
can be more cheery than their creaking clatter (like a
convention of old-fashioned tavern-signs) as they gather
at evening to debate in mass meeting their windy poli
tics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events of
the day. Their port is grave, and their stalk across the
turf as martial as that of a second-rate ghost in Hamlet.
They never meddled with my corn, so far as I could
discover
For a few years I had crows, but their nests are an
irresistible bait for boys, and their settlement was broken
up. They grew so wonted as to throw off a great part
of their shyness, and to tolerate my near approach.
One very hot day I stood for some time within twenty
feet of a mother and three children, who sat on an elm
bough over my head, gasping in the sultry air, and
holding their wings half-spread for coolness. All birds
during the pairing season become more or less sentimen
tal, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the
grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual
song. The crow is very comical as a lover, and to hear
him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint Preux
standard, has something the effect of a Mississippi boat
man quoting Tennyson. Yet there are few things to my
ear more melodious than his caw of a clear winter morn
ing as it drops to you filtered through five hundred
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 15
fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all smaller
birds makes the moral character of the crow, for all his
deacoulike demeanor and garb, somewhat questionable.
He could never sally forth without insult. The golden
robins, especially, would chase him as far as I could fol
low with my eye, making him duck clumsily to avoid
their importunate bills. I do not believe, however, that
he robbed any nests hereabouts, for the refuse of the
gas-works, which, in our free-and-easy community, is
allowed to poison the river, supplied him with dead
alewives in abundance. I used to watch him making
his periodical visits to the salt-marshes and coming back
with a fish in his beak to his young savages, who, no
doubt, like it in that condition which makes it savory to
the Kanakas and other corvine races of men.
Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have seen
seven males flashing about the garden at once. A
merrv crew of them swing their hammocks from the
pendulous boughs. During one of these latter years,
when the canker-worms stripped our elms as bare as
winter, these birds went to the trouble of rebuilding
their unroofed nests, and chose for the purpose trees
which are safe from those swarming vandals, such as the
ash and the button-wood. One year a pair (disturbed,
I suppose, elsewhere) built a second nest in an elm,
within a few yards of the house. My friend, Edward E.
Hale, told me once that the oriole rejected from his web
all strands of brilliant color, and I thought it a striking
example of that instinct of concealment noticeable in
many birds, though it should seem in this instance that
the nest was amply protected by its position from all
marauders but owls and squirrels. Last year, however,
I had the fullest proof that Mr. Hale was mistaken.
A pair of orioles built on the lowest trailer of a weeping
elm, which hung within ten feet of our drawing-room
16 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
window, and so low that I could reach it from the
ground. The nest was wholly woven and felted with
ravellings of woollen carpet in which scarlet predomi
nated. Would the same thing have happened in the
woods 1 Or did the nearness of a human dwelling
perhaps give the birds a greater feeling of security?
They are very bold, by the way, in quest of cordage,
and I have often watched them stripping the fibrous
bark from a honeysuckle growing over the very door.
But, indeed, all my birds look upon me as if I were a
laere tenant at will, and they were landlords. With
shame I confess it, I have been bullied even by a hum
ming-bird. This spring, as I was cleansing a pear-tree
of its lichens, one of these little zigzagging blurs came
purring toward me, couching his long bill like a lance,
his throat spai'kling with angry fire, to warn me oft" from
a Missouri-currant whose honey he was sipping. And
many a time he has driven me out of a flower-bed.
This summer, by the way, a pair of these winged
emeralds fastened their mossy acorn-cup upon a bough
of the same elm which the orioles had enlivened the
year before. We watched all their proceedings from the
window through an opera-glass, and saw their two nest
lings grow from black needles with a tuft of down at the
lower end, till they whirled away on their first short
experimental flights. They became strong of wing in a
surprisingly short time, and I never saw them or the
male bird after, though the female was regular as usual
in her visits to our petunias and verbenas. I do not
think it ground enough for a generalization, but in the
many times when I watched the old birds feeding their
young, the mother always alighted, while the father as
uniformly remained upon the wing.
The bobolinks are generally chance visitors, tinkling
through the garden in blossoming-time, but this year,
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 17
owing to the long rains early in the season, their favorite
meadows were flooded, and they were driven to the up
land. So I had a pair of them domiciled in my grass-
field. The male used to perch in an apple-tree, then in
full bloom, and, while I stood perfectly still close by, he
would circle away, quivering round the entire field of
five acres, with no break in his song, and settle down
again among the blossoms, to be hurried away almost
immediately by a new rapture of music. He had the
volubility of an Italian charlatan at a fair, and, like him,
appeared to be proclaiming the merits of some quack
remedy. Of>odeldoc-opodeldoc-try-Doctor-Lincolris-opodel-
doc ! he seemed to repeat over and over again, with a
rapidity that would have distanced the deftest-tongued
Figaro that ever rattled. I remember Count Gurowski
saying once, with that easy superiority of knowledge
about this country which is the monopoly of foreigners,
that we had no singing-birds ! Well, well, Mr. Hepworth
Dixon has found the typical America in Oneida and
Salt Lake City. Of course, an intelligent European is
the best judge of these matters. The truth is there are
more Binging-birdfl in Europe because there are fewer
forests. These songsters love the neighborhood of man
because hawks and owls are rarer, while their own food
is more abundant. Most people seem to think, the more
trees, the more birds. Even Chateaubriand, who first
tried the primitive-forest-cure, and whose description of
the wilderness in its imaginative effects is immatched,
fancies the " people of the air singing their hymns to
him." So far as my own observation goes, the farther
one penetrates the sombre solitiides of the woods, the
more seldom does he hear the voice of any singing-bird.
Tn spite of Chateaubriand's minuteness of detail, in spite
of that marvellous reverberation of the decrepit tree
falling of its own weight, which he was the first to
B
18 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
notice, I cannot help doubting whether he made his way
very deep into the wilderness. At any rate, in a letter
to Fontanes, written in 1804, he speaks of mes chevaux
paissant a quelque distance. To be sure Chateaubriand
was apt to mount the high horse, and this may have
been but an afterthought of the grand seigneur, but
certainly one would not make much headway on horse
back toward the druid fastnesses of the primaeval pine.
The bobolinks build in considerable numbers in a
meadow within a quarter of a mile of us. A houseless
lane passes through the midst of their camp, and in
clear westerly weather, at the right seaton, one may
hear a score of them singing at once. When they are
breeding, if I chance to pass, one of the male birds
always accompanies me like a constable, flitting from
post to post of the rail-fence, with a short note of re
proof continually repeated, till I am fairly out of the
neighborhood. Then he will swing away into the air
and run down the wind, gurgling music without stint
over the unheeding tussocks of meadow-grass and dark
clumps of bulrushes that mark his domain.
We have no bird whose song will match the nightin
gale's in compass, none whose note is so rich as that
of the European blackbird ; but for mere rapture I
have never heard the bobolink's rival. But his opera-
season is a short one. The ground and tree sparrows
are our most constant performers. It is now late in
August, and one of the latter sings every day and all
day long in the garden. Till within a fortnight, a pair
of indigo-birds would keep up their lively duo for an
hour together. While I write, I hear an oriole gay as
in June, and the plaintive may-be of the goldfinch tells
me he is stealing my lettuce-seeds. I know not what
the experience of others may have been, but the only
bird I have ever heard sing in the night has been the
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 19
chip-bird. I should say he sang about as often during
the darkness as cocks crow. One can hardly help fancy
ing that he sings in his dreams.
" Father of light, what sunnie seed,
What glance of day hast thou confined
Into this bird? To all the breed
This busie ray thou hast assigned;
Their magnetism works all night, ,
And dreams of Paradise and light."
On second thought, I remember to have heard the cuckoo
strike the hours nearly all night with the regularity of a
Swiss clock.
The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to that
end, bring us the flicker every summer, and almost
daily I hear his wild scream and laugh close at hand,
himself invisible. He is a shy bird, but a few days ago
I had the satisfaction of studying him through the
blinds as he sat on a tree within a few feet of me.
Seen so near and at rest, he makes good his claim to the
title of pigeon-woodpecker. Lumberers have a notion
that he is harmful to timber, digging little holes through
the bark to encourage the settlement of insects. The
regular rings of such perforations which one may see in
almost any apple-orchard seem to give some probability
to this theory. Almost every season a solitary quail
visits us, and, unseen among the currant-bushes, calls
Bob White, Bob White, as if he were playing at hide-and-
seek with that imaginary being. A rarer visitant is the
turtle-dove, whose pleasant coo (something like the
muffled crow of a cock from a coop covered with snow) I
have sometimes heard, and whom I once had the good
luck to see close by me in the mulberry -tree. The wild-
pigeon, once numerous, I have not seen for many years.*
Of savage birds, a hen-hawk now and then quarters him-
Belf upon us for a few days, sitting sluggish in a tree
* They made their appearance again this summer (1870).
20 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
after a surfeit of poultry. One of them once offered me
a near shot from my study-window one drizzly day for
several hours. But it was Sunday, and I gave him the
benefit of its gracious truce of God.
Certain birds have disappeared from our neighborhood
within my memory. I remember when the whippoorwill
could be heard in Sweet Auburn. The night-hawk, once
common, is now rare. The brown thrush has moved far
ther up country. For years I have not seen or heard
any of the larger owls, whose hooting was one of my boy
ish terrors. The cliff-swallow, strange emigrant, that
eastward takes his way, has come and gone again in my
time. The bank-swallows, wellnigh innumerable during
my boyhood, no longer frequent the crumbly cliff of the
gravel-pit by the river. The barn-swallows, which once
swarmed in our barn, flashing through the dusty sun-
streaks of the mow, have been gone these many years.
My father would lead me out to see them gather on the
roof, and take counsel before their yearly migration, as
Mr. White used to see them at Selborne. Eheu, fugaces !
Thank fortune, the swift still glues his nest, and rolls his
distant thunders night and day in the wide-throated chim
neys, still sprinkles the evening air with his merry twit
tering. The populous heronry in Fresh Pond meadows
has been wellnigh broken up, but still a pair or two
haunt the old home, as the gypsies of Ellangowan their
ruined huts, and every evening fly over us riverwards,
clearing their throats with a hoarse hawk as they go, and,
in cloudy weather, scarce higher than the tops of the
chimneys. Sometimes I have known one to alight in
one of our trees, though for what purpose I never could
divine. Kingfishers have sometimes puzzled me in the
same way, perched at high noon in a pine, springing their
watchman's rattle when they flitted away from my curi
osity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy heads along
as a man does a wheelbarrow.
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 21
Some birds have left us, I siippose, because the country
is growing less wild. I once found a summer duck's nest
within quarter of a mile of our house, but such a trou
vaille would be impossible now as Kidd's treasure. And
yet the mere taming of the neighborhood does not quite
satisfy me as an explanation. Twenty years ago, on my
way to bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace of
woodcock, on the miry edge of a spring within a few 1 rods
of a house, and constantly visited by thirsty cows. There
was no growth of any kind to conceal them, and yet these
ordinarily shy birds were almost as indifferent to my
passing as common poultry would have been. Since
bird-nesting has become scientific, and dignified itself as
oology, that, no doubt, is partly to blame for some of our
losses. But some old friends are constant. Wilson's
thrush comes every year to remind me of that most poetic
of ornithologists. He flits before me through the pine-
walk like the very genius of solitude. A pair of pewees
have built immemorially on a jutting brick in the arched
entrance to the ice-house. Always on the same brick,
and never more than a single pair, though two broods of
five each are raised there every summer. How do they
settle their claim to the homestead ] By what right of
primogeniture *? Once the children of a man employed
about the place oologized the nest, and the pewees left us
for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the mess
mates of the Ancient Mariner did towards him after he
had shot the albatross. But the pewees came back at
last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so near
my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he
enaps a fly on the wing with the unerring precision a
stately Trasteveriua shows iu the capture of her smaller
deer. The pewee is the iirst bird to pipe up in the morn
ing; and, during the early summer he preludes IPS
matutinal ejaculation of pewee with a slender whistle.
22 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE.
unheard at any other time. He saddens with the sea
son, and, as summer declines, he changes his note to eheu,
pewee ! as if in lamentation. Had he been an Italian bird,
Ovid would have had a plaintive tale to tell about him.
He is so familiar as often to pursue a fly through the
open window into my library.
There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these
old friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of
mine but has had, at some time or other, a happy home
stead among its boughs, to which I cannot say,
" Many light hearts and wings,
Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers."
My walk under the pines would lose half its summer
charm were I to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson's
thrush, nor hear in haying-time the metallic ring of
his song, that justifies his rustic name of scythe-ivhet.
I protect my game as jealously as an English squire.
If anybody had oblogized a certain cuckoo's nest I
know of (I have a pair in my garden every year),
it would have left me a sore place in my mind for
weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back to the man-
suetude they showed to the early voyagers, and before
(forgive the involuntary pun) they had grown accustomed
to man and knew his savage ways. And they repay your
kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever to
breed contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them,
preferring that to the Puritan way with the natives,
which converted them to a little Hebraism and a great
deal of Medford rum. If they will not come near enough
to me (as most of them will), I bring them close with an
opera-glass, a much better weapon than a gun. I
would not, if I could, convert them from their pretty
pagan ways. The only one I sometimes have savage
doubts about is the red squirrel. I think he oologizes.
I know he eats cherries (we counted five of them at one
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 23
time in a single tree, the stones pattering down like the
sparse hail that preludes a storm), and that he gnaws off
the small end of pears to get at the seeds. He steals
the corn from under the noses of my poultry. But what
would you have 1 He will come down upon the limb of
the tree I am lying under till he is within a yard of me.
He and his mate will scurry up and down the great black-
walnut for my diversion, chattering like monkeys. Can
I sign his death-warrant who has tolerated me about his
grounds so long 1 Not I. Let them steal, and welcome.
I am sure I should, had I had the same bringing up and
the same temptation. As for the birds, I do not believe
there is one of them but does more good than harm ; and
of how many featherless bipeds can this be said ]
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
" ~|V /TEN scarcely know how beautiful fire is," says
-LVJL Shelley ; and I am apt to think there are a
good many other things concerning which their knowl
edge might be largely increased without becoming burden
some. Nor are they altogether reluctant to be taiight,
not so reluctant, perhaps, as unable, and education
is sure to find one fulcrum ready to her hand by which
to get a purchase on them. For most of us, I have no
ticed, are not without an amiable willingness to assist at
any spectacle or entertainment (loosely so called) for
which no fee is charged at the door. If special tickets
are sent us, another element of pleasure is added in a
sense of privilege and pre-eminence (pitiably scarce in
a democracy) so deeply rooted in human nature that I
have seen people take a strange satisfaction in being
near of kin to the mute chief personage in a funeral. It
gave them a moment's advantage over the rest of us
whose grief was rated at a lower place in the procession.
But the words " admission free " at the bottom of a hand
bill, though holding out no bait of inequality, have yet
a singular charm for many minds, especially in the coun
try. There is something touching in the constancy with
which men attend free lectures, and in the honest
patience with which they listen to them. He who pays
may yawn or shift testily in his seat, or even go out with
an awful reverberation of criticism, for he has bought the
right to do any or all of these and paid for it. But gra-
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 25
tuitous hearers are anaesthetized to suffering by a sense
ot virtue. They are performing perhaps the noblest, as
it is one of the most difficult, of human functions in get
ting Something (no matter how small) for Nothing.
They are not pestered by the awful duty of securing
their money's worth. They are wasting time, to do
which elegantly and without lassitude is the highest
achievement of civilization. If they are cheated, it is, at
worst, only of a superfluous hour which was rotting on
their hands. Not only is mere amusement made more
piquant, but instruction more palatable, by this univer
sally relished sauce of gratuity. And if the philosophic
observer finds an object of agreeable contemplation in
the audience, as they listen to a discourse on the proba
bility of making missionaries go down better with the
Feejee- Islanders by balancing the hymn-book in one
pocket with a bottle of Worcestershire in the other, or
to a plea for arming the female gorilla with the ballot,
he also takes a friendly interest in the lecturer, and ad
mires the wise economy of Nature who thus contrives
an ample field of honest labor for her bores. Even
when the insidious hat is passed round after one of these
eleemosynary feasts, the relish is but heightened by a
conscientious refusal to disturb the satisfaction's com
pleteness with the rattle of a single contributory penny.
So firmly persuaded am I of this (/m^s-instinct in our
common humanity, that I believe I could fill a house by
advertising a free lecture on Tupper considered as a
philosophic poet, or on my personal recollections of the
late James K. Polk. This being so, I have sometimes
wondered that the peep-shows which Nature provides
with such endless variety for her children, and to which
we are admitted on the bare condition of having eyes,
should be so generally neglected. To be sure, eyes
are not so common as people think, or poets would be
2
26 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
plentier, and perhaps also these exhibitions of hers are
cheapened in estimation by the fact that in enjoying
them we are not getting the better of anybody else.
Your true lovers of nature, however, contrive to get
even this solace ; and Wordsworth looking upon moun
tains as his own pecxiliar sweethearts, was jealous of
anybody else who ventured upon even the most innocent
flirtation with them. As if such fellows, indeed, could
pretend to that nicer sense of what-d'ye-call-it which was
so remarkable in him ! Marry come up ! Mountains, no
doubt, may inspire a profounder and more exclusive pas
sion, but on the whole I am not sorry to have been born
and bred among more domestic scenes, where I can be
hospitable without a pang. I am going to ask you pres
ently to take potluck with me at a board where Winter
shall supply whatever there is of cheer.
I think the old fellow has hitherto had scant justice
done him in the main. We make him the symbol of old
age or death, and think we have settled the matter. As
if old age were never kindly as well as frosty ; as if it
had no reverend graces of its own as good in their way as
the noisy impertinence of childhood, the elbowing self-
conceit of youth, or the pompous mediocrity of middle
life ! As if there were anything discreditable in death,
or nobody had ever longed for it ! Suppose we grant
that Winter is the sleep of the year, what then 1 I take
it upon me to say that his dreams are finer than the
best reality of his waking rivals.
" Sleep, Silence 1 child, the father of soft Rest,"
is a very agreeable acquaintance, and most of us are bet
ter employed in his company than anywhere else. For
my own part, I think Winter a pretty wide-awake old
boy, and his bluff sincerity and hearty ways are more
congenial to my mood, and more wholesome for me,
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 27
than any charms of which his rivals are capable.
Spring is a fickle mistress, who either does not know her
own mind, or is so long in making it up, whether yon
shall have her or not have her, that one gets tired at
last of her pretty miffs and reconciliations. You go to
her to be cheered up a bit, and ten to one catch her in
the sulks, expecting you to find enough good-humor for
both. After she has become Mrs. Summer she grows a
little more staid in her demeanor ; and her abundant
table, where you are sure to get the earliest fruits and
vegetables of the season, is a good foundation for steady
friendship; but she has lost that delicious aroma of
maidenhood, and what was delicately rounded grace in
the girl gives more than hints of something like redun
dance in the matron. Autumn is the poet of the family.
He gets you up a splendor that you would say was
made out of real sunset ; but it is nothing more than a
few hectic leaves, when all is done. He is but a senti
mentalist, after all ; a kind of Lamartine whining along
the ancestral avenues he has made bare timber of, and
begging a contribution of good-spirits from your own
savings to keep him in countenance. But Winter has
his delicate sensibilities too, only he does not make them
as good as indelicate by thrusting them forever in your
face. He is a better poet than Autumn, when he has a
mind, but, like a truly great one as he is, he brings you
down to your bare manhood, and bids you understand
him out of that, with no adventitious helps of associa
tion, or he will none of you. He does not touch those
melancholy chords on which Autumn is as great a
master as Heine. Well, is there no such thing as
thrumming on them and maundering over them till
they get out of tune, and you wish some manly hand
would crash through them and leave them dangling
brokenly forever ? Take Winter as you find him, and he
28 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow, with no non
sense in him, and tolerating none in you, which is a
great comfort in the long run. He is not what they
call a genial critic ; but bring a real man along with you,
and you will find there is a crabbed generosity about
the old cynic that you would not exchange for all the
creamy concessions of Autumn. "Season of mists and
mellow fruitfulncss," quotha? That 's just it; Winter
soon blows your head clear of fog and makes you see
things as they are ; I thank him for it ! The truth is,
between ourselves, I have a very good opinion of the
whole family, who always welcome me without making
me feel as if I were too much of a poor relation. There
ought to be some kind of distance, never so little, you
know, to give the true relish. They are as good com
pany, the worst of them, as any I know, and I am not a
little flattered by a condescension from any one of them;
but I happen to hold Winter's retainer, this time, and,
like an honest advocate, am bound to make as good a
showing as I can for him, even if it cost a few slurs upon
the rest of the household. Moreover, Winter is coming,
and one would like to get on the blind side of him.
The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a mirror
for the moods of the mind, is a modern thing. The flee
ing to her as an escape from man was brought into
fashion by Rousseau ; for his prototype Petrarch, though
he had a taste for pretty scenery, had a true antique
horror for the grander aspects of nature. He got once
to the top of Mont Ventoux, but it is very plain that he
did not enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a century or so
that the search after the picturesque has been a safe em
ployment. It is not so even now in Greece or Southern
Italy. Where the Anglo-Saxon carves his cold fowl, and
leaves the relics of his picnic, the ancient or mediaeval
dan might be pretty confident that some ruffian would
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 29
try the edge of his kuife on a chicken of the Platonic
sort, and leave more precious bones as an ottering to the
genius of the place. The ancients were certainly more
social than we, though that, perhaps, was natural
enough, when a good part of the world was still covered
with forest. They huddled together in cities as well for
safety as to keep their minds warm. The Romans had a
fondness for country life, but they had tine roads, and
Rome was always within easy reach. The author of the
Book of Job is the earliest I know of who showed any
profound sense of the moral meaning of the outward
world ; and I think none has approached him since,
though Wordsworth comes nearest with the first two
books of the " Prelude." But their feeling is not pre
cisely of the kind I speak of as modern, and which gave
rise to what is called descriptive poetry. Chaucer opens
his Clerk's Tale with a bit of landscape admirable for its
large style, and as well composed as any Claude.
" There is right at the west end of Itaille,
Down nt the root of Vesulus the cold,
A lusty plain abundant of vitaille,
Where many a tower and town tliou mayst behold,
That founded were in time of fathers old,
And many an other delectable sight;
And Saluces this noble country hight."
What an airy precision of touch there is here, and
what a sure eye for the points of character in landscape !
But the picture is altogether subsidiary. No doubt
the works of Salvator Rosa and Caspar Poussin show that
there rmist have been some amateur taste for the grand
and terrible in scenery ; but the British poet Thomson
(" sweet-souled " is Wordsworth's apt word) was the first
to do with words what they had done partially with
colors. He was turgid, no good metrist, and his English
is like a translation from one of those poets who wrote
in Latin after it was dead : but lie was a man of sincere
30 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
genius, and not only English, but European literature is
largely in his debt. He was the inventor of cheap
amusement for the million, to be had of All-out-doors for
the asking. It was his impulse which unconsciously
gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school of Jean
Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateaubriand,
Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartme, George Sand, Ruskin,
the great painters of ideal landscape.
So long as men had slender means, whether of keep
ing out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat,
Winter was an unwelcome guest, especially in the coun
try. There he was the bearer of a iettre de cachet,
which shut its victims in solitary confinement with few
resources bat to boose round the fire and repeat ghost-
stories, which had lost all their freshness and none of
their terror. To go to bed was to lie awake of cold,
with an added shudder of fright whenever a loose case
ment or a waving curtain chose to give yon the goose-
flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his letters, gives us a
notion how uncomfortable it was in the country, with
green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and windows
that thought it was their duty to make the wind whistle,
not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not have
been much better in the city, to judge by Menage's
warning against the danger of our dressing-gowns taking
fire, while we cuddle too closely over the sparing blaze.
The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in
bed, with his hand through a hole in the blanket ; and
we may suspect that it was the warmth quite as much
as the company that first drew men together at the
coftee-house. Coleridge, in January, 1800, writes to
Wedge wood : "I am sitting by a fire in a rug great
coat It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear,
can shield yourself from it only by perpetual imprison
ment." This thermometrical view of winter is, I grant, a
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 31
depressing one ; for I think there is nothing so demoraliz
ing as cold. I know of a boy who, when his father, a
bitter economist, was brought home dead, said only,
" Now we can burn as much wood as we like." I would
not off-hand prophesy the gallows for that boy. I re
member with a shudder a pinch I got from the cold once
in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of fresh air, I found
myself glad to see the windows hermetically sealed by
the freezing vapor of our breath, and plotted the assassi
nation of the conductor every time he opened the door.
I felt myself sensibly barbarizing, and would have shared
Colonel Jack's bed in the ash-hole of the glass-furnace
with a grateful heart. Since then I have had more
charity for the prevailing ill-opinion of winter. It was
natural enough that Ovid should measure the years of
his exile in Pontus by the number of winters.
Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister,
Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris:
Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I
In Poutus was, thrice Euxine's wave made hard.
Jubinal has printed an Anglo-Norman piece of doggerel
in which Winter and Summer dispute which is the better
man. It is not without a kind of rough and inchoate
humor, and I like it because old Whitebeard gets toler
ably fair play. The jolly old fellow boasts of his rate of
living, with that contempt of poverty which is the weak
spot in the burly English nature.
Ja Dieu ne place que me avyerge
Quo in3 face plus honour
Et plus despenz en un soul jour
Que vus en tote vostre vie :
Now God forbid it hap to me
That I make not more great display,
And spend more in a single day
Than you can do in all your life.
The best touch, perhaps, is Winter's claim for credit as a
mender of the highways, which was not without point
32 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
when every road in Europe was a quagmire during a good
part of the year unless it was bottomed on some remains
of Roman engineering.
Je su, fet-il, seiguur et mestre
Et a bon droit le dey estre,
Quant de la bowe face cauce"
Par un petit de geele :
Master and lord I am, says he,
And of good right so ought to be,
Since I make causeys, safely crost,
Of mud, with just a pinch of frost.
But there is no recognition of Winter as the best of out
door company.
Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer of it,
if ever any, confesses,
" The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,
Sings in my ear, my hands are stones,
Curdles the blood to the marble bones,
Tugs at the heartstrings, numbs the sense,
And hems in life with narrowing fence."
Winter was literally " the inverted year," as Thomson
called him ; for such entertainments as could be had
must be got within doors. What cheerfulness there was
in brumal verse was that of Horace's dissolve frigus ligna
super foco large reponens, so pleasantly associated with
the cleverest scene in Roderick Random. This is the
tone of that poem of Walton's friend Cotton, which won
the praise of Wordsworth :
" Let us home,
Our mortal enemy is come:
Winter and all his blustering train
Have made a voyage o'er the main.
" Fly, fly, the foe advances fast:
Into our fortress let us haste.
Where all the roarers of the north
Can neither storm nor starve us forth.
** There underground a magazine
Of sovereign juice is cellared in.
Liquor that will the siege maintain
Should Phoebus ne'er return again.
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 33
"Whilst we together jovial sit
Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit,
Where, though bleak winds confine us home
Our fancies round the world shall roam."
Thomson's view of Winter is also, on the whole, a hostile
one, though he does justice to his grandeur.
" Thus Winter falls,
A heavy gloom oppressive o'er the woild,
Through Nature shedding influence malign."
He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the house,
though more refined :
" While without
The ceaseless winds blow ice. be my retreat
Between the groaning forest and the shore
Beat by the boundless multitude of waves,
A rural, sheltered, solitary scene,
W r here ruddy fire and beaming tapers join
To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit
And hold high converse with the mighty dead."
Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with respect,
follows Thomson. With him, too, "Winter desolates
the year,'' and
"How pleasing wears the wintry night
Spent with the old illustrious dead !
While by the taper's trembling light
I seem those awful scenes to tread
Where chiefs or legislators lie," &c.
Akenside had evidently been reading Thomson. He
had the conceptions of a great poet with less faculty than
many a little one, and is one of those versifiers of whom
it is enough to say that we are always willing to break
him off in the middle with an &c., well knowing that
what follows is but the coming-round again of what went
before, marching in a circle with the cheap numerosity
of a stage-army. In truth, it is no wonder that the short
days of that cloudy northern climate should have added
to winter a gloom borrowed of the mind. We hardly
know, till we have experienced the contrast, how sensibly
our winter is alleviated by the longer daylight and the
34 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
pellucid atmosphere. I once spent a winter in Dresden,
a southern climate compared with England, and really
almost lost my respect for the sun when 1 saw him grop
ing among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he
described his impoverished arc in the sky. The enforced
seclusion of the season makes it the time for serious study
and occupations that demand fixed incomes of unbroken
time. This is why Milton said " that his vein never
happily flowed but from the autumnal equinox to the
vernal," though in his twentieth year he had written, oil
the return of spring,
Fallor ? an et nobis recleunt in carmina vires
Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest 'I
Err I V or do the powers of song return
To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring ?
Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first to notice
the cheerfulness of snow in sunshine. His Harz-reise im
Winter gives no hint of it, for that is a diluted reminis
cence of Greek tragic choruses and the Book of Job in
nearly equal parts. In one of the singularly interesting
and characteristic letters to Frau von Stein, however,
written during the journey, he says : " It is beautiful in
deed ; the mist heaps itself together in light snow-clouds,
the sun looks through, and the snow over everything
gives back a feeling of gayety." But I find in Cowper
the first recognition of a general amiability in Winter.
The gentleness of his temper, and the wide charity of
his sympathies, made it natural for him to find good in
everything except the human heart. A dreadful creed
distilled from the darkest moments of dyspeptic solitaries
compelled him against his will to see in tkat the one evil
thing made by a God whose goodness is over all hia
works. Cowper's two walks in the morning and noon of
a winter's day are delightful, so long as he contrives t
let himself be happy in the graciousness of the landscape,
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 35
Your muscles grow spriugy, and your lungs dilate with
the crisp air as you walk along with him. You laugh
with him at the grotesque shadow of your legs lengthened
across the snow by the just-risen sun. I know nothing
that gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration than
the easy verses of this escaped hypochondriac. But
Cowper also preferred his sheltered garden-walk to those
robuster joys, and bitterly acknowledged the depressing
influence of the darkened year. In December, 1 780, he
writes : " At this season of the year, and in this gloomy
Uncomfortable climate, it is no easy matter for the owner
of a mind like mine to divert it from sad subjects, and to
fix it upon such as may administer to its amusement."
Or was it because he was writing to the dreadful Newton 1
Perhaps his poetry bears truer witness to his habitual
feeling, for it is only there that poets disenthral them
selves of their reserve and become fully possessed of their
greatest charm, the power of being franker than other
men. In the Third Book of the Task he boldly affirms
his preference of the country to the city even in winter :
" But are not wholesome airs, though nnperfumed
By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt,
And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure
From clamor, and whose very silence charms,
To be preferred to smoke ? . . . .
They would'be, were not madness in the head
And folly in the heart ; were England now
What England was, plain, hospitable kind,
And undebauched."
The conclusion shows, however, that he was thinking
mainly of fireside delights, not of the blusterous com
panionship of nature. This appears even more clearly in
the Fourth Book :
" O Winter, ruler of the inverted year" ;
but I cannot help interrupting him to say how pleasant
it always is to track poets through the gardens of their
36 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
predecessors and find out their likings by a flower
snapped off here and there to garnish their own nosegays.
Cowper had been reading Thomson, and "the inverted
year " pleased his fancy with its suggestion of that starry
wheel of the zodiac moving round through its spaces infi
nite. He could not help loving a handy Latinism (espe
cially with elision beauty added), any more than Gray,
any more than Wordsworth, on the sly. But the
member for Olney has the floor :
" Winter, ruler of the inverted year,
Thy scattered hair with sleet like ashes filled,
Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks
Fringed with a beard made white with other snows
Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds,
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne
A sliding car, indebted to no wheels,
But urged by storms along its slippery way,
I love thee all unlovely as thou seem'st,
And dreaded as thou art ! Thou hold'st the sun
A prisoner in the yet nndawning east,
Shortening his journey between morn and noon,
And hurrying him, impatient of his stay,
Down to the rosy west, but kindly still
Compensating his loss with added hours
Of social converse and instructive ease,
And gathering at short notice, in one group,
The family dispersed, and fixing thought,
Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares.
I crown thee king of intimate delights,
Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness,
And all the comforts that the lowly roof
Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours
Of long uninterrupted evening know."
I call this a good human bit of writing, imaginative,
too, not so flushed, not so .... highfaluting (let me
dare the odious word !) as the modern style since poets
have got hold of a theory that imagination is common-
sense turned inside out, and not common-sense sublimed,
but wholesome, masculine, and strong in the simplicity
of a mind wholly occupied with its theme. To me Cow-
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 37
per is still the best of our descriptive poets for every-day
wear. And what unobtrusive skill he has ! How he
heightens, for example, your sense of winter-evening se^
elusion, by the twanging horn of the postman on the
bridge ! That horn has rung in my ears ever since I
first heard it, during the consulate of the second Adams.
Wordsworth strikes a deeper note ; but does it not some
times come over one (just the least in the world) that
one would give anything for a bit of nature pure and
simple, without quite so strong a flavor of \V. W. 1 W. W.
is, of course, sublime and all that but ! For my part,
I will make a clean breast of it, and confess that I can't
look at a mountain without fancying the late laureate's
gigantic Roman nose thrust between me and it, and think
ing of Dean Swift's profane version of Romanos rerum
dominos into Roman nose ! a rare un ! dom your nose !
But do I judge verses, then, by the impression made on
me by the man who wrote them ] Not so fast, my good
friend, but, for good or evil, the character and its intel
lectual product are inextricably interfused.
If I remember aright, Wordsworth himself (except in
his magnificent skating-scene in the 'J Prelude") has not
much to say for winter out of doors. I cannot recall
any picture by him of a snow-storm. The reason may
possibly be that in the Lake Country even the winter
storms bring rain rather than snow. He was thankful
for the Christinas visits of Crabb Robinson, because they
"helped him through the winter." His only hearty
praise of winter is when, as General Fevrier, he defeats
the French :
" Humanity, delighting to behold
A fond reflection of her own decay,
Hath painted Winter like a traveller old,
Propped on a stall', and. tlirnii^h the sullen day,
In hooded mantle, limping o'er the plain
As though his weakness were disturbed by pain:
38 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
Or, if ajuster fancy should allow
An undisputed symbol of command,
The chosen sceptre is a withered bough
Infirmly grasped within a withered hand.
These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn;
But mighty Winter the device shall scorn."
The Scottish poet Grahame, in his " Sabbath," says
manfully :
" Now is the time
To visit Nature in her grand attire " ;
and he has one little picture which no other poet has
surpassed :
"High-ridged the whirled drift has almost reached
The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch:
Mute hangs the hooded bell; the tombs lie buried."
Even in our own climate, where the sun shows his win
ter face as long and as brightly as in central Italy, the
seduction of the chimney-corner is apt to predominate in
the mind over the severer satisfactions of muffled fields
and penitential woods. The very title of Whittier's de
lightful " Snow-Boimd " shows what he was thinking of,
though he does vapor a little about digging out paths.
The verses of Emerson, perfect as a Greek fragment
(despite the archaism of a dissyllabic fire), which he has
chosen for his epigraph, tell us, too, how the
" Housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm."
They are all in a tale. It is always the tristis Hiems
of Virgil. Catch one of them having a kind word for old
Barbe Fleurie, unless he whines through some cranny,
like a beggar, to heighten their enjoyment while they
toast their slippered toes. I grant there is a keen relish
of contrast about the bickering flame as it gives an
emphasis beyond Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, or
kindles the gloomy gold of volumes scarce less friendly,
especially when a tempest is blundering round the
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 39
house. Wordsworth has a fine touch that brings home
to us the comfortable contrast of without and within,
during a storm at night, and the passage is highly
characteristic of a poet whose inspiration always has an
undertone of bourgeois :
" How touching, when, at midnight, sweep
Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark,
To hear, and sink again to sleep ! "
J. H., one of those choice poets who will not tarnish
their bright fancies by publication, always insists on a
snow-storm as essential to the true atmosphere of whist.
Mrs. Battles, in her famous rule for the game, implies
winter, and would doubtless have added tempest, if it
could be had for the asking. For a good solid read also,
into the small hours, there is nothing like that sense of
safety against having your evening laid waste, which
Euroclydon brings, as he bellows down the chimney,
making your fire gasp, or rustles snow-flakes against the
pane with a sound more soothing than silence. Emer
son, as he is apt to do, not only hit the nail on the
head, but drove it home, in that last phrase of the
" tumultuous privacy."
But I would exchange this, and give something to
boot, for the privilege of walking out into the vast blur
of a north-northeast snow-storm, and getting a strong
draught on the furnace within, by drawing the first fur
rows through its sandy drifts. I love those
" Noontide twilights which snow makes
With tempest of the blinding flakes."
If the wind veer too much toward the east, you get the
heavy snow that gives a true Alpine slope to the boughs
of your evergreens, and traces a skeleton of your elms in
white ; but you must have plenty of north in your gale
if you want those driving nettles of frost that sting the
cheeks to a crimson manlier than that of fire. During
40 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
the great storm of two winters ago, the most robustious
periwig-pated fellow of late years, I waded and floun
dered a couple of miles through the whispering night,
and brought home that feeling of expansion we have
after being in good company. " Great things doeth He
which we cannot comprehend ; for he saith to the snow,
' Be thou on the earth.' ''
There is admirable snow scenery in Judd's " Marga
ret," but some one has confiscated my copy of that ad
mirable book, and, perhaps, Homer's picture of a snow
storm is the best yet in its large simplicity :
' And as in winter-time, when Jove his cold sharp javelins throws
Amongst us mortals, and is moved to white the earth with snows,
The winds asleep, he freely pours till highest prominents,
Hill-tops, low meadows, and the fields that crown with most contents
The toils of men, seaports and shores, are hid, and every place,
But floods, that fair snow's tender flakes, as their own brood, em
brace."
Chapman, after all, though he makes very free with
him, comes nearer Homer than anybody else. There is
nothing in the original of that fair snow's tender flakes,
but neither Pope nor Cowper could get out of their
heads the Psalmist's tender phrase, " He giveth his snow
like wool," for which also Homer affords no hint. Pope
talks of "dissolving fleeces," and Cowper of a "fleecy
mantle." But David is nobly simple, while Pope is
simply nonsensical, and Cowper pretty. If they must
have prettiness, Martial would have supplied them with
it in his
Densum tacitarum vellus aquarum,
which is too pretty, though I fear it would have pleased
Dr. Donne. Eustatlmis of Thessalonica calls snow v8<ap
Ipi(o8(s, woolly water, which a poor old French poet,
Godeau, has amplified into this :
Lorsque la froidure inhumaine
De leur verd ornement depouille les forets
Sous une neige epaisse il couvre les guerets,
Et la neige a pour eux la chaleur de la laine.
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 41
In this, as in Pope's version of the passage in Homer,
there is, at least, a sort of suggestion of snow-storm in
the blinding drift of words. But, on the whole, if one
would know what snow is, I should advise him not to
hunt up what the poets have said about it, but to look
at the sweet miracle itself.
The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as those of
Spring. In a gray December day, when, as the farmers
say, it is too cold to snow, his numbed fingers will let
fall doubtfully a few star- shaped flakes, the snow-drops
and anemones that harbinger his more assured reign.
Now, and now only, may be seen, heaped on the hori
zon's eastern edge, those " blue clouds " from forth
which Shakespeare says that Mars " doth pluck the
masoned turrets." Sometimes also, when the sun is
low, you will see a single cloud trailing a flurry of snow
along the southern hills in a wavering fringe of purple.
And when at last the real snow-storm comes, it leaves
the earth with a virginal look on it that no other of the
seasons can rival, compared with which, indeed, they
seem soiled and vulgar.
And what is there in nature so beautiful as the next
morning after such confusion of the elements? Night
has no silence like this of busy day. All the batteries
of noise are spiked. We see the movement of life as a
deaf man sees it, a mere wraith of the clamorous exist
ence that inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is
bare. The earth is clothed in innocence as a garment.
Every wound of the landscape is healed ; whatever was
stiff has been sweetly rounded as the breasts of Aphro
dite ; what was unsightly has been covered gently with
a soft splendor, as if, Cowley would have said, Nature
had cleverly let fall her handkerchief to hide it. If the
Virgin (Notre Dame de la neige) were to come back, here
is an earth that would not bruise her foot nor stain it.
42 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
It is
" The fanned snow
That 's bolted by the northern blasts twice o'er,"
Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi,
Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds,
packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will bear
your weight. What grace is in all the curves, as if
every one of them had been swept by that inspired
thumb of Phidias's journeyman !
Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in those
light ripples that sometimes scurry across smooth water
with a sudden blur. But on this gleaming hush the
aerial deluge has left plain marks of its course ; and
in gullies through which it rushed torrent-like, the eye
finds its bed irregularly scooped like that of a brook in
hard beach-sand, or, in more sheltered spots, traced with
outlines like those left by the sliding edges of the surf
upon the shore. The air, after all, is only an infinitely
thinner kind of water, such as I suppose we shall have
to drink when the state does her whole duty as a moral
reformer. Nor is the wind the only thing whose trail
you will notice on this sensitive surface. You will find
that you have more neighbors and night visitors than
you dreamed of. Here is the dainty footprint of a cat ;
here a dog has looked in on you like an amateur watch
man to see if all is right, slumping clumsily about in the
mealy treachery. And look ! before you were up in the
morning, though you were a punctual courtier at the
sun's levee, here has been a squirrel zigzagging to and
fro like a hound gathering the scent, and some tiny bird
searching for unimaginable food, perhaps for the tinier
creature, whatever it is, that drew this slender continu
ous trail like those made on the wet beach by light
borderers of the sea. The earliest autographs were as
frail as these. Poseidon traced his lines, or giant birds
made their mark, on preadamite sea-margins ; and the
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 43
thunder-gust left the tear-stains of its sudden passion
there ; nay, we have the signatures of delicatest fern-
leaves on the soft ooze of seons that dozed away their
dreamless leisure before consciousness came upon the
earth with man. Some whim of nature locked them fast
in stone for us after-thoughts of creation. Which of us
shall leave a footprint as imperishable as that of the
ornithorhyncus, or much more so than that of these
Bedouins of the snow-desert 1 Perhaps it was only be
cause the ripple and the rain-drop and the bird were not
thinking of themselves, that they had such luck. The
chances of immortality depend very much on that. How
often have we not seen poor mortals, dupes of a season's
notoriety, carving their names on seeming-solid rock of
merest beach-sand, whose feeble hold on memory shall
be washed away by the next wave of fickle opinion !
Well, well, honest Jacques, there are better things to be
found in the snow than sermons.
The snow that falls damp comes commonly in larger
flakes from windless skies, and is the prettiest of all to
watch from under cover. This is the kind Homer had
in mind ; and Dante, who had never read him, compares
the dilatate falde, the flaring flakes, of his fiery rain, to
those of snow among the mountains without wind. This
sort of snowfall has no fight in it, and does not challenge
you to a wrestle like that which drives well from the
northward, with all moisture thoroughly winnowed out
of it by the frosty wind. Burns, who was more out of
doors than most poets, and whose barefoot Muse got the
color in her cheeks by vigorous exercise in all weathers,
was thinking of this drier deluge, when he speaks of the
" whirling drift," and tells how
" Chanticleer
Shook off the powthery snaw."
But the damper and more deliberate falls have a choice
44 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
knack ac draping the trees ; and about eaves or stone
walls, wherever, mdeed, the evaporation is rapid, and it
finds a chance to cling, it will build itself out in curves
of wonderful beauty. I have seen one of these dumb
waves, thus caught in the act of breaking, curl four feet
beyond the edge of my roof and hang there for days, as
if Nature were too well pleased with her work to let it
crumble from its exquisite pause. After such a storm,
if you are lucky enough to have even a sluggish ditch
for a neighbor, be sure to pay it a visit. You will find
its banks corniced with what seems precipitated light,
and the dark current down below gleams as if with an
inward lustre. Dull of motion as it is, you never saw
water that seemed alive before. It has a brightness,
like that of the eyes of some smaller animals, which
gives assurance of life, but of a life foreign and unintel
ligible.
A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in our
freakish climate, the wind will whisk sometimes into the
northwest so suddenly as to plate all the trees with crys
tal before it has swept the sky clear of its last cobweb
of cloud. Ambrose Philips, in a poetical epistle from
Copenhagen to the Earl of Dorset, describes this strange
confectionery of Nature, for such, I am half ashamed
to say, it always seems to me, recalling the " glorified
sugar-candy " of Lamb's first night at the theatre. It
has an artificial air, altogether beneath the grand ai'tist
of the atmosphere, and besides does too much mischief
to the trees for a philodendrist to take unmixed pleasure
in it. Perhaps it deserves a poet like Philips, who
really loved Nature and yet liked her to be mighty fine,
as Pepys would say, with a heightening of powder and
rouge :
" And yet but lately have I seen e'en here
The winter in a lovely dress appear.
A GOOD WORD FOB WINTER. 45
Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow,
Or winds begun through hazy skies to blow,
At even ing a keen eastern breeze arose,
And the descending rain unsullied froze.
Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew,
The ruddy noon disclosed at once to view
The face of Nature in a rich disguise,
And brightened every object to my eyes;
For every shrub, and every blade of grass,
And every pointed thorn, seemed wrought in glass;
In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show,
And through the ice the crimson berries glow;
The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yield,
Seem polished lances in a hostile field;
The stag in limpid currents with surprise
Sees crystal branches on his forehead rise;
The spreading oak, the beech, the towering pine,
Glazed over in the freezing ether shine;
The frighted birds the rattling branches shun,
Which wave and glitter in the distant sun,
When, if a sudden gust of wind arise,
The brittle forest into atoms flies,
The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends
And in a spangled shower the prospect ends."
It is not uninstructive to see how tolerable Ambrose is,
so long as he sticks manfully to what he really saw,
The moment he undertakes to improve on Nature h<^
sinks into the mere court poet, and we surrender him to
the jealousy of Pope without a sigh. His " rattling
branches " and " crackling forest " are good, as truth al
ways is after a fashion ; but what shall we say of that
dreadful stag which, there is little doubt, he valued
above all the rest, because it was purely his own 1
The damper snow tempts the amateur architect and
sculptor. His Pentelicus has been brought to his very
door, and if there are boys to be had (whose company
beats all other recipes for prolonging life) a middle-aged
Master of the Works will knock the years off his ac
count and make the family Bible seem a dealer in foolish
fables, by a few hours given heartily to this business.
First comes the Sisyphean toil of rolling the clammy
46 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
balls till they refuse to budge farther. Then, if you
would play the statuary, they are piled one upon the
other to the proper height ; or if your aim be masonry,
whether of house or fort, they must be squared and
beaten solid with the shovel. The material is capable
of very pretty effects, and your young companions mean
while are unconsciously learning lessons in aesthetics.
From the feeling of satisfaction with which one squats
on the damp floor of his extemporized dwelling, I have
been led to think that the backwoodsman must get a
sweeter savor of self-reliance from the house his own
hands have built than Bramante or Sansovino could ever
give. Perhaps the fort is the best thing, for it calls out
more masculine qualities and adds the cheer of battle
with that dumb artillery which gives pain enough to
test pluck without risk of serious hurt. Already, as I
write, it is twenty-odd years ago. The balls fly thick
and fast. The uncle defends the waist-high ramparts
against a storm of nephews, his breast plastered with
decorations like another Radetsky's. How well I recall
the indomitable good-humor under fire of him who fell
in the front at Ball's Bluff, the silent pertinacity of the
gentle scholar who got his last hurt at Fair Oaks, the
ardor in the charge of the gallant gentleman who, with
the death-wound in his side, headed his brigade at Cedar
Creek ! How it all comes back, and they never come !
I cannot again be the Vauban of fortresses in the inno
cent snow, but I shall never see children moulding their
clumsy giants in it without longing to help. It was a
pretty fancy of the young Vermont sculptor to make his
first essay in this evanescent material. Was it a figure
of Youth, I wonder ] Would it not be well if all artists
could begin in stuff as perishable, to melt away when the
sun of prosperity began to shine, and leave nothing be
hind but the gain of practised hands ] It is pleasant
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 47
to fancy that Shakespeare served his apprenticeship at
this trade, and owed to it that most pathetic of despair*
ing wishes,
* 0, that I were a mockery-king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water-drops! "
I have spoken of the exquisite curves of snow sur
faces. Not less rare are the tints of which they are
capable, the faint blue of the hollows, for the shadows
in snow are always blue, and the tender rose of higher
points, as you stand with your back to the setting sun
and look upward across the soft rondure of a hillside.
I have seen within a mile of home effects of color as
lovely as any iridescence of the Silberhorn after sun
down. Charles II., who never said a foolish thing, gave
the English climate the highest praise when he said that
it allowed you more hours out of doors than any other,
and I think our winter may fairly make the same boast
as compared with the rest of the year. Its still morn
ings, with the thermometer near zero, put a premium on
walking. There is more sentiment in turf, perhaps, and
it is more elastic to the foot ; its silence, too, is wellnigh
as congenial with meditation as that of fallen pine-tassel ;
but for exhilaration there is nothing like a stiff snow-
crust that creaks like a cricket at every step, and com
municates its own sparkle to the senses. The air you
drink isfrappe, all its grosser particles precipitated, and
the dregs of your blood with them. A purer current
mounts to the brain, courses sparkling through it, and
rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff. There is
nothing left to breed an exhalation of ill-humor or
despondency. They say that this rarefied atmosphere
has lessened the capacity of our lungs. Be it so. Quart-
pots are for muddier liquor than nectar. To me, the
city in winter is infinitely dreary, the sharp street-
48 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
corners have such a chill in them, and the snow so soon
loses its maidenhood to become a mere drab, " doing
shameful things," as Steele says of politicians, " without
being ashamed." I pine for the Quaker purity of my
country landscape. I am speaking, of course, of those
winters that are not niggardly of snow, as ours too often
are, giving us a gravelly dust instead. Nothing can be
unsightlier than those piebald fields where the coarse
brown hide of Earth shows through the holes of her
ragged ermine. But even when there is abundance of
snow, I find as I grow older that there are not so many
good crusts as there used to be. When 1 first observed
this, I rashly set it to the account of that general
degeneracy in nature (keeping pace with the same
melancholy phenomenon in man) which forces itself up
on the attention and into the philosophy of middle life.
But happening once to be weighed, it occurred to me
that an arch which would bear fifty pounds could hardly
be blamed for giving way under more than three times
the weight. I have sometimes thought that if theologians
would remember this in their arguments, and consider
that the man may slump through, with no fault of his
own, where the boy would have skimmed the surface in
safety, it would be better for all parties. However,
when you do get a cmst that will bear, and know any
brooklet that runs down a hillside, be sure to go and
take a look at him, especially if your crust is due, as it
commonly is, to a cold snap following eagerly on a thaw.
You will never find him so cheerful. As he shrank
away after the last thaw, he built for himself the most
exquisite caverns of ice to run through, if not " measure
less to man " like those of Alph, the sacred river, yet
perhaps more pleasing for their narrowness than those
for their grandeur. What a cunning silversmith is
Frost ! The rarest workmanship of Delhi or Genoa
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 49
copies him but clumsily, as if the fingers of all other
artists were thumbs. Fern work and lacework and fila
gree in endless variety, and under it all the water tinkles
like a distant guitar, or drums like a tambourine, or
gurgles like the Tokay of an anchorite's dream. Be
yond doubt there is a fairy procession marching along
those frail arcades and translucent corridors.
" Their oaten pipes blow wondrous shrill,
The hemlock small blow clear."
And hark ! is that the ringing of Titania's bridle, or the
bells of the wee, wee hawk that sits on Oberon's wrist ]
This wonder of Frost's handiwork may be had every
winter, but he can do better than this, though I have
seen it but once in my life. There had been a thaw
without wind or rain, making the air fat with gray vapor.
Towards sundown came that chill, the avant-courier of
a northwesterly gale. Then, though there was no per
ceptible current in the atmosphere, the fog began to
attach itself in frosty roots and filaments to the southern
side of every twig and grass-stem. The very posts had
poems traced upon them by this dumb minstrel.
Wherever the moist seeds found lodgement grew an
inch-deep moss fine as cobweb, a slender coral-reef,
argentine, delicate, as of some silent sea in the moon,
such as Agassiz dredges when he dreams. The frost,
too, can wield a delicate graver, and in fancy leaves
Piranesi far behind. He covers your window-pane with
Alpine etchings, as if in memory of that sanctuary where
he finds shelter even in midsummer.
Now look down from your hillside across the valley.
The trees are leafless, but this is the season to study
their anatomy, and did you ever notice before how much
color there is in the twigs of many of them ] And the
smoke from those chimneys is so blue it seems like a
feeder of the sky into which it flows. Winter refines it
3 D
50 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
and gives it agreeable associations. In summer it sug
gests cookery or the drudgery of steam-engines, but now
your fancy (if it can forget for a moment the dreary
usurpation of stoves) traces it down to the fireside and
the brightened faces of children. Thoreau is the only
poet who has fitly sung it. The wood-cutter rises before
day and
" First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad
His early scout, his emissary, smoke,
The earliest, latest pilgrim from his roof,
To feel the frosty air ; . . . .
And, while he crouches still beside the hearth,
Nor musters courage to unbar the door,
It has gone down the glen with the light wind
And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath.
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill,
And warmed the pinions of the early bird ;
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air,
Has caught sight of the day o'er the earth's edge,
And greets its master's eye at his low door
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky."
Here is very bad verse and very good imagination. He
had been reading Wordsworth, or he would not have
made tree-tops an iambus. In the Moretum of Virgil (or,
if not his, better than most of his) is a pretty picture
of a peasant kindling his winter-morning fire. He risea
before dawn,
Sollicitaque manu tenebras explorat inertes
Vestisratque focum laesus quem denique sensit.
Parvulus exusto remanebat stipite fumus,
Et cinis obductas celabat lumina prunse.
Admovet his pronam submissa fronte lucernam,
Et producit acu stupas humore carentes,
Excitat et crebris Innguentem flatibus ijrnem ;
Tandem concepto tenebrse fulgore recedunt,
Oppositaque manu lumen defendit ab aura.
With cautious hand he gropes the sluggish dark,
Tracking the hearth which, scorched, he feels erelong.
In burnt-out logs a slender smoke remained,
And raked-np ashes hid the cinders' eyes;
Stooping, to these the lamp outstretched he nears,
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 5]
And, with a needle loosening the dry wick,
With frequent breath excites the languid flame.
Before the gathering glow the shades recede,
And his bent hand the new-caught li^ht defends.
Ovid heightens the picture by a single touch :
Ipse genu poito flammas exsuscitat aura.
Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames.
If you walk down now into the woods, you may find a
robin or a blue-bird among the red-cedars, or a nuthatch
scaling deviously the trunk of some hardwood tree with
an eye as keen as that of a French soldier foraging for
the pot-au-feu of his mess. Perhaps a blue-jay shrills
cah call in his corvine trebles, or a chickadee
" Shows feats of his gymnastic play,
Head downward, clinging to the spray."
But both him and the snow-bird I love better to see.
tiny fluffs of feathered life, as they scurry about in a
driving mist of snow, than in this serene air.
Coleridge has put into verse one of the most beautiful
phenomena of a winter walk :
' The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a halo round its head."
But this aureole is not peculiar to winter. I have noticed
it often in a summer morning, when the grass was heavy
with dew, and even later in the day, when the dewless
grass was still fresh enough to have a gleam of its own.
For my own part I prefer a winter walk that takes in
the nightfall and the intense silence that erelong follows
it. The evening lamps looks yellower by contrast with
the snow, and give the windows that hearty look of
which our secretive fires have almost robbed them. Tha
stars seem
52 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER.
To hang, like twinkling winter lamps,
Among the branches of the leafless trees,"
or, if you are on a hill-top (whence it is sweet to watch
the home-lights gleam out one by one), they look nearer
than in summer, and appear to take a conscious part in
the cold. Especially in one of those stand-stills of the
air that forebode a change of weather, the sky is dusted
with motes of fire of which the summer-watcher never
dreamed. Winter, too, is, on the whole, the triumphant
season of the moon, a moon devoid of sentiment, if you
choose, but with the refreshment of a purer intellectual
light, the cooler orb of middle life. Who ever saw
anything to match that gleam, rather divined than seen,
which runs before her over the snow, a breath of light,
as she rises on the infinite silence of winter night 1 High
in the heavens, also she seems to bring out some intenser
property of cold with her chilly polish. The poets have
instinctively noted this. When Goody Blake imprecates
a curse of perpetual chill upon Harry Gill, she has
" The cold, cold moon above her head " ;
and Coleridge speaks of
" The silent icicles,
Quietly gleaming to the quiet moon. 1 "
As you walk homeward, for it is time that we should
end our ramble, you may perchance hear the most
impressive sound in nature, unless it be the fall of a tree
in the forest during the hush of summer noon. It is the
stifled shriek of the lake yonder as the frost throttles it.
Wordsworth has described it (too much, I fear, in the
style of Dr. Armstrong) :
" And, interrupting oft that eager game,
From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice,
The pent-up air, struggling to free itself,
Gave out to meadow-grounds and hills a loud
Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves
Howling in troops along the Bothnic main."
A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 53
Thoreau (unless the English lakes have a different dia
lect from ours) calls it admirably well a " whoop." But
it is a noise like none other, as if Demogorgon were
moaning inarticulately from under the earth. Let us
get within doors, lest we hear it again, for there is some
thing bodeful and uncanny in it.
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN
FOREIGNERS.
TTT^ALKING one day toward the Village, as we used
V V to call it in the good old days when almost every
dweller in the town had been born in it, I was enjoying
that delicious sense of disenthralment from the actual
which the deepening twilight brings with it, giving
as it does a sort of obscure novelty to things familiar.
The coolness, the hush, broken only by the distant bleat
of some belated goat, querulous to be disburthened of her
milky load, the few faint stars, more guessed as yet than
seen, the sense that the coming dark would so soon fold
me in the secure privacy of its disguise, all things
combined in a result as near absolute peace as can be
hoped for by a man who knows that there is a writ out
against him in the hands of the printer's devil. For the
moment, I was enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking
without being called on to stand and deliver what I
thought to the small public who are good enough to take
any interest therein. I love old ways, and the path I
was walking felt kindly to the feet it had known for al
most fifty years. How many fleeting impressions it had
shared with me ! How many times I had lingered to
study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon the
turf that edged it by the moon, of the bare boughs etched
with a touch beyond Rembrandt by the same unconscioxis
artist on the smooth page of snow ! If I turned round,
through dusky tree-gaps came the first twinkle of even-
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 55
ing lamps in the dear old homestead. On Corey's hill I
could see these tiny pharoses of love and home and sweet
domestic thoughts flash out one by one across the black
ening salt-meadow between. How much has not kerosene
added to the cheerfulness of our evening landscape ! A
pair of night-herons flapped heavily over me toward the
hidden river. The war was ended. I might walk town-
ward without that aching dread of bulletins that had
darkened the July sunshine and twice made the scarlet
leaves of October seem stained with blood. I remem
bered with a pang, half-proud, half-painful, how, so many
years ago, I had walked over the same path and felt
round my finger the soft pressure of a little hand that
was one day to harden with faithful grip of sabre. On
how many paths, leading to how many homes where proud
Memory does all she can to fill up the fireside gaps with
shining shapes, must not men be walking in just such
pensive mood as 1 1 Ah, young heroes, safe in immortal
youth as those of Homer, you at least carried your ideal
hence untarnished ! It is locked for you beyond moth or
rust in the treasure-chamber of Death.
Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as they
in it, that could give such as they a brave joy in dying
for it, worth something, then ] And as I felt more and
more the soothing magic of evening's cool palm upon my
temples, as my fancy came home from its revery, and my
senses, with reawakened curiosity, ran to the front win
dows again from the viewless closet of abstraction, and
felt a strange charm in finding the old tree and shabby
fence still there under the travesty of falling night, nay,
were conscious of an unsTispected newness in familiar
stars and the fading outlines of hills my earliest horizon,
I was conscious of an immortal soul, and could not but
rejoice in the unwaning goodliness of the world into which
I had been born without any merit of my own. I thought
56 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
of dear Henry Vaughan's rainbow, " Still young and
fine ! " I remembered people who had to go over to the
Alps to learn what the divine silence of snow was, who
must run to Italy before they were conscious of the mir
acle wrought every day under their very noses by the
sunset, who must call upon the Berkshire hills to teach
them what a painter autumn was, while close at hand
the Fresh Pond meadows made all oriels cheap with
hues that showed as if a sunset-cloud had been wrecked
among their maples. One might be worse off than even
in America, I thought. There are some things so elastic
that even the heavy roller of democracy cannot flatten
them altogether down. The mind can weave itself
warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts and dwell a
hermit anywhere. A country without traditions, with
out ennobling associations, a scramble of parvenus, with
a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through poli
tics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself? I con
fess, it did not seem so to me there in that illimitable
quiet, that serene self-possession of nature, where Collins
might have brooded his " Ode to Evening," or where
those verses on Solitude in Dodsley's Collection, that
Hawthorne liked so much, might have been composed.
Traditions 1 Granting that we had none, all that is worth
having in them is the common property of the soul,
an estate in gavelkind for all the sons of Adam, and,
moreover, if a man cannot stand on his two feet (the
prime quality of whoever has left any tradition behind
him), were it not better for him to be honest about it at
once, and go down on all fours 1 And for associations, if
one have not the wit to make them for himself out ofjiis
native earth, no ready-made ones of other men will avail
him much. Lexington is none the worse to me for not
being in Greece, nor Gettysburg that its name is not
Marathon. "Blessed old fields," I was just exclaiming
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 57
to myself, like one of Mrs. Radcliff'e's heroes, " dear acres,
innocently secure from history, which these eyes first be
held, may you be also those to which they shall at last
slowly darken ! " when I was interrupted by a voice
which asked me in German whether I was the Herr Pro
fessor, Doctor, So-and-so 1 The " Doctor " was by brevet
ir vaticination, to make the grade easier to my pocket.
One feels so intimately assured that he is made up,
in part, of shreds and leavings of the past, in part of
the interpolations of other people, that an honest man
would be slow in saying yes to such a question. But
" my name is So-and-so " is a safe answer, and I gave it-
While I had been romancing with myself, the street-
lamps had been lighted, and it was under one of these
detectives that have robbed the Old Road of its privilege
of sanctuary after nightfall that 1 was ambushed by my
foe. The inexorable villain had taken my description, it
appears, that I might have the less chance to escape
him. Dr. Holmes tells us that we change our substance,
not every seven years, as was once believed, but with
every breath we draw. Why had I not the wit to avail
myself of the subterfuge, and, like Peter, to renounce
my identity, especially, as in certain moods of mind, I
have often more than doubted of it myself? When a
man is, as it were, his own front-door, and is thus
knocked at, why may he not assume the right of that
sacred wood to make every house a castle, by denying
himself to all visitations'? I was truly not at home
when the question was put to me, but had to recall my
self from all out-of-doors, and to piece my self-conscious
ness hastily together as well as I could before I an
swered it.
I knew perfectly well what was coming. It is seldom
that debtors or good Samaritans waylay people under
gas-lamps in order to force money upon them, so far as I
58 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
have seen or heard. I was also aware, from considerable
experience, that every foreigner is persuaded that, by
doing this country the favor of coming to it, he has laid
every native thereof under an obligation, pecuniary or
other, as the case may be, whose discharge he is entitled-
to on demand duly made in person or by letter. Too
much learning (of this kind) had made me mad in the
provincial sense of the word. I had begun life with the
theory of giving something to every beggar that came
along, though sure of never finding a native-born coun
tryman among them. In a small way, I was resolved
to emulate Hatem Tai's tent, with its three hundred
and sixty-five entrances, one for every day in the year,
I know not whether he was astronomer enough to
add another for leap-years. The beggars were a kind
of German-silver aristocracy ; not real plate, to be sure,
but better than nothing. Where everybody was over
worked, they supplied the comfortable equipoise t of
absolute leisure, so aesthetically needful. Besides, I was
but too conscious of a vagrant fibre in myself, which too
often thrilled me in my solitary walks with the temp
tation to wander on into infinite space, and by a single
spasm of resolution to emancipate myself from the
drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectability and the
regular course of things. This prompting has been at
times my familiar demon, and I could not bat feel a
kind of respectful sympathy for men who had dared
what I had only sketched out to myself as a splendid
possibility. For seven years I helped maintain one
heroic man on an imaginary journey to Portland, as
fine an example as I have ever known of hopeless loyalty
to an ideal. I assisted another so long in a fruitless
attempt to reach Mecklenburg-Schwerin, that at last we
grinned in each other's faces when we met, like a couple
of augurs. He was possessed by this harmless mania
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 59
as some are by the North Pole, and I shall never forget
his look of regretful compassion (as for one who was
sacrificing his higher life to the fleshpots of Egypt) when
I at last advised him somewhat strenuously to go to the
D , whither the road was so much travelled that he
oould not miss it. General Banks, in his noble zeal for
the honor of his country, would confer on the Secretary
of State the power of imprisoning, in case of war, all
these seekers of the unattainable, thus by a stroke of
the pen annihilating the single poetic element in our
humdrum life. Alas ! not everybody has the genius to
be a Bobbin-Boy, or doubtless all these also would have
chosen that more prosperous line of life ! But moralists,
sociologists, political economists, and taxes have slowly
convinced me that my beggarly sympathies were a sin
against society. Especially was the Buckle doctrine of
averages (so flattering to our free-will) persuasive with
me ; for as there must be in every year a certain num
ber who would bestow an alms on these abridged edi
tions of the Wandering Jew, the withdrawal of my quota
could make no possible difference, since some destined
proxy must always step forward to fill my gap. Just
so many misdirected letters every year and no more !
Would it were as easy to reckon up the number of men
on whose backs fate has written the wrong address, so
that they arrive by mistake in Congress and other places
where they do not belong! May not these wanderers
of whom I speak have been sent into the world without
any proper address at alH Where is our Dead-Letter
Office for such ? And if wiser social arrangements
should furnish us with something of the sort, fancy
(horrible thought !) how many a workingman's friend
(a kind of industry in which the labor is light and the
wages heavy) would be sent thither because not called
for in the office where he at present lies !
60 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long under
the lamp-post. The same Gano which had betrayed me
to him revealed to me a well-set young man of about
half my own age, as well dressed, so far as I could see,
as I was, and with every natural qualification for getting
his own livelihood as good, if not better, than my own.
He had been reduced to the painful necessity of calling
upon me by a series of crosses beginning with the Baden
Revolution (for which, I own, he seemed rather young,
but perhaps he referred to a kind of revolution prac
tised every season at Baden-Baden), continued by re
peated failures in business, for amounts which must
convince me of his entire respectability, and ending with
our Civil War. During the latter, he had served with
distinction as a soldier, taking a main part in every im
portant battle, with a rapid list of which he favored me
and no doubt would have admitted that, impartial as
Jonathan Wild's great ancestor, he had been on both
sides, had I baited him with a few hints of conservative
opinions on a subject so distressing to a gentleman wish
ing to profit by one's sympathy and unhappily doubtful
as to which way it might lean. For all these reasons,
and, as he seemed to imply, for his merit in consenting
to be born in Germany, he considered himself my natural
creditor to the extent of five dollars, which he would
handsomely consent to accept in greenbacks, though he
preferred specie. The offer was certainly a generous
one, and the claim presented with an assurance that
carried conviction. But, unhappily, I had been led to
remark a curious natural phenomenon. If I was ever
weak enough to give anything to a petitioner of what
ever nationality, it always rained decayed compatriots
of his for a month after. Post hoc ergo propler hoc may
not be always safe logic, but here I seemed to perceive a
natural connection of cause and effect. Now, a few days
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 61
before I had been so tickled with a paper (professedly
written by a benevolent American clergyman) certifying
that the bearer, a hard-working German, had long
" sofered with rheumatic paints in his limps," that, after
copying the passage into my note-book, I thought it but
fair to pay a trifling honorarium to the author. I had
pulled the string of the shower-bath ! It had been run
ning shipwrecked sailors for some time, but forthwith it
began to pour Teutons, redolent of lager-bier. I could
not help associating the apparition of my new friend
with this series of otherwise unaccountable phenomena.
I accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, and
modestly did so, pleading a native bias towards impecu-
niosity to the full as strong as his own. He took a high
tone with me at once, such as an honest man would
naturally take with a confessed repudiator. He even
brought down his proud stomach so far as to join him
self to me for the rest of my townward walk, that he
might give me his views of the American people, and
thus inclusively of myself.
I know not whether it is because I am pigeon-livered
and lack gall, or whether it is from an overmastering
sense of drollery, but I am apt to submit to such bast
ings with a patience which afterwards surprises me,
being not without my share of warmth in the blood.
Perhaps it is because I so often meet with young per
sons who know vastly more than I do, and especially with
so many foreigners whose knowledge of this country is
superior to my own. However it may be, I listened for
some time with tolerable composure as my self-appointed
lecturer gave me in detail his opinions of my country
and its people. America, he informed me, was without
arts, science, literature, culture, or any native hope of
supplying them. We were a people wholly given to
money-getting, and who, having got it, knew no other
62 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
use for it than to hold it fast. I am fain to confess that
I felt a sensible itching of the biceps, and that my fingers
closed with such a grip as he had just informed me was
one of the effects of our unhappy climate. But happen
ing just then to be where I could avoid temptation by
dodging down a by-street, I hastily left him to finish his
diatribe to the lamp-post, which could stand it better
than I. That young man will never know how near
he came to being assaulted by a respectable gentleman
of middle age, at the corner of Church Street. I have
never felt quite satisfied that I did all my duty by him
in not knocking him down. But perhaps he might have
knocked me down, and then ]
The capacity of indignation makes an essential part
of the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined to
doubt whether he is a wise one who allows himself to act
upon its first hints. It should be rather, I suspect, a
latent heat in the blood, which makes itself felt in
character, a steady reserve for the brain, warming the
ovum of thought to life, rather than cooking it by a too
hasty enthusiasm in reaching the boiling-point. As my
pulse gradually fell back to its normal beat, I reflected
that I had been uncomfortably near making a fool of
myself, a handy salve of euphuism for our vanity,
though it does not always make a just allowance to
Nature for her share in the business. What possible
claim had my Teutonic friend to rob me of my compo
sure'? I am not, I think, specially thin-skinned as to
other people's opinions of myself, having, as I conceive,
later and fuller intelligence on that point than anybody
else can give me. Life is continually weighing us in
very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us pre
cisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust.
Whoever at fifty does not rate himself quite as low as
most of his acquaintance would be likely to put him,
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 63
must be either a fool or a great man, and I humbly dis
claim being either. But if I was not smarting in per
son from any scattering shot of my late companion's
commination, why should I grow hot at any implication
of my country therein 1 Surely her shoulders are broad
enough, if yours or mine are not, to bear up under a
considerable avalanche of this kind. It is the bit of
truth in every slander, the hint of likeness in every
caricature, that makes us smart. " Art thou there, old
Truepenny 1 ?" How did your blade know its way so
well to that one loose rivet in our armor 1 I wondered
whether Americans were over-sensitive in this respect,
whether they were more touchy than other folks. On
the whole, I thought we were not. Plutarch, who at least
had studied philosophy, if he had not mastered it, could
not stomach something Herodotus had said of Boeotia,
and devoted an essay to showing up the delightful old
traveller's malice and ill-breeding. French editors leave
out of Montaigne's " Travels " some remarks of his about
France, for reasons best known to themselves. Pachy
dermatous Deutschland, covered with trophies from
every field of letters, still winces under that question
which Pere Bouhours put two centuries ago, Si un Alle-
mand pent etre bel-esprit ? John Bull grew apoplectic
with angry amazement at the audacious persiflage of
Piickler-Muskau. To be sure, he was a prince, but
that was not all of it, for a chance phrase of gentle
Hawthorne sent a spasm through all the journals of
England. Then this tenderness is not peculiar to its ?
Console yourself, dear man and brother, whatever you
may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are
dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a
much greater genius for sameness than for originality,
or the world would be at a sad pass shortly. The sur
prising thing is that men have such a taste for this
64 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
somewhat musty flavor, that an Englishman, for exam
ple, should feel himself defrauded, nay, even outraged,
when he comes over here and finds a people speaking
what he admits to be something like English, and yet
so very different from (or, as he would say, to) those
he left at home. Nothing, I am sure, equals my thank
fulness when I meet an Englishman who is not like
every other, or, I may add, an American of the same
odd turn.
Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be
as nice about his country as about his sweetheart, and
who ever heard even the friendliest appreciation of that
unexpressive she that did not seem to fall infinitely
short ? Yet it would hardly be wise to hold every one
an enemy who could not see her with our own enchanted
eyes. It seems to be the common opinion of foreigners
that Americans are too tender upon this point. Per
haps we are ; and if so, there must be a reason for it.
Have we had fair play 1 Could the eyes of what is
called Good Society (though it is so seldom true either to
the adjective or noun) look upon a nation of democrats
with any chance of receiving an undistorted image 1
Were not those, moreover, who found in the old order
of things an earthly paradise, paying them quarterly
dividends for the wisdom of their ancestors, with the
punctuality of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to mis
understand if not to misrepresent us 1 Whether at war
or at peace, there we were, a standing menace to all
earthly paradises of that kind, fatal underminers of the
very credit on which the dividends were based, all the
more hateful and terrible that our destructive agency was
so insidious, working invisible in the elements, as it
seemed, active while they slept, and coming upon them in
the darkness like an armed man. Could Laius have the
proper feelings of a father towards CEdipus, announced
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 65
as his destined destroyer by infallible oracles, and felt to
be such by every conscious fibre of his soul 1 For more
than a century the Dutch were the laughing-stock of
polite Europe. They were butter-firkins, swillers of beer
and schnaps, and their vrouws from whom Holbein painted
the ail-but loveliest of Madonnas, Rembrandt the grace
ful girl who sits immortal on his knee in Dresden, and
Rubens his abounding goddesses, were the synonymes
of clumsy vulgarity. Even so late as Irving the ships
of the greatest navigators in the world were represented
as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the aristo
cratic Venetians should have
" Riveted with gigantic piles
Thorough the centre their new-catched miles,"
was heroic. But the far more marvellous achievement
of the Dutch in the same kind was ludicrous even to re
publican Marvell. Meanwhile, during that very century
of scorn, they were the best artists, sailors, merchants,
bankers, printers, scholars, jurisconsults, and statesmen
in Europe, and the genius of Motley has revealed them
to us, earning a right to themselves by the most heroic
struggle in human annals. But, alas ! they were not
merely simple burghers who had fairly made themselves
High Mightinesses, and could treat on equal terms with
anointed kings, but their commonwealth carried in its
bosom the germs of democracy. They even unmuzzled,
at least after dark, that dreadful mastiff, the Press,
whose scent is, or otight to be, so keen for wolves in
sheep's clothing and for certain other animals in lions'
skins. They made fun of Sacred Majesty, and, what was
worse, managed uncommonly well without it. In an
age when periwigs made so large a part of the natural
dignity of man, people with such a turn of mind were
dangerous. How could they seem other than vulgar and
hateful ]
s
66 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
In the natural course of things we succeeded to this
unenviable position of general butt. The Dutch had
thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope that we
could at least contrive to worry along. And we certainly
did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps we deserved
some of the sarcasm more than our Dutch predecessors
in office. We had nothing to boast of in arts or letters,,
and were given to bragging overmuch of our merely ma
terial prosperity, due quite as much to the virtue of our
continent as to our own. There was some truth in Car-
lyle's sneer, after all. Till we had succeeded in some
higher way than this, we had only the success of physical
growth. Our greatness, like that of enormous Russia,
was greatness on the map, barbarian mass only ; but
had we gone down, like that other Atlantis, in some vast
cataclysm, we should have covered but a pin's point on
the chart of memory, compared with those ideal spaces
occupied by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the
same time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that
material must make ready the foundation for ideal tri
umphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries.
But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a great
deal in our shortcoming. The Edinburgh Review never
would have thought of asking, " Who reads a Russian
book ] " and England was satisfied with iron from Sweden
without being impertinently inquisitive after her painters
and statuaries. Was it that they expected too much
from the mere miracle of Freedom 1 Is it not the highest
art of a Republic to make men of flesh and blood, and
not the marble ideals of such 1 It may be fairly doubted
whether we have produced this higher type of man yet.
Perhaps it is the collective, not the individual, humanity
that is to have a chance of nobler development among
us. We shall see. We have a vast amount of imported
ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made knowl-
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 67
edge, to digest before even the preliminaries of such a
consummation can be arranged. We have got to learn
that statesmanship is the most complicated of all arts,
and to come back to the apprenticeship-system too hastily
abandoned. At present, we trust a man with making
constitutions on less proof of competence than we should
demand before we gave him our shoe to patch. We have
nearly reached the limit of the reaction from the old
notion, which paid too much regard to birth and station
as qualifications for office, and have touched the extreme
point in the opposite direction, putting the highest of
human functions up at auction to be bid for by any
creature capable of going upright on two legs. In some
places, we have arrived at a point at which civil society
is no longer possible, and already another reaction has
begun, not backwards to the old system, but towards fit.
ness either from natural aptitude or special training.
But will it always be safe to let evils work their own
cure by becoming unendurable 1 ? Every one of them
leaves its taint in the constitution of the body-politic,
each in itself, perhaps, trifling, yet all together powerful
for evil.
But whatever we might do or leave undone, we were
not genteel, and it was uncomfortable to be continually
reminded that, though we should boast that we were the
Great West till we were black in the face, it did not bring
us an inch nearer to the world's West-End. That sacred
enclosure of respectability was tabooed to us. The Holy
Alliance did not inscribe us on its visiting-list. The Old
World of wigs and orders and liveries would shop with
us, but we must ring at the area-bell, and not venture to
awaken the more august clamors of the knocker. Our
manners, it must be granted, had none of those graces
that stamp the caste of Vere de Vere, in whatever mu
seum of British antiquities they may be hidden. In
short, we were vulgar.
68 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
This was one of those horribly vague accusations, tha
victim of which has no defence. An umbrella is of no
avail against a Scotch mist. It envelops you, it pene
trates at every pore, it wets you through without seem
ing to wet you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth deadly sin,
added to the list in these latter days, and worse than all
the others put together, since it perils your salvation in
this world, far the more important of the two in the
minds of most men. It profits nothing to draw nice dis
tinctions between essential and conventional, for the con
vention in this case is the essence, and you may break
every command of the decalogue with perfect good-breed
ing, nay, if you are adroit, without losing caste. We,
indeed, had it not to lose, for we had never gained it.
"How am I vulgar 1 ?" asks the culprit, shudderingly.
" Because thou art not like unto Us," answers Lucifer,
Son of the Morning, and there is no more to be said.
The god of this world may be a fallen angel, but he has
us there ! We were as clean, so far as my observation
goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and physically,
than the English, and therefore, of course, than every
body else. But we did not pronounce the diphthong ou
as they did, and we said eether and not eyther, following
therein the fashion of our ancestors, who imhappily could
bring over no English better than Shakespeare's ; and we
did not stammer as they had learned to do from the
courtiers, who in this way nattered the Hanoverian king,
a foreigner among the people he had come to reign over.
Worse than all, we might have the noblest ideas and
the finest sentiments in the world, but we vented them
through that organ by which men are led rather than
leaders, though some physiologists would persuade us
that Nature furnishes her captains with a fine handle to
their faces that Opportunity may get a good purchase ou
them for dragging them to the front.
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 69
This state of things was so painful that excellent
people were not wanting who gave their whole genius to
reproducing here the original Bull, whether by gaiters,
the cut of their whiskers, by a factitious brutality in their
tone, or by an accent that was forever tripping and fail
ing flat over the tangled roots of our common tongue.
Martyrs to a false ideal, it never occurred to them that
nothing is more hateful to gods and men than a second-
rate Englishman, and for the very reason that this planet
never produced a more splendid creature than the first-
rate one, witness Shakespeare and the Indian Mutiny.
Witness that truly sublime self-abnegation of those pris
oners lately among the bandits of Greece, where average
men gave an example of quiet fortitude for which all
the stoicism of antiquity can show no match. If we
could contrive to be not too unobtrusively our simple
selves, we should be the most delightful of human be
ings, and the most original ; whereas, when the plating
of Anglicism rubs off, as it always will in points that
come to much wear, we are liable to very unpleasing
conjectures about the quality of the metal underneath.
Perhaps one reason why the average Briton spreads him
self here with such an easy air of superiority may be
owing to the fact that he meets with so many bad imi
tations as to conclude himself the only real thing in a
wilderness of shams. He fancies himself moving through
an endless Bloomsbury, where his mere apparition con
fers honor as an avatar of the court-end of the universe.
Not a Bull of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa
upon his back. This is the sort of fellow whose patron
age is so divertingly insufferable. Thank Heaven he it)
not the only specimen of cater-cousinship from the dear
old Mother Island that is shown to us ! Among genuine
things, 1 know nothing more genuine than the better
men whose limbs were made hi England. So manly-
70 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
tender, so brave, so true, so warranted to wear, they
make us proud to feel that blood is thicker than water.
But it is not merely the Englishman ; every European
candidly admits in himself some right of primogeniture
in respect to us, and pats this shaggy continent on the
back with a lively sense of generous unbending. The
German who plays the bass-viol has a well-founded con
tempt, which he is not always nice in concealing, for a
country so few of whose children ever take that noble
instrument between their knees. His cousin, the Ph.
D. from Gottingen, cannot help despising a people who
do not grow loud and red over Aryans and Turanians,
and are indifferent about their descent from either. The
Frenchman feels an easy mastery in speaking his mother
tongue, and attributes it to some native superiority of
parts that lifts him high above us barbarians of the
West. The Italian prima donna sweeps a courtesy of
careless pity to the over-facile pit which unsexes her
with the bravo ! innocently meant to show a familiarity
with foreign usage. But all without exception make no
secret of regarding us as the goose bound to deliver
them a golden egg in return for their cackle. Such
men as Agassiz, Guyot, and Goldwin Smith come with
gifts in their hands ; but since it is commonly European
failures who bring hither their remarkable gifts and
acquirements, this view of the case is sometimes just
the least bit in the world provoking. To think what a
delicious seclusion of contempt we enjoyed till Califor
nia and our own ostentatious parvenus, flinging gold
away in Europe that might have endowed libraries at
home, gave us the ill repute of riches ! What a shabby
downfall from the Arcadia which the French officers of
our Revolutionary War fancied they saw here through
Rousseau-tinted spectacles ! Something of Arcadia there
really was, something of the Old Age ; and that divine
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 71
i
provincialism were cheaply repurchased could we have
it back again in exchange for the tawdry upholstery
that has taken its place.
For some reason or other, the European has rarely
been able to see America except in caricature. Would
the first Review of the world have printed the niaiseries
of Mr. Maurice Sand as a picture of society in any civil
ized country ? Mr. Sand, to be sure, has inherited
nothing of his famous mother's literary outfit, except
the pseudonyme. But since the conductors of the
Revue could not have published his story because it was
clever, they must have thought it valuable for its truth.
As true as the last-century Englishman's picture of
Jean Crapaud ! We do not ask to be sprinkled with
rosewater, but may perhaps fairly protest against being
drenched with the rinsings of an unclean imagination.
The next time the Revue allows such ill-bred persons to
throw their slops out of its first-floor windows, let it
honestly preface the discharge with a gare de Feau ! that
we may run from under in season. And Mr. Duvergier
d'Hauranne, who knows how to be entertaining ! I
know le Franqais est plutot indiscret que conftant, and the
pen slides too easily when indiscretions will fetch so
much a page ; but should we not have been tant-soit-peu
more cautious had we been writing about people on the
other side of the Channel 1 But then it is a fact in the
natural history of the American long familiar to Euro
peans, that he abhors privacy, knows not the meaning
of reserve, lives in hotels because of their greater pub
licity, and is never so pleased as when his domestic
affairs (if he may be said to have any) are paraded in
the newspapers. Barnum, it is well known, represents
perfectly the average national sentiment in this respect.
However it be, we are not treated like other people, or
perhaps I should say like people who are ever likely to
be met with in society.
72 ON A. CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
Is it in the climate ? Either I have a false notion of
European manners, or else the atmosphere affects them
strangely when exported hither. Perhaps they suffer
from the sea-voyage like some of the more delicate
wines. During our Civil War an English gentleman of
the highest description was kind enough to call upon
me, mainly, as it seemed, to inform me how entirely
he sympathized with the Confederates, and how sure he
felt that we could never subdue them, " they were
the gentlemen of the country, you know." Another, the
first greetings hardly over, asked me hew I accounted
for the universal meagreness of my countrymen. To a
thinner man than I, or from a stouter man than he, the
question might have been offensive. The Marquis of
Hartington * wore a secession badge at a public ball in
New York. In a civilized country he might have been
roughly handled ; but here, where the bienseances are
not so well understood, of course nobody minded it. A
French traveller told me he had been a good deal in the
British colonies, and had been astonished to see how
soon the people became Americanized. He added, with
delightful bonhomie, and as if he were sure it would
charm me, that " they even began to talk through their
noses, just like you ! " I was naturally ravished with
this testimony to the assimilating power of democracy,
and could only reply that I hoped they would never
adopt our democratic patent-method of seeming to settle
one's honest debts, for they would find it paying through
the nose in the long-run. I am a man of the New
* One of Mr. Lincoln's neatest strokes of humor was his treatment
of this gentleman "when a laudable curiosity induced him to be pre
sented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln persisted
in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of good-breed
ing could go no further. Giving the young man his real name (already
notorious in the newspapers) would have made his visit an insult
Had Henri IV. done this, it would have been famous.
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 73
World, aud do not know precisely the present fashion of
May-Fair, but I have a kind of feeling that if an Ameri
can (mutato nomine, de te is always frightfully possible)
were to do this kind of thing under a European roof, it
would induce some disagreeable reflections as to the
ethical results of democracy. I read the other day in
print the remark of a British tourist who had eaten
large quantities of our salt, such as it is (I grant it has
not the European savor), that the Americans were
hospitable, no doubt, but that it was partly because they
longed for foreign visitors to relieve the tedium of their
dead-level existence, and partly from ostentation. What
shall we do? Shall we close our doors'? Not I, for one,
if I should so have forfeited the friendship of L. S.,
most lovable of men. He somehow seems to find us
human, at least, and so did Clough, whose poetry will
one of these days, perhaps, be found to have been the
best utterance in verse of this generation. And T. H.
the mere grasp of whose manly hand carries with it the
pledge of frankness and friendship, of *an abiding sim
plicity of nature as affecting as it is rare !
The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not
hard to bear. There was something even refreshing in
it, as in a northeaster to a hardy temperament. When
a British parson, travelling in Newfoundland while the
slash of our separation was still raw, after prophesying a
glorious future for an island that continued to dry its
fish under the segis of Saint George, glances disdainfully
over his spectacles in parting at tb~ U. S. A., and fore
bodes for them a " speedy relapse into barbarism," now
that they have madly cut themselves off from the
humanizing influences of Britain, I smile with barbarian
self-conceit. But this kind of thing became by degrees
an unpleasant anachronism. For meanwhile the young
giant was growing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in
4
74 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
his clothes, was obliged to let in a gore here and there
in Texas, in California, in New Mexico, in Alaska, and
had the scissors and needle and thread ready for Can
ada when the time came. His shadow loomed like a
Brocken-spectre over against Europe, the shadow of
what they were coming to, that was the unpleasant part
of it. Even in such misty image as they had of him, it
was painfully evident that his clothes were not of any
cut hitherto fashionable, nor conceivable by a Bond
Street tailor, and this in an age, too, when everything
depends upon clothes, when, if we do not keep up ap
pearances, the seeming-solid frame of this universe, nay,
your very God, would slump into himself, like a mockery
king of snow, being nothing, after all, but a prevailing
mode. From this moment the young giant assumed the
respectable aspect of a phenomenon, to be got rid of if
possible, but at any rate as legitimate a subject of human
study as the glacial period or the silurian what-d'ye-call-
ems. If the man of the primeval drift-heaps is so ab
sorbingly interesting, why not the man of the drift that
is just beginning, of the drift into whose irresistible cur
rent we are just being sucked whether we will or no 1 If
I were in their place, I confess I should not be fright
ened. Man has survived so much, and contrived to be
comfortable on this planet after surviving so much ! I
am something of a protestant in matters of government
also, and am willing to get rid of vestments and cere
monies and to come down to bare benches, if only faith
in God take the pto^e of a general agreement to profess
confidence in ritual and sham. Every mortal man of us
holds stock in the only public debt that is absolutely
sure of payment, and that is the debt of the Maker of
this Universe to the Universe he has made. I have no
notion of selling out my stock in a panic.
It was something to have advanced even to the dignity
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 75
of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that the rela
tion of the individual American to the individual Euro
pean was bettered by it ; and that, after all, must adjust
itself comfortably before there can be a right under
standing between the two. We had been a desert, we
became a museum. People came hither for scientific
and not social ends. The very cockney could not com
plete his education without taking a vacant stare at iis
in passing. But the sociologists (I think they call them
selves so) were the hardest to bear. There was no es
cape. I have even known a professor of this fearful
science to come disguised in petticoats. We were cross-
examined as a chemist cross-examines a new substance.
Human 1 yes, all the elements are present, though ab
normally combined. Civilized ? Hm ! that needs a
stricter assay. No entomologist could take a more
friendly interest in a strange bug. After a few such ex
periences, I, for one, have felt as if I were merely one of
those horrid things preserved in spirits (and very bad
spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the fellow-being of
these explorers : I was a curiosity ; I was a specimen.
Hath not an American organs, dimensions, senses, affec
tions, passions even as a European hath ? If you prick
us, do we not bleed 1 If you tickle us, do we not laugh ?
I will not keep on with Shylock to his next question but
one.
Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter the
head of any foreigner, especially of any Englishman, that
an American had what could be called a country, except
as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then it seemed to
strike them suddenly. "By Jove, you know, fellahs
don't fight like that for a shop-till ! " No, I rather think
not. To Americans America is something more than a
promise and an expectation. It has a past and tradi
tions of its own. A descent from men who sacrificed
76 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
everything and came hither, not to better their fortunes,
but to plant their idea in virgin soil, should be a good
pedigree. There was never colony save this that went
forth, not to seek gold, but God. Is it not as well to
have sprung from such as these as from some burly
beggar who came over with Wilhelmus Conquestor, un
less, indeed, a line grow better as it runs farther away
from stalwart ancestors ] And for history, it is dry
enough, no doubt, in the books, but, for all that, is of a
kind that tells in the blood. I have admitted that Car-
lyle's sneer had a show of truth in it. But what does
he himself, like a true Scot, admire in the Hohenzol-
lerns 1 ? First of all, that they were canny, a thrifty,
forehanded race. Next, that they made a good fight
from generation to generation with the chaos around
them. That is precisely the battle which the English
race on this continent has been carrying doughtily on for
two centuries and a half. Doughtily and silently, for
you cannot hear in Europe " that crash, the death-song
of the perfect tree," that has been going on here from
sturdy father to sturdy son, and making this continent
habitable for the weaker Old World breed that has
swarmed to it during the last half-century. If ever men
did a good stroke of work on this planet, it was the fore
fathers of those whom you are wondering whether it
would not be prudent to acknowledge as far-off cousins.
Alas, man of genius, to whom we owe so much, could
you see nothing more than the burning of a foul chim
ney in that clash of Michael and Satan which flamed up
under your very eyes 1
Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob of
adventurers and shop-keepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it
well enough when he said that he could never think of
America without seeing a gigantic counter stretched all
along the seaboard. Feudalism had by degrees made
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 77
commerce, the great civilizer, contemptible. But a
tradesman with sword on thigh and very prompt of
stroke was not only redoubtable, he had become respect-
able also. Few people, I suspect, alluded twice to a
needle in Sir John Hawkwood's presence, after that
doughty fighter had exchanged it for a more dangerous
tool of the same metal. Democracy had been hitherto
only a ludicrous effort to reverse the laws of nature by
thrusting Cleon into the place of Pericles. But a democ
racy that could fight for an abstraction, whose members
held life and goods cheap compared with that larger life
which we call country, was not merely unheard-of, but
portentous. It was the nightmare of the Old World
taking upon itself flesh and blood, turning out to be
substance and not dream. Since the Norman crusader
clanged down upon the throne of the porphyro-geniti,
carefully-draped appearances had never received such a
shock, had never been so rudely called on to produce
their titles to the empire of the world. Authority has
had its periods not unlike those of geology, and at last
comes Man claiming kingship in right of his mere man
hood. The world of the Saurians might be in some
respects more picturesque, but the march of events is
inexorable, and it is bygone.
The young giant had certainly got out of long-clothes.
He had become the enfant terrible of the human house
hold. It was not and will not be easy for the world
(especially for our British cousins) to look upon us as
grown up. The youngest of nations, its people must also
be young and to be treated accordingly, was the syl
logism, as if libraries did not make all nations equally
old in all those respects, at least, where age is an ad
vantage and not a defect. Youth, no doubt, has its good
qualities, as people feel who are losing it, but boyishness
is another thing. We had been somewhat boyish as a
78 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
nation, a little loud, a little pushing, a little braggart.
But might it not partly have been because we felt that
we had certain claims to respect that were not admitted 1
The war which established our position as a vigorous
nationality has also sobered us. A nation, like a man,
cannot look death in the eye for four years, without some
strange reflections, without arriving at some clearer con
sciousness of the stuff it is made of, without some great
moral change. Such a change, or the beginning of it,
no observant person can fail to see here. Our thought
and our politics, our bearing as a people, are assuming a
manlier tone. We have been compelled to see what was
weak in democracy as well as what was strong. We
have begun obscurely to recognize that things do not go
of themselves, and that popular government is not in
itself a panacea, is no better than any other form except
as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and
that when men undertake to do their own kingship, they
enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as well as
the privileges of the function. Above all, it looks as if
we were on the way to be persuaded that no government
can be carried on by declamation. It is noticeable also
that facility of communication has made the best Eng
lish and French thought far more directly operative
here than ever before. Without being Europeanized,
our discussion of important questions in statesmanship,
political economy, in aesthetics, is taking a broader scope
and a higher tone. It had certainly been provincial,
one might almost say local, to a very unpleasant extent.
Perhaps our experience in soldiership has taught us to
value training more than we have been popularly wont.
We may possibly come to the conclusion, one of these
days, that self-made men may not be always equally
skilful in the manufacture of wisdom, may not be
divinely commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities
of opinion on all possible topics of human interest.
ON \ CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 79
So long as we continue to be the most common-
schooled and the least cultivated people in the world, I
suppose we must consent to endure this condescending
manner of foreigners toward us. The more friendly
they mean to be the more ludicrously prominent it be
comes. They can never appreciate the immense amount
of silent work that has been done here, making this
continent slowly fit for the abode of man, and which
will demonstrate itself, let us hope, in the character of
the people. Outsiders can only be expected to judge a
nation by the amount it has contributed to the civiliza
tion of the world the amount, that is, that can be seen
and handled. A great place in history can only be
achieved by competitive examinations, nay, by a long
course of them. How much new thought have we con
tributed to the common stock 1 Till that question can
be triumphantly answered, or needs no answer, we must
continue to be simply interesting as an experiment, to
be studied as a problem, and not respected as an at
tained result or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as
I have hinted, their patronizing manner toward us is the
fair result of their failing to see here anything more than
a poor imitation, a plaster-cast of Europe. And are
they not partly right 1 If the tone of the uncultivated
American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian,
is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic 1
In the America they meet with is there the simplicity,
the manliness, the absence of sham, the sincere human
nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation,
that in any way distinguishes us from what our orators
caU "the effete civilization of the Old World"? Is
there a politician among us daring enough (except a
Dana here and there) to risk his future on the chance
of our keeping our word with the exactness of super
stitious communities like England 1 Is it certain that
80 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS,
we shall be ashamed of a bankruptcy of honor, if we
can only keep the letter of our bond 1 I hope we shall
be able to answer all these questions with a frank yes.
At any rate, we would advise our visitors that we are
not merely curious creatures, but belong to the family
of man, and that, as individuals, we are not to be al
ways subjected to the competitive examination above
mentioned, even if we acknowledged their competence
as an examining boai'd. Above all, we beg them to re
member that America is not to us, as to them, a mere
object of external interest to be discussed and analyzed,
but in us, part of our very marrow. Let them not sup
pose that we conceive of ourselves as exiles from the
graces and amenities of an older date than we, though
very much at home in a state of things not yet all it
might be or should be, but which we mean to make so,
and which we find both wholesome and pleasant for men
(though perhaps not for dilettanti) to live in. " The full
tide of human existence " may be felt here as keenly as
Johnson felt it at Charing Cross, and in a larger sense.
I know one person who is singular enough to think
Cambridge the very best spot on the habitable globe.
" Doubtless God could have made a better, but doubtless
he never did."
It will take England a great while to get over her airs
of patronage toward us, or even passably to conceal
them. She cannot help confounding the people with the
country, and regarding us as lusty juveniles. She has a
conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly
English, when the truth is that we are worth nothing ex
cept so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism.
She is especially condescending just now, and lavishes
sugar-plums on us as if we had not outgrown them. I
am no believer in sudden conversions, especially in sud
den conversions to a favorable opinion of people who
ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 81
have just proved you to be mistaken in judgment and
therefore unwise in policy. I never blamed her for not
wishing well to democracy, how should she 1 but
Alabamas are not wishes. Let her not be too hasty in
believing Mr. Reverdy Johnson's pleasant words. Though
there is no thoughtful man in America who would not
consider a war with England the greatest of calamities,
yet the feeling towards her here is very far from cordial,
whatever our Minister may say in the effusion that
comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams, with his famous
" My Lord, this means war," perfectly represented his
country. Justly or not, we have a feeling that we have
been wronged, not merely insulted. The only sure way
of bringing about a healthy relation between the two
countries is for Englishmen to clear their minds of the
notion that we are always to be treated as a kind of
inferior and deported Englishman whose nature they
perfectly understand, and whose back they accordingly
stroke the wrong way of the fur with amazing persever
ance. Let them learn to treat us naturally on our
merits as human beings, as they would a German or a
Frenchman, and not as if we were a kind of counterfeit
Briton whose crime appeared in every shade of difference,
and before long there would come that right feeling
which we naturally call a good understanding. The
common blood, and still more the common language, are
fatal instruments of misapprehension. Let them give
up trying to understand us, still more thinking that
they do, and acting in various absurd ways as the
necessary consequence, for they will never arrive at that
devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, till they learn to
look at us as we are and not as they suppose us to be.
Dear old long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many
years since we parted. Since 1660, when you married
again, you have been a step-mother to us. Put on your
82 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS.
spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and
changed likewise. You would not let us darken your
doors, if you could help it. We know that perfectly
well. But pray, when we look to be treated as men,
don't shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us
any longer.
* Do, child, go to it grandam, child ;
Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will
Give it a pluni, a cherry, and a fig! "
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER."
IT is the misfortune of American biography that it
must needs be more or less provincial, and that,
contrary to what might have been predicted, this qual
ity in it predominates in proportion as the country
grows larger. Wanting any great and acknowledged
centre of national life and thought, our expansion has
hitherto been rather aggregation than growth ; reputa
tions must be hammered out thin to cover so wide a
eurface, and the substance of most hardly holds out to
the boundaries of a single State. Our very history
wants unity, and down to the Revolution the attention
is wearied and confused by having to divide itself among
thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred
on a single clew. A sense of remoteness and seclusion
comes over us as we read, and we cannot help asking
ourselves, " Were not these things done in a corner ? "
Notoriety may be achieved in a narrow sphere, but
fame demands for its evidence a more distant and pro
longed reverberation. To the world at large we were
but a short column of figures in the corner of a blue-
book, New England exporting so much salt-fish, timber,
and Medford rum, Virginia so many hogsheads of tobac
co, and buying with the proceeds a certain amount of
English manufactures. The story of our early coloniza
tion had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was
altogether inferior in picturesque fascination to that of
* The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son.
84 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
Mexico or Peru. The lives of our worthies, like that of
our nation, are bare of those foregone and far-reaching
associations with names, the divining-rods of fancy, which
the soldiers and civilians of the Old World get for
nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their historians
and biographers have succeeded to the good-will, as
well as to the long-established stand, of the shop of
glory. Time is, after all, the greatest of poets, and the
sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs
of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace
in saying,
" Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ?nte
Trita solo " ;
but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece
and Rome behind him, and can begin his poem with in
voking a goddess from whom legend derived the planter
of his race. His eyes looked out on a landscape sstu-
rated with glorious recollections ; he had seen Ctesar,
and heard Cicero. But who shall conjure with Saugus
or Cato Four Corners, with Israel Putnam or Return
Jonathan Meigs ] We have been transplanted, and for
us the long hierarchical succession of history is broken.
The Past has not laid its venerable hands upon us in
consecration, conveying to us that mysterious influence
whose force is in its continuity. We are to Europe aa
the Church of England to her of Rome. The latter old
lady may be the Scarlet Woman, or the Beast with ten
horns, if you will, but hers are all the heirlooms, hers
that vast spiritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet every
where, whose revenues are none the less fruitful for
being levied on the imagination. We may claim that
England's history is also ours, but it is a de jure, and not
a de facto property that we have in it, something that
may be proved indeed, yet is a merely intellectual satis
faction, and does not savor of the realty. Have we not
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 85
seen the mockery crown and sceptre of the exiled Stuarts
in St. Peter's] the medal struck so lately as 1784 with
its legend, HEN IX MAG BRIT ET HIB REX, whose con
tractions but faintly typify the scantness of the fact ?
As the novelist complains that jur society wants that
sharp contrast of character and costume which comes of
caste, so in the narrative of our historians we miss what
may be called background and perspective, as if the
events and the actors in them failed of that cumulative
interest which only a long historical entail can give. Rel
atively, the crusade of Sir William Pepperell was of more
consequence than that of St. Louis, and yet forgive us,
injured shade of the second American baronet, if we find
the narrative of Joinville more interesting than your de
spatches to Governor Shirley. Relatively, the insurrec
tion of that Daniel whose Irish patronymic Shea was
euphonized into Shays, as a set-off for the debasing of
French chaise into shay, was more dangerous than that
of Charles Edward ; but for some reason or other (as vice
sometimes has the advantage of virtue) the latter is more
enticing to the imagination, and the least authentic relic
of it in song or story has a relish denied to the painful
industry of Minot. Our events seem to fall short of that
colossal proportion which befits the monumental style.
Look grave as we will, there is something ludicrous in
Counsellor Keane's pig being the pivot of a revolution.
We are of yesterday, and it is to no purpose that our
political augurs divine from the flight of our eagles that
to-morrow shall be ours, and flatter us with an all-hail
hereafter. Things do really gain in greatness by being
acted on a great and cosmopolitan stage, because there
is inspiration in the thronged audience, and the nearer
match that puts men on their mettle. Webster was
more largely endowed by nature than Fox, and Fisher
Ames not much below Burke as a talker ; but what a
86 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
difference in the intellectual training, in the literary cul
ture and associations, in the whole social outfit, of the
men who were their antagonists and companions ! It
should seem that, if it be collision with other minds and
with events that strikes or draws the tire from a man, then
the quality of those might have something to do with
the quality of the fire, whether it shall be culinary or
electric. We have never known the varied stimulus, the
inexorable criticism, the many-sided opportunity of a
great metropolis, the inspiring reinforcement of an un
divided national consciousness. In everything but trade
we have missed the invigoration of foreign rivalry. We
may prove that we are this and that and the other,
our Fourth-of-July orators have proved it time and again,
the census has proved it ; but the Muses are women,
and have no great fancy for statistics, though easily
silenced by them. We are great, we are rich, we are all
kinds of good things ; but did it never occur to you that
somehow we are not interesting, except as a phenomenon ?
It may safely be affirmed that for one cultivated man in
this country who studies American, there are fifty who
study Etiropean history, ancient or modern.
Till within a year or two we have been as distant and
obscure to the eyes of Europe as Ecuador to our own.
Every day brings us nearer, enables us to see the Old
World more clearly, and by inevitable comparison to
judge ourselves with some closer approach to our real
value. This has its advantage so long as our culture is,
as for a long time it must be, European ; for we shall be
little better than apes and parrots till we are forced to
measure our muscle with the trained and practised cham
pions of that elder civilization. We have at length es
tablished our claim to the noblesse of the sword, the first
step still of every nation that would make its entry into
the best society of history. To maintain ourselves there,
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 87
we must achieve an equality in the more exclusive circle
of culture, and to that end must submit ourselves to the
European standard of intellectual weights and measures-
That we have made the hitherto biggest gun might ex
cite apprehension (were there a dearth of iron), but can
never exact respect. That our pianos and patent reapers
have won medals does but confirm us in our mechanic
and material measure of merit. We must contribute
something more than mere contrivances for the saving
of labor, which we have been only too ready to misapply
in the domain of thought and the higher kinds of inven
tion. In those Olympic games where nations contend for
truly immortal wreaths, it may well be questioned whether
a mowing-machine would stand much chance in the
chariot-races, whether a piano, though made by a chev
alier, could compete successfully for the prize of music.
We shall have to be content for a good while yet with
our provincialism, and must strive to make the best of it.
In it lies the germ of nationality, and that is, after all,
the prime condition of all thorough-bred greatness of
character. To this choicest fruit of a healthy life, well
rooted in native soil, and drawing prosperous juices
thence, nationality gives the keenest flavor. Mr. Lincoln
was an original man, and in so far a great man ; yet it
was the Americanism of his every thought, word, and act
which not only made his influence equally at home in
East and West, but drew the eyes of the outside world,
and was the pedestal that lifted him where he could be
seen by them. Lincoln showed that native force may
transcend local boundaries, but the growth of such
nationality is hindered and hampered by our division
into so many half -independent communities, each with its
objects of county ambition, and its public men great to
the borders of their district. In this way our standard
of greatness is insensibly debased. To receive any na-
88 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
tional appointment, a man must have gone through pre
cisely the worst training for it ; he must have so far
narrowed and belittled himself with State politics as to
be acceptable at home. In this way a man may become
chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, because
he knows how to pack a caucus in Catawampus County,
or be sent ambassador to Barataria, because he has drunk
bad whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City. Should
we ever attain to a conscious nationality, it will have the
advantage of lessening the number of our great men, and
widening our appreciation to the larger scale of the two
or three that are left, if there should be so many.
Meanwhile we offer a premium to the production of great
men in a small way, by inviting each State to set up the
statues of two of its immortals in the Capitol. What a
niggardly percentage ! Already we are embarrassed, not
to find the two, but to choose among the crowd of candi
dates. Well, seventy-odd heroes in about as many years
is pretty well for a young nation. We do not envy most
of them their eternal martyrdom in marble, their pillory
of indiscrimination. We fancy even native tourists paus
ing before the greater part of the effigies, and, after
reading the names, asking desperately, " Who was he?"
Nay, if they should say, " Who the devil was he ? " it
were a pardonable invocation, for none so fit as the
Prince of Darkness to act as cicerone among such pal
pable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of the Uffizj
at Florence. That also is not free of parish celebrities ;
but Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Macchiavelli, shall
the inventor of the sewing-machine, even with the button
holing improvement, let us say, match with these, or
with far lesser than these 1 Perhaps he was more prac
tically useful than any one of these, or all of them to
gether, but the soul is sensible of a sad difference some
where. These also were citizens of a provincial capital ;
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 89
so were the greater part of Plutarch's heroes. Did they
have a better chance than we moderns, than we
Americans 1 At any rate they have the start of us, and
we must confess that
" By bed and table they lord tt o'er us,
Our elder brothers, but one in blood."
Yes, one in blood ; that is the hardest part of it. Is
our provincialism then in some great measure due to
our absorption in the practical, as we politely call it,
meaning the material, to our habit of estimating
greatness by the square mile and the hundred weight 1
Even during our war, in the midst of that almost .unri
valled stress of soul, were not our speakers and newspa
pers so enslaved to the vulgar habit as to boast ten
times of the thousands of square miles it covered with
armed men, for once that they alluded to the motive
that gave it all its meaning and its splendor ? Perhaps
it was as well that they did not exploit that passion of
patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum
or Perham. " I scale one hundred and eighty pounds,
but when I 'm mad I weigh two ton," said the Ken-
tuckian, with a true notion of moral avoirdupois. That
ideal kind of weight is wonderfully increased by a na
tional feeling, whereby one man is conscious that thirty
millions of men go into the balance with him. The
Roman in ancient, and the Englishman in modern times,
have been most conscious of this representative solidity,
and wherever one of them went there stood Rome or
England in his shoes. We have made some advance in
the right direction. Our civil war, by the breadth of its
proportions and the implacability of its demands, forced
us to admit a truer valuation, and gave us, in our own
despite, great soldiers and sailors, allowed for such by all
the world. The harder problems it has left behind may
in time compel us to have great statesmen, with views
90 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
capable of reaching beyond the next election. The
criticism of Europe alone can rescue us from the provin
cialism of an over or false estimate of ourselves. Let us
be thankful, and not angry, that we must accept it as
our touchstone. Our stamp has so often been impressed
upon base metal, that we cannot expect it to be taken
on trust, but we may be sure that true gold will be
equally persuasive the world over. Real manhood and
honest achievement are nowhere provincial, but enter
the select society of all time on an even footing.
Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look
into. Those Catharine-wheel republics, always in revolu
tion while the powder lasts, and sure to burn the fingers
of whoever attempts intervention, have also their great
men, as placidly ignored by us as our own by jealous
Europe. The following passage from the life of Don
Simon Bolivar might allay many motus animorum, if
rightly pondered. Bolivar, then a youth, was travelling in
Italy, and his biographer tells us that " near Castiglione
he was present at the grand review made by Napoleon of
the columns defiling into the plain large enough to con
tain sixty thousand men. The throne was situated on
an eminence that overlooked the plain, and Napoleon on
several occasions looked through a glass at Bolivar and
his companions, who were at the base of the hill. The
hero Csesar could not imagine that he beheld the libera
tor of the world of Columbus ! " And small blame to
him, one would say. We are not, then, it seems, the
only foundling of Columbus, as we are so apt to take for
granted. The great Genoese did not, as we supposed,
draw that first star-guided furrow across the vague of
waters with a single eye to the future greatness of the
United States. And have we not sometimes, like the
enthusiastic biographer, fancied the Old World staring
through all its telescopes at us, and wondered that it did
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 91
not recognize in us what we were fully persuaded we
were going to be and do ]
Our American life is dreadfully barren of those ele
ments of the social picturesque which give piquancy to
anecdote. And without anecdote, what is biography, or
even history, which is only biography on a larger scale 1
Clio, though she take airs on hersc-lf, and pretend to be
"philosophy teaching by example," is, after all, but a
gossip who has borrowed Fame's speaking-trumpet, and
should be figured with a tea-cup instead of a scroll in
her hand. How much has she not owed of late to the
tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia 1 In what gut
ters has not Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits with
which he has put together his admirable mosaic picture
of England under the last two Stuarts 1 Even Mommsen
himself, who dislikes Plutarch's method as nmch as
Montaigne loved it, cannot get or give a lively notion of
ancient Rome, without running to the comic poets and
the anecdote-mongers. He gives us the very beef-tea
of history, nourishing and even palatable enough, excel
lently portable for a memory that must carry her own
packs, and can afford little luggage ; but for our own
part, we prefer a full, old-fashioned meal, with its side-
dishes of spicy gossip, and its last relish, the Stilton
of scandal, so it be not too high. One volume of con
temporary memoirs, stuffed though it be with lies, (for
lies to be good for anything must have a potential prob
ability, must even be true so far as their moral and
social setting is concerned,) will throw more light into
the dark backward of time than the gravest Camden or
Thuanus. If St. Simon is not accurate, is he any the
less essentially true ? No history gives us so clear an
understanding of the moral condition of average men
after the restoration of the Stuarts as the unconscious
blabbings of the Puritan tailor's son, with his two con-
92 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
sciences, as it were, an inward, still sensitive in spots,
though mostly toughened to India-rubber, and good
rather for rubbing out old scores than retaining them,
and an outward, alert, and termagantly effective in Mrs.
Pepys. But we can have no St. Simons or Pepysea
till we have a Paris or London to delocalize our gossip
and give it historic breadth. All our capitals are frac
tional, merely greater or smaller gatherings of men t
centres of business rather than of action or influence.
Each contains so many souls, but is not, as the word
" capital " implies, the true head of a community and
seat of its common soul.
Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic
than it once was 1 As the clearing away of the woods
scants the streams, may not our civilization have dried
up some feeders that helped to swell the current of
individual and personal force 1 We have sometimes
thought that the stricter definition and consequent
seclusion from each other of the different callings in
modern times, as it narrowed the chance of developing
and giving variety to character, lessened also the interest
of biography. Formerly arts and arms were not divided
by so impassable a barrier as now. There was hardly
sxich a thing as a pekin. Csesar gets up from writing
his Latin Grammar to conquer Gaul, change the course
of history, and make so many things possible, among
the rest our English language and Shakespeare. Horace
had be'en a colonel ; and from yEschylus, who fought at
Marathon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low
Countries, the list of martial civilians is a long one. A
man's education seems more complete who has smelt
hostile powder from a less aesthetic distance than Goethe.
It raises our confidence in Sir Kenelm Digby as a physi
cist, that he is able to illustrate some theory of acous
tics in his Treatise of Bodies by instancing the effect of
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 93
his guns in a sea-fight off Scanderoon. One would ex
pect the proportions of character to be enlarged by such
variety and contrast of experience. Perhaps it will by
and by appear that our own Civil War has done some
thing for us in this way. Colonel Higginson comes
down from his pulpit to draw on his jack-boots, and
thenceforth rides in our imagination alongside of John
Bunyan and Bishop Compton. To have stored moral
capital enough to meet the drafts of Death at sight,
must be an unmatched tonic. We saw our light-hearted
youth come back with the modest gravity of age, as if
they had learned to throw out pickets against a surprise
of any weak point in their temperament. Perhaps that
American shiftiness, so often complained of, may not
be so bad a thing, if, by bringing men acquainted with
every humor of fortune and human nature, it puts them
in fuller possession of themselves.
But with whatever drawbacks in special circumstances,
the main interest of biography must always lie in the
amount of character or essential manhood which the
subject of it reveals to us, and events are of import
only as means to that end. It is true that lofty and
far-seen exigencies may give greater opportunity to some
men, whose energy is more sharply spurred by the shout
of a multitude than by the grudging Well done ! of con
science. Some theorists have too hastily assumed that,
as the power of public opinion increases, the force of
private character, or what we call originality,, is ab
sorbed into and diluted by it. But we think Horace
was right in putting tyrant and mob on a level as the
trainers and tests of a man's solid quality. The amount
of resistance of which one is capable to whatever lies
outside the conscience, is of more consequence than all
other faculties together ; and democracy, perhaps, tries
this by pressure in more directions, and v>ith a more
94 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
continuous strain, than any other form of society. In
Josiah Quincy we have an example of character trained
and shaped, under the nearest approach to a pure
democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity,
and self-centred poise that recall the finer types of anti
quity, in whom the public and private man were so
wholly of a piece that they were truly everywhere at
home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the
hearth carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum.
The phrase " a great public character," once common,
seems to be going out of fashion, perhaps because there
are fewer examples of the thing. It fits Josiah Quincy
exactly. Active in civic and academic duties till beyond
the ordinary period of man, at fourscore and ten his pen,
voice, and venerable presence were still efficient in pub
lic affairs. A score of years after the energies of even
vigorous men are declining or spent, his mind and char
acter made themselves felt as in their prime. A true
pillar of house and state, he stood unflinchingly upright
under whatever burden might be laid upon him. The
French Revolutionists aped what was itself but a parody
of the elder republic, with their hair a la Brutus and
their pedantic moralities d la Cato Minor, but this man
unconsciously was the antique Roman they laboriously
went about to be. Others have filled places more con
spicuous, few have made the place they filled so conspicu
ous by an exact and disinterested performance of duty.
In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son there is
something of the provincialism of which we have spoken
as inherent in most American works of the kind. His
was a Boston life in the strictest sense. But provincial
ism is relative, and where it has a flavor of its own, as
in Scotland, it is often agreeable in proportion to its
very intensity. The Massachusetts in which Mr. Quin
cy 's habits of thought were acquired was a very different
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 95
Massachusetts from that in which we of later generations
have been bred. Till after he had passed middle life,
Boston was more truly a capital than any other city in
America, before or since, except possibly Charleston.
The acknowledged head of New England, with a popula
tion of wellnigh purely English descent, mostly derived
from the earlier emigration, with ancestral traditions and
inspiring memories of its own, it had made its name
familiar in both worlds, and was both historically and
politically more important than at any later period.
The Revolution had not interrupted, but rather given a
freer current to the tendencies of its past. Both by its
history and position, the town had what the French call
a solidarity, an almost personal consciousness, rare any
where, rare especially in America, and more than ever
since our enormous importation of fellow-citizens to
whom America means merely shop, or meat three times
a day. Boston has been called the "American Athens."
^Estheticaliy, the comparison is ludicrous, but politically
it was more reasonable. Its population was homogene
ous, and there were leading families ; while the form of
government by town-meeting, and the facility of social
and civic intercourse, gave great influence to popular
personal qualities and opportunity to new men. A wide
commerce, while it had insensibly softened the asperities
of Puritanism and imported enough foreign refinement
to humanize, not enough foreign luxury to corrupt, had
not essentially qualified the native tone of the town.
Retired sea-captains (true brothers of Chaucer's Ship-
man), whose exploits had kindled the imagination of
Burke, added a not unpleasant savor of salt to society.
They belonged to the old school of Gilbert, Hawkins,
Frobisher, and Drake, parcel-soldiers all of them, who
had commanded armed ships and had tales to tell of
gallant fights with privateers or pirates, truest represent-
96 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
atives of those Vikings who, if trade in lumber or peltry
was dull, would make themselves Dukes of Dublin or
Earls of Orkney. If trade pinches the mind, commerce
liberalizes it ; and Boston was also advantaged with
the neighborhood of the country's oldest College, which
maintained the wholesome traditions of culture, where
Homer and Horace are familiar there is a certain amount
of cosmopolitanism, and would not allow bigotry to
become despotism. Manners were more self-respectful,
and therefore more respectful of others, and personal
sensitiveness was fenced with more of that ceremonial
with which society armed itself when it surrendered the
ruder protection of the sword. We had not then seen a
Governor in his chamber at the State-House with his
hat on, a cigar in his mouth, and his feet upon the stove.
Domestic service, in spite of the proverb, was not seldom
an inheritance, nor was household peace dependent on
the whim of a foreign armed neutrality in the kitchen.
Servant and master were of one stock ; there was decent
authority and becoming respect ; the tradition of the
Old World lingered after its superstition had passed
away. There was an aristocracy such as is healthful
in a well-ordered community, founded on public service,
and hereditary so long as the virtue which was its patent
was not escheated. The clergy, no longer hedged by
the reverence exacted by sacerdotal caste, were more
than repaid by the consideration willingly paid to supe
rior culture. What changes, many of them for the bet
ter, some of them surely for the worse, and all of them
inevitable, did not Josiah Quincy see in that wellnigh
secular life which linked the. war of independence to the
war of nationality ! We seemed to see a type of them
the other day in a colored man standing with an air of
comfortable self-possession while his boots were brushed
by a youth of catholic neutral tint, but whom nature had
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 97
planned for white. The same eyes that had looked on
Gage's red-coats, saw Colonel Shaw's negro regiment
march out of Boston in the national blue. Seldom has a
life, itself actively associated with public affairs, spanned
so wide a chasm for the imagination. Oglethorpe's
offers a parallel, the aide-de-camp of Prince Eugene
calling on John Adams, American Ambassador to Eng
land. Most long lives resemble those threads of gos
samer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly
prolonged, scarce visible pathway of some worm from
his cradle to his grave ; but Quincy's was strung with
seventy active years, each one a rounded bead of useful
ness and service.
Mr. Quincy was a Bostonian of the purest type.
Since the settlement of the town, there had been a
colonel of the Boston regiment in every generation of his
family. He lived to see a grandson brevetted with the
same title for gallantry in the field. Only child of one
among the most eminent advocates of the Revolution,
and who but for his untimely death would have been a
leading actor in it, his earliest recollections belonged to
the heroic period in the history of his native town.
With that history his life was thenceforth intimately
united by offices of public trust, as Representative in
Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and President of the
University, to a period beyond the ordinary span of
mortals. Even after he had passed ninety, he would
not claim to be emeritus, but came forward to brace his
townsmen with a courage and warm them with a fire
younger than their own. The legend of Colonel GofFe
at Deerfield became a reality to the eyes of this genera
tion. The New England breed is running out, we are
told ! This was in all ways a beautiful and fortunate
life, fortunate in the goods of this world, fortunate,
above all, in the force of character which makes fortune
98 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
secondary and subservient. We are fond in this country
of what are called self-made men (as if real success could
ever be other) ; and this is all very well, provided they
make something worth having of themselves. Otherwise
it is not so well, and the examples of such are at best
but stuff for the Alnaschar dreams of a false democracy.
The gist of the matter is, not where a man starts from,
but where he comes out. We are glad to have the
biography of one who, beginning as a gentleman, kept
himself such to the end, who, with no necessity of
labor, left behind him an amount of thoroughly done
work such as few have accomplished with the mighty
help of hunger. Some kind of pace may be got out of
the veriest jade by the near prospect of oats ; but the
thorough-bred has the spur in his blood.
Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father's
life with the skill and good taste that might have been
expected from the author of " Wensley." Considering
natural partialities, he has shown a discretion of which
we are oftener reminded by missing than by meeting it.
He has given extracts enough from speeches to show
their bearing and quality, from letters, to recall by
gone modes of thought and indicate many-sided friendly
relations with good and eminent men ; above all, he has
lost no opportunity to illustrate that life of the past,
near in date, yet alien in manners, whose current glides
so imperceptibly from one generation into another that
we fail to mark the shiftings of its bed or the change in
its nature wrought by the affluents that discharge into
it on all sides, here a stream bred in the hills to
sweeten, there the sewerage of some great city to cor
rupt. We cannot but lament that Mr. Quincy did not
earlier begin to keep a diary. " Miss not the discourses
of the elders," though put now in the Apocrypha, is a
wise precept, but incomplete unless we add, " Nor cease
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 99
from recording whatsoever thing thou hast gathered
therefrom," so ready is Oblivion with her fatal shears.
The somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and-bone-
picker, like Athenseus, is turned to gold by time. Even
the Virgilium vidi tantum of Dryden about Milton, and
of Pope again about Dryden, is worth having, and gives
a pleasant fillip to the fancy. There is much of this
quality in Mr. Edmund Quincy's book, enough to make
us wish there were more. We get a glimpse of President
Washington, in 1795, who reminded Mr. Quincy "of
the gentlemen who used to come to Boston in those
days to attend the General Court from Hampden or
Franklin County, in the western part of the State. A
little stiff in his person, not a little formal in his mari
ners, not particularly at ease in the presence of strangers.
He had the air of a country-gentleman not accustomed
to mix much in society, perfectly polite, but not easy in
his address and conversation, and not graceful in his gait
and movements." Our figures of Washington have
been so long equestrian, that it is pleasant to meet him
dismounted for once. In the same way we get a card of
invitation to a dinner of sixty covers at John Hancock's,
and see the rather light-weighted great man wheeled
round the room (for he had adopted Lord Chatham's
convenient trick of the gout) to converse with his guests.
In another place we are presented, with Mr. Merry, the
English Minister, to Jefferson, whom we find in an un
official costume of studied slovenliness, intended as a snub
to haughty Albion. Slippers down at the heel and a
dirty shirt become weapons of diplomacy and threaten
more serious war. Thus many a door into the past, long
irrevocably shut upon us, is set ajar, and we of the
younger generation on the landing catch peeps of dis
tinguished men, and bits of their table-talk. We drive
in from Mr. Lyman's beautiful seat at Waltham (unique
100 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
at that day in its stately swans and half-shy, half-familiar
deer) with John Adams, who tells us that Dr. Priestley
looked on the French monarchy as the tenth horn of the
Beast in Revelation, a horn that has set more sober
wits dancing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those
were days, we are inclined to think, of more solid and
elegant hospitality than our own, the elegance of
manners, at once more courtly and more frugal, of men
who had better uses for wealth than merely to display it.
Dinners have more courses now, and, like the Gascon in
the old story, who could not see the town for the houses,
we miss the real dinner in the multiplicity of its details.
We might seek long before we found so good cheer, so
good company, or so good talk as our fathers had at
Lieutenant-Governor Winthrop's or Senator Cabot's.
We shall not do Mr. Edmund Quiney the wrong of
picking out in advance all the plums in his volume,
leaving to the reader only the less savory mixture that
held them together, a kind of filling unavoidable in
books of this kind, and too apt to be what boys at
boarding-school call stick-jaw, but of which there is no
more than could not be helped here, and that light and
palatable. But here and there is a passage where we
cannot refrain, for there is a smack of Jack Horner in all
of us, and a reviewer were nothing without it. Josiah
Quiney was born in 1772. His father, returning from a
mission to England, died in sight of the dear New Eng
land shore three years later. His young widow was
worthy of him, and of the son whose character she was
to have so large a share in forming. There is some
thing very touching and beautiful in this little picture
of her which Mr. Quiney drew in his extreme old age.
" My mother imbibed, as was usual with the women
of the period, the spirit of the times. Patriotism was
not then a profession, but an energetic principle beating
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTEK. 101
in the heart and active in the life. The death of my
father, under circumstances now the subject of history,
had overwhelmed her with grief. She viewed him as
a victim in the cause of freedom, and cultivated his
memory with veneration, regarding him as a martyr, fall
ing, as did his friend Warren, in the defence of the liber
ties of his country. These circumstances gave a pathos
and vehemence to her grief, which, after the first violence
of passion had subsided, sought consolation in earnest
and solicitous fulfilment of duty to the representative of
his memory and of their mutual affections. Love and
reverence for the memory of his father was early im
pressed on the mind of her son, anc 1 worn into his heart
by her sadness and tears. She cultivated the memory of
my father in my heart and affections, even in my earliest
childhood, by reading to me passages from the poets, and
obliging me to learn by heart and repeat such as were
best adapted to her own circumstances and feelings.
Among others, the whole leave-taking of Hector and
Andromache, in the sixth book of Pope's Homer, was one
of her favorite lessons, which she made me learn and fre
quently repeat. Her imagination, probably, found con*
solation in the repetition of lines which brought to mind
and seemed to typify her own great bereavement.
' And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be,
A widow I, a helpless orphan he ? '
These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's ad
dress and circumstances, she identified with her own
sufferings, which seemed relieved by the tears my repe
tition of them drew from her."
Pope's Homer is not Homer, perhaps ; but how many
noble natures have felt its elation, how many bruised
spirits the solace of its bracing, if monotonous melody ]
To us there is something inexpressibly tender in this in
stinct of the widowed mother to find consolation in the
102 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
idealization of her grief by mingling it with those sor
rows which genius has turned into the perennial delight
of mankind. This was a kind of sentiment that was
healthy for her boy, refining without unnerving, and as
sociating his father's memory with a noble company un
assailable by time. It was through this lady, whose
image looks down on us out of the past, so full of
sweetness and refinement, that Mr. Quincy became of
kin with Mr. Wendell Phillips, so justly eminent as a
speaker. There is something nearer than cater-cousin-
ship in a certain impetuous audacity of temper common
to them both.
When six years old, Mr. Quincy was sent to Phillips
Academy at Andover, where he remained till he entered
college. His form-fellow here was a man of thirty, who
had been a surgeon in the Continental Army, and
whose character and adventures might almost seem bor
rowed from a romance of Smollett. Under Principal
Pearson, the lad, though a near relative of the founder
of the school, seems to have endured all that severity of
the old a posteriori method of teaching which still
smarted in Tusser's memory when he sang,
" From Paul's I went, to Eton sent,
To learn straight-ways the Latin phrase,
Where fifty-three stripes given to me
At once I had."
The yoxing victim of the wisdom of Solomon was boarded
with the parish minister, in whose kindness he found a
lenitive for the scholastic discipline he underwent. This
gentleman had been a soldier in the Colonial service, and
Mr. Quincy afterwards gave as a reason for his mildness,
that, " while a sergeant at Castle William, he had seen
something of mankind." This, no doubt, would be a
better preparative for successful dealing with the young
than is generally thought However, the birch was
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then the only classic tree, and every round in the ladder
of learning was made of its inspiring wood. Dr. Pear
son, perhaps, thought he was only doing justice to his
pupil's claims of kindred by giving him a larger share of
the educational advantages which the neighboring forest
afforded. The vividness with which this system is al
ways remembered by those who have been subjected to it
would seem to show that it really enlivened the attention,
and thereby invigorated the memory, nay, might even
raise some question as to what part of the person is chosen
by the mother of the Muses for her residence. With
an appetite for the classics quickened by " Cheever's
Accidence," and such other preliminary whets as were
then in vogue, young Quincy entered college, where he
spent the usual four years, and was graduated with the
highest honors of his class. The amount of Latin and
Greek imparted to the students of that day was not
very great. They were carried through Horace, Sallust,
and the De Oratoribus of Cicero, and read portions of
Livy, Xenophon, and Homer. Yet the chief end of clas
sical studies was perhaps as often reached then as now,
in giving young men a love for something apart from
and above the more vulgar associations of life. Mr.
Quincy, at least, retained to the last a fondness for-
certain Latin authors. While he was President of the
College, he told a gentleman, from whom we received
the story, that, "if he were imprisoned, and allowed
to choose one book for his amusement, that should
be Horace."
In 1797 Mr. Quincy was married to Miss Eliza Susan
Morton of New York, a union which lasted in imbroken
happiness for more than fifty years. His case might be
cited among the leading ones in support of the old poet's
axiom, that
" He never loved, that loved not at first sight ";
104 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
for he saw, wooed, and won in a week. In later life he
tried in a most amusing way to account for this rash
ness, and to find reasons of settled gravity for the happy
inspiration of his heart. He cites the evidence of Judge
Sedgwick, of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Wolcott, of the Rev.
Dr. Smith, and others, to the wisdom of his choice.
But it does not appear that he consulted them before
hand. If love were not too cunning for that, what
would become of the charming idyl, renewed in all its
wonder and freshness for every generation ] Let us be
thankful that in every man's life there is a holiday of
romance, an illumination of the senses by the soul, that
makes him a poet while it lasts. Mr. Quiricy caught
the enchantment through his ears, a song of Burns
heard from the next room conveying the infection, a
fact still inexplicable to him after lifelong meditation
thereon, as he " was not very impressible by music " !
To us there is something very characteristic in this
rapid energy of Mr. Quincy, something very delightful
in his naive account of the affair. It needs the magic
of no Dr. Heidegger to make these dried roses, that
drop from between the leaves of a vohime shut for
seventy years, bloom again in all their sweetness. Mr.
Edmund Quincy tells us that his mother was " not hand
some " ; but those who remember the gracious dignity
of her old age will hardly agree with him. She must
always have had that highest kind of beauty which
grows more beautiful with years, and keeps the eyes
young, as if with the partial connivance of Time.
We do not propose to follow Mr. Quincy closely
through his whole public life, which, beginning with his
thirty-second, ended with his seventy-third year. He
entered Congress as the representative of a party pri
vately the most respectable, publicly the least sagacious,
among all those which undei different names have
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 105
divided the country. The Federalists were the only
proper tories our politics have ever produced, whose
conservatism truly represented an idea, and not a mere
selfish interest, men who honestly distrusted democ
racy, and stood up for experience, or the tradition which
they believed for such, against empiricism. During
his Congressional career, the government was little more
than an attache of the French legation, and the opposi
tion to which he belonged a helpless revenant from the
dead and buried Colonial past. There are some ques
tions whose interest dies the moment they are settled ;
others, into which a moral element enters that hinders
them from being settled, though they may be decided.
It is hard to revive any enthusiasm about the Embargo,
though it once could inspire the boyish Muse of Bryant,
or in the impressment quarrel, though the Trent diffi
culty for a time rekindled its old animosities. The stars
in their courses fought against Mr. Quincy's party,
which was not in sympathy with the instincts of the
people, groping about for some principle of nationality,
and finding a substitute for it in hatred of England.
But there are several things which still make his career
in Congress interesting to us, because they illustrate the
personal character of the man. He prepared himself
honestly for his duties, by a thorough study of whatever
could make him efficient in them. It was not enough
that he could make a good speech ; he wished also to
have something to say. In Congress, as everywhere else,
quod voluit valde voluit ; and he threw a fervor into the
most temporary topic, as if his eternal salvation de
pended upon it. He had not merely, as the French say,
the courage of his opinions, but his opinions became
principles, and gave him that gallantry of fanaticism
which made him always ready to head a forlorn hope,
the more ready, perhaps, that it was a forlorn hope.
106 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
This is not the humor of a statesman, no, unless he
holds a position like that of Pitt, and can charge a
whole people with his own enthusiasm, and then we
call it genius. Mr. Quincy had the moral firmness
which enabled him to decline a duel without any loss
of personal prestige. His opposition to the Louisiana
purchase illustrates that Roman quality in him to which
we have alluded. He would not conclude the pur
chase till each of the old thirteen States had signified
its assent. He was reluctant to endow a Sabine city
with the privilege of Roman citizenship. It is worth
noting, that while in Congress, and afterwards in the
State Senate,- many of his phrases became the catch
words of party politics. He always dared to say what
others deemed it more prudent only to think, and what
ever he said he intensified with the whole ardor of his
temperament. It is this which makes Mr. Quincy's
speeches good reading still, even when the topics they
discussed were ephemeral. In one respect he is dis
tinguished from the politicians, and must rank with the
far-seeing statesmen of nis time. He early foresaw and
denounced the political danger with which the Slave
Power threatened the Union. His fears, it is true, were
aroused for the balance of power between the old States,
rather than by any moral sensitiveness, which would,
indeed, have been an anachronism at that time. But
the Civil War justified his prescience.
It was as Mayor of his native city that his remark
able qualities as an administrator were first called into
requisition and adequately displayed. He organized the
city government, and put it in working order. To him
we owe many reforms in police, in the management of
the poor, and other kindred matters, much in the
way of cure, still more in that of prevention. The place
demanded a man of courage and firmness, and found
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 107
those qualities almost superabundantly in him. His
virtues lost him his office, as such virtues are only too
apt to do in peaceful times, where they are felt more as
a restraint than a protection. His address on laying
down the mayoralty is very characteristic. We quote
the concluding sentences :
" And now, gentlemen, standing as I do in this relation
for the last time in your presence and that of my fellow-
citizens, about to surrender forever a station full of diffi
culty, of labor and temptation, in which I have been
called to very arduous duties, affecting the rights, prop
erty, and at times the liberty of others ; concerning
which the perfect line of rectitude though desired
was not always to be clearly discerned ; in which great
interests have been placed within my control, under cir
cumstances in which it would have been easy to advance
private ends and sinister projects ; under these cir
cumstances, I inquire, as I have a right to inquire,
for in the recent contest insinuations have been cast
against my integrity, in this long management of
your affairs, whatever errors have been committed,
and doubtless there have been many, have you found
in me anything selfish, anything personal, anything mer
cenary 1 ? In the simple language of an ancient seer, I
say, ' Behold, here I am ; witness against me. Whom
have I defrauded 7 Whom have I oppressed 7 At
whose hands have I received any bribe 7 '
" Six years ago, when I had the honor first to address
the City Council, in anticipation of the event which has
now occurred, the following expressions were used : ' In
administering the police, in executing the laws, in pro
tecting the rights and promoting the prosperity of the
city, its first officer will be necessarily beset and assailed
by individual interests, by rival projects, by personal in
fluences, by party passions. The more firm and inflexi
108 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
ble he is in maintaining the rights and in pursuing the
interests of the city, the greater is the probability of his
becoming obnoxious to the censure of all whom he
causes to be prosecuted or punished, of all whose pas
sions he thwarts, of all whose interests he opposes.'
" The day and the event have come. I retire as in
that first address 1 told my fellow-citizens, ' If, in con
formity with the experience of other republics, faithful
exertions should be followed by loss of favor and confi
dence,' I should retire 'rejoicing, not, indeed, with a
public and patriotic, but with a private and individual
joy ' ; for I shall retire with a consciousness weighed
against which all human suffrages are but as the light
dust of the balance."
Of his mayoralty we have another anecdote quite
Roman in color. He was in the habit of riding early in
the morning through the various streets that he might
look into everything with his own eyes. He was once
arrested on a malicious charge of violating the city ordi
nance against fast driving. He might have resisted, but
he appeared in court and paid the fine, because it would
serve as a good example " that no citizen was above the
law."
Hardly had Mr. Quincy given up the government of
the city, when he was called to that of the College. It
is here that his stately figure is associated most inti
mately and warmly with the recollections of the greater
number who hold his memory dear. Almost everybody
looks back regretfully to the days of some Consul
Plancus. Never were eyes so bright, never had wine so
much wit and good-fellowship in it, never were we our
selves so capable of the various great things we have
never done. Nor is it merely the sunset of life that
casts such a ravishing light on the past, and makes the
western windows of those homes of fancy we have left
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 109
forever tremble with a sentiment of such sweet regret.
We set great store by what we had, and cannot have
again, however indifferent in itself, and what is past is
infinitely past. This is especially true of college life,
when we first assume the titles without the responsibili
ties of manhood, and the President of our year is apt to
become our Plancus very early. Popular or not while
in office, an ex-president is always sure of enthusiastic
cheers at every college festival. Mr. Quincy had many
qualities calculated to win favor with the young, that
one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck.
With him the dignity was in the man, not in the office.
He had some of those little oddities, too, which afford
amusement without contempt, and which rather tend to
heighten than diminish personal attachment to superiors
in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping
asleep there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular in
ability to make even the shortest off-hand speech to the
students, all the more singular in a practised ora
tor, his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to
hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he
had just dried with it, the old-fashioned courtesy of
his, " Sir, your servant," as he bowed you out of his
study, all tended to make him popular. He had also
a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry
humor, not without influence in his relations with the
students. In taking leave of the graduating class, he
was in the habit of paying them whatever honest com
pliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall
be nameless, will ever forget the gravity with which he
assured them that they were " the best-dressed class that
had passed through college during his administration " ]
How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful
levity, will always be gratefully remembered by whoever
had occasion to experience it. A visitor not loug before
110 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
his death found him burning some memoranda of college
peccadilloes, lest they should ever rise up in judgment
against the men eminent in Church and State who had
been guilty of them. One great element of his popu
larity with the students was his esprit de corps. How
ever strict in discipline, he was always on our side as re
spected the outside world. Of his efficiency, no higher
testimony could be asked than that of his successor, Dr.
Walker. Here also many reforms date from his time.
He had that happiest combination for a wise vigor in
the conduct of affairs, he was a conservative with an
open mind.
One would be apt to think that, in the various offices
which Mr. Quincy successively filled, he would have
found enough to do. But his indefatigable activity over
flowed. Even as a man of letters, he occupies no incon
siderable place. His " History of Harvard College " is
a valuable and entertaining treatment of a subject not
wanting in natural dryness. His " Municipal History
of Boston," his " History of the Boston Athenaeum,"
and his " Life of Colonel Shaw " have permanent interest
and value. All these were works demanding no little
labor and research, and the thoroughness of their work
manship makes them remarkable as the by-productions
of a busy man. Having consented, when more than
eighty, to write a memoir of John Quincy Adams, to be
published in the " Proceedings " of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, he was obliged to excuse himself.
On account of his age 1 Not at all, but because the
work had grown to be a volume under his weariless
hand. Ohne Hast ohne Rast, was as true of him as of
Goethe. We find the explanation of his accomplishing
BO much in a rule of life which he gave, when President,
to a young man employed as his secretary, and who was
ft little behindhand with his work : " When you have a
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number of duties to perform, always do the most dis
agreeable one first." No advice could have been more
in character, and it is perhaps better than the great
German's, "Do the duty that lies nearest thee."
Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Quincy's life
was his old age. What in most men is decay, was
in him but beneficent prolongation and adjournment.
His interest in affairs unabated, his judgment undimmed,
his fire unchilled, his last years were indeed " lovely as
a Lapland night." Till within a year or two of its fall,
there were no signs of dilapidation in that stately edifice.
Singularly felicitous was Mr. Winthrop's application to
him of Wordsworth's verses :
" The monumental pomp of age
Was in that goodly personage.'*
Everything that Macbeth foreboded the want of, he had
in deserved abundance, the love, the honor, the obe
dience, the troops of friends. His equanimity was beau-
tiful. He loved life, as men of large vitality always do,
but he did not fear to lose life by changing the scene of
it. Visiting him in his ninetieth year with a friend, he
said to us, among other things : "I have no desire to
die, but also no reluctance. Indeed, I have a considera
ble curiosity about the other world. I have never been
to Europe, you know." Even in his extreme senescence
there was an April mood somewhere in his nature "that
put a spirit of youth in everything." He seemed to feel
that he could draw against an unlimited credit of years.
When eighty-two, he said smilingly to a young man just
returned from a foreign tour, " Well, well, I mean to go
myself when I am old enough to profit by it." We have
seen many old men whose lives were mere waste and
desolation, who made longevity disreputable by their
untimely persistence in it; but in Mr. Quincy's length
of years there was nothing that was not venerable. To
112 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER,
him it was fulfilment, not deprivation ; the days were
marked to the last for what they brought, not for what
they took away.
The memory of what Mr. Quincy did will be lost in
the crowd of newer activities ; it is the memory of what
he was that is precious to us. Bonum virum facile
crederes, magnum libmter. If John Winthrop be the
highest type of the men who shaped New England, we
can find no better one of those whom New England has
shaped than Josiah Quincy. It is a figure that we can
contemplate with more than satisfaction, a figure of
admirable example in a democracy as that of a model
citizen. His courage and high-mindedness were personal
to him ; let us believe that his integrity, his industry,
his love of letters, his devotion to duty, go in some sort
to the credit of the society which gave him birth and
formed his character. In one respect he is especially
interesting to us, as belonging to a class of men of whom
he was the last representative, and whose like we shall
never see again. Born and bred in an age of greater
social distinctions than ours, he was an aristocrat in
a sense that is good even in a republic. He had the
sense of a certain personal dignity inherent in him, and
which could not be alienated by any whim of the popu
lar will. There is no stouter buckler than this for inde
pendence of spirit, no surer guaranty of that courtesy
which, in its consideration of others, is but paying a
debt of self-respect. During his presidency, Mr. Quincy
was once riding to Cambridge in a crowded omnibus. A
colored woman got in, and could nowhere find a seat.
The President instantly gave her his own, and stood the
rest of the way, a silent rebuke of the general rudeness.
He was a man of quality in the true sense, of quality
not hereditary, but personal. Position might be taken
from him, but he remained where he was. In what he
A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 113
valued most, his sense of personal worth, the world's
opinion could neither help nor hinder. We do not
mean that this was conscious in him ; if it had been,
it would have been a weakness. It was an instinct, and
acted with the force and promptitude proper to such.
Let us hope that the scramble of democracy will give us
something as good ; anything of so classic dignity we
shall not look to see again.
Josiah Quincy was no seeker of office ; from first to
last he and it were drawn together by the mutual attrac
tion of need and fitness, and it clung to him as most
men cling to it. The people often make blunders in
their choice ; they are apt to mistake presence of speech
for presence of mind ; they love so to help a man rise
from the ranks, that they will spoil a good demagogue to
make a bad general ; a great many faults may be laid at
their door, but they are not fairly to be charged with
fickleness. They are constant to whoever is constant to
his real self, to the best manhood that is in him, and
not to the mere selfishness, the antica lupa so cunning to
hide herself in the sheep's fleece even from ourselves.
It is true, the contemporary world is apt to be the gull
of brilliant parts, and the maker of a lucky poem or
picture or statue, the winner of a lucky battle, gets per
haps more than is due to the solid result of his triumph.
It is time that fit honor should be paid also to him who
shows a genius for public usefulness, for the achieve
ment of character, who shapes his life to a certain classic
proportion, and comes oft conqueror on those inward
fields where something more than mere talent is de
manded for victory. The memory of such men should
be cherished as the most precious inheritance which one
generation can bequeath to the next. However it might
be with popular favor, public respect followed Mr.
Quincy unwaveringly for seventy years, and it was
114 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.
because he had never forfeited his own. In this, it
appears to us, lies the lesson of his life, and his claim
upon our grateful recollection. It is this which makes
him an example, while the careers of so many of our
prominent men are only useful for warning. As regards
history, his greatness was narrowly provincial ; but if
the measure of deeds be the spirit in which they are
done, that fidelity to instant duty, which, according to
Herbert, makes an action fine, then his length of years
should be very precious to us for its lesson. Talleyrand,
whose life may be compared with his for the strange
vicissitude which it witnessed, carried with him out of
the world the respect of no man, least of all his own ;
and how many of our own public men have we seen
whose old age but accumulated a disregard which they
would gladly have exchanged for oblivion ! In Quincy
the public fidelity was loyal to the private, and the with
drawal of his old age was into a sanctuary, a diminu
tion of publicity with addition of influence.
" Conclude we, then, felicity consists
Not in exterior fortunes
Sacred felicity doth ne'er extend
Beyond itself. ....
The swelling of an outward fortune can
Create a prosperous, not a happy man."
CARLYLE.*
A FEELING of comical sadness is likely to come
over the mind of any middle-aged man who sets
himself to recollecting the names of different authors
that have been famous, and the number of contemporary
immortalities whose end he has seen since coming to man
hood. Many a light, hailed by too careless observers as
a fixed star, has proved to be only a short-lived lantern
at the tail of a newspaper kite. That literary heaven
which our youth saw dotted thick with rival glories, we
find now to have been a stage-sky merely, artificially
enkindled from behind ; and the cynical daylight which
is sure to follow all theatrical enthusiasms shows us
ragged holes where once were luminaries, sheer vacancy
instead of lustre. Our earthly reputations, says a great
poet, are the color of grass, and the same sun that
makes the green bleaches it out again. But next morn
ing is not the time to criticise the scene-painter's firma
ment, nor is it quite fair to examine coldly a part of
some general illusion in the absence of that sympathetic
enthusiasm, that self-surrender of the fancy, which made
it what it was. It would not be safe for all neglected
authors to comfort themselves in Wordsworth's fashion,
inferring genius in an inverse proportion to public favor,
and a high and solitary merit from the world's indiffer
ence. On the contrary, it would be more just to
argue from popularity a certain amount of real value,
* Apropos of his Frederick the Great.
116 CARLYLE.
though it may not be of that permanent quality which
insures enduring fame. The contemporary world and
Wordsworth were both half right. He undoubtedly
owned and worked the richest vein of his period ; but
he offered to his contemporaries a heap of gold-bearing
quartz where the baser mineral made the greater show,
and the purchaser must do his own crushing and smelt
ing, with no guaranty but the bare word of the miner.
It was not enough that certain bolder adventurers
should now and then show a nugget in proof of the
success of their venture. The gold of the poet must
be refined, moulded, stamped with the image and super
scription of his time, but with a beauty of design and
finish that are of no time. The work must surpass the
material. Wordsworth was wholly void of that shaping
imagination which is the highest criterion of a poet.
Immediate popularity and lasting fame, then, would
seem to be the result of different qualities, and not of
mere difference in degree. It is safe to prophesy a
certain durability of recognition for any author who
gives evidence of intellectual force, in whatever kind,
above the average amount. There are names in literary
history which are only names ; and the works associated
with them, like acts of Congress already agreed on in
debate, are read by their titles and passed. What is it
that insures what may be called living fame, so that a
book shall be at once famous and read ] What is it
that relegates divine Cowley to that remote, uncivil
Pontus of the " British Poets," and keeps garrulous
Pepys within the cheery circle of the evening lamp and
fire ] Originality, eloquence, sense, imagination, not
one of them is enough by itself, but only in some happy
mixture and proportion. Imagination seems to possess
in itself more of the antiseptic property than any other
single quality ; but, without less showy and more sub
CARLYLE. 117
etantial allies, it can at best give only deathlessness,
without the perpetual youth that makes it other than
dreary. It were easy to find examples of this Tithonus
immortality, setting its victims apart from both gods
and men; helpless duration, undying, to be sure, but
sapless and voiceless also, and long ago deserted by the
fickle Hemera. And yet chance could confer that gift
on Glaucus, which love and the consent of Zeus failed
to secure for the darling of the Dawn. Is it mere luck,
then ? Luck may, and often does, have some share in
ephemeral successes, as in a gambler's winnings spent as
soon as got, but not in any lasting triumph over time.
Solid success must be based on solid qualities and the
honest culture of them.
The first element of contemporary popularity is un
doubtedly the power of entertaining. If a man have
anything to tell, the world cannot be expected to listen
to him unless he have perfected himself in the best way
of telling it. People are not to be argued into a
pleasurable sensation, nor is taste to be compelled by
any syllogism, however stringent. An author may make
himself very popular, however, and even justly so, by
appealing to the passion of the moment, without having
anything in him that shall outlast the public whim
which he satisfies. Churchill is a remarkable example
of this. He had a surprising extemporary vigor of
mind ; his phrase carries great weight of blow ; he un
doubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as Cowper says
of him, in a certain rude and earth-born vigor ; but his
verse is dust and ashes now, solemnly inurned, of course,
in the Chalmers columbarium, and without danger of
violation. His brawn and muscle are fading traditions,
while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is still a
good life on the books of the Critical Insurance Office.
" IB it not, then, loftiness of mind that puts one by the
118 CARLYLE.
side of Virgil 1 " cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wits'
end. Certainly not altogether that. There must he
also the great Mantuan's art ; his power, not only of
being strong in parts, but of making those parts cohe
rent in an harmonious whole, and tributary to it. Gray,
if we may believe the commentators, has not an idea,
scarcely an epithet, that he can call his own ; and yet
he is, in the best sense, one of the classics of English
literature. He had exquisite felicity of choice ; his
dictionary had no vulgar word in it, no harsh one, but
all culled from the luckiest moods of poets, and with a
faint but delicious aroma of association ; he had a per
fect sense of sound, and one idea without which all the
poetic outfit (si absit prudentia) is of little avail, that
of combination and arrangement, in short, of art. The
poets from whom he helped himself have no more claim
to any of his poems as wholes, than the various beauties
of Greece (if the old story were true) to the Venus of
the artist.
Imagination, as we have said, has more virtue to keep
a book alive than any other single faculty. Burke is
rescued from the usual doom of orators, because his
learning, his experience, his sagacity are rimmed with a
halo by this bewitching light behind the intellectual eye
from the highest heaven of the brain. Shakespeare has
impregnated his common sense with the steady glow of
it, and answers the mood of youth and age, of high aad
low, immortal as that dateless substance of the soul he
wrought in. To have any chance of lasting, a book
must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day,
but a constant longing and hunger of human nature ;
and it needs only a superficial study of literature to be
convinced that real fame depends rather on the sum of
an author's powers than on any brilliancy of special
parts. There must be wisdom as well as wit, sense n
CARLYLE. 119
less than imagination, judgment in equal measure with
fancy, and the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the
poor wooden stick that gives it guidance if it would
mount and draw all eyes. There are some who think
that the brooding patience which a great work calls for
belonged exclusively to an earlier period than ours.
Others lay the blame on our fashion of periodical publi
cation, which necessitates a sensation and a crisis in
every number, and forces the writer to strive for start
ling effects, instead of that general lowness of tone
which is the last achievement of the artist. The sim
plicity of antique passion, the homeliness of antique
pathos, seem not merely to be gone out of fashion, but
out of being as well. Modern poets appear rather to
tease their words into a fury, than to infuse them with
the deliberate heats of their matured conception, and
strive to replace the rapture of the mind with a fervid
intensity of phrase. Our reaction from the decorous
platitudes of the last century has no doubt led us to ex
cuse this, and to be thankful for something like real fire,
though of stubble ; but our prevailing style of criticism,
which regards parts rather than wholes, which dwells on
the beauty of passages, and, above all, must have its
languid nerves pricked with the expected sensation at
whatever cost, has done all it could to confirm us in our
evil way. Passages are good when they lead to some
thing, when they are necessary parts of the building,
but they are not good to dwell in. This taste for the
startling reminds us of something which happened once
at the burning of" a country meeting-house. The build
ing stood on a hill, and, apart from any other considera
tions, the fire was as picturesque as could be desired.
When all was a black heap, licking itself here and there
with tongues of fire, there rushed up a farmer gasping
anxiously, "Hez the bell fell yitl" An ordinary fire
120 CARLYLE.
was no more to him than that on his hearthstone ; even
the burning of a meeting-house, .in itself a vulcanic
rarity, (so long as he was of another parish,) could not
tickle his outworn palate ; but he had hoped for a cer
tain tang in the downcome of the bell that might recall
the boyish flavor of conflagration. There was something
dramatic, no doubt, in this surprise of the brazen senti
nel at his post, but the breathless rustic has always
seemed to us a type of the prevailing delusion in aesthet
ics. Alas ! if the bell must fall in every stanza or every
monthly number, how shall an author contrive to stir us
at last, unless with whole Moscows, crowned with the
tintinnabulary crash of the Kremlin ] For ourselves, we
are glad to feel that we are still able to find content
ment in the more conversational and domestic tone
of our old-fashioned wood-fire. No doubt a great part
of our pleasure in reading is unexpectedness, whether in
turn of thought or of phrase ; but an emphasis out
of place, an intensity of expression not founded on
sincerity of moral or intellectual conviction, reminds one
of the underscorings in young ladies' letters, a wonder
even to themselves under the colder north-light of ma-
tronage. It is the part of the critic, however, to keep
cool under whatever circumstances, and to reckon that
the excesses of an author will be at first more attractive
to the many than that average power which shall win
him attention with a new generation of men. It is
seldom found out by the majority, till after a considera
ble interval, that he was the original man who contrived
to be simply natural, the hardest lesson in the school
of art and the latest learned, if, indeed, it be a thing
capable of acquisition at all. The most winsome and
wayward of brooks draws now and then some lover's foot
to its intimate reserve, while the spirt of a bursting
water-pipe gathers a gaping crowd forthwith.
CARLYLE. 121
Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been so long
before the world, that we may feel toward him some
thing of the unprejudice of posterity. It has long been
evident that he had no more ideas to bestow upon
us, and that no new turn of his kaleidoscope would give
us anything but some variation of arrangement in the
brilliant colors of his style. It is perhaps possible, then,
to arrive at some not wholly inadequate estimate of his
place as a writer, and especially of the value of the ideas
whose advocate he makes himself, with a bitterness and
violence that increase, as it seems to us, in proportion as
his inward conviction of their truth diminishes.
The leading characteristics of an author who is in any
sense original, that is to say, who does not merely repro
duce, but modifies the influence of tradition, culture, and
contemporary thought upon himself by some admixture
of his own, may commonly be traced more or less clearly
in his earliest works. This is more strictly true, no
doubt, of poets, because the imagination is a fixed quan
tity, not to be increased by any amount of study and
reflection. Skill, wisdom, and even wit are cumulative ;
but that diviner faculty, which is the spiritual eye,
though it may be trained and sharpened, cannot be
added to by taking thought. This has always been
something innate, unaccountable, to be laid to a happy
conjunction of the stars. Goethe, the last of the great
poets, accordingly takes pains to tell us under what
planets he was born ; and in him it is curious how
uniform the imaginative quality is from the beginning
to the end of his long literary activity. His early poems
show maturity, his mature ones a youthful freshness.
The apple already lies potentially in the blossom, as
that may be traced also in the ripened fruit. With
a mere change of emphasis, Goethe might be called an
old boy at both ends of his career.
6
122 CARLYLE.
In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we find some
not obscure hints of the future man. Nearly fifty years
ago he contributed a few literary and critical articles to
the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia. The outward fashion of
them is that of the period ; but they are distinguished
by a certain security of judgment remarkable at any
time, remai'kable especially in one so young. British
criticism has been always more or less parochial; has
never, indeed, quite freed itself from sectarian cant, and
planted itself honestly on the aesthetic point of view.
It cannot quite persuade itself that truth is of immortal
essence, totally independent of all assistance from quar
terly journals or the British army and navy. Carlyle,
in these first essays, already shows the influence of his
master, Goethe, the most widely receptive of critics. In
a compact notice of Montaigne, there is not a word as to
his religious scepticism. The character is looked at
purely from its human and literary sides. As illustrat
ing the bent of the author's mind, the following passage
is most to our purpose: "A modern reader will not
easily cavil at the patient and good-natured, though ex
uberant egotism which brings back to our view 'the
form and pressure ' of a time long past. The habits and
humors, the mode of acting and thinking, which character
ized a Gascon gentleman in the sixteenth century, cannot
fail to amuse an inquirer of the nineteenth; while the
faithful delineation of human feelings, in all their strength
and weakness, will serve as a mirror to every mind capable
of self-examination." We find here no uncertain indica
tion of that eye for the moral picturesque, and that
sympathetic appreciation of character, which within the
next few years were to make Carlyle the first in insight
of English critics and the most vivid of English histo
rians. In all his earlier writing he never loses sight of
his master's great rule, Den Gegenstand fest zu halten,
CARLYLE. 123
He accordingly gave to Englishmen tne first humanly
possible likeness of Voltaire, Diderot, Mirabeau, and
others, who had hitherto been measured by the usual
British standard of their respect for the geognosy of
Moses and the historic credibility of the Books of Chron
icles. What was the real meaning of this phenomenon ?
what the amount of this man's honest performance in the
world 1 and in what does he show that family -likeness,
common to all the sons of Adam, which gives us a fair
hope of being able to comprehend him 1 These were the
questions which Carlyle seems to have set himself hon
estly to answer in the critical writings which fill the first
period of his life as a man of letters. In this mood he
rescued poor Boswell from the unmerited obloquy of an
ungrateful generation, and taught us to see something
half-comically beautiful in the poor, weak creature, with
his pathetic instinct of reverence for what was nobler,
wiser, and stronger than himself. Everything that Mr.
Carlyle wrote during this first period thrills with the
purest appreciation of whatever is brave and beautiful
in human nature, with the most vehement scorn of
cowardly compromise with things base ; and yet, immit
igable as his demand for the highest in us seems to be,
there is always something reassuring in the humorous
sympathy with mortal frailty which softens condemna
tion and consoles for shortcoming. The remarkable
feature of Mr. Carlyle's criticism (see, for example, his
analysis and exposition of Goethe's ''Helena") is the
sleuth-hound instinct with which he presses on to the
matter of his theme, never turned aside by a false
scent, regardless of the outward beauty of form, some
times almost contemptuous of it, in his hunger after the
intellectual nourishment which it may hide. The deli
cate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parta
which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and
124 CARLYLE.
keeps it from sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he
would crush remorselessly to come at the marrow of
meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to the
ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint con
ception of their possible unity.
By degrees the humorous element in his nature gains
ground, till it overmasters all the rest. Becoming al
ways more boisterous and obtrusive, it ends at last, as
such humor must, in cynicism. In " Sartor Resartus "
it is still kindly, still infused with sentiment ; and the
book, with its mixture of indignation and farce, strikes
one as might the prophecies of Jeremiah, if the marginal
comments of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his wildest mood
had by some accident been incorporated with the text.
In " Sartor " the marked influence of Jean Paul is un
deniable, both in matter and manner. It is curious for
one who studies the action and reaction of national liter
atures on each other, to see the humor of Swift and
Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, re
appear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes
it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be,
to the English mind. Unhappily the bit of mother from
Swift's vinegar-barrel has had strength enough to sour
all the rest. The whimsicality of " Tristram Shandy,"
which, even in the original, has too often the effect
of forethought, becomes a deliberate artifice in Richter,
and at last a mere mannerism in Carlyle.
Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the advantage
of a well-defined theme, and of limits both in the
subject and in the space allowed for its treatment, which
kept his natural extravagance within bounds, and com
pelled some sort of discretion and compactness. The
great merit of these essays lay in a criticism based on
wide and various study, which, careless of tradition,
applied its standard to the real and not the contem-
CARLYLE. 125
porary worth of the literary or other performance to be
judged, and in an unerring eye for that fleeting expres
sion of the moral features of character, a perception of
which alone makes the drawing of a coherent likeness
possible. Their defect was a tendency, gaining strength
with years, to confound the moral with the aesthetic
standard, and to make the value of an author's work
dependent on the general force of his nature rather
than on its special fitness for a given task. In propor
tion as his humor gradually overbalanced the other
qualities of his mind, his taste for the eccentric, amor
phous, and violent in men became excessive, disturbing
more and more his perception of the more common
place attributes which give consistency to portraiture.
His " French Revolution " is a series of lurid pictures,
unmatched for vehement power, in which the figures
of such sons of earth as Mirabeau and Danton loom
gigantic and terrible as in the glare of an eniption, their
shadows swaying far and wide grotesquely awful. But
all is painted by eruption-flashes in violent light and
shade. There are no half-tints, no gradations, and we
find it impossible to account for the continuance in
power of less Titanic actors in the tragedy like Robes
pierre, on any theory whether of human nature or of
individual character supplied by Mr. Carlyle. Of his
success, however, in accomplishing what he aimed at,
which was to haunt the mind with memories of a horri
ble political nightmare, there can be no doubt.
Goethe says, apparently thinking of Richter, " The
worthy Germans have persuaded themselves that the
essence of true humor is formlessness." Heine had not
yet shown that a German might combine the most airy
Immor with a sense of form as lelicate as Goethe's own,
and that there was no need to borrow the bow of Phi-
loctetes for all kinds of game. Mr. Carlyle's own
126 CARLYLE.
tendency was toward the lawless, and the attraction of
Jean Paul made it an overmastering one. Goethe, we
think, might have gone farther, and affirmed that nothing
but the highest artistic sense can prevent humor from
degenerating into the grotesque, and thence downwards
to utter anarchy. Rabelais is a striking example of
it. The moral purpose of his book cannot give it that
unity which the instinct and forethought of art only
can bring forth. Perhaps we owe the masterpiece of
humorous literature to the fact that Cervantes had been
trained to authorship in a school where form predomi
nated over substance, and the most convincing proof of
the supremacy of art at the highest period of Greek
literature is to be found in Aristophanes. Mr. Carlyle
has no artistic sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of
proportion. Accordingly he looks on verse with con
tempt as something barbarous, a savage ornament
which a higher refinement will abolish, as it has tattoo
ing and nose-rings. With a conceptive imagination
vigorous beyond any in his generation, with a mastery
of language equalled only by the greatest poets, he wants
altogether the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty,
which would have made him a poet in the highest sense.
He is a preacher and a prophet, anything you will, -
but an artist he is not, and never can be. It is always
the knots and gnarls of the oak that he admires, never
the perfect and balanced tree.
It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful for what
we owe an author, than to blame him for what he cannot
give us. But it is sometimes the business of a critic to
trace faults of style and of thought to their root in char
acter and temperament, to show their necessary rela
tion to, and dependence on, each other, and to find some
more trustworthy explanation than mere wantonness of
will for the moral obliquities of a man so largely moulded
CARLYLE. 127
and gifted as Mr. Carlyle. So long as he was merely an
exhorter or dehorter, we were thankful for such elo
quence, such humor, such vivid or grotesque images,
and such splendor of illustration as only he could give ;
but when he assumes to be a teacher of moral and polit
ical philosophy, when he himself takes to compounding
the social panaceas he has made us laugh at so often,
and advertises none as genuine but his own, we begin to
inquire into his qualifications and his defects, and to
ask ourselves whether his patent pill differs from others
except in the larger amount of aloes, or has any better
recommendation than the superior advertising powers of
a mountebank of genius. Comparative criticism teaches
us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly
related than is commonly supposed. Had Mr. Carlyle
been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he
would have had an ideal in his work which would have
lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and
trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the
harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of
things. His innate love of the picturesque, (which is
only another form of the sentimentalism he so scoffs at,
perhaps as feeling it a weakness in himself,) once turned
in the direction of character, and finding its chief satis
faction there, led him to look for that ideal of human
nature in individual men which is but fragmentary
represented in the entire race, and is rather divined
from the aspiration, forever disenchanted to be forever
renewed, of the immortal part in us, than found in any
example of actual achievement. A wiser temper would
have found something more consoling than disheartening
in the continual failure of men eminently endowed to
reach the standard of this spiritual requirement, would
perhaps have found in it an inspiring hint that it is
mankind, and not special men, that are to be shaped at
128 CARLYLE.
last into the image of God, and that the endless life of
the generations may hope to come nearer that goal of
which the short-breathed threescore years and ten fall
too unhappily short.
But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, and all
who recommend any other method, or see any hope of
healing elsewhere, are either quacks and charlatans or
their victims. His lively imagination conjures up the
image of an impossible he, as contradictorily endowed
as the chief personage in a modern sentimental novel,
and who, at all hazards, must not lead mankind like a
shepherd, but bark, bite, and otherwise worry them
toward the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. If Mr.
Carlyle would only now and then recollect that men are
men, and not sheep, nay, that the farther they are
from being such, the more well grounded our hope of
one day making something better of them ! It is indeed
strange that one who values Will so highly in the
greatest, should be blind to its infinite worth in the least
of men ; nay, that he should so often seem to confound
it with its irritable and purposeless counterfeit, Wilful-
ness. The natural impatience of an imaginative tem
perament, which conceives so vividly the beauty and
desirableness of a nobler manhood and a diviner political
order, makes him fret at the slow moral processes by
which the All-Wise brings about his ends, and turns the
very foolishness of men to his praise and glory. Mr.
Carlyle is for calling down fire from Heaven whenever
he cannot readily lay his hand on the match-box. No
doubt it is somewhat provoking that it should be so easy
to build castles in the air, and so hard to find tenants
for them. It is a singular intellectual phenomenon to
see a man, who earlier in life so thoroughly appreciated
the innate weakness and futile tendency of the " storm
and thrust " period of German literature, constantly
CARLYLE. 1JO
assimilating, as he grows older, more and more nearly to
its principles and practice. It is no longer the sagacious
and moderate Goethe who is his type of what is highest in
human nature, but far rather some Gb'tz of the Iron Hand,
some assertor of the divine legitimacy of Faustrecht.
It is odd to conceive the fate of Mr. Carlyle under the
sway of any of his heroes, how Cromwell would have
scorned him as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne,
but less clear and practical, how Friedrich would have
scoffed at his tirades as dummes Zeuy not to be compared
with the romances of Crebillon fils, or possibly have
clapped him in a marching regiment as a fit subject for
the cane of the sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr.
Carlyle's irritability is to be laid to the account of his
early schoolmastership at Ecclefechan. This great booby
World is such a dull boy, and will not learn the lesson
we have taken such pains in expounding for the fiftieth
time. Well, then, if eloquence, if example, if the awful
warning of other little boys who neglected their acci
dence and came to the gallows, if none of these avail, the
birch at least is left, and we will try that. The dominie
spirit has become every year more obtrusive and in
tolerant in Mr. Carlyle's writing, and the rod, instead of
being kept in its place as a resource for desperate cases,
has become the alpha and omega of all successful train
ing, the one divinely-appointed means of human enlight
enment and progress, in short, the final hope of that
absurd animal who fancies himself a little lower than
the angels. Have we feebly taken it for granted that
the distinction of man was reason 1 Never was there a
more fatal misconception. It is in the gift of unreason
that we are unenviably distinguished from the brutes,
whose nobler privilege of instinct saves them from our
blunders and our crimes.
But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed with the
130 CARLYLE.
hallucination that he is head-master of this huge boys 1
school which we call the world, his pedagogic birch has
grown to the taller proportions and more ominous as
pect of a gallows. His article on Dr. Francia was a
panegyric of the halter, in which the gratitude of man
kind is invoked for the self-appointed dictator who had
discovered in Paraguay a tree more beneficent than that
which produced the Jesuits' bark. Mr. Carlyle seems to
be in the condition of a man who uses stimulants, and
must increase his dose from day to day as the senses
become dulled under the spur. He began by admiring
strength of character and purpose, and the manly self-
denial which makes a humble fortune great by steadfast
loyalty to duty. He has gone on till mere strength has
become such washy weakness that there is no longer any
titillation in it ; and nothing short of downright violence
will rouse his nerves now to the needed excitement. At
first he made out very well with remarkable men ; then,
lessening the water and increasing the spirit, he took to
Heroes : and now he must have downright inhumanity,
or the draught has no savor ; so he gets on at last to
Kings, types of remorseless Force, who maintain the
political views of Berserkers by the legal principles of
Lynch. Constitutional monarchy is a, failure, represen
tative government is a gabble, democracy a birth of the
bottomless pit ; there is no hope for mankind except in
getting themselves under a good driver who shall not
spare the lash. And yet, unhappily for us, these drivers
are providential births not to be contrived by any cun
ning of ours, and Friedrich II. is hitherto the last of
them. Meanwhile the world's wheels have got fairly
stalled in mire and other matter of every vilest consist
ency and most disgustful smell. What are we to do 1
Mr. Carlyle will not let us make a lever with a rail from
the next fence, or call in the neighbors. That would be
CARLYLE. 131
too commonplace and cowardly, too anarchical. No;
he would have us sit down beside him in the slough, and
shout lustily for Hercules. If that indispensable demi*
god will not or cannot come, we can find a useful and
instructive solace, during the intervals of shouting, in a
hearty abuse of human nature, which, at the long last,
is always to blame.
Since " Sartor Resartus " Mr. Carlyle has done little
but repeat himself with increasing emphasis and height
ened shrillness. Warning has steadily heated toward
denunciation, and remonstrance soured toward scolding.
The image of the Tartar prayer-mill, which he borrowed
from Richter and turned to such humorous purpose,
might be applied to himself. The same phrase comes
round and round, only the machine, being a little crank
ier, rattles more, and the performer is called on for a
more visible exertion. If there be not something very
like cant in Mr. Carlyle's later writings, then cant is not
the repetition of a creed after it has become a phrase by
the cooling of that white-hot conviction which once made
it both the light and warmth of the soul. We do not
mean intentional and deliberate cant, but neither is that
which Mr. Carlyle denounces so energetically in his fel
low-men of that conscious kind. We do not mean to
blame him for it, but mention it rather as an interesting
phenomenon of human nature. The stock of ideas
which mankind has to work with is very limited, like the
alphabet, and can at best have an air of freshness given
it by new arrangements and combinations, or by applica
tion to new times and circumstances. Montaigne is but
Ecclesiastes writing in the sixteenth century, Voltaire
but Lucian in the eighteenth. Yet both are original,
and so certainly is Mr. Carlyle, whose borrowing is
mainly from his own former works. But he does this so
often and so openly, that we may at least be sure that
\
132 CAELYLE.
he ceased growing a number of years ago, and is a
remarkable example of arrested development.
The cynicism, however, which has now become the
prevailing temper of his mind, has gone on expanding
with unhappy vigor. In Mr. Carlyle it is not, certainly,
as in Swift, the result of personal disappointment, and
of the fatal eye of an accomplice for the mean qualities
by which power could be attained that it might be used
for purposes as mean. It seems rather the natural cor
ruption of his exuberant humor. Humor in its first
analysis is a perception of the incongruous, and in its
highest development, of the incongruity between the
actual and the ideal in men and life. With so keen
a sense of the ludicrous contrast between what men
might be, nay, wish to be, and what they are, and with
a vehement nature that demands the instant realization
of his vision of a world altogether heroic, it is no wonder
that Mr. Carlyle, always hoping for a thing and always
disappointed, should become bitter. Perhaps if he
expected less he would find more. Saul seeking his
father's asses found himself turned suddenly into a king ;
but Mr. Carlyle, on the lookout for a king, always seems
to find the other sort of animal. He sees nothing on
any side of him but a procession of the Lord of Misrule,
in gloomier moments, a Dance of Death, where every
thing is either a parody of whatever is noble, or an aim
less jig that stumbles at last into the annihilation of the
grave, and so passes from one nothing to another. Is a
world, then, which buys and reads Mr. Carlyle's works
distinguished only for its " fair, large ears " 1 If he who
has read and remembered so much would only now and
then call to mind the old proverb, Nee deus, nee lupus,
sed homo! If he would only recollect that, from the
days of the first grandfather, everybody has remembered
a golden age behind him !
CARLYLE. 133
The very qualities, it seems to us, which came so near
making a great poet of Mr. Carlyle, disqualify him for
the office of historian. The poet's concern is with the
appearances of things, with their harmony in that whole
which the imagination demands for its satisfaction, and
their truth to that ideal nature which is the proper
object of poetry. History, unfortunately, is very far
from being ideal, still farther from an exclusive interest
in those heroic or typical figures which answer all the
wants of the epic and the drama and fill their utmost
artistic limits. Mr. Carlyle has an unequalled power and
vividness in painting detached scenes, in bringing out in
their full relief the oddities or peculiarities of character ;
but he has a far feebler sense of those gradual changes
of opinion, that strange communication of sympathy
from mind to mind, that subtile influence of very subor
dinate actors in giving a direction to policy or action,
which we are wont somewhat vaguely to call the progress
of events. His scheme of history is purely an epical one,
where only leading figures appear by name and are in any
strict sense operative. He has no conception of the peo
ple as anything else than an element of mere brute
force in political problems, and would sniff scornfully at
that unpicturesque common-sense of the many, which
comes slowly to its conclusions, no doubt, but compels
obedience even from rulers the most despotic when once
its mind is made up. His history of Frederick is, of
course, a Fritziad ; but next to his hero, the cane of the
drill-sergeant and iron ramrods appear to be the condi
tions which to his mind satisfactorily account for the
result of the Seven Years War. It is our opinion, which
subsequent events seem to justify, that, had there not
been in the Pmssian people a strong instinct of nation
ality, Protestant nationality too, and an intimate convic
tion of its advantages, the war might have ended quite
134 CARLYLE.
otherwise. Frederick II. left the machine of war which
he received from his father even more perfect than he
found it, yet within a few years of his death it went to
pieces before the shock of French armies animated by an
idea. Again a few years, and the Prussian soldiery, in
spired once more by the old national fervor, were victori
ous. Were it not for the purely picturesque bias of
Mr. Carlyle's genius, for the necessity which his epical
treatment lays upon him of always having a protagonist,
we should be astonished that an idealist like him should
have so little faith in ideas and so much in matter.
Mr. Carlyle's manner is not so well suited to the histo
rian as to the essayist. He is always great in single
figures and striking episodes, but there is neither grada
tion nor continuity. He has extraordinary patience and
conscientiousness in the gathering and sifting of his
material, but is scornful of commonplace facts and char
acters, impatient of whatever will not serve for one of his
clever sketches, or group well in a more elaborate figure-
piece. He sees history, as it were, by flashes of light
ning. A single scene, whether a landscape or an inte
rior, a single figure or a wild mob of men, whatever may
be snatched by the eye in that instant of intense illumi
nation, is minutely photographed upon the memory.
Every tree and stone, almost every blade of grass ; every
article of furniture in a room ; the attitude or expression,
nay, the very buttons and shoe-ties of a principal figure ;
the gestures of momentary passion in a wild throng, -
everything leaps into vision under that sudden glare
with a painful distinctness that leaves the retina quiver
ing. The intervals are absolute darkness. Mr. Carlyle
makes us acquainted with the isolated spot where we
happen to be when the flash comes, as if by actual eye
sight, but there is no possibility of a comprehensive
view. No other writer compares with him for vividness.
CARLYLE. 135
fie is himself a witness, and makes us witnesses of what
ever he describes. This is genius beyond a question,
and of a very rare quality, but it is not history. He
has not the cold-blooded impartiality of the historian;
and while he entertains us, moves us to tears or laughter,
makes us the unconscious captives of his ever-changeful
mood, we find that he has taught us comparatively little.
His imagination is so powerful that it makes him the
contemporary of his characters, and thus his history
seems to be the memoirs of a cynical humorist, with
hearty likes and dislikes, with something of acridity in
his partialities whether for or against, more keenly sen
sitive to the grotesque than the simply natural, and who
enters in his diary, even of what comes within the range
of his own observation, only so much as amuses his
fancy, is congenial with his humor, or feeds his prejudice.
Mr. Carlyle's method is accordingly altogether picto
rial, his hasty temper making narrative wearisome to
him. In his Friedrich, for example, we get very little
notion of the civil administration of Prussia ; and when
he comes, in the last volume, to his hero's dealings with
civil reforms, he confesses candidly that it would tire him
too much to tell us about it, even if he knew anything
at all satisfactory himself.
Mr. Carlyle's historical compositions are wonderful
prose poems, full of picture, incident, humor, and char
acter, where we grow familiar with his conception of
certain leading personages, and even of subordinate ones,
if they are necessary to the scene, so that they come out
living upon the stage from the dreary limbo of names ;
but this is no more history than the historical plays of
Shakespeare. There is nothing in imaginative literature
superior in its own way to the episode of Voltaire in the
Fritziad. It is delicious in humor, masterly in minute
characterization. We feel as if the principal victim (for
136 CARLYLE.
we cannot help feeling all the while that he is so) of this
mischievous genius had been put upon the theatre before
us by some perfect mimic like Foote, who had studied
his habitual gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought,
costume, trick of feature, and rendered them with the
slight dash of caricature needful to make the whole
composition tell. It is in such things that Mr. Carlyle
is beyond all rivalry, and that we must go back to Shake
speare for a comparison. But the mastery of Shake
speare is shown perhaps more strikingly in his treatment
of the ordinary than of the exceptional. His is the
gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr. Carlyle's gift-
is rather in the representation than in the evolution of
character ; and it is a necessity of his art, therefore, to
exaggerate slightly his heroic, and to caricature in like
manner his comic parts. His appreciation is less psy
chological than physical and external. Grimm relates
that Garrick, riding once with Pre'ville, proposed to him
that they should counterfeit drunkenness. They rode
through Passy accordingly, deceiving all who saw them.
When beyond the town Preville asked how he had suc
ceeded. "Excellently," said Garrick, "as to your body;
but your legs were not tipsy." Mr. Carlyle would be as
exact in his observation of nature as the great actor, and
would make us see a drunken man as well ; but we
doubt whether he could have conceived that unmatch-
able scene in Antony and Cleopatra, where the tipsiness
of Lepidus pervades the whole metaphysical no less
than the physical part of the triumvir. If his sym
pathies bore any proportion to his instinct for catching
those traits which are the expression of character, but
not character itself, we might have had a great historian
in him instead of a history-painter. But that which is
a main element in Mr. Carlyle's talent, and does perhaps
more than anything else to make it effective, is a defect
CARLYLE. 137
of his nature. The cynicism which renders him so en
tertaining precludes him from any just conception of
men and their motives, and from any sane estimate of
the relative importance of the events which concern
them. We remember a picture of Hamon's, where be
fore a Punch's theatre are gathered the wisest of man
kind in rapt attention. Socrates sits on a front bench,
absorbed in the spectacle, and in the corner stands Dante
making entries in his note-book. Mr. Carlyle as an
historian leaves us in somewhat such a mood. The
world is a puppet-show, and when we have watched the
play out, we depart with a half-comic consciousness of
the futility of all human enterprise, and the ludicrous-
ness of all man's action and passion on the stage of the
world. Simple, kindly, blundering Oliver Goldsmith
was after all wiser, and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and
not less immortal, is a demonstration of the perennial
beauty and heroism of the homeliest human nature.
The cynical view is congenial to certain moods, and is so
little inconsistent with original nobleness of mind, that
it is not seldom the acetous fermentation of it ; but it
is the view of the satirist, not of the historian, and takes
in but a narrow arc in the circumference of truth.
Cynicism in itself is essentially disagreeable. It is the
intellectual analogue of the truffle ; and though it may
be very well in giving a relish to thought for certain
palates, it cannot supply the substance of it. Mr. Car-
lyle's cynicism is not that polished weariness of the out-
sides of life which we find in Ecclesiastes. It goes much
deeper than that to the satisfactions, not of the body or
the intellect, but of the very soul itself. It vaunts
itself; it is noisy and aggressive. What the wise master
ptits into the mouth of desperate ambition, thwarted of
the fruit of its crime, as the fitting expression of pas
sionate sophistry, seems to have become an article of his
creed. With him
138 CARLYLE.
" Life is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
He goes about with his Diogenes dark-lantern, professing
to seek a man, but inwardly resolved to find a monkey.
He loves to flash it suddenly on poor human nature in
some ridiculous or degrading posture. He admires still,
or keeps affirming that he admires, the doughty, silent,
hard-working men who, like Cromwell, go honestly about
their business ; but when we come to his later examples,
we find that it is not loyalty to duty or to an inward
ideal of high-mindedness that he finds admirable in
them, but a blind unquestioning vassalage to whomso
ever it has pleased him to set up for a hero. He would
fain replace the old feudalism with a spiritual counter
part, in which there shall be an obligation to soul-service.
He who once popularized the word flunkey by ringing
the vehement changes of his scorn upon it, is at last
forced to conceive an ideal flunkeyism to squire the
hectoring Don Belianises of his fancy about the world.
Failing this, his latest theory of Divine government
seems to be the cudgel. Poets have sung all manner of
vegetable loves ; Petrarch has celebrated the laurel,
Chaucer the daisy, and Wordsworth the gallows-tree ; it
remained for the ex-pedagogue of Ecclefechan to become
the volunteer laureate of the rod, and to imagine a
world created and directed by a divine Dr. Busby. We
cannot help thinking that Mr. Carlyle might have
learned something to his advantage by living a few years
in the democracy which he scoffs at as heartily a priori
as if it were the demagogism which Aristophanes derided
from experience. The Hero, as Mr. Carlyle understands
him, was a makeshift of the past ; and the ideal of man
hood is to be found hereafter in free communities, where
the state shall at length sum up and exemplify in itself
CARLYLE. 139
ftll those qualities which poets were forced to imagine
and typify because they could not find them in the
actual world.
In the earlier part of his literary career, Mr. Carlyle
was the denouncer of shams, the preacher up of sincer
ity, manliness, and of a living faith, instead of a dron
ing ritual. He had intense convictions, and he made
disciples. With a compass of diction unequalled by any
other public performer of the time, ranging as it did
from the unbooked freshness of the Scottish peasant to
the most far-sought phrase of literary curiosity, with
humor, pathos, and eloquence at will, it was no wonder
that he found eager listeners in a world longing for a
sensation, and forced to put up with the West-End
gospel of " Pelham." If not a profound thinker, he had
what was next best, he felt profoundly, and his cry
came out of the depths. The stern Calvinism of his
early training was rekindled by his imagination to the
old fervor of Wishart and Brown, and became a new
phenomenon as he reproduced it subtilized by German
transcendentalism and German culture. Imagination,
if it lays hold of a Scotchman, possesses him in the old
demoniac sense of the word, and that hard logical
nature, if the Hebrew fire once gets fair headway in it,
burns unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But to
utilize these sacred heats, to employ them, as a literary
man is always tempted, to keep the domestic pot a-boil
ing, is such a thing possible? Only too possible, wo
fear; and Mr. Carlyle is an example of it. If the lan
guid public long for a sensation, the excitement of
making one becomes also a necessity of the successful
author, as the intellectual nerves grow duller and the
old inspiration that came unbidden to the bare garret
grows shier and shier of the comfortable parlor. As ho
himself said thirty years ago of Edward Irving, " Un-
140 CARLYLE.
consciously, for the most part in deep unconsciousness,
there was now the impossibility to live neglected, to
walk on the quiet paths where alone it is well with us.
Singularity must henceforth succeed singularity.
foulest Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Ap
plause ! madness is in thee and death ; thy end is
Bedlam and the grave." Mr. Carlyle won his first suc
cesses as a kind of preacher in print. His fervor, his
oddity of manner, his pugnacious paradox, drew the
crowd ; the truth, or, at any rate, the faith that under
lay them all, brought also the fitter audience, though
fewer. But the curse was upon him ; he must attract,
he must astonish. Thenceforth he has done nothing
but revamp his telling things ; but the oddity has be
come always odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical.
No very large share of truth falls to the apprehension
of any one man ; let him keep it sacred, and beware of
repeating it till it turn to falsehood on his lips by be
coming ritual. Truth always has a bewitching savor of
newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that
original sweetness to the tongue ; but alas for him who
would make the one a substitute for the other ! We
seem to miss of late in Mr. Carlyle the old sincerity.
He has become the purely literary man, less concerned
about what he says than about how he shall say it to
best advantage. The Muse should be the companion,
not the guide, says he whom Mr. Carlyle has pronounced
"the wisest of this generation." What would be a
virtue in the poet is a vice of the most fatal kind in the
teacher, and, alas that we should say it ! the very Draco
of shams, whose code contained no penalty milder than
capital for the most harmless of them, has become at
last something very like a sham himself. Mr. Carlyle
continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness, but no
longer a voice with any earnest conviction behind it
CARLYLE. 141
Hearing him rebuke us for being humbugs and impos
tors, we are inclined to answer, with the ambassador of
Philip II., when his master reproached him with for
getting siibstance in ceremony, " Your Majesty forgets
that you are only a ceremony yourself." And Mr. Car-
lyle's teaching, moreover, if teaching we may call it,
belongs to what the great German, whose disciple he
is, condemned as the "literature of despair." An apostle
to the gentiles might hope for some fruit of his preach
ing; but of what avail an apostle who shouts his
message down the mouth of the pit to poor lost souls,
whom he can positively assure only that it is impossible
to get out 1 Mr. Carlyle lights up the lanterns of his
Pharos after the ship is already rolling between the
tongue of the sea and the grinders of the reef. It is
very brilliant, and its revolving flashes touch the crests
of the breakers with an awful picturesqtieness ; but in
so desperate a state of things, even Dr. Syntax might
be pardoned for being forgetful of the picturesque. The
Toryism of Scott sprang from love of the past ; that of
Carlyle is far more dangerously infectious, for it is logi
cally deduced from a deep disdain of human nature.
Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an old king
sitting at the gate of his palace to judge his people in
the calm sunshine of that past which never existed out
side a poet's brain. It is the sweetest of waking dreams,
this of absolute power and perfect wisdom in one su
preme ruler; but it is as pure a creation of human
want and weakness, as clear a witness of mortal limita
tion and incompleteness, as the shoes of swiftness, the
cloak of darkness, the purse of Fortunatus, and the
elixir vitce. It is the natural refuge of imaginative tem
peraments impatient of our blunders and shortcomings,
and, given a complete man, all would submit to the
divine right of his despotism. But alas ! to every the
142 CARLYLE.
most fortunate human birth hobbles up that malign fairy
who has been forgotten, with her fatal gift of imperfec
tion ! So far as our experience has gone, it has been the
very opposite of Mr. Carlyle's. Instead of finding men
disloyal to their natural leader, nothing has ever seemed
to us so touching as the gladness with which they follow
him, when they are sure they have found him at last.
But a natural leader of the ideal type is not to be looked
for nisi dignus vindice nodus. The Divine Forethought
had been cruel in furnishing one for every petty occa
sion, and thus thwarting in all inferior men that price
less gift of reason, to develop which, and to make it one
with free-will, is the highest use of our experience on
earth. Mr. Carlyle was hard bestead and very far gone
in his idolatry of mere pluck, when he was driven to
choose Friedrich as a hero. A poet and Mr. Carlyle
is nothing else is unwise who yokes Pegasus to a pro
saic theme which no force of wing can lift from the dull
earth. Charlemagne would have been a wiser choice,
far enough in the past for ideal treatment, more mani
festly the Siegfried of Anarchy, and in his rude way the
refounder of that empire which is the ideal of despotism
in the Western world.
Friedrich was doubtless a remarkable man, but surely
very far below any lofty standard of heroic greatness.
He was the last of the European kings who could look
upon his kingdom as his private patrimony ; and it was
this estate of his, this piece of property, which he so
obstinately and successfully defended. He had no idea
of country as it was understood by an ancient Greek or
Roman, as it is understood by a modern Englishman or
American ; and there is something almost pitiful in see
ing a man of genius like Mr. Carlyle fighting painfully
over again those battles of the last century which settled
nothing but the continuance of the Prussian monarchy.
CARLYLE. 143
while he saw only the " burning of a dirty chimney " in
the war which a great people was waging under his very
eyes for the idea of nationality and orderly magistrature,
and which fixed, let us hope forever, a boundary-line on
the map of history and man's advancement toward self-
conscious and responsible freedom. The true historical
genius, to our thinking is that which can see the nobler
meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is
he who detects the divine in the casual ; and we some
what suspect the depth of his insight into the past, who
cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that dis
guise in which it always visits us. Shall we hint to Mr.
Carlyle that a man may look on an heroic age, as well as
an heroic master, with the eyes of a valet, as misappre-
ciative certainly, though not so ignoble ]
What Goethe says of a great poet, that he must be a
citizen of his age as well as of his country, m,ay be said
inversely of a great king. He should be a citizen of his
country as well as of his age. Friedrich was certainly
the latter in its fullest sense ; whether he was, or could
have been, the former, in any sense, may be doubted.
The man who spoke and wrote French in preference
to his mother-tongue, who, dying when Goethe was
already drawing toward his fortieth year, Schiller toward
his thirtieth, and Lessing had been already five years in
his grave, could yet see nothing but barbarism in Ger
man literature, had little of the old Teutonic fibre in his
nature. The man who pronounced the Nibelungen Lied
not worth a pinch of priming, had little conception of
the power of heroic traditions in making heroic men, and
especially in strengthening that instinct made up of so
many indistinguishable associations which we call love
of country. Charlemagne, when he caused the old songs
of his people to be gathered and written down, showed a
truer sense of the sources of national feeling and a
144 CARLYLE.
deeper political insight. This want of sympathy points
to the somewhat narrow limits of Friedrich's nature.
In spite of Mr. Carlyle's adroit statement of the case,
and the whole book has an air of being the plea of
a masterly advocate in mitigation of sentence, we feel
that his hero was essentially hard, narrow, and selfish.
His popularity will go for little with any one who has
studied the trifling and often fabulous elements that
make up that singular compound. A bluntness of speech,
a shabby uniform, a frugal camp equipage, a timely
familiarity, may make a man the favorite of an army or
a nation, above all, if he have the knack of success.
Moreover, popularity is much more easily won from
above downward, and is bought at a better bargain by
kings and generals than by other men. We doubt if
Friedrich would have been liked as a private person, or
even as an unsuccessful king. He apparently attached
very few people to himself, fewer even than his brutal
old Squire AVestern of a father. His sister Wilhelmina
is perhaps an exception. We say perhaps, for we do not
know how much the heroic part he was called on to
play had to do with the matter, and whether sisterly
pride did not pass even with herself for sisterly affection.
Moreover she was far from him ; and Mr. Carlyle waves
aside, in his generous fashion, some rather keen com
ments of hers on her brother's character when she visited
Berlin after he had become king. Indeed, he is apt
to deal rather contemptuously with all adverse criticism
of his hero. We sympathize with his impulse in this re
spect, agreeing heartily as we do in Chaucer's scorn of
those who " gladlie demen to the baser end" in such
matters. But we are not quite sure if this be a safe
method with the historian. He must doubtless be the
friend of his hero if he would understand him, but he
must be more the friend of truth if he would understand
CARLYLE. 145
history. Mr. Carlylc's passion for truth is intense,
as befits his temper, but it is that of a lover for his
mistress. He would have her all to himself, and hus
a lover's conviction that no one is able, or even fit, to
appreciate her but himself. He does well to despise the
tittle-tattle of vulgar minds, but surely should not ig
nore all testimony on the other side. For ourselves, we
think it not unimportant that Goethe's friend Knebel, a
man not incapable of admiration, and who had served a
dozen years or so as an officer of Friedrich's guard,
should have bluntly called him " the tyrant."
Mr. Carlyle's history traces the family of his hero
down from its beginnings in the picturesque chiaro-scuro
of the Middle Ages. It was an able and above all a
canny house, a Scotch version of the word able, which
implies thrift and an eye to the main chance, the said
main chance or chief end of man being altogether of
this world. Friedrich, inheriting this family faculty in
full measure, was driven, partly by ambition, partly by
necessity, to apply it to war. He did so, with the
success to be expected where a man of many expedients
has the good luck to be opposed by men with few. He
adds another to the many proofs that it is possible to be
a great general without a spark of that divine fire which
we call genius, and that good fortune in war results from
the same prompt talent and unbending temper which
lead to the same result in the peaceful professions.
Friedrich had certainly more of the temperament of
genius than Maryborough or Wellington ; but not to go
beyond modern instances, he does not impress us with
the massive breadth of Napoleon, nor attract us with
the climbing ardor of Turenne. To compare him with
Alexander or Caesar were absurd. The kingship that
was in him, and which won Mr. Carlyle to be his biogra
pher, is that of will merely, of rapid and relentless
7 J
146 CARLYLE.
command. For organization he had a masterly talent j
but he could not apply it to the arts of peace, both be
cause he wanted experience and because the rash decision
of the battle-field will not serve in matters which are
governed by natural laws of growth. He seems, indeed,
to have had a coarse, soldier's contempt for all civil dis
tinction, altogether unworthy of a wise king, or even
of a prudent one. He confers the title of Hofrath on
the husband of a woman with whom his General Wai-
rave is living in what Mr. Carlyle justly calls " bnitish
polygamy," and this at Walrave's request, on the ground
that " a general's drab ought to have a handle to her
j:ame." Mr. Carlyle murmurs in a mild parenthesis that
" we rather regret this " ! (Vol. III. p. 559.) This is
his usual way of treating unpleasant matters, sidling by
with a deprecating shrug of the shoulders. Not that
he ever wilfully suppresses anything. On the contrary,
there is no greater proof of his genius than the way in
which, while he seems to paint a character with all its
disagreeable traits, he contrives to win our sympathy for
it, nay, almost our liking. This is conspicuously true
of his portrait of Friedrich's father ; and that he does
not succeed in making Friedrich himself attractive is a
strong argument with us that the fault is in the subject
and not the artist.
The book, we believe, has been comparatively unsuc
cessful as a literary venture. Nor do we wonder at it.
It is disproportionately long, and too much made up of
those descriptions of battles to read which seems even
more difficult than to have won the victory itself, more
disheartening than to have suffered the defeat. To an
American, also, the warfare seemed Liliputian in the
presence of a conflict so much larger in its proportions
and significant in its results. The interest, moreover,
flags decidedly toward the close, where the reader cannot
CARLYLE. 147
help feeling that the author loses breath somewhat pain
fully under the effort of so prolonged a course. Mr.
Carlyle has evidently devoted to his task a labor that
may be justly called prodigious. Not only has he sifted
all the German histories and memoirs, but has visited
every battle-field, and describes them with an eye for
country that is without rival among historians. The
book is evidently an abridgment of even more abundant
collections, and yet as it stands the matter overburdens
the work. It is a bundle of lively episodes rather than
a continuous narrative. In this respect it contrasts
oddly with the concinnity of his own earlier Life of
Schiller. But the episodes are lively, the humor and
pathos spring from a profound nature, the sketches of
character are masterly, the seizure of every picturesque
incident infallible, and the literary judgments those of a
thorough scholar and critic. - There is, of course, the
usual amusing objurgation of Dryasdust and his rubbish-
heaps, the usual assumption of omniscience, and the
usual certainty of the lively French lady of being al
ways in the right ; yet we cannot help thinking that a
little of Dryasdust's plodding exactness would have saved
Foucniet eleven years of the imprisonment to which Mr.
Carlyle condemns him, would have referred us to St.
Simon rather than to Voltaire for the character of the
brothers Belle-He, and would have kept clear of a
certain ludicrous etymology of the name Antwerp, not
to mention some other trifling slips of the like nature.
In conclusion, after saying, as honest critics must, that
" The History of Friedrich II. called Frederick the
Great " is a book to be read in with more satisfaction
than to be read through, after declaring that it is open
to all manner of criticism, especially in point of moral
purpose and tendency, we must admit with thankful
ness, that it has the one prime merit of being the work
148 CARLYLE.
of a man who has every quality of a great poet except
that supreme one of rhythm which shapes both matter
and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where
it is good, it is good as only genius knows how to be.
With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the
greatest of epic poets since Homer. Without it, to
modulate and harmonize and bring parts into their
proper relation, he is the most amorphous of humorists,
the most shining avatar of whim the world has ever seen.
Beginning with a hearty contempt for shams, he has
come at length to believe in brute force as the only
reality, and has as little sense of justice as Thackeray
allowed to women. We say brute force because, though
the theory is that this force should be directed by the
supreme intellect for the time being, yet all inferior wits
are treated rather as obstacles to be contemptuously
shoved aside than as ancillary forces to be conciliated
through their reason. But, with all deductions, he re
mains the profoundest critic and the most dramatic imagi
nation of modern times. Never was there a more striking
example of that ingenium perfervidum long ago said to be
characteristic of his countrymen. His is one of the
natures, rare in these latter centuries, capable of rising
to a white heat ; but once faii'ly kindled, he is like a
three-decker on fire, and his shotted guns go off, as the
glow reaches them, alike dangerous to friend or foe.
Though he seems more and more to confound material
with moral success, yet there is always something whole
some in his unswerving loyalty to reality, as he under
stands it. History, in the true sense, he does not and
cannot write, for he looks on mankind as a herd without
volition, and without moral force ; but such vivid pic
tures of events, such living conceptions of character, we
find nowhere else in prose. The figures of most histo
rians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole sub'
CARLYLE. 149
stance runs out through any hole that criticism may
tear in them, but Carlyle's are so real in comparison,
that, if you prick them, they bleed. He seems a little
wearied, here and there, in his Friedrich, with the mul
tiplicity of detail, and does his filling-in rather shabbily ;
but he still remains in his own way, like his hero, the
Only, and such episodes as that of Voltaire would make
the fortune of any other writer. Though not the safest
of guides in politics or practical philosophy, his value as
an inspirer and awakener cannot be over-estimated. It
is a power which belongs only to the highest order of
minds, for it is none but a divine fire that can so kindle
and irradiate. The debt due him from those who lis
tened to the teachings of his prime for revealing to them
what sublime reserves of power even the humblest may
find in manliness, sincerity, and self-reliance, can be paid
with nothing short of reverential gratitude. As a puri
fier of the sources whence our intellectual inspiration is
drawn, his influence has been second only to that of
Wordsworth, if even to his.
rpHERE have been many painful crises since the in>
-*- patient vanity of South Carolina hurried ten pros
perous Commonwealths into a crime whose assured ret
ribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the
nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had
summoned but could not control, when no thoughtful
American opened his morning paper without dreading to
find that he had no longer a country to love and honor.
Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks
were beginning to be felt, there would still be enough
square miles of earth for elbow-room ; but that ineffable
sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct and
tradition, which swells every man's heart and shapes his
thought, though perhaps never present to his conscious
ness, would be gone from it, leaving it common earth
and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops from
it, but that ideal harvest of priceless associations would
be reaped no longer ; that fine virtue which sent up
messages of courage and security from every sod of
it would have evaporated beyond recall. We should be
irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced to splice
the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new con
ditions chance might leave dangling for us.
We confess that we had our doubts at first whether
the patriotism of our people were not too narrowly pro
vincial to embrace the proportions of national peril
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 151
We felt an only too natural distrust of immense public
meetings and enthusiastic cheers.
That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm
with which the war was entered-on, that it should follow
soon, and that the slackening of public spirit should
be proportionate to the previous over-tension, might well
be foreseen by all who had studied human nature .or
history. Men acting gregariously are always in ex
tremes ; as they are one moment capable of higher
courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser depression,
and it is often a matter of chance whether numbers shall
multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does de
ception lead more surely to distrust of men, than self-
deception to suspicion of principles. The only faith that
wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that
which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp
mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material
for the orator, but the statesman needs something more
durable to work in, must be able to rely on the delib
erate reason and consequent firmness of the people, with
out which that presence of mind, no less essential in
times of moral than of material peril, will be wanting at
the critical moment. Would this fervor of the Free
States hold out ] Was it kindled by a just feeling of the
value of constitutional liberty 1 Had it body enough to
withstand the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses,
delays 1 Had our population intelligence enough to
comprehend that the choice was between order and anar
chy, between the equilibrium of a government by law
and the tussle of misrule by pronuntiamiento ? Could a
war be maintained without the ordinary stimulus of
hatred and plunder, and with the impersonal loyalty of
principle ] These were serious questions, and with no
precedent to aid in answering them.
At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occa-
152 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
sion for the most anxious apprehension. A President
known to be infected with the political heresies, and
Suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the Southern
conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will not
say of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as
the representative of a party whose leaders, with long
training in opposition, had none in the conduct of affairs;
an empty treasury was called on to supply resources
beyond precedent in the history of finance ; the trees
were yet growing and the iron unmined with which a
navy was to be built and armored ; officers without dis
cipline were to make a mob into an army ; and, above
all, the public opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced
with every vague hint and every specious argument of
despondency by a powerful faction at home, was either
contemptuously sceptical or actively hostile. It would
be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter element
of disintegration and discouragement among a people
where every citizen at home, and every soldier in the
field, is a reader of newspapers. The pedlers of rumor
in the North were the most effective allies of the re
bellion. A nation can be liable to no more insidious
treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly its
electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the
community, till the excited imagination makes every
real danger loom heightened with its unreal double.
And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties,
the problem to be solved by our civil war was so vast.
both in its immediate relations and its future conse
quences ; the conditions of its solution were so intricate
and so greatly dependent on incalculable and uncontrol
lable contingencies ; so many of the data, whether for
hope or fear, were, from their novelty, incapable of
arrangement under any of the categories of historical
precedent, that there were moments of crisis when the
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 153
firmest believer in the strength and sufficiency of the
democratic theory of government might well hold his
breath in vague apprehension of disaster. Our teachers
of political philosophy, solemnly arguing from the pre
cedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city,
whose long periods of aristocracy were broken now and
then by awkward parentheses of mob, had always taught
us that democracies were incapable of the sentiment of
loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reach
ing conceptions ; were absorbed in material interests ; im
patient of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint ;
had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but
centrifugal ; were always on the verge of civil war, and
slunk at last into the natural almshouse of bankrupt
popular government, a military despotism. Here was
indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew democ
racy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but
merely from books, and America only by the report of
some fellow-Briton, who, having eaten a bad dinner or
lost a carpet-bag here, had written to the Times demand
ing redress, and drawing a mournful inference of demo
cratic instability. Nor were men wanting among our
selves who had so steeped their brains in London
literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European cul
ture, and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan
breadth of view, and who, owing all they had and all
they were to democracy, thought it had an air of high-
breeding to join in the shallow epicedium that our bub
ble had burst.
But beside any disheartening influences which might
affect the timid or the despondent, there were reasons
enough of settled gravity against any over-confidence of
hope. A war which, whether we consider the expanse
of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field,
or the reach of the principles involved, may fairly be
154 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
reckoned the most momentous of modern times was
to be waged by a people divided at home, unnerved by
fifty years of peace, under a chief magistrate without ex
perience and without reputation, whose every measure
was sure to be cunningly hampered by a jealous and
unscrupulous minority, and who, while dealing with un
heard-of complications at home, must soothe a hostile
neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war.
All this was to be done without warning and without
preparation, while at the same time a social revolution
was to be accomplished in the political condition of four
millions of people, by softening the prejudices, allaying
the fears, and gradually obtaining the co-operation, of
their unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were an
occasion when the heightened imagination of the histo
rian might see Destiny visibly intervening in human
affairs, here was a knot worthy of her shears. Never,
perhaps, was any system of government tried by so con
tinuous and searching a strain as ours during the last
. three years ; never has any shown itself stronger ; and
never could that strength be so directly traced to the
virtue and intelligence of the people, to that general
enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion
possible only under the influence of a political framework
like our own. We find it hard to understand how even
a foreigner should be blind to the grandeur of the com
bat of ideas that has been going on here, to the heroic
energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving
that it knows how much dearer greatness is than mere
power ; and we own that it is impossible for us to con
ceive the mental and moral condition of the American
who does not feel his spirit braced and heightened by
being even a spectator of such qualities and achieve
ments. That a steady purpose and a definite aim have
been given to the jarring forces which, at the beginning
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 155
of the war, spent themselves in the discussion of schemes
which could only become operative, if at all, after the
war was over ; that a popular excitement has been
slowly intensified into an earnest national will ; that
a somewhat impracticable moral sentiment has been
made the unconscious instrument of a practical moral
end ; that the treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of
rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have been made not
only useless for mischief, but even useful for good ; that
the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the horrors
of civil conflict has been prevented from complicating a
domestic with a foreign war ; all these results, any
one of which might suffice to prove greatness in a ruler,
have been mainly due to the good sense, the good-
humor, the sagacity, the large-mindedness, and the un
selfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind for
tune, as it seemed, had lifted from the crowd to the
most dangerous and difficult eminence of modern times.
It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the
native metal of a man is tested ; it is by the sagacity to
see, and the fearless honesty to admit, whatever of truth
there may be in an adverse opinion, in order more con
vincingly to expose the fallacy that lurks behind it, that
a reasoner at length gains for his mere statement of a
fact the force of argument ; it is by a wise forecast
which allows hostile combinations to go so far as by the
inevitable reaction to become elements of his own power,
that a politician proves his genius for state-craft ; and
especially it is by so gently guiding public sentiment
that he seems to follow it, by so yielding doubtful points
that he can be firm without seeming obstinate in essen
tial ones, and thus gain the advantages of compromise
without the weakness of concession ; by so instinctively
comprehending the temper and prejudices of a people as
to make them gradually conscious of the superior wisdom
156 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
of his freedom from temper and prejudice, it is by
qualities such as these that a magistrate shows himself
worthy to be chief in a commonwealth of freemen. And
it is for qualities such as these that we firmly believe
History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the most prudent
of statesmen and the most successful of rulers. If we
wish to appreciate him, we have only to conceive the in
evitable chaos in which we should now be weltering, had
a weak man or an unwise one been chosen in his stead.
" Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, " without
brother behind it " ; and this is, by analogy, true of an
elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical
emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of
prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent in
terest, while the new man must slowly and painfully
create all these out of the unwilling material around
him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness
of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular ten
dencies and instinctive sympathy with the national char
acter. Mr. Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and
exceptional difficulty. Long habit had accustomed the
American people to the notion of a party in power, and
of a President as its creature and organ, while the more
vital fact, that the executive for the time being repre
sents the abstract idea of government as a permanent
principle superior to all party and all private interest,
had gradually become unfamiliar. They had so long
seen the public policy more or less directed by views of
party, and often even of personal advantage, as to bf
ready to suspect the motives of a chief magistrate com
polled, for the first time in our history, to feel himself
the head and hand of a great nation, and to act upon
the fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicists,
that the first duty of a government is to defend and
maintain its own existence. Accordingly, a powerful
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 157
weapon seemed to be put into the hands of the opposi
tion by the necessity under which the administration
found itself of applying this old truth to new relations.
Nor were the opposition his only nor his most dangerous
opponents.
The Republicans had carried the country upon an
issue in which ethics were more directly and visibly
mingled with politics than usual. Their leaders were
trained to a method of oratory which relied for its ef
fect rather on the moral sense than the understanding.
Their arguments were drawn, not so much from experi
ence as from general principles of right and wrong.
When the war came, their system continued to be ap
plicable and effective, for here again the reason of the
people was to be reached and kindled through their sen
timents. It was one of those periods of excitement,
gathering, contagious, universal, which, while they last,
exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere
words country, human rights, democracy, a meaning and
a force beyond that of sober and logical argument.
They were convictions, maintained and defended by the
supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran in
and roused those primary instincts that make their lair
in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called
the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable
something which may be, according to circumstances,
the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But
enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into
anything better than cant, and phrases, when once
the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power
has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning
which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds.
Among the lessons taught by the French Revolution
there is none sadder or more striking than this, that you
may make everything else out of the passions of men
158 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
except a political system that will work, and that there
is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sin
cerity formulated into dogma. It is always demoralizing
to extend the domain of sentiment over questions where
it has no legitimate jurisdiction ; and perhaps the
severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a ten
dency of his own supporters which chimed with his own
private desires while wholly opposed to his convictions
of what would be wise policy.
The change which three years have brought about ia
too remarkable to be passed over without comment, too
weighty in its lesson not to be laid to heart. Never did
a President enter upon office with less means at his
command, outside his own strength of heart and steadi
ness 'of understanding, for inspiring confidence in the
people, and so winning it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln.
All that was known of him was that he was a good
stump-speaker, nominated for his availability, that is,
because he had no history, and chosen by a party with
whose more extreme opinions he was not in sympathy.
It might well be feared that a man past fifty, against
whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could rake up
no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of charac
ter, in decision of principle, in strength of will ; that
a man who was at best only the representative of a
party, and who yet did not fairly represent even that,
woiild fail of political, much more of popular, support.
And certainly no one ever entered upon office with so
few resources of power in the past, and so many mate
rials of weakness in the present, as Mr. Lincoln. Even
in that half of the Union which acknowledged him as
President, there was a large, and at that time dangerous
minority, that hardly admitted his claim to the office,
and even in the party that elected him there was also a
large minority that suspected him of being secretly a
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 159
communicant with the church of Laodicea. All that he
did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one
side ; all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof
of lukewarmness and backsliding by the other. Mean
while he was to carry on a truly colossal war by means
of both ; he was to disengage the country from diplo
matic entanglements of unprecedented peril undisturbed
by the help or the hinderance of either, and to win from
the crowning dangers of his administration, in the con
fidence of the people, the means of his safety and their
own. He has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of
our Presidents since Washington has stood so firm in
the confidence of the people as he does after three years
of stormy administration.
Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and rightly
so. He laid down no programme which must compel
him to be either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron
theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they
rose, or else be useless to his ends. He seemed to have
chosen Mazarin's motto, Le temps et moi. The moi, to
be sure, was not very prominent at first ; but it has
grown more and more so, till the world is beginning to
be persuaded that it stands for a character of marked
individuality and capacity for affairs. Time was his
prime-minister, and, we began to think, at one period,
his general-in-chief also. At first he was so slow that
he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress
but in blowing up the engine ; then he was so fast, that
he took the breath away from those who think there is
no getting on safely while there is a spark of fire under
the boilers. God is the only being who has time enough ;
but a pi'udent man, who knows how to seize occasion,
can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs.
Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to iis in reviewing his career,
though we have sometimes in our impatience thought
160 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
otherwise, has always waited, as a wise man should, till
the right moment brought up all his reserves. Semper
nocuit differre paratis, is a sound axiom, but the really
efficacious man will also be sure to know when he is not
ready, and be firm against all persuasion and reproach
till he is.
One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms
made on Mr. Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree
with him in principle, that the chief object of a states
man should be rather to proclaim his adhesion to certain
doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by quietly ac
complishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more
unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire,
nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic
scheme of policy that admits of no pliability for contin
gencies. True, there is a popular image of an impossi
ble He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies
of mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding
necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful
pliancy of fiction ; but in real life we commonly find
that the men who control circumstances, as it is called,
are those who have learned to allow for the influence of
their eddies, and have the nerve to turn them to account
at the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous task has
been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids,
making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch oppor
tunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he
did not think it his duty to run straight at all hazards,
but cautiously to assure himself with his setting-pole
where the main current was, and keep steadily to that.
He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill
and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last.
A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel, might
be drawn between Mr. Lincoln and one of the most
striking figures in modern history, Henry IV. of
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 161
France. The career of the latter may be more pictur
esque, as that of a daring captain always is ; but in all
its vicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than that
sudden change, as by a rub of Aladdin's lamp, from the
attorney's office in a country town of Illinois to the helm
of a great nation in times like these. The analogy
between the characters and circumstances of the two
men is in many respects singularly close. Succeeding to
a rebellion rather than a crown, Henry's chief material
dependence was the Huguenot party, whose doctrines
sat upon him with a looseness distasteful certainly, if
not suspicious, to the more fanatical among them. King
only in name over the greater part of France, and with
his capital barred against him, it yet gradually became
clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic party
that he was the only centre of order and legitimate
authority round which France could reorganize itself.
While preachers who held the divine right of kings made
the churches of Paris ring with declamations in favor of
democracy rather than submit to the heretic dog of a
Bearnois, much as our soi-disant Democrats have
lately been preaching the divine right of slavery, and
denouncing the heresies of the Declaration of Indepen
dence, Henry bore both parties in hand till he was
convinced that only one course of action could possibly
combine his own interests and those of France. Mom-
while the Protestants believed somewhat doubtfully that
he was theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhat doubtfully
that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned aside
remonstrance, advice, and curiosity alike with a jest
or a proverb (if a little high, he liked them none the
worse), joking continually as his manner was. We have
seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously compared to Sancho
Panza by persons incapable of appreciating one of the
deepest pieces of wisdom in the profoundest romance
162 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
ever written; namely, that, while Don Quixote was
incomparable in theoretic and ideal statesmanship, San-
cho, with his stock of proverbs, the ready money of
human experience, made the best possible practical
governor. Henry IV. was as full of wise saws and
modern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this
was the thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly
earnest man, around whom the fragments of France
were to gather themselves till she took her place again
as a planet of the first magnitude in the European sys
tem. In one respect Mr. Lincoln was more fortunate
than Henry. However some may think him wanting in
zeal, the most fanatical can find no taint of apostasy
in any measure of his, nor can the most bitter charge
him with being influenced by motives of personal in
terest. The leading distinction between the policies of
the two is one of circumstances. Henry went over to
the nation ; Mr. Lincoln has steadily drawn the nation
over to him. One left a united France ; the other, we
hope and believe, will leave a reunited America. We
leave our readers to trace the further points of difference
and resemblance for themselves, merely suggesting a
general similarity which has often occurred to us. One
only point of melancholy interest we will allow ourselves
to touch upon. That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor
elegant, we learn from certain English tourists who
would consider similar revelations in regard to Queen
Victoria as thoroughly American in their want of bien-
seance. It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his fit
ness for the high place he so worthily occupies ; but he
is certainly as fortunate as Henry in the matter of good
looks, if we may trust contemporary evidence. Mr.
Lincoln has also been reproached with Americanism by
some not unfriendly British critics ; but, with all defer
ence, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 163
it, or see in it any reason why he should govern Ameri
cans the less wisely.
People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked,
but we are glad that in this our true war of indepen
dence, which is to free us forever from the Old World,
we have had at the head of our affairs a man whom
America made, as God made Adam, out of the very
earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to show us
how much truth, how much magnanimity, and how much
statecraft await the call of opportunity in simple man
hood when it believes in the justice of God and the
worth of man. Conventionalities are all very well in
their proper place, but they shrivel at the touch of
nature like stiibble in the fire. The genius that sways
a nation by its arbitrary will seems less august to us
than that which multiplies and reinforces itself in the
instincts and convictions of an entire people. Autocracy
may have something in it more melodramatic than this,
but falls far short of it in human value and interest.
Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of
improvised statesmanship, even if we did not believe
politics to be a science, which, if it cannot always com
mand men of special aptitude and great powers, at least
demands the long and steady application of the best
powers of such men as it can command to master even
its first principles. It is curious, that, in a country
which boasts of its intelligence, the theory should be so
generally held that the most complicated of human con
trivances, and one which every day becomes more com
plicated, can be worked at sight by any man able to
talk for an hour or two without stopping to think.
Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a
ready-made ruler. But no case could well be less in
point ; for, besides that he was a man of such fair-mind
edness as is always the raw material of wisdom, he had
164 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
in his profession a training precisely the opposite of that
to which a partisan is subjected. His experience as a
lawyer compelled him not only to see that there is a
principle underlying every phenomenon in human affairs,
but that there are always two sides to every question,
both of which must be fully understood in order to un
derstand either, and that it is of greater advantage to
an advocate to appreciate the strength than the weakness
of his antagonist's position. Nothing is more remarka
ble than the unerring tact with which, in his debate with
Mr. Douglas, he went straight to the reason of the ques
tion nor have we ever had a more striking lesson in
political tactics than the fact, that, opposed to a man
exceptionally adroit in using popular prejudice and big
otry to his purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in ap
pealing to those baser motives that turn a meeting of
citizens into a mob of barbarians, he should yet have won
his case before a jury of the people. Mr. Lincoln was
as far as possible from an impromptu politician. His
wisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as
of men ; his sagacity resulted from a clear perception
and honest acknowledgment of difficulties, which enabled
him to see that the only durable triumph of political
opinion is based, not on any abstract right, but upon so
much of jxistice, the highest attainable at any given
moment in human affairs, as may be had in the balance
of mutual concession. Doubtless he had an ideal, but it
was the ideal of a practical statesman, to aim at the
best, and to take the next best, if he is lucky enough
to get even that. His slow, but singularly masculine,
intelligence taught him that precedent is only another
name for embodied experience, and that it counts for
even more in the guidance of communities of men than
in that of the individual life. He was not a man who
held it good public economy to pull down on the mere
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 165
chance of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln's faith in God
was qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the
wisdom of man. Perhaps it was his want of self-confi
dence that more than anything else won him the unlim
ited confidence of the people, for they felt that there
would be no need of retreat from any position he had
deliberately taken. The cautious, but steady, advance
of his policy during the war was like that of a Roman
army. He left behind him a firm road on which public
confidence could follow ; he took America with him
where he went ; what he gained he occupied, and his
advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness
of his genius was its distinction. His kingship was con
spicuous by its workday homespun. Never was ruler so
absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it ; for he was
the incarnate common-sense of the people. With all
that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness touched
whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, there
was no trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action.
He seems to have had but one rule of conduct, always
that of practical and successful politics, to let himself
be guided by events, when they were sure to bring him
out where he wished to go, though by what seemed to
unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at
the desirable, a longer road.
Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is
by degrees to accommodate the conduct of communities to
ethical laws, and to subordinate the conflicting self-inter
ests of the day to higher and more permanent concerns.
But it is on the understanding, and not on the senti
ment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based.
Voltaire's saying, that " a consideration of petty circum
stances is the tomb of great things," may be true of
individual men, but it certainly is not true of govern
ments. It is by a multitude of such considerations, each
166 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that the framers
of policy can alone divine what is practicable and there
fore wise. The imputation of inconsistency is one to
which every sound politician and every honest thinker
must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and
the dead alone never change their opinion. The course
of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers,
avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of con-'
cession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men
soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking
the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency,
yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited
from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting
open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce
through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It
is loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine
the small and opposing motives of selfish men to accom
plish them ; it is the anchored cling to solid principles of
duty and action, which knows how to swing with the
tide, but is never carried away by it, that we demand
in public men, and not sameness of policy, or a conscien
tious persistency in what is impracticable. For the im
practicable, however theoretically enticing, is always po
litically unwise, sound statesmanship being the applica
tion of that prudence to the public business which is the
safest guide in that of private men.
No doubt slavery was the most delicate and embarrass
ing question with which Mr. Lincoln was called on to deal,
and it was one which no man in his position, whatever his
opinions, could evade ; for, though he might withstand
the clamor of partisans, he must sooner or later yield to
the persistent importunacy of circumstances, which thrust
the problem upon him at every turn and in every shape.
It has been brought against us as an accusation
abroad, and repeated here by people who measure their
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 167
country rather by what is thought of it than by what
it is, that our war has not been distinctly and avow
edly for the extinction of slavery, but a war rather for
the preservation of our national power and greatness, in
which the emancipation of the negro has been forced
upon us by circumstances and accepted as a necessity.
We are very far from denying this ; nay, we admit that
it is so far true that we were slow to renounce our con
stitutional obligations even toward those who had ab
solved us by their own act from the letter of our duty.
We are speaking of the government which, legally in
stalled for the whole country, was bound, so long as
it was possible, not to overstep the limits of orderly pre
scription, and could not, without abnegating its own
very nature, take the lead in making rebellion an ex
cuse for revolution. There were, no doubt, many ardent
and sincere persons who seemed to think this as simple
a thing to do as to lead off a Virginia reel. They forgot
what should be forgotten least of all in a system like
ours, that the administration for the time being repre
sents not only the majority which elects it, but the
minority as well, a minority in this case powerful,
and so little ready for emancipation that it was opposed
even to war. Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as
general agent of an antislavery society, but President of
the United States, to perform certain functions exactly
defined by law. Whatever were his wishes, it was no
less duty than policy to mark out for himself a line of
action that would not further distract the country, by
raising before their time questions which plainly wo\ild
soon enough compel attention, and for which every day
was making the answer more easy.
Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new
Sphinx, or be devoiired. Though Mr. Lincoln's policy
in this critical affair has not been such as to satisfy
168 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
those who demand an heroic treatment for even the
most trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat
according to their cloth, unless they can borrow the
scissors of Atropos, it has been at least not unworthy of
the long-headed king of Ithaca. Mr. Lincoln had the
choice of Bassanio offered him. Which of the three
caskets held the prize that was to redeem the fortunes
of the country 1 There was the golden one whose showy
speciousness might have tempted a vain man ; the silver
of compromise, which might have decided the choice of
a merely acute one ; and the leaden, dull and homely-
looking, as prudence always is, yet with something
about it sure to attract the eye of practical wisdom.
Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decision perhaps longer than
seemed needful to those on whom its awful responsibility
was not to rest, but when he made it, it was worthy of
his cautious but sure-footed understanding. The moral
of the Sphinx-riddle, and it is a deep one, lies in the
childish simplicity of the solution. Those who fail in
guessing it, fail because they are over-ingenious, and
cast about for an answer that shall suit their own notion
of the gravity of the occasion and of their own dignity,
rather than the occasion itself.
In a matter which must be finally settled by public
opinion, and in regard to which the ferment of prejudice
and passion on both sides has not yet subsided to that
equilibrium of compromise from which alone a sound
public opinion can result, it is proper enough foi the
private citizen to press his own convictions with all pos
sible force of argument and persuasion ; but the popular
magistrate, whose judgment must become action, and
whose action involves the whole country, is bound to
wait till the sentiment of the people is so far advanced
toward his own point of view, that what he does shall
find support in it, instead of merely confusing it with
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 169
new elements of division. It was not unnatural that
men earnestly devoted to the saving of their country,
and profoundly convinced that slavery was its only real
enemy, should demand a decided policy round which all
patriots might rally, and this might have been the
wisest course for an absolute ruler. But in the then
unsettled state of the public mind, with a large party
decrying even resistance to the slaveholders' rebellion as
not only unwise, but even unlawful ; with a majority,
perhaps, even of the would-be loyal so long accustomed
to regard the Constitution as a deed of gift conveying to
the South their own judgment as to policy and instinct
as to right, that they were in doubt at first whether
their loyalty were due to the country or to slavery ; and
with a respectable body of honest and influential men
who still believed in the possibility of conciliation, Mr.
Lincoln judged wisely, that, in laying down a policy in
deference to one party, he should be giving to the other
the very fulcrum for which their disloyalty had been
waiting.
It behooved a clear-headed man in his position not to
yield so far to an honest indignation against the brokers
of treason in the North as to lose sight of the materials
for misleading which were their stock in trade, and
to forget that it is not the falsehood of sophistry which
is to be feared, but the grain of truth mingled with
it to make it specious, that it is not the knavery of
the leaders so much as the honesty of the followers they
may seduce, that gives them power for evil. It was
especially his duty to do nothing which might help the
people to forget the true cause of the war in fruitless
disputes about its inevitable consequences.
The doctrine of State rights can be so handled by an
adroit demagogue as easily to confound the distinction
between liberty and lawlessness in the minds of ignorant
170 ABRAHAM LINCOLN,
persons, accustomed always to be influenced by the
sound of certain words, rather than to reflect upon the
principles which give them meaning. For, though Seces
sion involves the manifest absurdity of denying to a
State the right of making war against any foreign power
while permitting it against the United States ; though
it supposes a compact of mutual concessions and guaran
ties among States without any arbiter in case of dissen
sion ; though it contradicts common-sense in assuming
that the men who framed our government did not know
what they meant when they substituted Union for Con
federation ; though it falsifies history, which shows that
the main opposition to the adoption of the Constitution
was based on the argument that it did not allow that
independence in the several States which alone would
justify them in seceding ; yet, as slavery was univer
sally admitted to be a reserved right, an inference could
be drawn from any direct attack upon it (though only in
self-defence) to a natural right of resistance, logical
enough to satisfy minds untrained to detect fallacy, as
the majority of men always are, and now too much dis
turbed by the disorder of the times, to consider that the
order of events had any legitimate bearing on the argu
ment. Though Mr. Lincoln was too sagacious to give
the Northern allies of the Rebels the occasion they
desired and even strove to provoke, yet from the begin
ning of the war the most persistent efforts have been
made to confuse the public mind as to its origin and
motives, and to drag the people of the loyal States down
from the national position they had instinctively taken
to the old level of party squabbles and antipathies. The
wholly unprovoked rebellion of an oligarchy proclaim
ing negro slavery the corner-stone of free institutions,
and in the first flush of over-hasty confidence venturing
to parade the logical sequence of their leading dogma,
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 171
" that slavery is right in principle, and has nothing to
do with difference of complexion," has been represented
as a legitimate and gallant attempt to maintain the true
principles of democracy. The rightful endeavor of an
established government, the least onerous that ever
existed, to defend itself against a treacherous attack on
its very existence, has been cunningly made to seem the
wicked effort of a fanatical clique to force its doctrines
on an oppressed population.
Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet con
vinced of the danger and magnitude of the crisis, was
endeavoring to persuade himself of Union majorities at
the South, and to carry on a war that was half peace in
the hope of a peace that would have been all war,
while he was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law,
under some theory that Secession, however it might
absolve States from their obligations, could not escheat
them of their claims under the Constitution, and that
slaveholders in rebellion had alone among mortals the
privilege of having their cake and eating it at the same
time, the enemies of free government were striving
to persuade the people that the war was an Abolition
crusade. To rebel without reason was proclaimed as
one of the rights of man, while it was carefully kept
out of sight that to suppress rebellion is the first duty
of government. All the evils that have come upon the
country have been attributed to the Abolitionists, though
it is hard to see how any party can become permanently
powerful except in one of two ways, either by the
greater truth of its principles, or the extravagance of
the party opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state,
riding safe at her constitutional moorings, suddenly
engulfed by a huge kraken of Abolitionism, rising from
unknown depths and graspintr it with slimy tentacles, is
to look at the natural history of the matter with the
172 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
eyes of Pontoppidan. To believe that the leaders in
the Southern treason feared any danger from Abolition
ism, would be to deny them ordinary intelligence, though
there can be little doubt that they made use of it to
stir the passions and excite the fears of their deluded
accomplices. They rebelled, not because they thought
slavery weak, but because they believed it strong
enough, not to overthrow the government, but to get
possession of it ; for it becomes daily clearer that they
used rebellion only as a means of revolution, and if they
got revolution, though not in the shape they looked for,
is the American people to save them from its conse
quences at the cost of its own existence 1 The election
of Mr. Lincoln, which it was clearly in their power to
prevent had they wished, was the occasion merely, and
not the cause, of their revolt. Abolitionism, till within
a year or two, was the despised heresy of a few earnest
persons, without political weight enough to carry the
election of a parish constable ; and their cardinal prin
ciple was disunion, because they were convinced that
within the Union the position of slavery was impregna
ble. In spite of the proverb, great effects do not
follow from small causes, that is, disproportionately
small, but from adequate causes acting under certain
required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak
with that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had
paid all costs from its slender strong-box, may serve for
a child's wonder ; but the real miracle lies in that divine
league which bound all the forces of nature to the ser
vice of the tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Every
thing has been at work for the past ten years in the
cause of antislavery, but Garrison and Phillips have been
far less successful propagandists than the slaveholders
themselves, with the constantly-growing arrogance of
their pretensions and encroachments. They have forced
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 173
the question upon the attention of every voter in the
Free States, by defiantly putting freedom and democracy
on the defensive. But, even after the Kansas outrages,
there was no wide-spread desire on the part of the North
to commit aggressions, though there was a growing
determination to resist them. The popular unanimity
in favor of the war three years ago was but in small
measure the result of antislavery sentiment, far less of
any zeal for abolition. But every month of the war,
every movement of the allies of slavery in the Free
States, has been making Abolitionists by the thousand.
The masses of any people, however intelligent, are very
little moved by abstract principles of humanity and
justice, until those principles are interpreted for them
by the stinging commentary of some infringement upon
their own rights, and then their instincts and passions,
once aroused, do indeed derive an incalculable reinforce
ment of impulse and intensity from those higher ideas,
those sublime traditions, which have no motive political
force till they are allied with a sense of immediate per
sonal wrong or imminent peril. Then at last the stars
in their courses begin to fight against Sisera. Had any
one doubted before that the rights of human nature are
unitary, that oppression is of one hue the world over,
no matter what the color of the oppressed, had any
one failed to see what the real essence of the contest
was, the efforts of the advocates of slavery among
ourselves to throw discredit upon the fundamental
axioms of the Declaration of Independence and the
radical doctrines of Christianity, could not fail to sharp
en his eyes.
While every day was bringing the people nearer to the
conclusion which all thinking men saw to be inevitable
from the beginning, it was wise in Mr. Lincoln to leave
the shaping of his policy to events. In this country,
174 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
where the rough and ready understanding of the people
is sure at last to be the controlling power, a pi'ofound
common-sense is the best genius for statesmanship.
Hitherto the wisdom of the President's measures has
been justified by the fact that they have always resulted
in more firmly uniting public opinion. One of the
things particularly admirable in the public utterances
of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity,
which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment
of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal
character. There must be something essentially noble
in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of con
fidential ease without losing respect, something very
manly in one who can break through the etiquette of
his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason
and intelligence of those who have elected him. No
higher compliment was ever paid to a nation than the
simple confidence, the fireside plainness, with which Mr.
Lincoln always addresses himself to the reason of the
American people. This was, indeed, a true democrat,
who grounded himself on the assumption that a democ
racy can think. " Come, let us reason together about
this matter," has been the tone of all his addresses to
the people ; and accordingly we have never had a chief
magistrate who so won to himself the love and at the
same time the judgment of his countrymen. To us,
that simple confidence of his in the right-mindedness of
his fellow-men is very touching, and its success is as
strong an argument as we have ever seen in favor of the
theory that men can govern themselves. He never
appeals to any vulgar sentiment, he never alludes to the
humbleness of his origin ; it probably never occurred to
him, indeed, that there was anything higher to start
from than manhood ; and he put himself on a level with
those he addressed, not by going down to them, but
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 175
only by taking it for granted that they had brains and
would come up to a common ground of reason. In an
article lately printed in "The Nation," Mr. Bayard
Taylor mentions the striking fact, that in the foulest
dens of the Five Points he found the portrait of Lincoln.
The wretched population that makes its hive there
threw all its votes and more against him, and yet paid
this instinctive tribute to the sweet humanity of his
nature. Their ignorance sold its vote and took its
money, but all that was left of manhood in them recog
nized its saint and martyr.
Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying, "This is
my opinion, or my theory," but, " This is the conclusion
to which, in my judgment, the time has come, and to
which, accordingly, the sooner we come the better for
us." His policy has been the policy of public opinion
based on adequate discussion and on a timely recogni
tion of the influence of passing events in shaping the
features of events to come.
One secret of Mr. Lincoln's remarkable success in
captivating the popular mind is undoubtedly an un
consciousness of self which enables him, though under
the necessity of constantly using the capital /, to do it
without any suggestion of egotism. There is no single
vowel which men's mouths can pronounce with such
difference of effect. That which one shall hide away,
as it were, behind the substance of his discourse, or, if
he bring it to the front, shall use merely to give an
agreeable accent of individuality to what he says, another
shall make an offensive challenge to the self-satisfaction
of all his hearers, and an unwarranted intrusion upon
each man's sen^se of personal importance, irritating every
pore of his vanity, like a dry northeast wind, to a goose-
flesh of opposition and hostility. Mr. Lincoln has never
studied Quinctilian ; but he has, in the earnest sirn-
176 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
plicity and unaffected Americanism of his own character,
one art of oratory worth all the rest. He forgets him
self so entirely in his object as to give his / the sympa
thetic and persuasive effect of We with the great body
of his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all
the rough-edged process of his thought as it goes along,
yet arriving at his conclusions with an honest kind of
every-day logic, he is so eminently our representative
man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people
were listening to their own thinking aloud. The dig
nity of his thought owes nothing to any ceremonial
garb of words, but to the manly movement that comes
of settled purpose and an energy of reason that knows
not what rhetoric means. There has been nothing of
Cleon, still less of Strepsiades striving to underbid him
in demagogism, to be found in the public utterances of
Mr. Lincoln. He has always addressed the intelligence
of men, never their prejudice, their passion, or their
ignorance.
On the day of his death, this simple Western attor
ney, who according to one party was a vulgar joker,
and whom the doctrinaires among his own supporters
accused of wanting every element of statesmanship,
was the most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this
solely by the hold his good-humored sagacity had
laid on the hearts and understandings of his country
men. Nor was this all, for it appeared that he had
drawn the great majority, not only of his fellow-citizens,
but of mankind also, to his side. So strong and so
persuasive is honest manliness without a single quality
of romance or unreal sentiment to help it ! A civilian
during times of the most captivating military achieve'
ment, awkward, with no skill in the lower technicalities
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 177
of manners, he left behind him a fame beyond that of
any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher than that
of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than
mere breeding. Never before that startled April morn
ing did such multitudes of men shed tears for the depth
of one they had never seen, as if with him a friendly
presence had been taken away from their lives, leaving
them colder and darker. Never was funeral panegyric
so eloquent as the silent look of sympathy which stran
gers exchanged when they met on that day. Their
common manhood had lost a kinsman.
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES
GATES PERC1VAL.
is an interesting and in many respects instruc-
-_ tive book. Mr. Ward has done his work, as is
fitting, in a loving spirit ; and if he over-estimates both
what Percival was and what he did, he enables us to
form our own judgment by letting him so far as possible
speak for himself. The book gives a rather curious
picture of what the life of a man of letters is likely to
be in a country not yet ripe for literary production,
especially if he be not endowed with the higher qualities
which command and can wait for that best of all suc
cesses which comes slowly. In a generation where
everybody can write verses, and where certain modes of
thought and turns of phrase have become so tyrannous
that it is as hard to distinguish between the produc
tions of one minor poet and another as among those of
so many Minnesingers or Troubadours, there is a de
mand for only two things, for what chimes with the
moment's whim of popular sentiment and is forgotten
when that has changed, or for what is never an anachro
nism, because it slakes or seems to slake the eternal thirst
of our nature for those ideal waters that glimmer before
us and still before us in ever-renewing mirage. Percival
met neither of these conditions. With a nature singu
larly unplastic, unsympathetic, and self-involved, he was
incapable of receiving into his own mind the ordinary
emotions of men and giving them back in music ; and
LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 179
with a lofty conception of the object and purposes of
poesy, he had neither the resolution nor the power
which might have enabled him to realize it. He offers
as striking an example as coxild be found of the poetic
temperament unballasted with those less obvious quali
ties which make the poetic faculty. His verse carries
every inch of canvas that diction and sentiment can
crowd, but the craft is cranky, and we miss that deep-
grasping keel of reason which alone can steady and give
direction. His mind drifts, too waterlogged to answer
the helm, and in his longer poems, like " Prometheus,"
half the voyage is spent in trying to make up for a lee
way which becomes at last irretrievable. If he had a
port in view when he set out, he seems soon to give up
all hope of ever reaching it ; and wherever we open the
log-book, we find him running for nowhere in particular,
as the wind happens to lead, or lying-to in the merest
gale of verbiage. The truth is, that Percival was led to
the writing of verse by a sentimental desire of the mind,
and not by that concurring instinct of all the faculties
which is a self-forgetting passion of the entire man.
Too excitable to possess his subject fully, as a man of
mere talent may often do, he is not possessed by it as
the man of genius is, and seems helplessly striving, the
greater part of the time, to make out what, in the name
of common or uncommon sense, he is after. With all
the stock properties of verse whirling and dancing about
his ears puffed out to an empty show of life, the reader
of much of his blank verse feels as if a mob of well-
draperied clothes-lines were rioting about him in all the
unwilling ecstasy of a thunder-gust.
Percival, living from 1795 to 1856, arrived at man
hood just as the last war with England had come to an
end. Poor, shy, and proud, there is nothing in his
earlier years that might not be paralleled in those of
180 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL.
hundreds of sensitive boys who gradually get the non
sense shaken out of them in the rough school of life.
The length of the schooling needful in his case is what
makes it peculiar. Not till after he was fifty, if even
then, did he learn that the world never takes a man at
his own valuation, and never pays money for what it
does not want, or think it wants. It did not want his
poetry, simply because it was not, is not, and by no con
ceivable power of argument can be made, interesting,
the first duty of every artistic product. Percival, who
would have thought his neighbors mad if they had in
sisted on his buying twenty thousand refrigerators mere
ly because they had been at the trouble of making them,
and found it convenient to turn them into cash, could
never forgive the world for taking this business view of
the matter in his own case. He went on doggedly,
making refrigerators of every possible pattern, and com
forted himself with the thought of a wiser posterity,
which should have learned that the purpose of poetry is
to cool and not to kindle. His "Mind," which is on
the whole perhaps the best of his writings, vies in cold
ness with the writings of his brother doctor, Akenside,
whose " Pleasures of Imagination" are something quite
other than pleasing in reality. If there be here and
there a semblance of pale fire, it is but the reflection of
moonshine upon ice. Akenside is respectable, because
he really had something new to say, in spite of his pom
pous, mouthing way of saying it ; but when Percival
says it over again, it is a little too much. In his more
ambitious pieces, and it is curious how literally the
word " pieces " applies to all he did, he devotes him
self mainly to telling us what poetry ought to be, as if
mankind were not always more than satisfied with any
one who fulfils the true office of poet, by showing them,
with the least possible fuss, what it is. Percival was a
LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 181
professor of poetry rather than a poet, and we are not
surprised at the number of lectures he reads us, when
we learn that in early life he was an excellent demon
strator of anatomy, whose subject must be dead before
his business with it begins. His interest in poetry was
always more or less scientific. He was forever trying
experiments in matter and form, especially the latter.
And these were especially unhappy, because it is plain
that he had no musical ear, or at best a very imperfect
one. His attempts at classical metres are simply un
readable, whether as verse or prose. He contrives to
make even the Sapphic so, which when we read it in
Latin moves featly to our modern accentuation. Let
any one who wishes to feel the difference between ear
and no ear compare Percival's specimens with those in
the same kind of Coleridge, who had the finest metrical
sense since Milton. We take this very experimenting
to be a sufficient proof that Percival's faculty, such as it
was, and we do not rate it highly, was artificial, and not
innate. The true poet is much rather experimented
upon by life and nature, by joy and sorrow, by beauty
and defect, till it be found out whether he have any
hidden music in him that can sing them into an accord
with the eternal harmony which we call (rod.
It is easy to trace the literary influences to which the
mind of Percival was in turn subjected. Early in life
we find a taint of Byronism, which indeed does not
wholly disappear to the last. There is among his poems
" An Imprecation," of which a single stanza will suffice
as a specimen :
" Wrapped in shoots of gory lightning.
While cursed night-hags ring thy knell,
May the arm of vengeance bright'ning,
O'er thee wave the sword of hell ! "
If we could fancy Laura Matilda shut up tipsy in the
182 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMFS GATES 1'ERCIVAL.
watch-house, we might suppose her capable of this me
lodious substitute for swearing. We confess that we
cannot read it without laughing, after learning from Mr.
Ward that its Salmoneus-thunderbolts were launched at
the comfortable little city of Hartford, because the poet
fancied that the inhabitants thereof did not like him or
his verses so much as he himself did. There is some
thing deliciously ludicrous in the conception of night-
hags ringing the orthodox bell of the Second Congrega
tional or First Baptist Meeting-house to summon the
parishioners to witness these fatal consequences of not
reading Percival's poems. Nothing less than the fear
of some such catastrophe could compel the perusal of
the greater part of them. Next to Byron comes Moore,
whose cloying sentimentalism and too facile melody are
recalled by the subject and treatment of very many of
the shorter lyrics of Percival. In "Prometheus" it is
Shelley who is paramount for the time, and Shelley at
his worst period, before his unwieldy abundance of
incoherent words and images, that were merely words
and images without any meaning of real experience to
give them solidity, had been compressed in the stricter
moulds of thought and study. In the blank verse
again, we encounter Wordsworth's tone and sentiment.
These were no good models for Percival, who always
improvised, and who seems to have thought verse the
great distinction between poetry and prose. Percival
got nothing from Shelley but the fatal copiousness which
is his vice, nothing from Wordsworth but that tendency
to preach at every corner about a sympathy with nature
which is not his real distinction, and which becomes a
wearisome cant at second-hand. Shelley and W r ords-
worth are both stilted, though in different ways. Shel
ley wreathed his stilts with flowers; while Wordsworth,
protesting against the use of them as sinful, mounts his
LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 183
solemnly at last, and stalks away conscientiously eschew
ing whatever would serve to hide the naked wood,
nay, was it not Gray's only that were scandalous, and
were not his own, modelled upon those of the sainted
Cowper, of strictly orthodox pattern after all ? Percival,
like all imitators, is caught by the defects of what he
copies, and exaggerates them. With him the stilts are
the chief matter ; and getting a taller pair than either
of his predecessors, he lifts his commonplace upon them
only to make it more drearily conspicuous. Shelley has
his gleams of iinearthly wildfire, Wordsworth is by fits
the most deeply inspired man of his generation ; but
Percival has no lucid interval. He is pertinaciously and
unappeasably dull, as dull as a comedy of Goethe.
He never in his life wrote a rememberable verse. We
should not have thought this of any consequence now,
for we need not try to read him, did not Mr. Ward with
amusing gravity all along assume that he was a great
poet. There was scarce timber enough in him for the
making of a Tiedge or a Hagedorn, both of whom he
somewhat resembles.
Percival came to maturity at an unfortunate time for
a man so liable to self-delusion. Leaving college with so
imperfect a classical training (in spite of the numerous
" testimonials " cited by Mr. Ward) that he was capable
of laying the accent on the second syllable of Pericles,
he seems never to have systematically trained even such
faculty as was in him, but to have gone on to the end
mistaking excitability of brain for wholesome exercise of
thought. The consequence is a prolonged immaturity,
which makes his latest volume, published in 1843, as
crude and as plainly wanting in enduring quality as the
first number of his " Clio." We have the same old com
plaints of neglected genius, as if genius could ever be
neglected so long as it has the perennial consolation of
184 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL.
its own divine society, the same wilted sentiment, the
same feeling about for topics of verse in which he may
possibly find that inspiration from without which the
true poet cannot flee from in himself. These tedious
wailings about heavenly powers suffocating in the heavy
atmosphere of an uncongenial, unrecognizing world, and
Percival is profuse of them, are simply an advertisement
to whoever has ears of some innate disability in the man
who utters them. Heavenly powers know very well how
to take care of themselves. The poor " World," meaning
thereby that small fraction of society which has any
personal knowledge of an author or his affairs, has had
great wrong done it in such matters. It is not, and
never was, the powers of a man that it neglects, it
could not if it would, but his weaknesses, and espe
cially the publication of them, of which it grows weary.
It can never supply any man with what is wanting
in himself, and the attempt to do it only makes bad
worse. If a man can find the proof of his own genius
only in public appreciation, still worse, if his vanity con
sole itself with taking it as an evidence of rare qualities
in himself that his fellow-mortals are unable to see them,
it is all up with him. The " World " resolutely refused
to find Wordsworth entertaining, and it refuses still, on
good grounds ; but the genius that was in him bore up
unflinchingly, would take no denial, got its claim admit
ted on all hands, and impregnated at last the literature
of an entire generation, though luibitans in sicco, if ever
genius did. But Percival seems to have satisfied him
self with a syllogism something like this : Men of genius
are neglected ; the more neglect, the more genius ; I am
altogether neglected, ergo, wholly made up of that
priceless material.
The truth was that he suffered rather from over-
appreciation ; and " when," says a nameless old French*
LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 185
man, " I see a man go up like a rocket, I expect before
long to see the stick come down." The times were
singularly propitious to mediocrity. As in Holland one
had only to
" Invent a shovel and be a magistrate,"
so here to write a hundred blank verses was to be im
mortal, till somebody else wrote a hundred and fifty
blanker ones. It had been resolved unanimously that
we must and would have a national literature. England,
France, Spain, Italy, each already had one, Germany
was getting one made as fast as possible, and Ireland
vowed that she once had one far surpassing them all.
To be respectable, we must have one also, and that
speedily. That we were not yet, in any true sense, a
nation ; that we wanted that literary and social atmos
phere which is the breath of life to all artistic produc
tion; that our scholarship, such as it was, was mostly
of that theological sort which acts like a prolonged
drouth upon the brain ; that our poetic fathers were
Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight, was nothing to the
purpose ; a literature adapted to the size of the coun
try was what we must and would have. Given the
number of square miles, the length of the rivers, the
size of the lakes, and you have the greatness of the lit
erature we were bound to produce without further
delay. If that little dribble of an Avon had succeeded
in engendering Shakespeare, what a giant might we not
look for from the mighty womb of Mississippi ! Physical
Geography for the first time took her rightful place
as the tenth and most inspiring Muse. A glance at the
map would satisfy the most incredulous that she had
done her best for us, and should we be wanting to the
glorious opportunity ] Not we indeed ! So surely as
Franklin invented the art of printing, and Fulton the
steam-engine, we would invent us a great poet in time
186 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL.
to send the news by the next packet to England, and
teach her that we were her masters in arts as well as
arms.
Percival was only too ready to be invented, and he
forthwith produced his bale of verses from a loom capa
ble of turning off a hitherto unheard-of number of yards
to the hour, and perfectly adapted to the amplitude of
our territory, inasmuch as it was manufactured on the
theory of covering the largest surface with the least
possible amount of meaning that would hold words
together. He was as ready te accept the perilous em
prise, and as loud in asserting his claim thereto, as
Sir Kay used to be, and with much the same result.
Our critical journals and America certainly has led
the world in a department of letters which of course
requires no outfit but the power to read and write, gra
tuitously furnished by our public schools received him
with a shout of welcome. Here came the true deliverer
at last, mounted on a steed to which he himself had
given the new name of " Pegasus," for we were to be
original in everything, and certainly blowing his own
trumpet with remarkable vigor of lungs. Solitary en
thusiasts, who had long awaited this sublime avatar,
addressed him in sonnets which he accepted with a
gravity beyond all praise. (To be sure, even Mr. Ward
seems to allow that his sense of humor was hardly equal
to his other transcendent endowments.) Hia path was
strewn with laurel of the native variety, altogether
superior to that of the Old World, at any rate not pre
cisely like it. Verses signed " P.," as like each other as
two peas, and as much like poetry as that vegetable
is like a peach, were watched for in the corner of a news
paper as an astronomer watches for a new planet. There
was never anything so comically unreal since the crown
ing in the Capitol of Messer Francesco Petrarca, Grand
LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 187
Sentimentalist in Ordinary at the Court of King Robert
of Naples. Unhappily, Percival took it all quite seri
ously. There was no praise too ample for the efsy
elasticity of his swallow. He believed himself as gigan
tic as the shadow he cast on these rolling mists of insub
stantial adulation, and life-long he could never make out
why his fine words refused to butter his parsnips for
him, nay, to furnish both parsnips and sauce. While the
critics were debating precisely how many of the prime
qualities of the great poets of his own and preceding
generations he combined in his single genius, and in
what particular respects he surpassed them all, a
point about which he himself seems never to have had
any doubts, the public, which could read Scott and
Byron with avidity, and which was beginning even to
taste Wordsworth, found his verses inexpressibly weari
some. They would not throng and subscribe for a col
lected edition of those works which singly had been too
much for them. With whatever dulness of sense they
may be charged, they have a remarkably keen scent for
tediousness, and will have none of it unless in a tract or
sermon, where, of course, it is to be expected. Percival
never forgave the public ; but it was the critics that he
never should have forgiven, for of all the maggots that
can make their way into the brains through the ears,
there is none so disastrous as the persuasion that you
are a great poet. There is surely something in the con
struction of the ears of small authors which lays them
specially open to the inroads of this pest. It tickles
pleasantly while it cats away the fibre of will, and inca
pacitates a man for all honest commerce with realities.
Unhappily its insidious titillation seems to have born
Percival' s one great pleasure during life.
We began by saying that the book before us was
interesting and instructive ; but we meant that it was so
188 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL.
not so much from any positive merits of its own as by
the lesson which almost every page of it suggests. To
those who have some knowledge of the history of litera
ture, or some experience in life, it is from beginning
to end a history of weakness mistaking great desires for
great powers. If poetry, in Bacon's noble definition of
it, "adapt the shows of things to the desires of the mind,"
sentimentalism is equally skilful in making realities
shape themselves to the cravings of vanity. The theory
that the poet is a being above the world and apart from
it is true of him as an observer only who applies to the
phenomena about him the test of a finer and more spirit
ual sense. That he is a creature divinely set apart from
his fellow-men by a mental organization that makes
them mutually unintelligible to each other, is in flat
contradiction with the lives of those poets universally
acknowledged as greatest. Dante, Shakespeare, Cer
vantes, Calderon, Milton, Moliere, Goethe, in what
conceivable sense is it true of them that they wanted
the manly qualities which made them equal to the
demands of the world in which they lived ] That a poet
should assume, as Victor Hugo used to do, that he is a
reorganizer of the moral world, and that works cunningly
adapted to the popular whim of the time form part of
some mysterious system which is to give us a new heaven
and a new earth, and to remodel laws of art which are
as unchangeable as those of astronomy, can do no very
great harm to any one but the author himself, who will
thereby be led astray from his proper function, and from
the only path to legitimate and lasting success. But
when the theory is carried a step further, and we are
asked to believe, as in Percival's case, that, because
a man can write verses, he is exempt from that inexora
ble logic of life and circumstance to which all other men
ore subjected, and to which it is wholesome for them
LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 189
that they should be, then it becomes mischievous, and
calls for a protest from all those who have at heart the
interests of good morals and healthy literature. It is
the theory of idlers and dilettanti, of fribbles in morals
and declaimers in verse, which a young man of real
power may dally with during some fit of mental indiges
tion, but which when accepted by a mature man, and
carried along with him through life, is a sure mark
of feebleness and of insincere dealing with himself. Per-
cival is a good example of a class of authors unhappily
too numerous in these latter days. In Europe the
natural growth of a world ill at ease with itself and still
nervous with the frightful palpitation of the French
Revolution, they are but feeble exotics in our healthier
air. Without faith or hope, and deprived of that out
ward support in the habitual procession of events and in
the authoritative limitations of thought which in ordi
nary times gives steadiness to feeble and timid intellects,
they are turned inward, and forced, like Hudibras's
sword,
" To eat into themselves, for lack
Of other thing to hew and hack."
Compelled to find within them that stay which had hith
erto been supplied by creeds and institutions, they learned
to attribute to their own consciousness the grandeur
which belongs of right only to the mind of the human
race, slowly endeavoring after an equilibrium between
its desires and the external conditions under which they
are attainable. Hence that exaggeration of the individual,
and depreciation of the social man, which has become the
cant of modern literature. Abundance of such phenom
ena accompanied the rise of what was called Romanti
cism in Germany and France, reacting to some extent
even upon England, and consequently America. The
smaller poets ei'ected themselves into a kind of guild,
190 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL.
into which all were admitted who gave proof of a certain
feebleness of character which rendered them superior to
their grosser fellow-men. It was a society of cripples
undertaking to teach the new generation how to walk.
Meanwhile, the object of their generous solicitude, what
Avith clinging to Mother Past's skirts, and helping itself
by every piece of household furniture it could lay hands
on, learned, after many a tumble, to get on its legs, and
to use them as other generations had done before it.
Percival belonged to this new order of bards, weak in the
knees, and thinking it healthy exercise to climb the peaks
of Dreamland. To the vague and misty views attaina
ble from those sublime summits into his own vast in
terior, his reports in blank verse and otherwise did ample
justice, but failed to excite the appetite of mankind. He
spent his life, like others of his class, in proclaiming him
self a neglected Columbus, ever ready to start on his
voyage when the public would supply the means of
building his ships. Meanwhile, to be ready at a moment's
warning, he packs his mind pellmell like a carpet-bag,
wraps a geologist's hammer in a shirt with a Byron collar,
does up Volney's " Ruins " with an odd volume of Words
worth, and another of Bell's " Anatomy " in a loose sheet
of Webster's Dictionary, jams Moore's poems between the
leaves of Bopp's Grammer, and forgets only such small
matters as combs and brushes. It never seems to have
entered his head that the gulf between genius and its
new world is never too wide for a stout swimmer. Like
all sentimentalists, he reversed the process of nature,
which makes it a part of greatness that it is a simple
thing to itself, however much of a marvel it may be to
other men. He discovered his own genius, as he sup
posed, a thing impossible had the genius been reaL
Donne never wrote a profounder verse than
" Who knows his virtue's name and place, hath none."
LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PEKCIVAL. 191
Percival's life was by no means a remarkable one, ex
cept, perhaps, in the number of chances that seem to
have been offered him to make something of himself,
if anything were possibly to be made. He was iie^er
without friends, never without opportunities, if he could
have availed himself of them. It is pleasant to see
Mr. Ticknor treating him with that considerate kindness
which many a young scholar can remember as shown so
generously to himself. But nothing could help Percival,
whose nature had defeat worked into its very composition.
He was not a real, but an imaginary man. His early
attempt at suicide (as Mr. Ward seems to think it) is
typical of him. He is not the first young man who, when
crossed in love, has spoken of " loupin o'er a linn," nor
will he be the last. But that any one who really meant
to kill himself should put himself resolutely in the way
of being prevented, as Percival did, is hard to believe.
Chateaubriand, the arch sentimentalist of these latter
days, had the same harmless velleity of self-destruction,
enough to scare his sister and so give him a smack of
sensation, but a very different thing from the settled
will which would be really perilous. Shakespeare, always
true to Nature, makes Hamlet dally with the same excit
ing fancy. Alas ! self is the one thing the sentimen
talist never truly wishes to destroy ! One remarkable
gift Percival seems to have had, which may be called
memory of the eye. What he saw he never forgot, and
this fitted him for a good geological observer. How great
his power of combination was, which alone could have
made him a great geologist, we cannot determine. But
he seems to have shown but little in other directions.
His faculty of acquiring foreign tongues we do not value
so highly as Mr. Ward. We have known many other
wise inferior men who possessed it. Indeed, the power
to express the same nothing in ten different languages is
192 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL.
something to be dreaded rather than admired. It gives
a horrible advantage to dulness. The best thing to be
learned from Percival's life is that he was happy for the
first time when taken away from his vague pursuit of the
ideal, and set to practical work.
THOREAU.
WHAT contemporary, if he was in the fighting
period of his life, (since Nature sets limits about
her conscription for spiritual fields, as the state does in
physical warfare,) will ever forget what was somewhat
vaguely called the " Transcendental Movement " of thirty
years ago 1 Apparently set astirring by Carlyle's essays
on the " Signs of the Times," and on "History," the final
and more immediate impulse seemed to be given by
" Sartor Resartus." At least the republication in Boston
of that wonderful Abraham a Sancta Clara sermon on
Lear's text of the miserable forked radish gave the signal
for a sudden mental and moral mutiny. Ecce nunc tern-
pus acceptabile ! was shouted on all hands with every
variety of emphasis, and by voices of every conceivable
pitch, representing the three sexes of men, women, an,d
Lady Mary Wortley Montagues. The nameless eagle of
the tree Ygdrasil was about to sit at last, and wild-eyed
enthusiasts rushed from all sides, each eager to thrust
under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which the new
and fairer Creation was to be hatched in due time. Rc~
deunt Saturnia regna, so far was certain, though in
what shape, or by what methods, was still a matter of
debate. Every possible form of intellectual and physical
dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its proph
ets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its mar
tyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed
9 M
194 THOREAU.
neighbors, and sent forth to illustrate the " feathered
Mercury," as denned by Webster and Worcester. Plain
ness of speech was carried to a pitch that would have
taken away the breath of George Fox ; and even swear
ing had its evangelists, who answered a simple inquiry
after their health with an elaborate ingenuity of impre
cation that might have been honorably mentioned by
Marlborough in general orders. Everybody had a mis
sion (with a capital M) to attend to everybody-else's
business. No brain but had its private maggot, which
must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not
a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (un
less earned by other people), professing to live on the
internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance
of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be
substituted for buttons. Communities were established
where everything was to be common but common-sense.
Men renounced their old gods, and hesitated only whether
to bestow their furloughed allegiance on Thor or Budh.
Conventions were held for every hitherto inconceivable
purpose. The belated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth
Monarchy men, spread like a contagion, rendering its
victims incomprehensible to all Christian men ; whether
equally so to the most distant possible heathen or not
was unexperimented, though many would have sub
scribed liberally that a fair trial might be made. It was
the pentecost of Shinar. The day of utterances repro
duced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and there was
nothing so simple that uncial letters and the style of
Diphilus the Labyrinth could not turn into a riddle.
Many foreign revolutionists out of work added to the
general misunderstanding their contribution of broken
English in every most ingenious form of fracture. All
stood ready at a moment's notice to reform everything
but themselves. The general motto was :
THOREAU. 195
" And we '11 talk with them, too,
And take upon 's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies."
Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds
a humorous lining. We have barely hinted at the comic
side of the affair, for the material was endless. This was
the whistle and trailing fuse of the shell, but there was
a very solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly
explosiveness. Thoughtful men divined it, but the gen
erality suspected nothing. The word " transcendental "
then was the maid of all work for those who could not
think, as " Pre-Raphaelite " has been more recently for
people of the same limited housekeeping. The truth is,
that there was a much nearer metaphysical relation and
a much more distant aesthetic and literary relation be
tween Carlyle and the Apostles of the Newness, as they
were called in New England, than has commonly been
supposed. Both represented the reaction and revolt
against Philisterei, a renewal of the old battle begun in
modern times by Erasmus and Reuchlin, and continued
by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, by
Heine in Germany, and of which Fielding, Sterne, and
Wordsworth in different ways have been the leaders in
England. It was simply a struggle for fresh air, in which,
if the windows could not be opened, there was danger
that panes would be broken, though painted with images
of saints and martyrs. Light colored by these reverend
effigies was none the more respirable for being pictu
resque. There is only one thing better than tradition, and
that is the original and eternal life out of which all tra
dition takes its rise. It was this life which the reformers
demanded, with more or less clearness of consciousness
and expression, life in politics, life in literature, life in
religion. Of what use to import a gospel from Ju<hra,
if we leave behind the soul that made it possible, the God
196 THOREAU.
who keeps it forever real and present 1 Surely Abana
and Pharpar are better than Jordan, if a living faith be
mixed with those waters and none with these.
Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual prog
ress was dead ; New England Puritanism was in like
manner dead ; in other words, Protestantism had made
its fortune and no longer protested; but till Carlyle
spoke out in the Old World and Emerson in the New,
no one had dared to proclaim, Le roi est mart: vive le roi!
The meaning of which proclamation was essentially
this : the vital spirit has long since departed out of this
form once so kingly, and the great seal has been in com
mission long enough ; but meanwhile the soul of man,
from which all power emanates and to which it reverts,
still survives in undiminished royalty; God still sur
vives, little as you gentlemen of the Commission seem
to be aware of it, nay, may possibly outlive the whole
of you, incredible as it may appear. The truth is, that
both Scotch Presbyterianism and New England Puritan
ism made their new avatar in Carlyle and Emerson, the
heralds of their formal decease, and the tendency of the
one toward Authority and of the other toward Indepen
dency might have been prophesied by whoever had
studied history. The necessity was not so much in the
men as in the principles they represented and the tradi
tions which overruled them. The Puritanism of the
past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest
creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some
ideal respects since Shakespeare ; but the Puritanism
that cannot die, the Puritanism that made New England
what it is, and is destined to make America what it
should be, found its voice in Emerson. Though holding
himself aloof from all active partnership in movements
of reform, he has been the sleeping partner who has
supplied a great part of their capital.
THOREAU. 197
The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every
well-read critic must feel at once ; and so is that of
^Eschylus, so is that of Dante, so is that of Montaigne,
so is that of Schiller, so is that of nearly every one
except Shakespeare ; but there is a gauge of height no
less than of breadth, of individuality as well as of
comprehensiveness, and, above all, there is the standard
of genetic power, the test of the masculine as distin
guished from the receptive minds. There are staminate
plants in literature, that make no fine show of fruit, but
without whose pollen, quintessence of fructifying gold,
the garden had been barren. Emerson's mind is emphat
ically one of these, and there is no man to whom our
aesthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan revolt had
made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politically
independent, but we were still socially and intellectually
moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable
and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of
blue water. No man young enough to have felt it can
forget, or cease to be grateful for, the mental and moral
nudge which he received from the writings of his high-
minded and brave-spirited countryman. That we agree
with him, or that he always agrees with himself, is aside
from the question ; but that he arouses in us something
that we are the better for having awakened, whether
that something be of opposition or assent, that he
speaks always to what is highest and least selfish in us,
few Americans of the generation younger than his own
would be disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi
Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, some thirty years
ago, was an event without any former parallel in our
literary annals, a scene^ to be always treasured in the
memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration.
What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clus
tering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval,
198 THOREAU.
what grim silence of foregone dissent ! It was our Yan
kee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard par
allel to the last public appearances of Schelling.
We said that the Transcendental Movement was the
protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and
an escape from forms and creeds which compressed
rather than expressed it. In its motives, its preaching,
and its results, it differed radically from the doctrine of
Carlyle. The Scotchman, with all his genius, and his
humor gigantesque as that of Rabelais, has grown shrill
er and shriller with years, degenerating sometimes into a
common scold, and emptying very unsavory vials of wrath
on the head of the sturdy British Socrates of worldly
common-sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much
more exclusively to self-culture and the independent de
velopment of the individual man. It seemed to many
almost Pythagorean in its voluntary seclusion from com
monwealth affairs. Both Carlyle and Emerson were
disciples of Goethe, but Emerson in a far truer sense ;
and while the one, from his bias toward the eccentric,
has degenerated more and more into mannerism, the
other has clarified steadily toward perfection of style,
exquisite fineness of material, unobtrusive lowness of tone
and simplicity of fashion, the most high-bred garb of
expression. Whatever may be said of his thought,
nothing can be finer than the delicious limpidness of his
phrase. If it was ever questionable whether democracy
could develop a gentleman, the problem has been affirma
tively solved at last. Carlyle, in his cynicism and his
admiration of force in and for itself, has become at last
positively inhuman ; Emerson, reverencing strength,
seeking the highest outcome of Jhe individual, has found
that society and politics are also main elements in the
attainment of the desired end, and has drawn steadily
manward and worldward. The two men represent re-
THOREAU. 199
spectively those grand personifications in the drama of
yEschylus, Bm and Kpdros.
Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage by the
Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remark
able ; and it is something eminently fitting that his
posthumous works should be offered us by Emerson, for
they are strawberries from his own garden. A singu
lar mixture of varieties, indeed, there is ; alpine, some
of them, with the flavor of rare mountain air ; others
wood, tasting of sunny roadside banks or shy openings
in the forest ; and not a few seedlings swollen hugely by
culture, but lacking the fine natural aroma of the more
modest kinds. Strange books these are of his, and in
teresting in many ways, instructive chiefly as showing
how considerable a crop may be raised on a comparative
ly narrow close of mind, and how much a man may
make of his life if he will assiduously follow it, though
perhaps never truly finding it at last.
We have just been renewing our recollection of Mr.
Thoreau's writings, and have read through his six vol
umes in the order of their production. We shall try to
give an adequate report of their impression upon us
both as critic and as mere reader. He seems to us to
have been a man with so high a conceit of himself that
he accepted without questioning, and insisted on our
accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as
virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he indolent,
he finds none of the activities which attract or employ
the rest of mankind worthy of him. Was he wanting
in the qualities that make success, it is success that
is contemptible, and not himself that lacks persistency
and purpose. Was he poor, money was an unmixed
evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he condemns doin.ij
good as one of the weakest of superstitions. To be of
use was with him the most killing bait of the wily
200 THOREAU.
tempter Uselessness. He had no faculty of generaliza
tion from outside of himself, or at least no experience
which would supply the material of such, and he makes
his own whim the law, his own range the horizon of the
universe. He condemns a world, the hollowness of
whose satisfactions he had never had the means of test
ing, and we recognize Apemantus behind the mask of
Timon. He had little active imagination ; of the recep
tive he had much. His appreciation is of the highest
quality ; his critical power, from want of continuity of
mind, very limited and inadequate. He somewhere cites
a simile from Ossian, as an example of the superiority
of the old poetry to the new, though, even were the
historic evidence less convincing, the sentimental melan
choly of those poems should be conclusive of their mod-
ernness. He had no artistic power such as controls a
great work to the serene balance of completeness, but
exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences
and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short bits of verse for
the expression of a detached thought, sentiment, or
image. His works give one the feeling of a sky full of
stars, something impressive and exhilarating certainly,
something high overhead and freckled thickly with spots
of isolated brightness ; but whether these have any
mutual relation with each other, or have any concern
with our mundane matters, is for the most part matter
of conjecture, astrology as yet, and not astronomy.
It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterwards
became, that he was not by nature an observer. He
only saw the things he looked for, and was less poet
than naturalist. Till he built his Walden shanty, he
did not know that the hickory grew in Concord. Till
he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent
wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most country
boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as
THOREAU. 201
a new discovery, though one should have thought that
its gold-dust of blowing pollen might have earlier drawn
his eye. Neither his attention nor his genius was of
the spontaneous kind. He discovered nothing. He
thought everything a discovery of his own, from moon
light to the planting of acorns and nuts by squirrels.
This is a defect in his character, but one of his chief
charms as a writer. Everything grows fresh under his
hand. He delved in his mind and nature ; he planted
them with all manner of native and foreign seeds, and
reaped assiduously. He was not merely solitary, he
would be isolated, and succeeded at last in almost per
suading himself that he was autochthonous. He valued
everything in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusive
ly his own. He complains in " Walden," that there is
no one in Concord with whom he could talk of Oriental
literature, though the man was living within two miles
of his hut who had introduced him to it. This intel
lectual selfishness becomes sometimes almost painful in
reading him. He lacked that generosity of " communi
cation " which Johnson admired in Burke. De Quincey
tells us that Wordsworth was impatient when any one
else spoke of mountains, as if he had a peculiar property
in them. And we can readily understand why it should
be so : no one is satisfied with another's appreciation of
his mistress. Hut Thoreau seems to have prized a lofty
way of thinking (often we should be inclined to call it a
remote one) not so much because it was good in itself as
because he wished few to share it with him. It seems
now and then as if he did not seek to lure others up
" above our lower region of turmoil," but to leave his
>wn name cut on the mountain peak as the first climber.
This itch of originality infects his thought and style.
To bo misty is IK it to be mystic. He turns common
places end for end, and fancies it makes something new
202 THOREAU.
of them. As we walk down Park Street, our eye is
caught by Dr. Windship's dumb-bells, one of which
bears an inscription testifying that it is the heaviest
ever put up at arm's length by any athlete ; and in
reading Mr. Thoreau's books we cannot help feeling as
if he sometimes invited our attention to a particular
sophism or paradox as the biggest yet maintained by
any single writer. He seeks, at all risks, for perversity
of thought, and revives the age of concetti while he
fancies himself going back to a pre-classical nature. " A
day," he says, "passed in the society of those Greek
sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon,
would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed
cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-
beds." It is not so much the True that he loves as the
Out-of-the-Way. As the Brazen Age shows itself in
other men by exaggeration of phrase, so in him by ex
travagance of statement. He wishes always to trump
your suit and to ruff when you least expect it. Do you
love Nature because she is beautiful 1 He will find a
better argument in her ugliness. Are you tired of the
artificial man 1 He instantly dresses you up an ideal in
a Penobscot Indian, and attributes to this creature of
his otherwise-mindedness as peculiarities things that are
common to all woodsmen, white or red, and this simply
because he has not studied the pale-faced variety.
This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could
have a patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man can
not escape in thought, any more than he can in language,
from the past and the present. As no one ever invents
a word, and yet language somehow grows by general
contribution and necessity, so it is with thought. Mr.
Thoreau seems to us to insist in public on going back to
flint and steel, when there is a match-box in his pocket
which he knows very well how to use at a pinch. Origt
THOREAU. 203
nality consists in power of digesting and assimilating
thought, so that they become part of our life and sub
stance. Montaigne, for example, is one of the most
original of authors, though he helped himself to ideas in
every direction. But they turn to blood and coloring in
his style, and give a freshness of complexion that is for
ever charming. In Thoreau much seems yet to be
foreign and unassimilated, showing itself in symptoms
of indigestion. A preacher-up of Nature, we now and
then detect under the surly and stoic garb something of
the sophist and the sentimental] zer. We are far from
implying that this was conscious on his part. But it is
much easier for a man to impose on himself when he
measures only with himself. A greater familiarity with
ordinary mwi would have done Thoreau good, by show
ing him how many fine qualities are common to the race.
The radical vice of his theory of life was, that he con
founded physical with spiritual remoteness from men.
One is far enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep
himself clear of their weaknesses. He is not so truly
withdrawn as exiled, if he refuse to share in their
strength. " Solitude," says Cowley, " can be well fitted
and set right but upon a very few persons. They must
have enough knowledge of the world to see the vanity
of it, and enough virtue to despise all vanity." It is
a morbid self-consciousness that pronounces the world
of men empty and worthless before trying it, the
instinctive evasion of one who is sensible of some
innate weakness, and retorts the accusation of it before
any has made it but himself. To a healthy mind,
the world is a constant challenge of opportunity. Mr.
Thoreau had not a healthy mind, or he would not
have been so fond of prescribing. His whole life
was a search for the doctor. The old mystics had a
wiser sense of what the world was worth. They or-
204 THOREAU.
dained a severe apprenticeship to law, and even ceremo
nial, in order to the gaining of freedom and mastery over
these. Seven years of service for Rachel were to be
rewarded at last with Leah. Seven other years of faith
fulness with her were to win them at last the true bride
of their souls. Active Life was with them the only path
to the Contemplative.
Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was
a sorry logician. Himself an artist in rhetoric, he con
founds thought with style when he undertakes to speak
of the latter. He was forever talking of getting away
from the world, but he must be always near enough to
it, nay, to the Concord corner of it, to feel the impres
sion he makes there. He verifies the shrewd remark of
Sainte-Beuve, " On touche encore a son temps et tres-
fort, meme quand on le repousse." This egotism of his
is a Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion which keeps him
in the public eye. The dignity of man is an excellent
thing, but therefore to hold one's self too sacred and
precious is the reverse of excellent. There is something
delightfully absurd in six volumes addressed to a world
of such " vulgar fellows " as Thoreau affirmed his fellow-
men to be. We once had a glimpse of a genuine solitary
who spent his winters one hundred and fifty miles be
yond all human communication, and there dwelt with
his rifle as his only confidant. Compared with this, the
shanty on Walden Pond has something the air, it must
be confessed, of the Hermitage of La Chevrette. We do
not believe that the way to a true cosmopolitanism
carries one into the woods or the society of musquashes.
Perhaps the narrowest provincialism is that of Self ; that
of Kleinwinkel is nothing to it. The natural man, like
the singing birds, comes out of the forest as inevitably
as the natural bear and the wildcat stick there. To seek
to be natural implies a consciousness that forbids all
THOREAU. 205
naturalness forever. It is as easy and no easier to
be natural in a salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at
it, for what we call unnaturalness always has its spring
in a man's thinking too much about himself. " It is
impossible," said Turgot, " for a vulgar man to be sim
ple."
We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimental-
ism about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more
symptom of the general liver-complaint. To a man of
wholesome constitution the wilderness is well enough
for a mood or a vacation, but not for a habit of life.
Those who have most loudly advertised their passion for
seclusion and their intimacy with nature, from Petrarch
down, have been mostly sentimentalists, unreal men,
misanthropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy
suspicion of themselves by professing contempt for their
kind. They make demands on the world in advance
proportioned to their inward measure of their own merit,
and are angry that the world pays only by the visible
measure of performance. It is true of Rousseau, the
modern founder of the sect, true of Saint Pierre, hia
intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, his grandchild,
the inventor, we might almost say, of the primitive forest,
and who first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree
from natural decay in the windless silence of the woods.
It is a very shallow view that affirms trees and rocks to
be healthy, and cannot see that men in communities
are just as true to the laws of their organization and
destiny ; that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but
not the fool and the knave ; that would shun politics
because of -its demagogues, and snuiF up the stench of
the obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more
wonderful, more various, more sublime in man than
in any other of her works, and the wisdom that is gained
by commerce with men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare
206 THOREAU.
gained it, or with one's own soul among men, as Dante,
is the most delightful, as it is the most precious, of all.
In outward nature it is still man that interests us, and
we care far less for the things seen than the way in
which poetic eyes like Wordsworth's or Thoreau's see
them, and the reflections they cast there. To hear the
to-do that is often made over the simple fact that a man
sees the image of himself in the outward world, one
is reminded of a savage when he for the first time
catches a glimpse of himself in a looking-glass. " Ven
erable child of Nature," we are tempted to say, " to
whose science in the invention of the tobacco-pipe, to
whose art in the tattooing of thine undegenerate hide
not yet enslaved by tailors, we are slowly striving to
climb back, the miracle thou beholdest is sold in my
unhappy country for a shilling ! " If matters go on as
they have done, and everybody must needs blab of all
the favors that have been done him by roadside and
river-brink and woodland walk, as if to kiss and tell
were no longer treachery, it will be a positive refresh
ment to meet a man who is as superbly indifferent to
Nature as she is to him. By and by we shall have John
Smith, of No. -12 -12th Street, advertising that he
is not the J. S. who saw a cow-lily on Thursday last, as
he never saw one in his life, would not see one if he
could, and is prepared to prove an alibi on the day
in question.
Solitary communion with Nature does not seem to
have been sanitary or sweetening in its influence on
Thoreau's character. On the contrary, his letters show
him more cynical as he grew older. While he studied
with respectful attention the minks and woodchucks,
his neighbors, he looked with utter contempt on the
august drama of destiny of which his country was the
scene, and on which the curtain had already risen. He
THOREAU. 207
was converting us back to a state of nature " so elo
quently," as Voltaire said of Rousseau, "that he almost
persuaded us to go on all fours," while the wiser fates
were making it possible for us to walk erect for the first
time. Had he conversed more with his fellows, his
sympathies would have widened with the assurance that
his peculiar genius had more appreciation, and his writ
ings a larger circle of readers, or at least a warmer one/
than he dreamed of. We have the highest testimony *
to the natural sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his
temper, and in his books an equally irrefragable one to
the rare quality of his mind. He was not a strong
thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind strikes us
as cold and wintry in its purity. A light snow has
fallen everywhere in which he seems to come on the
track of the shier sensations that would elsewhere leave
no trace. We think greater compression would have done
more for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us
as we read so much. Trifles are recorded with an over-
minute punctuality and conscientiousness of detail. He
records the state of his personal thermometer thirteen
times a day. We cannot help thinking sometimes of the
man who
" Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats
To learn but catechisms and alphabets
Of unconcerning things, matters of fact,"
and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, that
" when the owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice
at the edge of a hole." We could readily part with
some of his affectations. It was well enough for Py
thagoras to ,say, once for all, "When I was Euphorbus
at the siege of Troy " ; not so well for Thoreau to trav
esty it into " When I was a shepherd on the plains of
* Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the " Excur
sions."
208 THOREAU.
Assyria." A naive thing said over again is anything but
naive. But with every exception, there is no writing
comparable with Thoreau's in kind, that is comparable
with it in degree where it is best ; where it disengages
itself, that is, from the tangle'd roots and dead leaves of
a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and smooth
and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is grand
and lovely in both worlds.
George Sand says neatly, that " Art is not a study of
positive reality," (actuality were the fitter word,) "but a
seeking after ideal truth." It would be doing very inad
equate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that
this ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in
larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-wor
ship. He took nature as the mountain-path to an ideal
world. If the path wind a good deal, if he record too
faithfully every trip over a root, if he botanize somewhat
wearisomely, he gives us now and then superb outlooks
from some jutting crag, and brings us out at last into an
illimitable ether, where the breathing is not difficult for
those who have any true touch of the climbing spirit.
His shanty-life was a mere impossibility, so far as his
own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of
mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder bottom.
Thoreau's experiment actually presupposed all that com
plicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He
squatted on another man's land ; he borrows an axe ; his
boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his
lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's
evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that
artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such
a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. Mag-
nis tamen excidit <fusis. His aim was a noble and a useful
one, in the direction of " plain living and high thinking."
It was a practical sermon on Emerson's text that " things
THOREAU. 209
are in the saddle and ride mankind," an attempt to
solve Carlyle's problem (condensed from Johnson) of
"lessening your denominator." His whole life was a
rebuke of the waste and aimlessness of our American
luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry up
holstery. He had " fine translunary things " in him.
His better style as a writer is in keeping with the
simplicity and purity of his life. We have said that
his range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a mas
ter. He had caught his English at its living source,
among the poets and prose-writers of its best days ; his
literature was extensive and recondite ; his quotations
are always nuggets of the purest ore : there are sentences
of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts
as clearly crystallized ; his metaphors and images are al
ways fresh from the soil ; he had watched Nature like a
detective who is to go upon the stand ; as we read him,
it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and be
come its own Montaigne ; we look at the landscape as in
a Claude Lorraine glass ; compared with his, all other
books of similar aim, even White's " Selborne," seem dry
as a country clergyman's meteorological journal in an old
almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne and No-
valis ; if not with the originally creative men, with the
scarcely smaller class who are peculiar, and whose leaves
shed their invisible thought-seed like ferns.
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
ARE we really, then, to believe the newspapers f
once, and to doff our critical nightcaps, in which
we have comfortably overslept many similar rumors and
false alarms, to welcome the advent of a new poet 1 New
poets, to our thinking, are not very common, and the
soft columns of the press often make dangerous conces
sions, for which the marble ones of Horace's day were
too stony-hearted. Indeed, we have some well-grounded
doubts whether England is precisely the country from
which we have a right to expect that most precious of
gifts just now. There is hardly enough fervor of political
life there at present to ripen anything but the fruits of
the literary forcing-house, so fair outwardly and so flavor
less compared with those which grow in the hardier open
air of a vigorous popular sentiment. Mere wealth of
natural endowment is not enough ; there must be also
the co-operation of the time, of the public genius roused
to a consciousness of itself by the necessity of asserting
or defending the vital principle on which that conscious
ness rests, in order that a poet may rise to the highest
level of his vocation. The great names of the last gen
eration Scott, Wordsworth, Byron represent moods
of national thought and feeling, and are therefore more
or less truly British poets ; just as Goethe, in whose ca
pacious nature, open to every influence of earth and sky,
the spiritual fermentation of the eighteenth century set
tled and clarified, is a European one. A sceptic might
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 211
say, we think, with some justice, that poetry in England
was passing now, if it have not already passed, into one
of those periods of mere art without any intense convic
tions to back it, which lead inevitably, and by no long
gradation, to the mannered and artificial. Browning, by
far the richest nature of the time, becomes more difficult,
draws nearer to the all-for-point fashion of the concettisti,
with every poem he writes ; the dainty trick of Tenny
son cloys when caught by a whole generation of versi
fiers, as the style of a great poet never can be ; and we
have a foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in
many respects, and dying before he had subdued his sen
sitive temperament to the sterner requirements of his
art, will be thought a hundred years hence to have been
the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellec
tual tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled
convictions, of the period in which he lived. To make
beautiful conceptions immortal by exquisiteness of phrase,
is to be a poet, no doubt ; but to be a new poet is to feel
and to utter that immanent life of things without which
the utmost perfection of mere form is at best only wax
or marble. He who can do both is the great poet.
Over " Chastelard, a Tragedy," we need not spend
much time. It is at best but the school exercise of a
young poet learning to write, and who reproduces in his
copy-book, more or less travestied, the copy that has been
set for him at the page's head by the authors he most
admires. Grace and even force of expression are not
wanting, but there is the obscurity which springs from
want of definite intention ; the characters are vaguely
outlined from memory, not drawn firmly from the living
and the nude in actual experience of life ; the working
of passion is an a priori abstraction from a scheme in the
author's mind ; and there is no thought, but only a ve
hement grasping after thought. The hand is the hand
212 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
of Swinburne, but the voice is the voice of Browning.
With here and there a pure strain of sentiment, a genuine
touch of nature, the effect of the whole is unpleasant with
the faults of the worst school of modern poetry, the
physically intense school, as we should be inclined to call
it, of which Mrs. Browning's " Aurora Leigh " is the worst
example, whose muse is a fast young woman with the
lavish ornament and somewhat overpowering perfume of
the demi-monde, and which pushes expression to the last
gasp of sensuous exhaustion. They forget that convul
sion is not energy, and that words, to hold fire, must first
catch it from vehement heat of thought, while no arti
ficial fervors of phrase can make the charm work back
ward to kindle the mind of writer or reader. An over
mastering passion no longer entangles the spiritual being
of its victim in the burning toils of a retribution fore
doomed in its own nature, purifying us with the terror
and pity of a soul in its extremity, as the great masters
were wont to set it before us ; no, it must be fleshly,
corporeal, must " bite with small white teeth " and draw
blood, to satisfy the craving of our modern inquisitors,
who torture language instead of wooing it to confess
the secret of its witchcraft. That books written on this
theory should be popular, is one of the worst signs of the
times ; that they should be praised by the censors of
literature shows how seldom criticism goes back to first
principles, or is even aware of them, how utterly it
has forgotten its most earnest function of demolishing the
high places where the unclean rites of Baal and Ashta-
roth usurp on the worship of the one only True and Pure.
" Atalanta in Calydon " is in every respect better than
its forerunner. It is a true poem, and seldom breaks
from the maidenly reserve which should characterize the
higher forms of poetry, even in the keenest energy of
expression. If the blank verse be a little mannered and
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 213
Btiff, reminding one of Landor in his attempts to repro
duce the antique, the lyrical parts are lyrical in the
highest sense, graceful, flowing, and generally simple in
sentiment and phrase. There are some touches of nature
in the mother's memories of Althea, so sweetly pathetic
that they go as right to the heart as they came from it,
and are neither Greek nor English, but broadly human.
And yet, when we had read the book through, we felt as
if we were leaving a world of shadows, inhabited by less
substantial things than that nether realm of Homer
where the very eidolon of Achilles is still real to us in its
longings and regrets. These are not characters, but out
lines after the Elgin marbles in the thinnest manner of
Flaxman. There is not so much blood in the whole of
them as would warm the little finger of one of Shake
speare's living and breathing conceptions. We could
not help thinking of those exquisite verses addressed by
Schiller to Goethe, in which, while he expresses a half-
truth so eloquently as almost to make it seem a whole
one, he touches unconsciously the weak point of their
common striving after a Grecian instead of a purely hu
man ideal.
" Doch leicht gezimmert nur ist Thespis Wagen,
Und er ist gleich dem acheront'schen Kahti;
Nur Schatteu und Idole kann er trap-n,
Und drsingt das rohe Leben sich herari,
So droht das Icichte Fahrzeug umzuschlagen
I:i- nur die fliicht'gen Geister fassen kann;
' Der Scheiti soil nie die Wirkliclikoit orrciclicn
I'm I -ii'irt Natur, so muss die Kunst entweichen."
The actors in the drama are unreal and shadowy, the
motives which actxiate them alien to our modern modes
of thought and conceptions of character. To a Greek,
the element of Fate, with which his imagination \v:is
familiar, while it heightened the terror of the catastrophe,
would have supplied the place of that impulse in mere
214 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
human nature which our habit of mind demands for ita
satisfaction. The fulfilment of an oracle, the anger of
a deity, the arbitrary doom of some blind and purpose
less power superior to man, the avenging of blood to
appease an injured ghost, any one of these might make
that seem simply natural to a contemporary of Sopho
cles which is intelligible to us only by study and reflec
tion. It is not a little curious that Shakespeare should
have made the last of the motives we have just men
tioned, and which was conclusive for Orestes, insufficient
for Hamlet, who so perfectly typifies the introversion
and complexity of modern thought as compared with
ancient, in dealing with the problems of life and action.
It was not perhaps without intention .(for who may
venture to assume a want of intention in the world's
highest poetic genius at its full maturity ?) that Shake
speare brings in his hero fresh from the University
of Wittenberg, where Luther, who entailed upon us the
responsibility of private judgment, had been Professor.
The dramatic motive in the " Electra " and " Hamlet "
is essentially the same, but what a difference between
the straightforward bloody-mindednQss of Orestes and
the metaphysical punctiliousness of the Dane ! Yet each
was natural in his several way, and each would have
been unintelligible to the audience for which the other
was intended. That Fate which the Greeks made to
operate from without, we recognize at work within in
some vice of character or hereditary predisposition.
Hawthorne, the most profoundly ideal genius of these
latter days, was contimially returning, more or less
directly, to this theme; and his " Marble Faun," whether
consciously or not, illustrates that invasion of the aes
thetic by the moral which has confused art by dividing
its allegiance, and dethroned the old dynasty without
as yet firmly establishing the new in an acknowledged
legitimacy.
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 215
" Atalanta in Calydon " shows that poverty of thought
and profusion of imagery which are at once the defect
and the compensation of all youthful poetry, even of
Shakespeare's. It seems a paradox to say that there
can be too much poetry in a poem, and yet this is a
fault with which all poets begin, and which some never
get over. But "Atalanta" is hopefully distinguished,
in a rather remarkable way, from most early attempts,
by a sense of form and proportion, which, if seconded by
a seasonable ripening of other faculties, as we may fair
ly expect, gives promise of rare achievement hereafter.
Mr. Swinburne's power of assimilating style, which is,
perhaps, not so auspicious a symptom, strikes us as
something marvellous. The argument of his poem, in
its quaint archaism, would not need the change of a
word or in the order of a period to have been foisted on
Sir Thomas Malory as his own composition. The choos
ing a theme which ^Eschylus had handled in one of his
lost tragedies is justified by a certain ^Eschylean flavor
in the treatment. The opening, without deserving to be
called a mere imitation, recalls that of the " Agamemnon,"
and the chorus has often an imaginative lift in it, an
ethereal charm of phrase, of which it is the highest
praise to say that it reminds us of him who soars over
the other Greek tragedians like an eagle.
But in spite of many merits, we cannot help asking
ourselves, as we close the book, whether "Atalanta" can
be called a success, and if so, whether it be a success in
the right direction. The poem reopens a question which
in some sort touches the very life of modern literature.
We do not mean to renew the old quarrel of Fontenelle's
day as to the comparative merits of ancients and mod
erns. That, is an affair of taste, which docs not admit
of any authoritative settlement. Our concern is about
a principle which certainly demands a fuller discussion,
216 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
and which is important enough to deserve it. Do we
show our appreciation of the Greeks most wisely in
attempting the mechanical reproduction of their forms,
or by endeavoring to comprehend the thoughtful spirit of
full-grown manhood in which they wrought, to kindle
ourselves by the emulation of it, and to bring it to bear
with all its plastic force upon our wholly new conditions
of life and thought 1 It seems 'to us that the question is
answered by the fact, patent in the history of all the fine
arts, that every attempt at reproducing a bygone excel
lence by external imitation of it, or even by applying the
rules which analytic criticism has formulated from the
study of it, has resulted in producing the artificial, and
not the artistic. That most subtile of all essences in
physical organization, which eludes chemist, anatomist,
and microscopist, the life, is in aesthetics not less shy of
the critic, and will not come forth in obedience to his
most learned spells, for the very good reason that it
cannot, because in all works of art it is the joint product
of the artist and of the time. Faust may believe he is
gazing on "the face that launched a thousand ships,"
but Mephistopheles knows very well that it is only
shadows that he has the skill to conjure. He is not
merely the spirit that ever denies, but the spirit also of
discontent with the present, that material in which every
man shall work who will achieve realities and not their
hollow semblance. The true anachronism, in our opin
ion, is not in Shakespeare's making Ulysses talk as Lord
Bacon might, but in attempting to make him speak in a
dialect of thought utterly dead to all present compre
hension. Ulysses was the type of long-headedness ; and
the statecraft of an Ithacan cateran would have seemed
as childish to the age of Elizabeth and Burleigh as it
was naturally sufficing to the first hearers of Homer.
Ulysses, living in Florence during the fifteenth century,
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 217
might have been Macchiavelli ; in France, during the
seventeenth, Cardinal Richelieu ; in America, during the
nineteenth, Abraham Lincoln, but not Ulysses. Truth
to nature can be reached ideally, never historically ;
it must be a study from, the life, and not from the scho
liasts. Theocritus lets us into the secret of his good
poetry, when he makes Daphnis tell us that he preferred
his rock with a view of the Siculian Sea to the kingdom
of Pelops.
It is one of the marvels of the human mind, this
sorcery which the fiend of technical imitation weaves
about his victims, giving a phantasmal Helen to their
arms, and making an image of the brain seem substance.
Men still pain themselves to write Latin verses, matching
their wooden bits of phrase together as children do dis
sected maps, and measuring the value of what they have
done, not by any standard of intrinsic merit, but by the
difficulty of doing it. Petrarch expected to be known
to posterity by his Africa. Gray hoped to make a Latin
poem his monument. Goethe, who was classic in the
only way it is now possible to be classic, in his " Her
mann and Dorothea," and at least Propertian in his
" Roman Idyls," wasted his time and thwarted his crea
tive energy on the mechanical mock-antique of an un
readable "Achilleis." Landor prized his waxen " Ge-
birus Rex " above all the natural fruits of his mind ;
and we have no doubt that, if some philosopher should
succeed in accomplishing Paracelsxis's problem of an
artificial komvncultu, he would dote on this misbegotten
babe of his science, and think him the only genius of the
family. We cannot over-estimate the value of some of
the ancient classics, but a certain amount of superstition
about Greek and Latin has conic down to us from the
revival of learning, and seems to hold in mortmain the
intellects of whoever has, at some time, got a smattering
10
218 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
of them. Men quote a platitude in either of those
tongues with a relish of conviction as droll to the un
initiated as the knighthood of free-masonry. Horace
Walpole's nephew, the Earl of Orford, when he was in
his cups, used to have Statins read aloud to him every
night for two hours by a tipsy tradesman, whose hic-
cupings threw in here and there a kind of csesural pause,
and found some strange mystery of sweetness in the dis-
quantitied syllables. So powerful is this hallucination
that w r e can conceive offestina lente as the favorite maxim
of a Mississippi steamboat captain, and apiarov pev vSup
cited as conclusive by a gentleman for whom the bottle
before him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope, and
substituted the Gascon v for the b in binocular.
Something of this singular superstition has infected the
minds of those who confound the laws of conventional
limitation which governed the practice of Greek authors
in dramatic composition laws adapted to the habits
and traditions and preconceptions of their audience
with that sense of ideal form which made the Greeks
masters in art to all succeeding generations. Aristoph
anes is beyond question the highest type of pure comedy,
etherealizing his humor by the infusion, or intensifying
it by the contrast of poetry, and deodorizing the person
ality of his sarcasm by a sprinkle from the clearest
springs of fancy. His satire, aimed as it was at typical
characteristics, is as fresh as ever ; but we doubt whether
?tn Aristophanic drama, retaining its exact form, but
adapted to present events and personages, would keep
the stage as it is kept by " The Rivals," for example,
immeasurably inferior as that is in every element of
genius except the prime one of liveliness. Something
similar in purpose to the parabasis was essayed in one,
at least, of the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, and
in our time by Tieck ; but it took, of necessity, a differ
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 219
ent form of expression, and does not seem to have been
successful. Indeed, the fact that what is called the
legitimate drama of modern times in England, Spain,
and France has been strictly a growth, and not a manu
facture, that in each country it took a different form,
and that, in all, the period of its culminating and be
ginning to decline might be measured by a generation,
seems to point us toward some natural and inevitable
law of human nature, and to show that, while the prin
ciples of art are immutable, their application must ac
commodate itself to the material supplied them by the
time and by the national character and traditions. The
Spanish tragedy inclines more toward the lyrical, the
French toward the epical, the English toward the histor
ical, in the representation of real life ; the Spanish and
English agree in the Teutonic peculiarity of admitting
the humorous offset of the clown, though in the one
case he parodies the leading motive of the drama, and
represents the self-consciousness of the dramatist, while
in the other he heightens the tragic effect by contrast,
(as in the grave-digging scene of Hamlet,) and suggfsts
that stolid but wholesome indifference of the general
life of what, for want of a better term, we call Nature
to the sin and suffering, the weakness and misfortunes
of the individual man. All these nations had the same
ancient examples before them, had the same reverence
for antiquity, yet they involuntarily deviated, more or
less happily, into originality, success, and the freedom
of a living creativeness. The higher kinds of literature,
the only kinds that live on because they had life at the
start, are not, then, it should seem, the fabric of scholar
ship, of criticism, diligently studying and as diligently
copying the best models, but are much rather born of
some genetic principle in the character of the people and
the age which produce them. One drop of ruddy human
220 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
blood puts more life into the veins of a poem, than all
the delusive aurum potabiie that can be distilled out of
the choicest library.
The opera is the closest approach we have to the
ancient drama in the essentials of structure and presen
tation ; and could we have a libretto founded on a
national legend and written by one man of genius to be
filled out and accompanied by the music of another, we
might hope for something of the same effect upon the
stage. But themes of universal familiarity and interest
are rare, Don Giovanni and Faust, perhaps, most
nearly, though not entirely, fulfilling the required con
ditions, and men of genius rarer. The oratorio seeks
to evade the difficulty by choosing Scriptural subjects,
and it may certainly be questioned whether the day of
popular mythology, in the sense in which it subserves
the purposes of epic or dramatic poetry, be not gone by
forever. Longfellow is driven to take refuge among the
red men, and Tennyson in the Cambro-Breton cyclus of
Arthur ; but it is impossible that such themes should
come so intimately homo to us as the semi-fabulous
stories of their own ancestors did to the Greeks. The
most successful attempt at reproducing the Greek trag
edy, both in theme and treatment, is the " Samson
Agonistes," as it is also the most masterly piece of Eng
lish versification. Goethe admits that it alone, among
modern works, has caught life from the breath of the
antique spirit. But he failed to see, or at least to give,
the reason of it ; probably failed to see it, or he would
never have attempted the " Iphigenia." Milton not
only subjected himself to the structural requirements
of the Attic tragedy, but with a true poetic instinct
availed himself of the striking advantage it had in the
choice of a subject. No popular tradition lay neai
enough to him for his purpose ; none united in itself
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
the essential requisites of human interest and universal
belief. He accordingly chose a Jewish mythus, very
near to his own heart as a blind prisoner, betrayed by
his wife, among the Philistines of the Restoration, and
familiar to the earliest associations of his hearers. This
subject, and this alone, met all the demands both of
living poetic production and of antique form, the
action grandly simple, the personages few, the pro
tagonist at once a victim of divine judgment and an ex
ecutor of divine retribution, an intense personal sympa
thy in the poet himself, and no strangeness to the
habitual prepossessions of those he addressed to be over
come before he could touch their hearts or be sure of
aid from their imaginations. To compose such a drama
on such a theme was to be Greek, and not to counterfeit
it ; for Samson was to Milton traditionally just what
Herakles was to Sophocles, and personally far more.
The "Agonistes" is still fresh and strong as morning,
but where are " Caractacus " and " Elfrida " 1 Nay,
where is the far better work of a far abler man,
where is " Merope " 1 If the frame of mind which per
forms a deliberate experiment were the same as that
which produces poetry vitalized through and through by
the conspiring ardors of every nobler passion and power
of the soul, then " Merope " might have had some little
space of life. But without color, without harmonious
rhythm of movement, with less passion than survived in
an average Grecian ghost, and all this from the very
theory of her creation, she has gone back, a shadow, to
join her shadowy Italian and French namesakes in that
limbo of things that would be and cannot be. Mr.
Arnold but retraces, in his Preface to " Merope," the
arguments of Mason in the letters prefixed to his classi
cal experiments. What finds defenders, but not readers,
may be correct, classic, right in principle, but it is not
222 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
poetry of that absolute kind which may and does help
men, but needs no help of theirs ; and such surely we
have a right to demand in tragedy, if nowhere else. We
should not speak so unreservedly if we did not set a
high value on Mr. Arnold and his poetic gift. But
" Merope " has that one fault against which the very
gods, we are told, strive in vain. It is dull, and the
seed of this dulness lay in the system on which it was
written.
Pseudo-classicism takes two forms. Sometimes, as
Mr. Landor has done, it attempts truth of detail to
ancient scenery and manners, which may be attained
either by hard reading and good memory, or at a cheaper
rate from such authors as Becker. The "Moretum,"
once attributed to Virgil, and the idyl of Theocritus
lately chosen as a text by Mr. Arnold, are interesting,
because they describe real things ; but the mock-antique,
if not true, is nothing, and how true such poems are
likely to be we can judge by "Punch's" success at
Yankeeisms, by all England's accurate appreciation of
the manners and minds of a contemporary people one
with herself in language, laws, religion, and literature.
The eye is the only note-book of the true poet ; but a
patchwork of second-hand memories is a laborious futil
ity, hard to write and harder to read, with about as much
nature in it as a dialogue of the Deipnosophists. Alex
ander's bushel of peas was a criticism worthy of Aristotle's
pupil. We should reward such writing with the gift of
a classical dictionary. In this idyllic kind of poetry
also we have a classic, because Goldsmith went to nature
for his " Deserted Village," and borrowed of tradition
nothing but the poetic diction in which he described it.
This is the only method by which a poet may surely
reckon on ever becoming an ancient himself. When we
heard it said once that a certain poem might have been
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 223
written by Simonides, we could not help thinking that,
1C it were so, then it was precisely what Simonides could
never have written, since he looked at the world through
his own eyes, not through those of Linus or Hesiod, and
thought his own thoughts, not theirs, or we should never
have had him to imitate.
Objections of the same nature, but even stronger, lie
against a servile copying of the form and style of the
Greek tragic drama, and yet more against the selection
of a Greek theme. As we said before, the life we lead,
and the views we take of it, are more complex than
those of men who lived five centuries before Christ.
They may be better or worse, but, at any rate, they are
different, and irremediably so. The idea and the form
iu which it naturally embodies itself, mutually sustain
ing and invigorating each other, cannot be divided with
out endangering the lives of both. For in all real
poetry the form is not a garment, but a body. Our
very passion has become metaphysical, and speculates
upon itself. Their simple and downright way of think
ing loses all its savor when we assume it to ourselves
by an effort of thought. Human nature, it is true, re
mains always the same, but the displays of it change ;
the habits which are a second nature modify it inwardly
as well as outwardly, and what moves it to passionate
action in one age may leave it indifferent in the next.
Between us and the Greeks lies the grave of their
murdered paganism, making our minds and theirs irrec
oncilable. Christianity as steadily intensifies the self-
consciousness of man as the religion of the Greeks must
have turned their thoughts away from themselves to the
events of this life and the phenomena of nature. We
cannot even conceive of their conception of Phoibos
with any plausible assurance of coming near the truth.
To take lesser matters, since the invention of printing
224 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
and the cheapening of books have made the thought of
all ages and nations the common property of educated
men, we cannot so dis-saturate our minds of it as to be
keenly thrilled in the modern imitation with those com
monplaces of proverbial lore in which the chorus and
secondary characters are apt to indulge, though in the
original they may interest us as being natural and
characteristic. In the German-silver of the modern we
get something of this kind, which does not please us the
more by being cut up into single lines that recall the
outward semblance of some pages in Sophocles. We
find it cheaper to make a specimen than to borrow one.
CHORUS. Foolish who bites off nose, his face to spite.
OUTIS. Who fears his fate, him Fate shall one day spurn.
CHORUS. The gods themselves are pliable to Fate.
OUTIS. The strong self-ruler dreads no other sway.
CHORUS. Sometimes the shortest way goes most about.
OUTIS. Why fetch a compass, having stars within?
CHORUS. A shepherd once, I know that stars may set.
OUTIS. That thou led'st sheep fits not for leading men.
CHORUS. To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in vain.
We protest that we have read something very like this,
we will not say where, and we might call it the battle-
door and shuttlecock style of dialogue, except that the
players do not seem to have any manifest relation to
each other, but each is intent on keeping his own bit
of feathered cork continually in the air.
The first sincerely popular yearning toward antiquity,
the first germ of Schiller's " Gotter Griechenland's " is
to be found in the old poem of Tanhauser, very near
ly coincident with the beginnings of the Reformation.
And if we might allegorize it, we should say that it
typified precisely that longing after Venus, under her
other name of Charis, which represents the relation in
which modern should stand to ancient art. It is the
grace of the Greeks, their sense of proportion, their dis-
SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 225
taste for the exaggerated, their exquisite propriety of
phrase, which steadies imagination without cramping it,
it is these that we should endeavor to assimilate
without the loss of our own individuality. We should
quicken our sense of form by intelligent sympathy with
theirs, and not stiffen it into formalism by a servile sur
render of what is genuine in us to what was genuine
in them. "A pure form," says Schiller, "helps and
sustains, an impure one hinders and shatters." But we
should remember that the spirit of the age must enter
as a modifying principle, not only into ideas, but into
the best manner of their expression. The old bottles
will not always serve for the new wine. A principle of
life is the first requirement of all art, and it can only be
communicated by the touch of the time and a simple
faith in it ; all else is circumstantial and secondary.
The Greek tragedy passed through the three natural
stages of poetry, the imaginative in ^Eschylus, the
thoughtfully artistic in Sophocles, the sentimental in
Euripides, and then died. If people could only learn
the general applicability to periods and schools of what
young Mozart says of Gellert, that " he had written no
poetry since his death " ! No effort to raise a defunct
past has ever led to anything but just enough galvanic
twitching of the limbs to remind us unpleasantly of life.
The, romantic movement of the school of German poets
which succeeded Goethe and Schiller ended in extrava
gant unreality, and Goethe himself with his enerring
common-sense, has given us, in the second part of Faust,
the result of his own and Schiller's common striving
after a Grecian ideal. Euphorion, the child of Faust
and Helen, falls dead at their feet ; and Helen herself
soon follows him to the shades, leaving only her mantle
in the hands of her lover. This, he is told, shall lift
him above the earth. We fancy we can interpret the
10* o
226 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES.
symbol. Whether we can or not, it is certainly sugges
tive of thought that the only immortal production of
the greatest of recent poets was conceived and carried
out in that Gothic spirit and form from which he was aT
his life struggling to break loose.
CHAUCER.*
WILL it do to say anything more about Chaucer ?
Can any one hope to say anything, not new, but
even fresh, on a topic so well worn 1 It may well be
doubted ; and yet one is always the better for a walk in
the morning air, a medicine which may be taken over
and over again without any sense of sameness, or any
failure of its invigorating quality. There is a pervading
wholesomeness in the writings of this man, a vernal
property that soothes and refreshes in a way of which no
other has ever found the secret. I repeat to myself a
thousand times,
" Whan that Aprile with his showres sote
The droughte of March hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour
Of which vertue engendered is the flour, "
When Zephyrus eek with his swete breth
Enspired hath in every holt and heth
The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halfe cors yronne,
And smale foules maken melodic,"
and still at the thousandth time a breath of uncontami-
* Publications of the Chaucer Society. London. 1869-70.
Etude tur G. Chaucer considere comme imitateur des Trouveres. Par
E. G. SANDRAS, Agrege" de 1'Universite. Paris: Augiiste Dusand.
1859. 8vo. pp. 298.
Geoffrey Chnucer's Canterbury- Geschickten, uebersetzt in den Vers-
maisen der Urtchrift, und durch Kinleituny und Anmerkungen erldutert.
Von WILHEI.M HEKTZKKKG. HOdbwgfeaiuen. 1866. 12mo. pp.674.
Chaucer in Seinen Heziehungen zur italienischen Literatur. Jnnugu-
rnl- Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doclorwiirde. Von ALFONS Kiss-
NKB. Bonn. 1867. 8vo pp. 81.
228 CHAUCER.
nate springtide seems to lift the hair upon my forehead.
If here be not the largior ether, the serene and motionless
atmosphere of classical antiquity, we find at least the
seclusum nemus, the domos placidas, and the oubliance,
as Froissart so sweetly calls it, that persuade us we are
in an Elysium none the less sweet that it appeals to our
more purely human, one might almost say domestic, sym
pathies. We may say of Chaucer's muse, as Overbury of
his milkmaid, " her breath is her own, which scents all
the year long of June like a new-made haycock." The
most hardened roue of literature can scarce confront these
simple and winning graces without feeling somewhat of
the unworn sentiment of his youth revive in him. Mod
ern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious,
and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be
" the world's sweet inn," whither we repair for refresh
ment and repose, has become rather a watering-place,
where one's own private touch of the liver-complaint is
exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk
is a narrative of morbid symptoms. Poets have forgot
ten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life,
is the learning how to burn your own smoke ; that the
way to be original is to be healthy ; that the fresh color,
so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from
the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal
sentiments ; and that to make the common marvellous,
as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius. It is good
to retreat now and then beyond earshot of the introspec
tive confidences of modern literature, and to lose our
selves in the gracious worldliness of Chaucer. Here was
a healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need not
ask whether he were genuine or no, so sincere as quite to
forget his own sincerity, so tmly pious that he could be
happy in the best world that God chose to make, so hu
mane that he loved even the foibles of his kind. Hero
CHAUCER. 229
was a truly epic poet, without knowing it, who did not
waste time in considering whether his age were good or
bad, but quietly taking it for granted as the best that
ever was or could be for him, has left us such a picture
of contemporary life as no man ever painted. "A per
petual fountain of good-sense," Dry den calls him, yes,
and of good-humor, too, and wholesome thought. He
was one of those rare authors whom, if we had met him
under a porch in a shower, we should have preferred to
the rain. He could be happy with a crust and spring-
water," and could see the shadow of his benign face in a
flagon of Gascon wine without fancying Death sitting
opposite to cry Supernaculum ! when he had drained it.
He could look to God without abjectness, and on man
without contempt. The pupil of manifold experience,
scholar, courtier, soldier, ambassador, who had known
poverty as a housemate and been the companion of
princes, his was one of those happy temperaments
that could equally enjoy both halves of culture, the
world of books and the world of men.
" Unto this day it doth mine herte boote,
That I have had my world as in my time! "
The portrait of Chaucer, which we owe to the loving
regret of his disciple Occleve, confirms the judgment of
him which we make from his works. It is, I think, more
engaging than that of any other poet. The downcast
eyes, half sly, half meditative, the sensuous mouth, the
broad brow, drooping with weight of thought, and yet
with an inexpugnable youth shining out of it as from the
morning forehead of a boy, are all noticeable, and not less
so their harmony of placid tenderness. We are struck,
too, with the smoothness of the face as of one who thought
easily, whose phrase flowed naturally, and who had never
puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse.
Nothing has been added to our knowledge of Chaucer's
230 CHAUCER.
life since Sir Harris Nicholas, with the help of original
records, weeded away the fictions by which the few facts
were choked and overshadowed. We might be sorry that
no confirmation has been found for the story, fathered
on a certain phantasmal Mr. Buckley, that Chaucer was
'' fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in
.t^eet Street," if it were only for the alliteration; but we
refuse to give up the meeting with Petrarch. All the
probabilities are in its favor. That Chaucer, being at
Milan, should not have found occasion to ride across so
far as Padua, for the sake of seeing the most famous lit
erary man of the day, is incredible. If Froissart could
journey on horseback through Scotland and Wales, surely
Chaucer, whose curiosity was as lively as his, might have
ventured what would have been a mere pleasure-trip in
comparison. I cannot easily bring myself to believe that
he is not giving some touches of his own character in
that of the Clerk of Oxford : -
" For him was liefer have at his bed's head
A twenty bookiis clothed in black and red
Of Aristotle and his philosophic
Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltrie:
But although that he were a philosopher
Yet had he but a little gold in coffer:
Of study took lie moste care and heed;
Not one word spake he more than was need:
All that he spake it was of high prudence,
And short and quick, and full of great sentence ;
Sounding in moral virtue was his speech
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach."
That, himself as plump as Horace, he should have
described the Clerk as being lean, will be no objection to
those who remember how carefully Chaucer effaces his
own personality in his great poem. Our chief debt to
Sir Harris Nicholas is for having disproved the story that
Chaucer, imprisoned for complicity in the insurrection of
John of Northampton, had set himself free by betraying
CHAUCER. 231
his accomplices. That a poet, one of whose leading
qualities is his good sense and moderation, and who
should seem to have practised his own rule, to
" Fly from the press and dwell with soothfastness ;
Suffice thee thy good though it be small,"
should have been concerned in any such political excesses,
was improbable enough ; but that he should add to this
the baseness of broken faith was incredible except to
such as in a doubtful story
" Demen gladly to the badder end."
Sir Harris Nicholas has proved by the records that the
fabric is baseless, and we may now read the poet's fine
verse,
" Truth is the highest thing a man may keep,"
without a pang. We are thankful that Chaucer's shoul
ders are finally discharged of that weary load, " The
Testament of Love." * The later biographers seem in
clined to make Chaucer a younger man at his death in
1 400 than has hitherto been supposed. Herr Hertzberg
even puts his birth so late as 1340. But, till more con
clusive evidence is produced, we shall adhere to the re
ceived dates as on the whole more consonant with the
probabilities of the case. The monument is clearly right
as to the year of his death, and the chances are at least
even that both this and the date of birth were copied
from an older inscription. The only counter-argument
that has much force is the manifestly unfinished condi
tion of the " Cantertmry Tales." That a man of seventy
odd could have put such a spirit of youth into those
* Tyrwhitt doubted the authenticity of " The Flower and the Leaf"
and " The Cuckoo and the Nightingale." To these Mr. Bradshaw
(and there can be no higher authority) would add " The Court of Love,"
the "Dream." the " Praise of Woman," the " Komnunt ot'tlic Rose,"
and several of the shorter poems. To these doubtful productions there
is strong ground, both moral and aesthetic, for adding the " Parson's
Tale."
232 CHAUCER.
matchless prologues will not, however, surprise those who
remember Dryden's second spring-time. It is plain that
the notion of giving unity to a number of disconnected
stories by the device which Chaucer adopted was an after
thought. These stories had been written, and some of
them even published, at periods far asunder, and without
any reference to connection among themselves. The pro
logues, and those parts which internal evidence justifies
us in taking them to have been written after the thread
of plan to string them on was conceived, are in every way
more mature, in knowledge of the world, in easy mas
tery of verse and language, and in the overpoise of senti
ment by judgment. They may with as much probability
be referred to a green old age as to the middle-life of a
man who, upon any theory of the dates, was certainly
slow in ripening.
The formation of a Chaucer Society, now four cen
turies and a half after the poet's death, gives suitable
occasion for taking a new observation of him, as of a
fixed star, not only in our own, but in the European
literary heavens, " whose worth 's unknown although his
height be taken." The admirable work now doing by
this Society, whose establishment was mainly due to the
pious zeal of Mr. Furnivall, deserves recognition from
all who know how to value the too rare union of accu
rate scholarship with minute exactness in reproducing
the text. The six-text edition of the " Canterbury Tales,"
giving what is practically equivalent to six manuscript
copies, is particularly deserving of gratitude from this
side the water, as it for the first time affords to Ameri
cans the opportunity of independent critical study and
comparison. This beautiful work is fittingly inscribed
to our countryman, Professor Child, of Harvard, a lover
of Chaucer, " so proved by his worde's and his werke,"
CHAUCER. 233
who has done more for the great poet's memory than
any man since Tyrwhitt. We earnestly hope that the
Society may find enough support to print all the re
maining manuscript texts of importance, for there can
hardly be any one of them that may not help us to a
valuable hint. The works of Mr. Sandras and Herr
Hertzberg show that this is a matter of interest not
merely or even primarily to English scholars. The in
troduction to the latter is one of the best essays on
/
Chaucer yet written, while the former, which is an in
vestigation of the French and Italian sources of the
poet, supplies us with much that is new and worth
having as respects the training of the poet, and the
obstacles of fashion and taste through which he had to
force his way before he could find free play for his native
genius or even so much as arrive at a consciousness
thereof. M. Sandras is in every way a worthy pupil of
the accomplished M. Victor Leclerc, and, though he lays
perhaps a little too much stress on the indebtedness of
Chaucer in particulars, shows a singularly intelligent
and clear-sighted eye for the general grounds of his
claim to greatness and originality. It is these grounds
which I propose chiefly to examine here.
The first question we put to any poet, nay, to any
so-called national literature, is that which Farinata
addressed to Dante, Chi fur li magyior tui ? Here is no
question of plagiarism, for poems are not made- of words
and thoughts and images, but of that something in the
poet himself which can compel them to obey him and
move to the rhythm of his nature. Thus it is that the
new poet, however late he conic, can never be forestalled,
and the ship-builder \\lu> I milt the pinnace of Columbus
has as much claim to the discovery of America as he
who suggests a thought by which some other man opens
aew worlds to us has to a share in that achievement by
234 CHAUCER.
him imconceived and inconceivable. Chaucer undoubt.
edly began as an imitator, perhaps as mere translator,
serving the needful apprenticeship in the use of his
tools. Children learn to speak by watching the lips and
catching the words of those who know how already, and
poets learn in the same way from their elders. They
import their raw material from any and everywhere, and
the question at last comes down to this, whether an
author have original force enough to assimilate all he
has acquired, or that be so overmastering as to assimi^
late him. If the poet turn out the stronger, we allow
him to help himself from other people with wonderful
equanimity. Should a man discover the art of trans
muting metals and present us with a lump of gold as
large as an ostrich-egg, would it be in human nature to
inquire too nicely whether he had stolen the lead 1
Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not
sudden prodigies, but slow results. As an oak profits
by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races
that have worked-over the juices of earth and air into
organic life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather
fit to maintain that nobler birth of nature, so we may
be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew
the forces that built it up out of the decay of a long
succession of forgotten ones. Nay, in proportion as the
genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness be
greater, will its roots strike deeper into the past and
grope in remoter fields for the virtue that must sustain
it. Indeed, if the works of the great poets teach any
thing, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It
is not the finding of a thing, but the making something
out of it after it is found, that is of consequence. Ac
cordingly, Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost
nothing. Wherever he found anything directed to
Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it
CHAUCER. 235
It was not the subject treated, but himself, that was
the new thing. Cela m'appartient de droit, Moliere is
reported to have said when accused of plagiarism.
Chaucer pays that " usurious interest which genius," as
Coleridge says, "always pays in borrowing." The char
acteristic touch is his own. In the famous passage
about the caged bird, copied from the " Romaunt of the
Rose," the "gon eten wormes" was added by him. We
must let him, if he will, eat the heart out of the litera
ture that had preceded him, as we sacrifice the mulberry-
leaves to the silkworm, because he knows how to convert
them into something richer and more lasting. The
question of originality is not one of form, but of sub
stance, not of cleverness, but of imaginative power.
Given your material, in other words the life in which
you live, how much can you see in it? For on that
depends how much you can make of it. Is it merely
an arrangement of man's contrivance, a patchwork of
expediencies for temporary comfort and convenience,
good enough if it last your time, or is it so much of the
surface of that ever-flowing deity which we call Time,
wherein we catch such fleeting reflection as is possible
for us, of our relation to perdurable things] This is
what makes the difference between ^Eschylus and Eurip
ides, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Goethe
and Heine, between literature and rhetoric. Some
thing of this depth of insight, if not in the fullest, yet
in no inconsiderable measure, characterizes Chaucer.
\\ V must not let his playfulness, his delight in the world
as mere spectacle, mislead us into thinking that he was
incapable of serious purpose or insensible to the deeper
meanings of life.
There are four principal sources from which Chaucer
may be presumed to have drawn for poetical suggestion
t>r literary culture, the Latins, the Troubadours, the
236 CHAUCER.
Trouveres, and the Italians. It is only the two lattel
who can fairly claim any immediate influence in the
direction of his thought or the formation of his style.
The only Latin poet who can be supposed to have in
fluenced the spirit of mediaeval literature is Ovid. In
his sentimentality, his love of the marvellous and the
picturesque, he is its natural precursor. The analogy
between his Fasti and the versified legends of saints is
more than a fanciful one. He was certainly popular
with the poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen
turies. Virgil had wellnigh become mythical. The
chief merit of the Provengal poets is in having been the
first to demonstrate that it was possible to write with
elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest for us is
mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their
literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal senti
ment culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Bea
trice. Shakespeare's hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the
imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substi
tute the muse of a truer conception and more perfected
utterance, represents exactly the feeling with which we
read Provengal poetry :
" When in the chronicle of wasted Time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now ;
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring,
And, for tlipy looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing."
It is astonishing how little of the real life of the time we
learn from the Troubadours except by way of inference
and deduction. Their poetry is purely lyric in its most
narrow sense, that is, the expression of personal and
CHAUCER. 237
momentary moods. To the fancy of critics who take
their cue from tradition, Provence is a morning sky of
early summer, out of which innumerable larks rain a
faint melody (the sweeter because rather half divined
than heard too distinctly) over an earth where the dew
never dries and the flowers never fade. But when we
open Raynouard it is like opening the door of an aviary.
We are deafened and confused by a hundred minstrels
singing the same song at once, and more than suspect
that the flowers they welcome are made of French cam
bric spangled with dewdrops of prevaricating glass.
Bernard de Ventadour and Bertrand de Born are well-
nigh the only ones among them in whom we find an
original type. Yet the Troubadours undoubtedly led
the way to refinement of conception and perfection of
form. They were the conduit through which the failing
stream of Roman literary tradition flowed into the new
channel which mediaeval culture was slowly shaping for
itself. Without them we could not understand Petrarca,
who carried the manufacture of artificial bloom and fic
titious dew-drop to a point of excellence where artifice,
if ever, may claim the praise of art. Without them we
could not understand Dante, in whom their sentiment
for woman was idealized by a passionate intellect MI id
a profound nature, till Beatrice becomes a half-human,
half-divine abstraction, a woman still to memory and
devotion, a disembodied symbol to the ecstasy of thought.
The Provencal love-poetry was as abstracted from all
sensuality as that of Petrarca, but it stops short of that
larger and more gracious style of treatment which has
secured him a place in all gentle hearts and refined
imaginations forever. In it also woman leads her ser
vants upward, but it is along the easy slopes of conven
tional sentiment, and no Troubadour so much as dreamed
of that loftier region, native to Daute, where the woman
238 CHAUCER.
is subtilized into das Euuig-Weibliche, type of man's finer
conscience and nobler aspiration made sensible to him
only through her.
On the whole, it would be hard to find anything more
tediously artificial than the Provencal literature, except
the reproduction of it by the Minnesingers. The Tedes-
chi lurchi certainly did contrive to make something heavy
as dough out of what was at least light, if not very satis
fying, in the canorous dialect of Southern Gaul. But its
doom was inevitably predicted in its nature and position,
nay, in its very name. It was, and it continues to be, a
strictly provincial literature, imprisoned within extreme
ly narrow intellectual and even geographical limits. It
is not race or language that can inflict this leprous isola
tion, but some defect of sympathy with the simpler and
more universal relations of human nature. You cannot
shut up Burns in a dialect bristling with archaisms, nor
prevent Beranger from setting all pulses a-dance in the
least rhythmic and imaginative of modern tongues. The
healthy temperament of Chaucer, with its breadth of inter
est in all ranks and phases of social life, could have found
little that was sympathetic in the evaporated sentiment
and rhetorical punctilios of a school of poets which, with
rare exceptions, began and ended in courtly dilettantism.
The refined formality with which the literary product
of Proven9e is for the most part stamped, as with a
trademark, was doubtless the legacy of Gallo-Roman cul
ture, itself at best derivative and superficial. I think,
indeed, that it may well be doubted whether Roman
literature, always a half-hardy exotic, could ripen the
seeds of living reproduction. The Roman genius was
eminently practical, and far more apt for the triumphs
of politics and jurisprudence than of art. Supreme ele
gance it could and did arrive at in Virgil, but, if I may
trust my own judgment, it produced but one original
CHAUCER. 239
poet, and that was Horace, who has ever since continued
the favorite of men of the world, an apostle to the Gen
tiles of the mild cynicism of middle-age and an after-
dinner philosophy. Though in no sense national, he was,
more truly than any has ever been since, till the same
combination of circumstances produced Beranger, an ur
bane or city poet. Home, with her motley life, her formal
religion, her easy morals, her spectacles, her luxury, her
suburban country-life, was his muse. The situation was
new, and found a singer who had wit enough to turn it
to account. There are a half-dozen pieces of Catullus
unsurpassed (unless their Greek originals should turn
up) for lyric grace and fanciful tenderness. The sparrow
of Lesbia still pecks the rosy lips of his mistress, im
mortal as the eagle of Pindar. One profound imagination,
one man, who with a more prosperous subject might
have been a great poet, lifted Roman literature above
its ordinary level of tasteful common-sense. The in
vocation of Venus, as the genetic force of nature, by
Lucretius, seems to me the one sunburst of purely poetic
inspiration which the Latin language can show. But
this very force, without which neque fit laetum neque
amabile quicquam was wholly wanting in those poets of
the post-classic period, through whom the literary in
fluences of the past were transmitted to the romanized
provincials. The works of Ausonius interest us as those
of our own Dwights and Barlows do. The " Conquest of
Canaan " and the " Columbiad " were Connecticut epics
no doubt, but still were better than nothing in theft
day. If not literature, they were at least memories of
literature, and such memories are not without effect in
reproducing what they regret. The provincial writers
of Latin devoted themselves with a dreary assiduity to
the imitation of models which they deemed classical,
but which were truly so only in the sense that they
240 CHAUCER.
were the more decorously respectful of the dead form in
proportion as the living spirit had more utterly gone out
of it. It is, I suspect, to the traditions of this purely
rhetorical influence, indirectly exercised, that we are to
attribute the rapid passage of the new Provencal poetry
from what must have been its original popular character
to that highly artificial condition which precedes total
extinction. It was the alienation of the written from
the spoken language (always, perhaps, more or less ma
lignly operative in giving Roman literature a cold-blooded
turn as compared with Greek), which, ending at length
in total divorce, rendered Latin incapable of supplying
the wants of new men and new ideas. The same thing,
I am strongly inclined to think, was true of the language
of the Troubadours. It had become literary, and so far
dead. It is true that no language is ever so far gone iii
consumption as to be beyond the great-poet-cure. Un
doubtedly a man of genius can out of his own super
abundant vitality compel life into the most decrepit
vocabulary. But it is by the infusion of his own blood,
as it were, and not without a certain sacrifice of power.
No such resciie came for the langite d'oc, which, it should
seem, had performed its special function in the devel
opment of modern literature, and would have perished
even without the Albigensian war. The position of the
Gallo-Romans of the South, both ethical and geographi
cal, precluded them from producing anything really great
or even original in literature, for that must have its root
in a national life, and this they never had. After the
Burgundian invasion their situation was in many respects
analogous to our own after the Revolutionary War. They
had been thoroughly romanized in language and culture,
but the line of their historic continuity had been broken.
The Roman road, which linked them with the only past
they knew, had been buried under the great barbarian
CHAUCER. 241
land-slide. In like manner we, inheriting the language,
the social usages, the literary and political traditions of
Englishmen, were suddenly cut adrift from our historical
anchorage. Very soon there arose a demand for a native
literature, nay, it was even proposed that, as a first step
toward it, we should adopt a lingo of our own to be called
the Columbian or Hesperian. This, to be sure, was never
accomplished, though our English cousins seem to hint
sometimes that we have made very fair advances toward
it ; but if it could have been, our position would have
been precisely that of the Provengals when they began to
have a literature of their own. They had formed a lan
guage which, while it completed their orphanage from
their imperial mother, continually recalled her,"and kept
alive their pride of lineage. Such reminiscences as they
still retained of Latin culture were pedantic and rhetor
ical,* and it was only natural that cut of these they
should have elaborated a code of poetical jurisprudence
with titles and subtitles applicable to every form of verse
and tyrannous over every mode of sentiment. The re
sult could not fail to be artificial and wearisome, except
where some man with a truly lyrical genhis could breathe
life into the rigid formula and make it pliant to his more
passionate feeling. The great service of the Provencals
was that they kept in mind the fact that poetry was not
merely an amusement, but an art, and long after their
literary activity had ceased their influence reacted bene
ficially upon Europe through their Italian pupils. They
are interesting as showing the tendency of the Romanic
races to a scientific treatment of what, if it be not
spontaneous, becomes a fashion and erelong an imperti
nence. Fauriel has endeavored to prove that they were
the first to treat the mediaeval heroic legends epically,
but the evidence is strongly against him. The testimony
* Fauriel, Hutoire de la Gaule Aferidionale, Vol. I. paisim.
11 P
242 CHAUCER.
of Dante on this point is explicit,* and moreover not a
single romance of chivalry has come down to us in a
dialect of the pure Provencal.
The Trouveres, on- the other hand, are apt to have
something naive and vigorous about them, something
that smacks of race and soil. Their very coarseness
is almost better than the Troubadour delicacy, because
it was not an affectation. The difference between the
two schools is that between a culture pedantically trans
mitted and one which grows and gathers strength from
natural causes. Indeed, it is to the North of France and
to the Trouveres that we are to look for the true origins
of our modern literature. I do not mean in their epi
cal poetry, though there is something refreshing in the
mere fact of their choosing native heroes and legends as
the subjects of their song. It was in their Fabliaux and
Lais that, dealing with the realities of the life about
them, they became original and delightful in spite of
themselves. Their Chansons de Geste are fine specimens
of fighting Christianity, highly inspiring for men like
Peire de Bergerac, who sings
" Bel m'es can aug lo resso
Que fai 1'ausbercs ab 1'arso,
Li bruit e il crit e il masan
Que il corn e las trombas fan " ;
but who after reading them even the best of them,
* Allegat ergo pro se lingua Oilqnod propter sui faciliorem et delec-
tabiliorem vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vul-
gare prosaicum, suum est; videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, Roman-
orumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcherrima3 et
quamplures alise historic ac doctrinse. That Dante by prosaicum did
not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse, numeros lege solutos, is
clear. Cf. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92 seq. and notes. It has not, I
think, been remarked that Dante borrows his faciliorem et delectabilio-
vem from the plus diletable et comune of his master Brunetto Latini.
t " My ears no sweeter music know
Than hnuberk's clunk with saddlebow,
The noise, the cries, the tumult blown
From trumpet and from clarion."
CHAUCER. 243
the Song of Roland can remember much more than a
cloud of battle-dust, through which the paladins loom
dimly gigantic, and a strong verse flashes here and there
like an angry sword 1 ? What are the Roman d'avantures,
the cycle of Arthur and his knights, but a procession of
armor and plumes, mere spectacle, not vision like their
Grecian antitype, the Odyssey, whose pictures of life,
whether domestic or heroic, are among the abiding con
solations of the mind ? An element of disproportion, of
grotesqueness,* earmark of the barbarian, disturbs us,
even when it does not disgust, in them all. Except the
Roland, they all want adequate motive, and even in that
we may well suspect a reminiscence of the Iliad. They
are not without a kind of dignity, for manliness is always
noble, and there are detached scenes that are striking,
perhaps all the more so from their rarity, like the com
bat of Oliver and Fierabras, and the leave-taking of
Parise la Duchesse. But in point of art they are far
below even Firdusi, whose great poem is of precisely the
same romantic type. The episode of Sohrab and Rustem
as much surpasses the former of the passages just alluded
to in largeness and energy of treatment, in the true
epical quality, as the lament of Tehmine over her son
does the latter of them in refined and natural pathos.
In our revolt against pseudo-classicism we must not let
our admiration for the vigor and freshness which are the
merit of this old poetry tempt us to forget that our
direct literary inheritance conies to us from an ancestry
who would never have got beyond the Age of Iron but
for the models of graceful form and delicate workman
ship which they found in the tombs of an earlier race.
I recall but one passage (from Jourdain de Blaivies)
which in its simple movement of the heart can in any
way be compared with Chaucer. I translate it freely,
* Compare Floripar in Fierabrat with Nausikaa, for example.
244 CHAUCER.
merely changing the original assonance into rhyme.
Eremborc, to save the son of her liege-lord, has passed-
off her own child for his, only stipulating that he shall
pass the night before his death with her in the prison
where she is confined by the usurper Fromond. The
time is just as the dreaded dawn begins to break.
" ' Gamier, fair son,' the noble lady said,
' To save thy father's life must thou be dead;
And mine, alas, must be with sorrow spent,
Since thou must die, albeit so innocent !
Evening thou shalt not see that see'st the morn!
Woe worth the hour that I beheld thee born,
Whom nine long months within my side I bore!
Was never babe desired so much before.
Now summer will the pleasant clays recall
When I shall take my stand upon the wall
And see the fair young gentlemen thy peers
That come and go, and, as beseems their years
Run at the quintain, strive to pierce the shield,
And in the tourney keep their sell or yield;
Then must my heart be tearswoln for thy sake
That 't will be marvel if it do not break.'
At morning, when the day began to peer,
Matins rang out from minsters far and near,
And the clerks sang full well with voices high.
1 God,' said the dame, 'thou glorious in the sky,
These lingering nights were wont to tire me so!
And this, alas, how swift it hastes to go!
These clerks and cloistered folk, alas, in spite
So early sing to cheat me of my night! ' "
The great advantages which the langue d'oil had over
its sister dialect of the South of France were its wider
distribution, and its representing the national and unitary
tendencies of the people as opposed to those of provin
cial isolation. But the Trouveres had also this superi
ority, that they gave a voice to real and not merely
conventional emotions. In comparison with the Trou
badours their sympathies were more human, and their
expression more popular. While the tiresome ingenuity
of the latter busied itself chiefly in the filigree of wire-
CHAUCER. 245
drawn sentiment and supersubtilized conceit, the former
took their subjects from the street and the market as
well as from the chateau. In the one case language had
become a mere material for clever elaboration ; in the
other, as always in live literature, it was a soil from
which the roots of thought and feeling unconsciously
drew the coloring of vivid expression. The writers of
French, by the greater pliancy of their dialect and the
simpler forms of their verse, had acquired an ease which
was impossible in the more stately and sharply angled
vocabulary of the South. Their octosyllabics have not
seldom a careless facility not unworthy of Swift in his
best mood. They had attained the highest skill and
grace in narrative, as the lays of Marie de France and
the Lai de UOisekt bear witness.* Above all, they had
learned how to brighten the hitherto monotonous web of
story with the gayer hues of fancy.
It is no improbable surmise that the sudden and sur
prising development of the more strictly epical poetry in
the North of France, and especially its growing partiality
for historical in preference to mythical subjects, were
due to the Normans. The poetry of the Danes was much
of it authentic history, or what was believed to be so ;
the heroes of their Sagas were real men, with wives and
children, with relations public and domestic, on the
common levels of life, and not mere creatures of imagina
tion, who dwell apart like stars from the vulgar cares and
interests of men. If we compare Havelok with the least
ideali/.ed figures of Cwkmngian or Arthurian romance,
we shall have a keen sense of this difference. Manhood
has taken the place of caste, and homeliness of exaggera
tion. Havelok says,
I Will Witll tliPP
For to learn some good to get ;
If internal evidence may bo trusted, the Lai de tEtpine is not hers.
246 CHAUCER.
Swinken would I for my meat;
It is no shame for to swinken."
This Dane, we see, is of our own make and stature, a
being much nearer our kindly sympathies than his com
patriot Ogier, of whom we are told,
" Dix pies de lone avoit le chevalier."
But however large or small share we may allow to the
Danes in changing the character of French poetry and
supplanting the Romance with the Fabliau, there can be
little doubt either of the kind or amount of influence
which the Normans must have brought with them into
England. I am not going to attempt a definition of the
Anglo-Saxon element in English literature, for generaliza
tions are apt to be as dangerous as they are tempting.
But as a painter may draw a cloud so that we recognize
its general tmth, though the boundaries of real clouds
never remain the same for two minutes together, so amid
the changes of feature and complexion brought about
by commingling of race, there still remains a certain
cast of physiognomy which points back to some one
ancestor of marked and peculiar character. It is toward
this type that there is always a tendency to revert, to
borrow Mr. Darwin's phrase, and I think the general
belief is not without some adequate grounds which
in France traces this predominant type to the Kelt, and
in England to the Saxon. In old and stationary com
munities, where tradition has a chance to take root, and
where several generations are present to the mind of each
inhabitant, either by personal recollection or transmitted
anecdote, everybody's peculiarities, whether of strength
or weakness, are explained and, as it were, justified upon
some theory of hereditary bias. Such and such qualities
he got from a grandfather on the spear or a great-uncle
on the spindle side. This gift came in a right line from
CHAUCER. 247
So-and-so ; that failing came in by the dilution of the
family blood with that of Such-a-onc. In this way a
certain allowance is made for every aberration from some
assumed normal type, either in the way of reinforcement
or defect, and that universal desire of the human mind
to have everything accounted for which makes the
moon responsible for the whimsies of the weathercock
is cheaply gratified. But as mankind in the aggregate
is always wiser than any single man, because its experi
ence is derived from a larger range of observation and
experience, and because the springs that feed it drain a
wider region both of time and space, there is commonly
some greater or smaller share of truth in all popular
prejudices. The meteorologists are beginning to agree
with the old women that the moon is an accessary before
the fact in our atmospheric fluctuations. Now, although
to admit this notion of inherited good or ill to its fullest
extent would be to abolish personal character, and with
it all responsibility, to abdicate freewill, and to make
every effort at self-direction futile, there is no inconsid
erable alloy of truth in it, nevertheless. No man can
look into the title-deeds of what may be called his per
sonal estate, his faculties, his predilections, his failings,
whatever, in short, sets him apart as a capital I,
without something like a shock of dread to find how
much of him is held in mortmain by those who, though
long ago mouldered away to dust, are yet fatally alive
and active in him for good or ill. What is true of indi
vidual men is true also of races, and the prevailing belief
in a nation as to the origin of certain of its character
istics has something of the same basis in facts of obser
vation as the village estimate of the traits of particular
families. Intrril nm !'///<///.< rtchnii. riJc/.
We are apt, it is true, to talk rather loosely about our
Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and to attribute to them in a
248 CHAUCER.
vague way all the pith of our institutions and the
motive power of our progress. For my own part, I
think there is such a thing as being too Anglo-Saxon,
and the warp and woof of the English national charac
ter, though undoubtedly two elements mainly predomi
nate in it, is quite too complex for us to pick out a
strand here and there, and affirm that the body of the
fabric is of this or that. Our present concern with the
Saxons is chiefly a literary one ; but it leads to a study
of general characteristics. What, then, so far as we can
make it out, seems to be their leading mental feature 1
Plainly, understanding, common-sense, a faculty which
never carries its possessor very high in creative litera
ture, though it may make him great as an acting and
even thinking man. Take Dr. Johnson as an instance.
The Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any
capacity for art, nay, commonly commits ugly blunders
when he is tempted in that direction. He has made the
best working institutions and the ugliest monuments
among the children of men. He is wanting in taste,
which is as much as to say that he has no true sense of
proportion. His genius is his solidity, an admirable
foundation of national character. He is healthy, in no
danger of liver-complaint, with digestive apparatus of
amazing force and precision. He is the best farmer and
best grazier among men, raises the biggest crops and the
fattest cattle, and consumes proportionate quantities of
both. He settles and sticks like a diluvial deposit on
the warm, low-lying levels, physical and moral. He has
a prodigious talent, to use our Yankee phrase, of staying
put. You cannot move him ; he and rich earth have a
natural sympathy of cohesion. Not quarrelsome, but
with indefatigable durability of fight in him, sound of
stomach, and not too refined in nervous texture, he ia
capable of indefinitely prolonged punishment, with a
CHAUCER. 249
singularly obtuse sense of propriety in acknowledging
himself beaten. Among all races perhaps none has
shown so acute a sense of the side on which its bread
is buttered, and so great a repugnance for having fine
phrases take the place of the butyraceous principle.
They invented the words " humbug," " cant," " sham,"
"gag," " soft-sodder," "flapdoddle," and other disen
chanting formulas whereby the devil of falsehood and
unreality gets his effectual apage Satana !
An imperturbable perception of the real relations of*
things is the Saxon's leading quality, no sense what
ever, or at best small, of the ideal in him. He has no
notion that two and two ever make five, which is the
problem the poet often has to golve. Understanding,
that is, equilibrium of mind, intellectual good digestion,
this, with unclogged biliary ducts, makes him mentally
and physically what we call a very fixed fact ; but you
shall not find a poet in a hundred thousand square miles,
in many prosperous centuries of such. But one
element of incalculable importance we have not men
tioned. In this homely nature, the idea of God, and of
a simple and direct relation between the All-Father and
his children, is deeply rooted. There, above all, will he
have honesty and simplicity ; less than anything else
will he have the sacramental wafer, that beautiful
emblem of our dependence on Him who giveth the daily
bread ; iess than anything will he have this smeared
with that Barmecide butter of fair words. This is the
lovely and noble side of his character. Indignation at
this will make him forget crops and cattle ; and this,
after so many centuries, will give him at last a poet in
the monk of Kislelien, who shall cut deep on the memory
of mankind that brief creed of conscience, " Here arn
I . God help me : I cannot otherwise." This, it seems to
me, with dogged sense of justice, both results of that
11
250 CHAUCER.
equilibrium of thought which springs from clear-sighted
understanding,-*- makes the beauty of the Saxon nature.
He believes in another world, and conceives of it with
out metaphysical subtleties as something very much
after the pattern of this, but infinitely more desirable.
Witness the vision of John Bunyan. Once beat it into
him that his eternal well-being, as he calls it, depends
on certain conditions, that only so will the balance in
the ledger of eternity be in his favor, and the man who
seemed wholly of this world will give all that he has,
even his life, with a superb simplicity and scorn of the
theatric, for a chance in the next. Hard to move, his
very solidity of nature makes him terrible when once
fairly set agoing. He is the man of all others slow to
admit the thought of revolution ; but let him once admit
it, he will carry it through and make it stick, a secret
hitherto undiscoverable by other races.
But poetry is not made out of the understanding ;
that is not the sort of block out of which you can carve
wing-footed Mercuries. The question of common-sense
is always, "What is it good for 1 ?" a question which
would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly
by the cabbage. The danger of the prosaic type of
mind lies in the stolid sense of superiority which blinds
it to everything ideal, to the use of anything that does
not serve the practical purposes of life. Do we not re
member how the all-observing and all-fathoming Shake
speare has typified this in Bottom the weaver ] Sur
rounded by all the fairy creations of fancy, he sends
one to fetch him the bag of a humble-bee, and can find
no better employment for Mustard-seed than to help
< 'avalero Cobweb scratch his ass's head between the ears.
When Titania, queen of that fair ideal world, offers him
a feast of beauty, he says he has a good stomach to a
pottle of hay !
CHAUCER. 251
The Anglo-Saxons never had any real literature of
their own. They produced monkish chronicles in bad
Latin, and legends of saints in worse metre. Their
earlier poetry is essentially Scandinavian. It was that
gens inclytissima Northmannorum that imported the
divine power of imagination, that power which, min
gled with the solid Saxon understanding, produced at
last the miracle of Stratford. It was to this adventur
ous race, which found America before Columbus, which,
for the sake of freedom of thought, could colonize in
hospitable Iceland, which, as it were, typifying the very
action of the imaginative faculty itself, identified itself
always with what it conquered, that we owe whatever
aquiline features there are in the national physiognomy
of the English race. It was through the Normans that
the English mind and fancy, hitherto provincial and
uncouth, were first infused with the lightness, grace,
and self-confidence of Romance literature. They seem
to have opened a window to the southward in that solid
and somewhat sombre insiilar character, and it was a
painted window all aglow with the figures of tradition
and poetry. The old Gothic volume, grim with legends
of devilish temptation and satanic lore, they illuminated
with the gay and brilliant inventions of a softer climate
and more genial moods. Even the stories of Arthur
and his knights, toward which the stern Dante himself
relented so far as to call them gratissimas ambages, most.
delightful circumlocutions, though of British original,
were first set free from the dungeon of a barbarous
dialect by the French poets, and so brought back to
England, and made popular there by the Normans.
Chaucer, to whom French must have been almost as
truly a mother tongue ;>s Kii<Jisli, was familiar with all
that had been done by Troubadour or Trouvere. In
him we see the first result of the Norman yeast upou
252 CHAUCER.
the home-baked Saxon loaf. The flour had been honest,
the paste well kneaded, but the inspiring leaven was
wanting till the Norman brought it over. Chaucer
works still in the solid material of his race, but with
what airy lightness has he not infused it 1 Without
ceasing to be English, he has escaped from being insular.
But he was something more than this ; he was a scholar,
a thinker, and a critic. He had studied the Divina
Commedia of Dante, he had read Petrarca and Boccaccio,
and some of the Latin poets. He calls Dante the great
poet of Italy, and Petrarch a learned clerk. It is plain
that he knew very well the truer purpose of poetry, and
had even arrived at the higher wisdom of comprehend
ing the aptitudes and limitations of his own genius.
He saw clearly and felt keenly what were the faults
and what the wants of the prevailing literature of his
country. In the " MonkV' Tale " he slyly satirizes the
long-winded morality of Gower, as his prose antitype,
Fielding, was to satirize the prolix sentimentality of
Richardson. In the rhyme of Sir Thopas he gives the
coup de grace to the romances of Chivalry, and in bis
own choice of a siibject he heralds that new world in
which the actual and the popular were to supplant the
fantastic and the heroic.
Before Chaucer, modern Europe had given birth to one
great poet, Dante ; and contemporary with him was one
supremely elegant one, Petrarch. Dante died only
seven years before Chaucer was born, and, so far as
culture is derived from books, the moral and intellect
ual influences they had been subjected to, the specu
lative stimulus that may have given an impulse to
their minds, there could have been no essential differ
ence between them. Yet there are certain points of resem
blance and of contrast, and those not entirely fanci
ful, which seem to me of considerable interest. Both
CHAUCER. 253
were of mixed race, Dante certainly, Chaucer presum
ably so. Dante seems to have inherited on the Teutonic
side the strong moral sense, the almost nervous irrita
bility of conscience, and the tendency to mysticism which
made him the first of Christian poets, first in point
of time and first in point of greatness. From the other
side he seems to have received almost in overplus a feel
ing of order and proportion, sometimes wellnigh harden
ing into mathematical precision and formalism, a
tendency which at last brought the poetry of the Ro
manic races to a dead-lock of artifice and decorum.
Chaucer, on the other hand, drew from the South a
certain airiness of sentiment and expression, a felicity of
phrase, and an elegance of turn hitherto unprecedented
and hardly yet matched in our literature, but all the
while kept firm hold of his native soundness of under
standing, and that genial humor which seems to be the
proper element of worldly wisdom. With Dante, life
represented the passage of the soul from a state of na
ture to a state of grace ; and there would have been
almost an even chance whether (as Burns says) the
Divina Commedia had turned out a song or a sermon,
but for the wonderful genius of its author, which has
compelled the sermon to sing and the song to preach,
whether they would or no. With Chaucer, life is a pil
grimage, but only that his eye- may be delighted with
the varieties of costume and character. There are good
morals to be found in Chaucer, but they are always inci
dental. With Dante the main question is the saving of
the soul, with Chaucer it is the conduct of life. The
distance between them is almost that between holiness
and prudence. Dante applies himself to the realities
and Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the former is
consequently the more universal poet, as the latter is
the more truly national one. Dante represents the
254 CHAUCER.
justice of God, and Chaucer his loving-kindness. If
there is anything that may properly be called satire in
the one, it is like a blast of the divine wrath, before
which the wretches oower and tremble, which rends
away their cloaks of hypocrisy and their masks of worldly
propriety, and leaves them shivering in the cruel naked
ness of their shame. The satire of the other is genial
with the broad sunshine of humor, into which the vic
tims walk forth with a delightful unconcern, laying aside
of themselves the disguises that seem to make them un
comfortably warm, till they have made a thorough be
trayal of themselves so unconsciously that we almost
pity while we laugh. Dante shows us the punishment
of sins against God and one's neighbor, in order that we
may shun them, and so escape the doom that awaits them
in the other world. Chaucer exposes the cheats of the
transmuter of metals, of the begging friars, and of the
pedlers of indulgences, in order that we may be on our
guard against them in this world. If we are to judge of
what is national only by the highest and most charac
teristic types, surely we cannot fail to see in Chaucer
the true forerunner and prototype of Shakespeare, who,
with an imagination of far deeper grasp, a far wider
reach of thought, yet took the same delight in the
pageantry of the actual world, and whose moral is the
moral of worldly wisdom only heightened to the level
of his wide-viewing mind, and made typical by the dra
matic energy of his plastic nature.
Yet if Chaucer had little of that organic force of life
which so inspires the poem of Dante that, as he himself
says of the heavens, part answers to part with mutual
interchange of light, he had a structural faculty which
distinguishes him from all other English poets, his con
temporaries, and which indeed is the primary distinction
of poets properly so called. There is, to be sure, only
CHAUCER. 255
one other English writer coeval with himself who de
serves in any way to be compared with him, and that
rather for contrast than for likeness.
With the single exception of Langland, the English
poets, his contemporaries, were little else than bad
versifiers of legends classic or mediaeval, as happened,
without selection and without art. Chaucer is the first
who broke away from the dreary traditional style, and
gave not merely stories, but lively pictures of real life as
the ever-renewed substance of poetry. He was a re
former, too, not only in literature, but in morals. But
as in the former his exquisite tact saved him from all
eccentricity, so in the latter the pervading sweetness of
his nature could never be betrayed into harshness and
invective. He seems incapable of indignation. He
mused good-naturedly over the vices and follies of men,
and, never forgetting that he was fashioned of the same
clay, is rather apt to pity than condemn. There is no
touch of cynicism in all he wrote. Dante's brush seems
sometimes to have been smeared with the burning pitch
of his own fiery lake. Chaucer's pencil is dipped in the
cheerful color-box of the old illuminators, and he has
their patient delicacy of touch, with a freedom far be
yond their somewhat mechanic brilliancy.
English narrative poetry, as Chaucer found it, though
it had not altogether escaped from the primal curse of
long-windedness so painfully characteristic of its pro
totype, the French Romance of Chivalry, had certainly
shown a feeling for the picturesque, a sense of color, a
directness of phrase, and a simplicity of treatment which
give it graces of its own and a turn peculiar to itself.
In the easy knack of story-telling, the popular minstrels
cannot compare with Marie de France. The lightsome-
ness of fancy, that leaves a touch of sunshine and is
gone, is painfully missed in them all. Their incidents
256 CHAUCER.
enter dispersedly, as the old stage directions used to
say, and they have not learned the art of concentrating
their force on the key-point of their hearers' interest.
They neither get fairly hold of their subject, nor, what is
more important, does it get hold of them. But they
sometimes yield to an instinctive hint of leaving-off at
the right moment, and in their happy negligence achieve
an effect only to be matched by the highest successes of
art.
" That lady heard his mourning all
Right under her chamber wall,
In her oriel where she was,
Closed well with royal glass;
Fulfilled it was with imagery
Every window, by and by;
On each side had there a gin
Sperred with many a divers pin;
Auoii that hidj- lair and free
Undid a pin of ivory
And wide the window she open set,
The sun shone in at her closet."
It is true the old rhymer relapses a little into the habit
ual drone of his class, and shows half a mind to bolt
into their common inventory style when he comes to his
gins and pins, but he withstands the temptation man
fully, and his sunshine fills our hearts with a gush as
sudden as that which illumines the lady's oriel. Cole
ridge and Keats have each in his way felt the charm of
this winsome picture, but have hardly equalled its heartj
honesty, its economy of material, the supreme test of
artistic skill. I admit that the phrase " had there a
gin " is suspicious, and suggests a French original, but I
remember nothing altogether so good in the romances
from the other side of the Channel. One more passage
occurs to me, almost incomparable in its simple straight-
forward force and choice of the right word.
" Sir Graysteel to his death thus thraws,
He welters [wallows] and the grass updraws;
CHAUCER. , 257
A little while then lay he still,
(Friends that saw him liked full ill,)
And bled into his armor bright."
The last line, for suggestive reticence, almost deserves
to be put beside the famous
" Quel giorno piii non vi leggemmo avante "
of the great master of laconic narration. In the same
poem * the growing love of the lady, in its maidenliness
of unconscious betrayal, is touched with a delicacy and
tact as surprising as they are delightful. But such pas
sages, which are the despair of poets who have to work
in a language that has faded into diction, are exceptional.
They are to be set down rather to good luck than to art.
Even the stereotyped similes of these fortunate illiterates,
like " weary as water in a weir," or " glad as grass is of
the rain," are new, like nature, at the thousandth repe
tition. Perhaps our palled taste overvalues the wild
flavor of these wayside treasure-troves. They are wood-
strawberries, prized in proportion as we must turn over
more leaves ere we find one. This popular literature is
of value in helping us toward a juster estimate of Chaucer
by showing what the mere language was capable of, and
that all it wanted was a poet to put it through its paces.
For though the poems I have quoted be, in their present
form, later than he, they are, after all, but modernized
versions of older copies, which they doubtless reproduce
with substantial fidelity.
It is commonly assumed that Chaucer did for English
what Dante is supposed to have done for Italian and
Luther for German, that he, in short, in some hitherto
inexplicable way, created it. But this is to speak loosely
and without book. Languages are never made in any
* Sir Eger and Sir Grine in the Percy Folio. The passage quoted
i from Ellia.
258 CHAUCER.
such fashion, still less are they the achievement of any
single man, however great his genius, however powerful
his individuality. They shape themselves by laws as
definite as those which guide and limit the growth of
other living organisms. Dante, indeed, has told us that
he chose to write in the tongue that might be learned of
nurses and chafferers in the market. His practice shows
that he knew perfectly well that poetry has needs which
cannot be answered by the vehicle of vulgar commerce
between man and man. What he instinctively felt was,
that there was the living heart of all speech, without
whose help the brain were powerless to send will, motion,
meaning, to the limbs and extremities. But it is true
that a language, as respects the uses of literature, is lia
ble to a kind of syncope. No matter how complete its
vocabulary may be, how thorough an outfit of inflections
and case-endings it may have, it is a mere dead body
without a soul till some man of genius set its arrested
pulses once more athrob, and show what wealth of sweet
ness, scorn, persuasion, and passion lay there awaiting its
liberator. In this sense it is hardly too much to say
that Chaucer, like Dante, found his native tongue a dia
lect and left it a language. But it was not what he did
with deliberate purpose of reform, it was his kindly and
plastic genius that wrought this magic of renewal and
inspiration. It was not the new words he introduced,*
but his way of using the old ones, that surprised them
into grace, ease, and dignity in their own despite. In
order to feel fully how much he achieved, let any one
subject himself to a penitential course of reading in his
contemporary, Gower, who worked in a material to all
intents and purposes the same, or listen for a moment
to the barbarous jangle which Lydgate and Occleve con
trive to draw from the instrument their master had tuned
* I think he tried one now and then, like " eyen columbine.' 1 ' 1
CHAUCER. 259
so deftly. Gower has positively raised tediousness to the
precision of science, he has made dulness an heirloom for
the students of our literary history. As you slip to and
fro on the frozen levels of his verse, which give no foot
hold to the mind, as your nervous ear awaits the inevita
ble recurrence of his rhyme, regularly pertinacious as
the tick of an eight-day clock and reminding you of
Wordsworth's
" Once more the ass did lengthen out
The hard, dry, seesaw of his horrible bray,"
you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this
indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair
mediseval legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the
seemingly unnatural length, of a coffin. Love, beauty,
passion, nature, art, life, the natural and theological vir
tues, there is nothing beyond his power to disenchant,
nothing out of which the tremendous hydraulic press of
his allegory (or whatever it is, for I am not sure if it be
not something even worse) will not squeeze all feeling
and freshness and leave it a juiceless pulp. It matters
not where you try him, whether his story be Christian
or pagan, borrowed from history or fable, you cannot
escape him. Dip in at the middle or the end, dodge
back to the beginning, the patient old man is there to
take you by the button and go on with his imperturba
ble narrative. You may have left off with Clytemnes-
tra, and you begin again with Samson ; it makes no
odds, for you cannot tell one from tother. His tedious-
ness is omnipresent, and like Dogberry he could find in
his heart to bestow it all (and more if he had it) on your
worship. The word lengthy has been charged to our
American account, but it m\ist have been invented by
the first reader of Gower's works, the only inspiration of
which they were ever capable. Our literature had to lie
by and recruit for more than four centuries ere it could
260 CHAUCER.
give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a uni
formity of commonplace in the " Recreations of a Coun
try Parson." Let us be thankful that the industrious
Gower never found time for recreation !
But a fairer as well as more instructive comparison lies
between Chaucer and the author of " Piers Ploughman."
Langland has as much tenderness, as much interest in
the varied picture of life, as hearty a contempt for hy
pocrisy, and almost an equal sense of fun. He has the
same easy abundance of matter. But what a difference !
It is the difference between the poet and the man of
poetic temperament. The abundance of the one is a con
tinual fulness within the fixed limits of good taste ; that
of the other is squandered in overflow. The one can be
profuse on occasion ; the other is diffuse whether he will
or no. The one is full of talk ; the other is garrulous.
What in one is the refined bonhomie of a man of the world,
is a rustic shrewdness in the other. Both are kindly in
their satire, and have not (like too many reformers) that
vindictive love of virtue which spreads the stool of re
pentance with thistle-burrs before they invite the erring
to seat themselves therein. But what in " Piers Plough
man " is sly fun, has the breadth and depth of humor in
Chaucer ; and it is plain that while the former was taken
up by his moral purpose, the main interest of the latter
turned to perfecting the form of his work. In short,
Chaucer had that fine literary sense which is as rare as
genius, and, united with it, as it was in him, assures an
immortality of fame. It is not merely what he has to
say, but even more the agreeable way he has of saying it,
that captivates our attention and gives him an assured
place in literature. Above all, it is not in detached pas
sages that his charm lies, but in the entirety of expression
and the cumulative effect of many particulars working
toward a common end. Now though ex ungue leonem be
CHAUCER. 261
a good rule in comparative anatomy, its application, ex
cept in a very limited way, in criticism is sure to mislead ;
for we should always bear in mind that the really great
writer is great in the mass, and is to be tested less by his
cleverness in the elaboration of parts than by that reach
of mind which is incapable of random effort, which selects,
arranges, combines, rejects, denies itself the cheap tri
umph of immediate effects, because it is absorbed by the
controlling charm of proportion and unity. A careless
good-luck of phrase is delightful ; but criticism cleaves to
the teleological argument, and distinguishes the creative
intellect, not so much by any happiness of natural endow
ment as by the marks of design. It is true that one may
sometimes discover by a single verse whether an author
have imagination, or may make a shrewd guess whether
he have style or no, just as by a few spoken words you
may judge of a man's accent ; but the true artist in
language is never spotty, and needs no guide-boards of
admiring italics, a critical method introduced by Leigh
Hunt, whose feminine temperament gave him acute per
ceptions at the expense of judgment. This is the Boeotian
method, which offers us a brick as a sample of the house,
forgetting that it is not the goodness of the separate
bricks, but the way in which they are put together, that
brings them within the province of art, and makes the
difference between a heap and a house. A great writer
does not reveal himself here and there, but everywhere.
Langland's verse runs mostly like a brook, with a beguil
ing and wellnigh slumberous prattle, but he, more often
than any writer of his class, flashes into salient lines, gets
inside our guard with the home-thrust of a forthright
word, and he gains if taken piecemeal. His imagery is
naturally and vividly picturesque, as where he says of
Old Age,
262 CHAUCER.
" Eld the hoar
That was in the vauntward,
And bare the banner before death,"
and he softens to a sweetness of sympathy beyond Chau
cer when he speaks of the poor or tells us that Mercy is
" sib of all sinful " ; but to compare " Piers Ploughman"
with the " Canterbury Tales " is to compare sermon with
song.
Let us put a bit of Langland's satire beside one of
Chaucer's. Some people in search of Truth meet a pil
grim and ask him whence he comes. He gives a long
list of holy places, appealing for proof to the relics on his
hat :
" ' I have walked full wide in wet and in dry
And sought saints for my soul's health.'
' Know'st thou ever a relic that is called Truth?
Couldst thou show us the way where that wight dwelleth? '
' Nay, so God help me,' said the man then,
4 1 saw never palmer with staff nor with scrip
Ask after him ever till now in this place.' "
This is a good hit, and the poet is satisfied ; but, in what
I am going to quote from Chaucer, everything becomes
picture, over which lies broad and warm the sunshine of
humorous fancy.
" In olde dayes of the King Artour
Of which that Britouns speken gret honour,
All was this lond fulfilled of faverie:
The elf-queen with herjoly compaignie
Danced ful oft in many a grene mede:
This was the old opinion as I rede;
I speke of many hundrid yer asro:
But now can no man see none elves mo,
For now the grete charite and prayeres
Of lymytours and other holy freres
That sechen every lond and every streem,
As thick as motis in the sonnebeam,
Blessyng hallos, ohnmbres, kieheneX and boures,
Citees and burghes, castels hihe and toures,
Thorpe's and bernes, shepnes and dayeries,
This makith that ther ben no fayeries.
For ther as wont to waHteu was an elf
CHAUCER. 263
There walkith none but the lymytour himself,
In undermeles and in morwenynges.
And sayth his raatyns and his holy thinges,
As he goth in his lymytatioun.
Wommen may now go saufly up and doun;
In every bush or under every tre
There is none other incubus but he,
And he ne wol doon hem no dishonour."
How cunningly the contrast is suggested here between
the Elf-queen's jolly company and the unsocial limiters,
thick as motes in the sunbeam, yet each walking by him
self ! And with what an air of innocent unconsciousness
is the deadly thrust of the last verse given, with its con
temptuous emphasis on the he that seems so well-mean
ing ! Even Shakespeare, who seems to come in after
everybody has done his best with a "Let me take hold
a minute and show you how to do it," could not have
bettered this.
"Piers Ploughman" is the best example I know of what
is called popular poetry, of compositions, that is, which
contain all the simpler elements of poetry, but still in
solution, not crystallized around any thread of artistic
purpose. In it appears at her best the Anglo-Saxon Muse,
a first coxisin of Poor Richard, full of proverbial wisdom,
who always brings her knitting in her pocket, and seems
most at home in the chimney-corner. It is genial ; it
plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights and
wrongs ; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to
the gracious, and conceives of speech us a tool rather
than a musical instrument. If we should seek for a
single word that would define it most precisely, we should
not choose simplicity, but homeliness. There is more
or less of this in all early poetry, to be sure ; but I think
it especially proper to Knglish pools, and to the most
KiiLrlish among them, like Cowper, <Yal>l>o, and one in
tempted to add Wordsworth, where he forgets Cole
ridge's private lectures. In reading such poets as Lang-
264 CHAUCER.
land, also, we are not to forget a certain charm of dis
tance in the very language they use, making it unhack
neyed without being alien. As it is the chief function
of the poet to make the familiar novel, these fortunate
early risers of literature, who gather phrases with the
dew still on them, have their poetry done for them, as
it were, by their vocabulary. But in Chaucer, as in all
great poets, the language gets its charm from him. The
force and sweetness of his genius kneaded more kindly
together the Latin and Teutonic elements of our mother
tongue, and made something better than either. The
necessity of writing poetry, and not mere verse, made
him a reformer whether he would or no ; and the instinct
of his finer ear was a guide such as none before him or
contemporary with him, nor indeed any that came after
him, till Spenser, could command. Gower had no notion
of the uses of rhyme except as a kind of crease at the
end of every eighth syllable, where the verse was to be
folded over again into another layer. He says, for ex
ample,
" This maiden Canacee was hight,
Both in the day and eke by night,"
as if people commonly changed their names at dark.
And he could not even contrive to say this without the
clumsy pleonasm of both and eke. Chaucer was put to
no such shifts of piecing out his metre with loose-woven
bits of baser stuff. He himself says, in the " Man of
Law's Tale,"-
" Me lists not of the chaff nor of the straw
To make so long a tale as of the corn."
One of the world's three or four great story-tellers, he
was also one of the best versifiers that ever made Eng
lish trip and sing with a gayety that seems careless, but
where every foot beats time to the tune of the thought.
By the skilful arrangement of his pauses he evaded the
CHAUCER. 265
monotony of the couplet, and gave to the rhymed pen
tameter, which he made our heroic measure, something
of the architectural repose of blank verse. He found
our language lumpish, stiff, unwilling, too apt to speak
Saxonly in grouty monosyllables; he left it enriched
with the longer measure of the Italian and Provencal
poets. He reconciled, in the harmony of his verse, the
English bluntness with the dignity and elegance of the
less homely Southern speech. Though he did not and
could not create our language (for he who writes to be
read does not write for linguisters), yet it is true that he
first made it easy, and to that extent modern, so that
Spenser, two hundred years later, studied his method
and called him master. He first wrote English ; and it
was a feeling of this, I suspect, that made it fashionable
in Elizabeth's day to " talk pure Chaucer." Already we
find in his works verses that might pass without question
in Milton or even Wordsworth, so mainly unchanged
have the language of poetry and the movement of verse
remained from his day to our own.
" Thou Polymnia
On P^rnaso. that, with * thy sisters glade,
By Helicon, not far from Cirrea,
Singest with voice memorial in the shade,
Under the laurel which that may not fade.'!
" And downward from a hill under a bent
There stood the temple of Mars omnipotent
Wrought all of burned steel, of which th 1 ontre'e
Was long and strait and ghastly for to see:
The northern light in at the doore's shone
For window in the wall ne was there none
Through which men mighten any light discerne;
The dore was all of adamant eternc."
And here are some lines that would not seem out of
place in the " Paradise? of Dainty Devises" :
" Hide, Abso|uin,'thy gilte [gilded] (reuses clear,
Esther lay thoti thy meekness all adown.
* Commonly printed hiUh.
12
266 CHAUCER.
Make of your wifehood no comparison ;
Hide ye your beauties Ysoude and Elaine,
My lady cometh, that all this may distain."
When I remember Chaucer's malediction upon his scriv
ener, and consider that by far the larger proportion of
his verses (allowing always for change of pronunciation)
are perfectly accordant with our present accentual sys
tem, I cannot believe that he ever wrote an imperfect
line. His ear would never have tolerated the verses of
nine syllables, with a strong accent on the first, at
tributed to him by Mr. Skeate and Mr. Morris. Such
verses seem to me simply impossible in the pentameter
iambic as Chaucer wrote it. A great deal of misappre
hension would be avoided in discussing English metres,
if it were only understood that quantity in Latin and
quantity in English mean very different things. Perhaps
the best quantitative verses in our language (better even
than Coleridge's) are to be found in Mother Goose, com
posed by nurses wholly by ear and beating time as they
danced the baby on their knee. I suspect Chaucer and
Shakespeare would be surprised into a smile by the
learned arguments which supply their halting verses
with every kind of excuse except that of being readable.
When verses were written to be chanted, more license
could be allowed, for the ear tolerates the widest devia
tions from habitual accent in words that are sung.
Segnius irritant demissa per aurem. To some extent the
same thing is true of anapaestic and other tripping
measures, but we cannot admit it in marching tunes like
those of Chaucer. He wrote for the eye more than for
the voice, as poets had begun to do long before.* Some
* Froissart's description of the book ,of trails nmpurenx et de
moralit^, which he had had engrossed for presentation to Richard II.
in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. " Et
lui plut tres grandement; et plaire bien lui devoit car il <itait enluminei
CHAUCER. 267
loose talk of Coleridge, loose in spite of its affectation
of scientific precision, about " retardations " and the
like, has misled many honest persons into believing that
they can make good verse out of bad prose. Coleridge
himself, from natural fineness of ear, was the best
metrist among modern English poets, and, read with
proper allowances, his remarks upon versification are
always instructive to whoever is not rhythm-deaf. But
one has no patience with the dyspondeeuses, the pseon
primuses, and what not, with which he darkens verses that
are to be explained only by the contemporary habits of
pronunciation. Till after the time of Shakespeare we
must always bear in mind that it is not a language of
books but of living speech that we have to deal with.
Of this language Coleridge had little knowledge, except
what could be acquired through the ends of his fingers
as they lazily turned the leaves of his haphazard read
ing. If his eye was caught by a single passage that
gave him a chance to theorize he did not look farther.
Speaking of Massinger, for example, he says, " When a
speech is interrupted, or one of the characters speaks
aside, the last syllable of the former speech and first of
the succeeding Massinger counts for one, because both
are supposed to be spoken at the same moment.
' And felt the sweetness oft
' How her mouth runs over.' "
Now fifty instances may be cited from Massinger which
e'crit et historic' et convert de vermeil velours -i dis doux d'argont
dor^s d'or, et roses d'or nn milieu, et a deux grinds f'reuKiulx dorr* et
richement ouvre"s au milieu de rosier* d'or." How lovingly lie lingers
over it, hooking it together with et after tt .' Rut two centime* earlier.
while thejonylenrs were still in full song, poems were also read aloud.
" Pur retnembrer des anoessours
Le* fuits et le* dit* o.t Ics moiir*,
Deit Ten le* livres et les geste^
Et les estoires lire n festes." Roman dn Rot*.
Bat Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet
268 CHAUCER.
tell against this fanciful notion, for one that seems, and
only seems, in its favor. Any one tolerably familiar with
the dramatists knows that in the passage quoted by
Coleridge, the how being emphatic, "how her" was pro
nounced how 'r. He tells us that " Massinger is fond of
the anapaest in the first and third foot, as :
' T5 your more | than mas|culine rea|son that | commands 'em ||. f
Likewise of the second paeon (_ _ _ ^) in the first foot,
followed by four trochees (_ _), as :
' So greedily | long for, | know their | tltlll|ati6ns.' "
In truth, he was no fonder of them than his brother
dramatists who, like him, wrote for the voice by the ear.
" To your " is still one syllable in ordinary speech, and
" masculine " and " greedily " were and are dissyllables
or trisyllables according to their place in the verse.
Coleridge was making pedantry of a very simple matter.
Yet he has said with perfect truth of Chaucer's verse,
" Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final e
of syllables, and for expressing the terminations of such
words as ocean and nation, &c., as dissyllables, or let
the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by
a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with
a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are in
veterate, enable any one to feel the perfect smoothness
and harmony of Chaucer's verse." But let us keep wide
ly clear of Latin and Greek terms of prosody ! It is also
more important here than even with the dramatists of
Shakespeare's time to remember that we have to do with
a language caught more from the ear than from books.
The best school for learning to understand Chaucer's
elisions, compressions, si urr ings-over and runnings-to
gether of syllables is to listen to the habitiial speech of
rustics with whom language is still plastic to meaning, and
hurries or prolongs itself accordingly. Here is a contrao
CHAUCER. 269
tion frequent in Chaucer, and still common in New Eng,
land :
" But me were lever than [lever 'n] all this town, quod he."
Let one example suffice for many. To Coleridge's rules
another should be added by a wise editor ; and that is to
restore the final n in the infinitive and third person plural
of verbs, and in such other cases as can be justified by
the authority of Chaucer himself. Surely his ear could
never have endured the sing-song of such verses as
" I couthe telle for a gowne-cloth,"
or
" Than ye to me schuld breke youre trouthe."
Chaucer's measure is so uniform (making due allowances)
that words should be transposed or even omitted where
the verse manifestly demands it, and with copyists so
long and dull of ear this is often the case. Sometimes
they leave out a needful word :
" But er [the] thunder stynte, there cometh rain,"
" When [that] we ben yflattered and ypraised,"
u Tak [ye] him for the greatest gentleman."
Sometimes they thrust in a word or words that hobble
the verse :
" She trowed he were yfel in [some] maladie,"
" Ye faren like a man [that] had lost his wit,"
" Then have I got of you the maystrie, quod she,"
(Then have I got the maystery, quod she,)
" And quod the juge [also] thou must lose thy head."
Sometimes they give a wrong word identical in mean
ing:-
" And therwithal he knew [couthe] mo proverbes."
Sometimes they change the true order of the words :
" Therefore no woman of clerk iis is [is of clerkes] praised w
" His felaw lo, here he stont [stont he] hool on live."
" He that coveteth is a pore wight
For he wold have that is not in his might;
But he that nought hath no coveteth nought to have."
270 CHAUCER.
Here the " but " of the third verse belongs at the head
of the first, and we get rid of the anomaly of " coveteth"
differently accented within two lines. Nearly all the
seemingly unmetrical verses may be righted in this way.
I find a good example of this in the last stanza of " Troi-
lus and Creseide." As it stands, we read,
" Thou one, two, and three, eterne on live
That raignast aie in three, two and one."
It is plain that we should read " one and two " in the
first verse, and " three and two " in the second. Re
membering, then, that Chaucer was here translating
Dante, I turned (after making the correction) to the
original, and found as I expected
" Quell' uno e due e tre che sempre vive
E regna sempre in tre e due ed uno." (Par. xiv. 28, 29.)
In the stanza before this we have,
" To thee and to the philosophical strode,
To vouchsafe [vouchesafe] there need is, to correct " ;
and further on,
" With all mine herte' of mercy ever I pray
And to the Lord aright thus I speake and say,"
where we must either strike out the second " I " or put
it after " speake."
One often finds such changes made by ear justified by
the readings in other texts, and we cannot but hope that
the Chaucer Society will give us the means of at last
settling upon a version which shall make the poems of
one of the most fluent of metrists at least readable. Let
anyone compare the " Franklin's Tale " in the Aldine
edition* with the text given by Wright, and he will find
both sense and metre clear themselves up in a surpris
ing way. A careful collation of texts, by the way, con-
* One of the very worst, be it said in passing.
CHAUCER. 271
firms one's confidence in Tyrwhitt's good taste and
thoroughness.
A writer in the " Proceedings of the Philological Soci
ety" has lately undertaken to prove that Chaucer did not
sound the final or medial e, and throws us back on the
old theory that he wrote " riding-rime," that is, verse to
the eye and not the ear. This he attempts to do by
showing that the Anglo-Norman poets themselves did
not sound the e, or, at any rate, were not uniform in so
doing. It should seem a sufficient answer to this merely
to ask whence modern French poetry derived its rules of
pronunciation so like those of Chaucer, so different from
those of prose. But it is not enough to prove that
some of the Anglo-Norman rhymers were bad versifiers.
Let us look for examples in the works of the best poet
among them all, Marie de France, with whose works
Chaucer was certainly familiar. What was her practice ?
I open at random and find enough to overthrow the
whole theory :
"Odsafille*kelecela
Tut li curages li fremi
Di mei, fet-el par ta fei
La Dameisele 1'aporta
Kar ne li sembla mie boens
La dame 1'aveit apele'e
Et la mere Pareisuna."
But how about the elision 1
" Le pah'' esgarde sur le lit
Et ele' est devant li ale"e
Bele' amie [cf. mie, above] ne'il me celez.
La dame' ad sa fille' amende."
These are all on a single page f, and there are some to
* Whence came, pray, the Elizabethan comma ndement, chnpflain,
turety, and a score of others? Whence the Scottish boitny, and so
many English words of Romance derivation ending in y T
t Poesies de Marie de France, Tome I. p. 188.
272 CHAUCER.
spare. How about the hiatus ? On the same page
I find,
"Kar 1'Erceveske i estoit
Pur eus beneistre' e enseiner."
What was the practice of Wace ] Again I open at ran'
dom.
" N'osa remaindre' en Normandie,
Maiz, quant la guerre fu finie,
Od sou herneiz en Puille' ala
Cil de Baienes lunge'ment
Ne fl nes pout par force prendre
Dune la vile mult amendout,
Prisons e preies amenout." *
Again we have the sounded final e, the elision, and the
hiatus. But what possible reason is there for supposing
that Chaucer would go to obscure minstrels to learn the
rules of French versification 1 Nay, why are we to sup
pose that he followed them at all ] In his case as in
theirs, as in that of the Italians, with the works of whose
two greater poets he was familiar, it was the language
itself and the usages of pronunciation that guided the
poet, and not arbitrary laws laid down by a synod of
versemakers. Chaucer's verse differs from that of Gower
and Lydgate precisely as the verse of Spenser differs
from that of Gascoigne, and for the same reason, that
he was a great poet, to whom measure was a natural ve
hicle. But admitting that he must have formed his
style on the French poets, would he not have gone for
lessons to the most famous and popular among them,
the authors of the " Roman de la Rose " 1 Wherever
you open that poem, you find Guillaume de Lorris and
Jean de Meung following precisely the same method, a
method not 
