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Riverside Crition

THE WRITINGS OF
JOHN BURROUGHS
VOLUME VIII

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Chis Coition ig limited ta One Chougand Aets

THE WRITINGS OF
JOHN BURROUGHS

Riverside Cdirtion

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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

INDOOR STUDIES

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS
ee

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Che Vivergive Press, Cambridge
1895
HY

Vig

Copyright, 1889, 1895,
By JOHN BURROUGHS.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. 8. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

CONTENTS

PAGE
I. Henry D. Tooreav . m oto Boo Jen # oe CE
II. Sctence anp LITERATURE . é ¥ : . 43

III. Science AND THE Ports . ew oe » « 69

IV. Matruew Arnoup’s Criticism . f a Se 81

V. ARNOLD’s Virw or EMERSON AND CARLYLE « 129

VI. GirseRT Wuite’s Boox r * ei x - 163

VII. A ManrormMep Giant t -% & & - « 179
VIII. Brier Essays:

I. The Biologist’s Treeof Life. . . . 198

II. Dr. Johnson and Carlyle . . . . . 198

III. Little Spoons vs. Big Spoons . r F - 206

IV. The Ethics of War . : a . ‘< 6 2201.

V. Solitude . ‘ ‘ é % 7 . i 217

VI. AnOpenDoor ~~ «© «© «we 285

VII. The True Realism . r * . ‘ J got

VIII. Literary Fame . . . . «© « . 289

IX. An EcoristicAL CHAPTER . * S ‘ 243

InDEX . . 2 . S 5 ‘ 5 ‘ - 261

The frontispiece, representing a view on the Concord River,
and the vignette of Mr. Burroughs’ study at Riverby were etched
by Charles H. Woodbury.

INDOOR STUDIES

I
HENRY D. THOREAU

- “Walden” Thoreau enumerates, in a serio-
humorous vein, his various unpaid occupa-
tions, such as inspector of storms, surveyor of forest
paths and all across-lot routes, shepherd and herder
to the wild stock of the town, etc. Among the
rest he says: “For a long time I was reporter to a
journal of no very wide circulation, whose editor
has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my con-
tributions, and, as is too common with writers,
I got only my labor for my pains. However, in
this case my pains were their own reward.” The
journal to which Thoreau so playfully alludes, con-
sisting of many manuscript volumes, is now the prop-
erty of Mr. H. G. O. Blake, an old friend and
correspondent of his, and his rejected contributions
to it, after a delay of nearly twenty years, are
being put into print. “Early Spring in Massachu-
setts,” “Summer,” and ‘ Winter,” lately published,
are made up of excerpts from this journal, A few

2 INDOOR STUDIES

of the passages in the former have been in print
before. JI notice one in the ‘‘ Week,” one or more
in his discourse on ‘‘ Walking, or the Wild,” and
one in the essay called “Life without Principle.”
Thoreau published but two volumes in his life-
time, ““A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers” — which, by the way, is mainly a record
of other and much longer voyages upon other and
less tangible rivers than those named in the title —
and ‘‘ Walden, or Life in the Woods.” The other
six volumes of his works, including Mr. Blake’s,
have been collected and published since his death.4
Of Thoreau’s journal as published by Mr. Blake
I think it may be said that a good deal of it is
evidently experimental with the author. There is
often an attempt to make something out of nothing
by the mere force of words. He squeezes his sub-
ject as in a vice; we feel the effort he makes, but
the result is often not worth the labor; the precious
drop he is after is not forthcoming. In fact, his
journal is largely the record of a search for some-
thing he never fully finds: any fact of natural his-
tory or botany or geology which he does find is
only incidental; he turns it over curiously, remarks
upon it, and passes on in his chase of the unattain-
able. Yet there is most excellent and characteristic
matter in his journal, and many valuable and in-
teresting natural history notes. When he wrote

1 Since this was written a new Riverside Edition of Thoreaw’s
writings has been published in eleven volumes, including Autumn,
from his journal, and a selection of his Familiar Letters.

HENRY D. THOREAU 3

a book or a lecture or an essay, we are told, he
went to his journal for the greater share of his ma-
terial. He revised and corrected and supplemented
his record from day to day and from year to year,
till it often reflects truly his life and mind. He
was a man so thoroughly devoted to principle and
to his own aims in life that he seems never to have
allowed himself one indifferent or careless moment.
He was always making the highest demands upon
himself and upon others.

In his private letters his bow is strung just as
taut as in his printed works, and he uses arrows
from the same quiver, and sends them just as high
and far as he can. In his journal it appears to be
the same.

Thoreau’s fame has steadily increased since his
death, in 1862, as it was bound to do. It was
little more than in the bud at that time, and its
full leaf and flowering are not yet, perhaps not in
many years yet. He improves with age; in fact,
requires age to take off a little of his asperity and
fully ripen him. The generation he lectured so
sharply will not give the same heed to his words as
will the next and the next. The first effect of the
reading of his books, upon many minds, is irritation
and disapproval; the perception of their beauty and
wisdom comes later. He makes short work of our
prejudices; he likes the wind in his teeth, and to
put it in the teeth of his reader. He was a man
devoid of compassion, devoid of sympathy, devoid
of generosity, devoid of patriotism, as these words

4 INDOOR STUDIES

are usually understood, yet his life showed a devo-
tion to principle such as one life in millions does
not show; and matching this there runs through his
works a vein of the purest and rarest poetry and
the finest wisdom. For both these reasons, time
will enhance rather than lessen the value of his
contributions. The world likes a good hater and
refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and
acceptor, only it likes him farther off.

In writing of Thoreau, I am not conscious of
having any criticism to make of him. I would fain
accept him just as he was, and make the most of
him, defining and discriminating him as I would
a flower or a bird or any other product of nature, —
perhaps exaggerating some features the better to
bring them out. There were greater men among
his contemporaries, but I doubt if there were any
more genuine and sincere, or more devoted to ideal
ends. If he was not this, that, or the other great
man, he was Thoreau, and he fills his own niche
well, and has left a positive and distinct impression
upon the literature of his country. He did his
work thoroughly; he touched bottom; he made the
most of his life. He said: “I would not be one
of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere
lath and plastering;’’ he would beat about with his
hammer till he found the studding, and no one
can study his life and books and not feel that he
really drove his nail home into good solid timber.
He was, perhaps, a little too near his friend and
master, Emerson, and brought too directly under

HENRY D. THOREAU 5

his influence. If he had lived farther from him,
he would have felt his attraction less. But he was
just as positive a fact as Emerson. The contour
of his moral nature was just as firm and resisting.
He was no more a soft-shelled egg, to be dented
by every straw in the nest, than was his distin-
guished neighbor.

An English reviewer has summed up his estimate
of Thoreau by calling him a ‘‘skulker,” which is the
pith of Dr. Johnson’s smart epigram about Cowley,
a man in whom Thoreau is distinctly foreshadowed:
“Tf his activity was virtue, his retreat was coward-
ice.” Thoreau was a skulker if it appears that he
ran away from a noble part to perform an ignoble,
or one less noble. The world has a right to the
best there is in a man, both in word and deed, —
from the scholar, knowledge; from the soldier,
courage; from the statesman, wisdom; from the
farmer, good husbandry, etc.; and from all, virtue:
but has it a right to say arbitrarily who shall be
soldiers and who poets? Is there no virtue but
virtue? no religion but in the creeds? no salt but
what is crystallized? Who shall presume to say
the world did not get the best there was in Thoreau,
— high and much-needed service from him, —
albeit there appear in the account more kicks than
compliments? Would you have had him stick to
his lead-pencils, or to school-teaching, and let Wal-
den Pond and the rest go? We should have lost
some of the raciest and most antiseptic books in
English literature, and an example of devotion to

6 INDOOR STUDIES

principle that provokes and stimulates like a winter
morning. I am not aware that Thoreau shirked
any responsibility or dodged any duty proper to
him, and he could look the world as square in the
face as any man that ever lived.

The people of his native town remember at least
one notable occasion on which Thoreau did not
skulk, nor sulk either. I refer to the 30th of Octo-
ber, 1859, when he made his plea for Captain John
Brown, while the hero was on trial in Virginia.
It was proposed to stop Thoreau’s mouth, persuade
him to keep still and lie low, but he was not to be
stopped. He thought there were enough lying low,
—the ranks were all full there, the ground was
covered; and in an address delivered in Concord he
glorified the old hero in words that, at this day and
in the light of subsequent events, it thrills the blood
to read. This instant and unequivocal indorsement
of Brown by Thoreau, in the face of the most over-
whelming public opinion even among antislavery
men, throws a flood of light upon him. It is the
most significant act of his life. It clinches him;
it makes the colors fast. We know he means what
he says after that. It is of the same metal and has
the same ring as Brown’s act itself. It shows
what thoughts he had fed his soul on, what school
he had schooled himself in, what his devotion to
the ideal meant. His hatred of slavery and injus-
tice, and of the government that tolerated them,
was pure, and it went clean through; it stopped at
nothing. JIniquitous laws must be defied, and there

HENRY D. THOREAU 7

is no previous question. ‘The fact that the politi-
cian fears,” he says, referring to the repeal of the
Fugitive Slave Law, “is merely that there is less
honor among thieves than was supposed, and not
the fact that they are thieves.” For the most part,
Thoreau’s political tracts and addresses seem a little
petulant and willful, and fall just short of enlisting
one’s sympathies; and his carrying his opposition
to the state to the point of allowing himself to be
put in jail rather than pay a paltry tax, savors a
little bit of the grotesque and the melodramatic.
But his plea for John Brown when the whole coun-
try was disowning him, abolitionists and all, fully
satisfies one’s sense of the fitness of things. It
does not overshoot the mark. The mark was high,
and the attitude of the speaker was high and scorn-
ful, and uncompromising in the extreme. It was
just the occasion required to show Thoreau’s metal.
“Tf this man’s acts and words do not create a revi-
val, it will be the severest possible satire on the
acts and words that do. It is the best news that
America has ever heard.” ‘Think of him, — of
his rare qualities! —such a man as it takes ages to
make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor
the representative of any party. A man such as
the sun may not rise upon again in this benighted
land, to whose making went the costliest material,
the finest adamant; sent to be the redeemer of those
in captivity; and the only use to which you can
put him is to hang him at the end of a rope!”
“Do yourselves the honor to recognize him; he

8 INDOOR STUDIES

needs none of your respect.” It was just such
radical qualities as John Brown exhibited, or their
analogue and counterpart in other fields, that Tho-
reau coveted and pursued through life: in man,
devotion to the severest ideal, friendship founded
upon antagonism, or hate, as he preferred to call it;
in nature the untamed and untamable, even verging
on the savage and pitiless; in literature the heroic,
— “books, not which afford us a cowering enjoy-
ment, but in which each thought is of unusual
daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a
timid one would not be entertained by.” Indeed,
Thoreau was Brown’s spiritual brother, the last and
finer flowering of the same plant, — the seed flower-
ing: he was just as much of a zealot, was just as
gritty and unflinching in his way; a man whose
brow was set, whose mind was made up, and lead-
ing just as forlorn a hope, and as little quailed by
the odds.

In the great army of Mammon, the great army
of the fashionable, the complacent and church-go-
ing, Thoreau was a skulker, even a deserter, if you
please, — yea, a traitor fighting on the other side.

Emerson regrets the loss to the world of his rare
powers of action, and thinks that, instead of being
the captain of a huckleberry-party, he might have
engineered for all America. But Thoreau, doubt-
less, knew himself better when he said, with his
usual strength of metaphor, that he was as unfit for
the coarse uses of this world as gossamer for ship-
timber. A man who believes that “life should be

HENRY D. THOREAU 9

lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck
a flower,” and actually and seriously aims to live
his life so, is not a man to engineer for all America.
If you want a columbiad you must have tons and
tons of gross metal; and if you want an engineer for
all America, leader and wielder of vast masses of
men, you must have a certain breadth and coarse-
ness of fibre in your hero: but if you want a trench-
ant blade like Thoreau, you must leave the pot-
metal out and look for something bluer and finer.
Thoreau makes a frank confession upon this very
point in his journal, written when he was but
twenty-five. “I must confess I have felt mean
enough when asked how I was to act on society,
what errand I had to mankind. Undoubtedly I
did not feel mean without a reason, and yet my
loitering is not without a defense. I would fain
communicate the wealth of my life to men, would
really give them what is most precious in my gift.
I would secrete pearls with the shellfish, and lay
up honey with the bees for them. I will sift the
sunbeams for the public good. I know no riches I
would keep back.”” And his subsequent life made
good these words. He gave the world the strong-
est and bravest there was in him, the pearls of his
life, —not a fat oyster, not a reputation unctuous
with benevolence and easy good-will, but a character
crisp and pearl-like, full of hard, severe words and
stimulating taunts and demands. Thoreau was an
extreme product, an extreme type of mind and char-
acter, and was naturally more or less isolated from

10 INDOOR STUDIES

his surroundings. He planted himself far beyond
the coast-line that bounds most lives, and seems
insular and solitary; but he believed he had the
granite floor of principle beneath him, and without
the customary intervening clay or quicksands.

Of a profile we say the outlines are strong, or
they are weak and broken. The outlines of Tho-
reau’s moral nature are strong and noble, but the
direct face-to-face expression of his character is not
always pleasing, not always human. He appears
best in profile, when looking away from you and
not toward you, — when looking at nature and not
at man. He combined a remarkable strength of
will with a nature singularly sensitive and delicate,
—the most fair and fragile of wood-flowers on an
iron stem. With more freedom and flexibility of
character, greater capacity for self-surrender and
self-abandonment, he would have been a great poet,
But his principal aim in life was moral and intellec-
tual, rather than artistic. He was an ascetic before
he was a poet, and he cuts the deepest in the direc-
tion of character and conduct. He had no caution
or prudence in the ordinary sense, no worldly tem-
porizing qualities of any kind; was impatient of the
dross and alloy of life, — would have it pure flame,
pure purpose and aspiration; and, so far as he could
make it, his life was so. He was, by nature, of the
Opposition; he had a constitutional No in him that
could not be tortured into Yes. He was of the stuff
that saints and martyrs and devotees, or, if you please,
fanatics are made of, and no doubt, in an earlier age,

HENRY D. THOREAU 11

would have faced the rack or the stake with perfect
composure. Such a man was bound to make an im-
pression by contrast, if not by comparison, with the
men of his country and time. He is, for the most
part, a figure going the other way from that of the
eager, money-getting, ambitious crowd, and he ques-
tions and admonishes and ridicules the passers-by
sharply. We all see him and remember him, and
feel his shafts. Especially was his attitude upon
all social and political questions scornful and exas-
perating. His devotion to principle, to the ideal,
was absolute; it was like that of the Hindu to his
idol. If it devoured him or crushed him, — what
business was that of his? There was no conceiv-
able failure in adherence to principle.

Thoreau was, probably, the wildest civilized man
this country has produced, adding to the shyness of
the hermit and woodsman the wildness of the poet,
and to the wildness of the poet the greater ferity
and elusiveness of the mystic. An extreme product
of civilization and of modern culture, he was yet as
untouched by the worldly and commercial spirit of
his age and country as any red man that ever
haunted the shores of his native stream. He put
the whole of nature between himself and his fel-
lows. A man of the strongest local attachments, —
not the least nomadic, seldom wandering beyond his
native township, — yet his spirit was as restless and
as impatient of restraint as any nomad or Tartar
that ever lived. He cultivated an extreme wild-
ness, not only in his pursuits and tastes, but in his

12 INDOOR STUDIES

hopes and imaginings. He says to his friend,
“Hold fast your most indefinite waking dream.”
Emerson says his life was an attempt to pluck the
Swiss edelweiss from the all but inaccessible cliffs.
The higher and the wilder, the more the fascination
for him. Indeed, the loon, the moose, the beaver,
were but faint types and symbols of the wildness
he coveted and would have reappear in his life and
books; not the cosmical, the universal, — he was
not great enough for that, — but simply the wild as
distinguished from the domestic and the familiar,
the remote and the surprising as contrasted with
the hackneyed and the commonplace, arrow-heads
as distinguished from whetstones or jackknives.
Thoreau was French on one side and Puritan on
the other. It was probably the wild, untamable
French core in him —a dash of the gray wolf that
stalks through his ancestral folk-lore, as in Audubon
and the Canadian voyageurs — that made him turn
with such zest and such genius to aboriginal nature ;
and it was the Puritan element in him — strong,
grim, uncompromising, almost heartless — that held
him to such high, austere, moral, and ideal ends.
His genius was Saxon in its homeliness and sin-
cerity, in its directness and scorn of rhetoric; but
that wild revolutionary cry of his, and that sort of
restrained ferocity and hirsuteness, are more French.
He said in one of his letters, when he was but
twenty-four: “I grow savager and savager every
day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is
only the repose of untamableness.” But his sav-

HENRY D. THOREAU 13

ageness took a mild form. He could not even eat
meat; it was unclean and offended his imagination,
and when he went to Maine he felt for weeks that
his nature had been made the coarser because he
had witnessed the killing of a moose. His boasted
savageness, the gray wolf in him, only gave a more
decided grit or grain to his mental and moral nature,
—made him shut his teeth the more firmly, some-
times even with an audible snap and growl, upon
the poor lambs and ewes and superannuated wethers
of the social, religious, political folds.

In his moral and intellectual growth and expe-
rience, Thoreau seems to have reacted strongly from
a marked tendency to invalidism in his own body.
He would be well in spirit at all hazards. What
was this never-ending search of his for the wild
but a search for health, for something tonic and
antiseptic in nature? Health, health, give me
health, is his cry. He went forth into nature as
the boys go to the fields and woods in spring after
wintergreens, black birch, crinkle-root, and sweet-
flag; he had an unappeasable hunger for the pun-
gent, the aromatic, the bitter-sweet, for the very
rind and salt of the globe. He fairly gnaws the
ground and the trees in his walk, so craving is his
appetite for the wild. He went to Walden to
study, but it was as a deer goes to a deer-lick; the
brine he was after did abound there. Any trait of
wildness and freedom suddenly breaking out in any
of the domestic animals, as when your cow leaped
your fence like a deer and ate up your corn, or

14 INDOOR STUDIES

your horse forgot that he was not a mustang on
the plains, and took the bit in his teeth, and left
your buggy and family behind high and dry, ete.,
was eagerly snapped up by him. Ah, you have not
tamed them, you have not broken them yet! He
makes a most charming entry in his journal about
a little boy he one day saw in the street, with a
home-made cap on his head made of a woodchuck’s
skin, He seized upon it as a horse with the crib-
bite seizes upon a post. It tasted good to him.

“The great gray-tipped hairs were all preserved,
and stood out above the brown ones, only a little
more loosely than in life. It was as if he had put
his head into the belly of a woodchuck, having cut
off his tail and legs, and substituted a visor for the
head. The little fellow wore it innocently enough,
not knowing what he had on forsooth, going about
his small business pit-a-pat, and his black eyes
sparkled beneath it when I remarked on its warmth,
even as the woodchuck’s might have done. Such
should be the history of every piece of clothing that
we wear.”

He says how rarely are we encouraged by the
sight of simple actions in the street; but when one
day he saw an Irishman wheeling home from far a
large, damp, and rotten pine log for fuel, he felt
encouraged. ‘That looked like fuel; it warmed him
to think of it. The piles of solid oak-wood which
he saw in other yards did not interest him at all in
comparison. It savored of the wild, and, though
water-soaked, his fancy kindled at the sight.

HENRY D. THOREAU 15

He loved wild men, not tame ones. Any half-
wild Irishman, or fisherman, or hunter in his neigh-
borhood he was sure to get a taste of sooner or
later. He seems to have had a hankering for the
Indian all his life; could eat him raw, one would
think. In fact, he did try him when he went to
Maine, and succeeded in extracting more nutriment
out of him than any other man has done. He
found him rather tough diet, and was probably a
little disappointed in him, but he got something
out of him akin to that which the red squirrel gets
out of a pine-cone. In his books he casts many a
longing and envious glance upon the Indian. Some
old Concord sachem seems to have looked into his
fount of life and left his image there. His annual
spring search for arrow-heads was the visible out-
cropping of this aboriginal trace. How he prized
these relics! One is surprised to see how much he
gets out of them. They become arrow-root instead
of arrow-stones. “They are sown, like a grain
that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the earth.
As the dragon’s teeth bore a crop of soldiers, so
these bear crops of philosophers and poets, and the
same seed is just as good to plant again. It is a
stone-fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I
come nearer to the maker of it than if I found his
bones.” ‘“‘When I see these signs, I know that
the subtle spirits that made them are not far off,
into whatever form transmuted.”? Our poetry, he
said, was white man’s poetry, and he longed to

1 Early Spring in Massachusetts, pp. 259, 260.

16 INDOOR STUDIES

hear what the Indian muse had to say. I think
he liked the Indian’s paint and feathers. Cer-
tainly he did his skins, and the claws and hooked
beaks with which he adorned himself. He puts
a threatening claw or beak into his paragraphs
whenever he can, and feathers his shafts with the
nicest art.

So wild a man, and such a lover of the wild,
and yet it does not appear that he ever sowed any
wild oats. Though he somewhere exclaims impa-
tiently, ‘‘What demon possesses me that I behave
so well?” he took it all out in transcendentalism
and arrow-heads. His only escapades were eloping
with a mountain or coquetting with Walden Pond!
He sees a water-bug, and at once exclaims, “Ah!
if I had no more sins to answer for than a water-
bug!” Had he any more? His weakness was
that he had no weakness, — it was only unkindness.
He had a deeper centre-board than most men, and
he carried less sail. The passions and emotions
and ambitions of his fellows, which are sails that
so often need to be close-reefed and double-reefed,
he was quite free from. Thoreau’s isolation, his
avoidance of the world, was in self-defense, no
doubt. His genius would not bear the contact of
rough hands any more than would butterflies’ wings.
He says in “Walden:” “The finest qualities of
our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be pre-
served only by the most delicate handling.” This
bloom, this natural innocence, Thoreau was very
jealous of and sought to keep unimpaired, and,

HENRY D. THOREAU 17

perhaps, succeeded as few men ever have. He
says you cannot even know evil without being a
particeps criminis. He did not so much regret
the condition of things in this country (in 1861) as
that he had ever heard of it.

Yet Thoreau creates as much consternation among
the saints as among the sinners. His delicacy and
fineness were saved by a kind of cross-grain there
was in him, —a natural twist and stubbornness of
fibre. He was not easily reduced to kindling-wood.
His self-indulgences were other men’s crosses. His
attitude was always one of resistance and urge. He
hated sloth and indolence and compliance as he
hated rust. He thought nothing was so much to
be feared as fear, and that atheism might, compara-
tively, be popular with God himself. Beware even
the luxury of affection, he says, — ‘‘There must be
some nerve and heroism in our love, as in a winter
morning.” He tells his correspondent to make his
failure tragical by the earnestness and steadfastness
of his endeavor, and then it will not differ from
success. His saintliness is a rock-crystal. He says
in “Walden:” “ Probably I should not consciously
and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do
the good which society demands of me, to save the
universe from annihilation; and I believe that a
like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is
all that now preserves it.” Is this crystal a dia-
mond? What will it not cut?

There is no grain of concession or compromise in
this man. He asks no odds and he pays no boot,

18 INDOOR STUDIES

He will have his way, but his way is not down the
stream with the current. He loves to warp up it
against wind and tide, holding fast by his anchor
at night. When he is chagrined or disgusted, it con-
vinces him his health is better, — that there is some
vitality left. It is not compliments his friends get
from him, —rather taunts. The caress of the hand
may be good, but the sting of its palm is good also,
No is more bracing and tonic than Yes. He said:
“T love to go through a patch of scrub-oaks in a
bee-line, — where you tear your clothes and put
your eyes out.” The spirit of antagonism never
sleeps with Thoreau, and the love of paradox is one
of his guiding stars. “The longer I have forgotten
you, the more I remember you,” he says to his
correspondent. “My friend is cold and reserved,
because his love for me is waxing and not waning,”
he says in his journal. The difficult and the dis-
agreeable are in the line of his self-indulgence.
Even lightning will choose the easiest way out of
the house, —an open window or door. Thoreau
would rather go through the solid wall, or mine out
through the cellar.

When he is sad, his only regret is that he is not
sadder. He says if his sadness were only sadder it
would make him happier. In writing to his friend,
he says it is not sad to him to hear she has sad
hours: “I rather rejoice in the richness of your
experience.” In one of his letters, he charges his
correspondent to “‘improve every opportunity to be
melancholy,” and accuses himself of being too easily

HENRY D. THOREAU 19

contented with a slight and almost animal happi-
ness. “My happiness is a good deal like that of
the woodchucks.” He says that “of acute sorrow
I suppose that I know comparatively little. My
saddest and most genuine sorrows are apt to be but
transient regrets.” Yet he had not long before lost
by death his brother John, with whom he made his
voyage on the Concord and Merrimack. Referring
to John’s death, he said: “I find these things
more strange than sad to me. What right have I
to grieve who have not ceased to wonder?” and
says in effect, afterward, that any pure grief is its
own reward. John, he said, he did not wish ever
to see again, —not the John that was dead (O
Henry! Henry!), John as he was in the flesh,
but the ideal, the nobler John, of whom the real
was the imperfect representative. When the son of
his friend died, he wasted no human regrets. It
seemed very natural and proper that he should die.
“Do not the flowers die every autumn?” “His
fine organization demanded it [death], and nature
gently yielded its request. It would have been
strange if he had lived.”

Either Thoreau was destitute of pity and love (in
the human sense), and of many other traits that are
thought to be both human and divine, or else he
studiously suppressed them and thought them un-
worthy of him. He writes and talks a great deal
about love and friendship, and often with singular
beauty and appreciation, yet he always says to his
friend: “Stand off —keep away! Let there be an

20 INDOOR STUDIES

unfathomable gulf between us, —let there be a
wholesome hate.” Indeed, love and hatred seem
inseparable in his mind, and curiously identical.
He writes in his journal that “words should pass
between friends as the lightning passes from cloud
to cloud.” One of his poems begins: —

“Let such pure hate still underprop

Our love, that we may be

Each other’s conscience,

And have our sympathy
Mainly from thence.

“Surely, surely, thou wilt trust me
When I say thou dost disgust me.
Oh, I hate thee with a hate
That would fain annihilate ;

Yet, sometimes, against my will,
My dear friend, I love thee still.
It were treason to our love,

And a sin to God above,

One iota to abate

Of a pure, impartial hate.”

This is the salt with which he seasons and pre-
serves his love, —hatred. In this pickle it will
keep. Without it, it would become stale and vulgar.
This is characteristic of Thoreau; he must put in
something sharp and bitter. You shall not have the
nut without its bitter acrid rind or prickly sheath.

As a man, Thoreau appears to have been what is
called a crusty person, —a loaf with a hard bake,
a good deal of crust, forbidding to tender gums,
but sweet to those who had good teeth and unction
enough to soften him. He says he did not wish to
take a cabin passage in life, “but rather to go before
the mast and on the deck of the world.”

HENRY D. THOREAU 21

He was no fair-weather walker. He delighted
in storms, and in frost and cold. They were con-
genial to him. They came home. ‘“ Yesterday’s
rain,” he begins an entry in his journal, “in which
I was glad to be drenched,” etc. Again he says:
“T sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away
cave through a three weeks’ storm, cold and wet,
to give a tone to my system.” Another time: “A
long, soaking rain, the drops trickling down the
stubble, while I lay drenched on a last year’s bed
of wild oats, by the side of some bare hill, rumi-
nating.” And this in March, too! He says, “To
get the value of a storm, we must be out a long
time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly pene-
trate our skin,” etc. He rejoices greatly when,
on an expedition to Monadnock, he gets soaked
with rain and is made thoroughly uncomfortable.
It tastes good. It made him appreciate a roof and
a fire. The mountain gods were especially kind
and thoughtful to. get up the storm. When they
saw himself and friend coming, they said: ‘There
come two of our folks. Let us get ready for them,
—get up a serious storm that will send a-packing
these holiday guests. Let us receive them with
true mountain hospitality, — kill the fatted cloud.”
In his journal he says: “If the weather is thick
and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be
cold and wet and uncomfortable, —in other words,
to feel weather-beaten, — you may consume the after-
noon to advantage, thus browsing along the edge of
some near wood, which would scarcely detain you

22 INDOOR STUDIES

at all in fair weather.” ‘There is no better fence
to put between you and the village than a storm
into which the villagers do not venture forth.”
This passion for storms and these many drenchings
no doubt helped shorten Thoreau’s days.

This crustiness, this playful and willful perver-
sity of Thoreau, is one source of his charm as a
writer. It stands him in stead of other qualities, —
of real unction and heartiness, —is, perhaps, these
qualities in a more seedy and desiccated state.
Hearty, in the fullest sense, he was not, and unctu-
ous he was not, yet it is only by comparison that
we miss these qualities from his writings. Perhaps
he would say that we should not expect the milk
on the outside of the cocoanut; but I suspect there
is an actual absence of milk here, though there is
sweet meat, and a good, hard shell to protect it.
Good-nature and conciliation were not among his
accomplishments, and yet he puts his reader in a
genial and happy frame of mind. He is the occa-
sion of unction and heartiness in others, if he has
not them in himself. He says of himself, with
great penetration: “My only integral experience is
in my vision. I see, perchance, with more integ-
rity than I feel.” His sympathies lead you into
narrow quarters, but his vision takes you to the
hilltops. As regards humanity and all that goes
with it, he was like an inverted cone, and grew
broader and broader the farther he got from it.
He approached things, or even men, but very little
through his humanity or his manliness. How de-

HENRY D. THOREAU 23

lightful his account of the Canadian wood-chopper
in “Walden,” and yet he sees him afar off, across
an impassable gulf!—he is a kind of Homeric or
Paphlagonian man to him, Very likely he would
not have seen him at all had it not been for the
classic models and ideals with which his mind was
filled, and which saw for him.

Yet Thoreau doubtless liked the flavor of strong,
racy men. He said he was naturally no hermit,
but ready enough to fasten himself, like a blood-
sucker for the time, to any full-blooded man that
came in his way; and he gave proof of this when
he saw and recognized the new poet, Walt Whit-
man, Here is the greatest democrat the world has
seen, he said, and he found him exhilarating and
encouraging, while yet he felt somewhat imposed
upon by his heartiness and broad generalities. As
a writer, Thoreau shows all he is, and more. No-
thing is kept back; greater men have had far less
power of statement. His thoughts do not merely
crop out, but lie upon the surface of his pages.
They are fragments; there is no more than you see.
It is not the edge or crown of the native rock, but
a drift bowlder. He sees clearly, thinks swiftly,
and the sharp emphasis and decision of his mind
strew his pages with definite and striking images
and ideas. His expression is never sod-bound, and
you get its full force at once.

One of his chief weapons is a kind of restrained
extravagance of statement, a compressed exaggera-
tion of metaphor. The hyperbole is big, but it is

24 INDOOR STUDIES

gritty, and is firmly held. Sometimes it takes the
form of paradox, as when he tells his friend that
he needs his hate as much as his love: —
“ Indeed, indeed, I cannot tell,
Though I ponder on it well,

Which were easier to state,
All my love or all my hate.”

Or when he says, in “Walden:” ‘“‘Our manners
have been corrupted by communication with the
saints,” and the like. Sometimes it becomes down-
right brag, as when he says, emphasizing his own
preoccupation and indifference to events: “I would
not run around the corner to see the world blow
up;” or again: “Methinks I would hear with in-
difference if a trustworthy messenger were to inform
me that the sun drowned himself last night.”
Again it takes an impish ironical form, as when he
says: “In heaven I hope to bake my own bread
and clean my own linen.” Another time it as-
sumes a half-quizzical, half-humorous turn, as when
he tells one of his correspondents that he was
so warmed up in getting his winter’s wood that
he considered, after he got it housed, whether he
should not dispose of it to the ash-man, as if he
had extracted all its heat. Often it gives only an
added emphasis to his expression, as when he says:
“A little thought is sexton to all the world;” or,
“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as
when you find a trout in the milk;” but its best
and most constant office is to act as a kind of fer-
menting, expanding gas that lightens, if it some-

HENRY D. THOREAU 25

times inflates, his page. His exaggeration is saved
by its wit, its unexpectedness, It gives a whole-
some jostle and shock to the mind.

Thoreau was not a racy writer, but a trenchant;
not nourishing so much as stimulating; not con-
vincing, but wholesomely exasperating and arous-
ing, which, in some respects, is better. There is
no heat in him, and yet in reading him one under-
stands what he means when he says that, sitting by
his stove at night, he sometimes had thoughts that
kept the fire warm. I think the mind of his reader
always reacts, healthfully and vigorously from his
most rash and extreme statements. The blood
comes to the surface and to the extremities with a
bound. He is the best of counter-irritants when
he is nothing else. There is nothing to reduce the
tone of your moral and intellectual systems in Tho-
reau. Such heat as there is in refrigeration, as he
himself might say, — you are always sure of that in
his books.

His literary art, like that of Emerson’s, is in the
unexpected turn of his sentences. Shakespeare
says: —

“Tt is the witness still of excellency
To put a strange face on his own perfection.”

This “strange face” Thoreau would have at all
hazards, even if it was a false face. If he could
not state a truth he would state a paradox, which,
however, is not always a false face. He must
make the commonest facts and occurrences wear a
strange and unfamiliar look. The commonplace he

26 INDOOR STUDIES

would give a new dress, even if he set it masquer-
ading. But the reader is always the gainer by this
tendency in him. It gives a fresh and novel color-
ing to what in other writers would prove flat and
wearisome. He made the whole world interested
in his private experiment at Walden Pond by the
strange and, on the whole, beaming face he put
upon it. Of course, this is always more or less the
art of genius, but it was preéminently the art of
Thoreau. We are not buoyed up by great power,
we do not swim lightly as in deep water, but we
are amused and stimulated, and now and then posi-
tively electrified.

To make an extreme statement, and so be sure
that he made an emphatic one, that was his aim.
Exaggeration is less to be feared than dullness and
tameness. The far-fetched is good if you fetch it
swift enough; you must make its heels crack, — jerk
it out of its boots, in fact. Cushions are good,
provided they are well stuck with pins; you will
be sure not to go to sleep in that case. Warm
your benumbed hands in the snow; that is a more
wholesome warmth than that of the kitchen stove.
This is the way he underscored his teachings.
Sometimes he racked his bones to say the unsay-
able. His mind had a strong gripe, and he often
brings a great pressure to bear upon the most vague
and subtle problems, or shadows of problems, but
he never quite succeeds to my satisfaction in con-
densing bluing from the air or from the Indian
summer haze, any more than he succeeded in ex-

HENRY D. THOREAU 27

tracting health and longevity from water-gruel and
rye-meal.

He knew what an exaggeration he was, and he
went about it deliberately. He says to one of his
correspondents, a Mr. B——-, whom he seems to
have delighted to pummel with these huge boxing-
gloves: “I trust that you realize what an exag-
gerator I am, — that I lay myself out to exaggerate
whenever I have an opporturity, — pile Pelion
upon Ossa to reach heaven so. Expect no trivial
truth from me, unless I am on the witness-stand.
I will come as near to lying as you can drive a
coach-and-four.”

We have every reason to be thankful that he was
not always or commonly on the witness-stand. The
record would have been much duller. Eliminate
from him all his exaggerations, all his magnifying
of the little, all his inflation of bubbles, etc., and
you make sad havoc in his pages, — as you would,
in fact, in any man’s. Of course, it is one thing
to bring the distant near, and thus magnify as does
the telescope, and it is quite another thing to inflate
a pigmy to the stature of a giant with a gaspipe.
But Thoreau brings the stars as near as any writer
I know of, and if he sometimes magnifies a will-o’-
the-wisp, too, what matters it? He had a hard
common sense, as well as an uncommon sense, and
he knows well when he is conducting you to the
brink of one of his astonishing hyperboles, and
inviting you to take the leap with him, and, what
is more, he knows that you know it. Nobody is

28 INDOOR STUDIES

deceived, and the game is well played. Writing
to a correspondent who had been doing some big
mountain-climbing, he says: —

“It is after we get home that we really go over
the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain
say? What did the mountain do? I keep a moun-
tain anchored off eastward a little way, which I
ascend in my dreams, both awake and asleep. Its
broad. base spreads over a village or two, which do
not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I
when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as
plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I
do not invent in the least, but state exactly what
I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-
footed and earnest. I am not aware that a single
villager frequents it, or knows of it. I keep this
mountain to ride instead of a horse.” What a
saving clause is that last one, and what humor!

The bird Thoreau most admired was Chanticleer,
crowing from his: perch in the morning. He says
the merit of that strain is its freedom from all
plaintiveness. Unless our philosophy hears the
cock-crow in the morning, it is belated. ‘It is an
expression of the health and soundness of Nature,
—a brag for all the world.” “Who has not be-
trayed his Master many times since he last heard
that note?” “The singer can easily move us to
tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite
in us a pure morning joy? When in doleful
dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden
sidewalk on a Sunday, or perchance a watcher in

HENRY D. THOREAU 29

the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow, far
or near, I think to myself, ‘There is one of us well
at any rate,’ and with a sudden gush return to my
senses.”

Thoreau pitched his “ Walden” in this key; he
claps his wings and gives forth a clear, saucy,
cheery, triumphant note, —if only to wake his
neighbors up. And the book is certainly the most
delicious piece of brag in literature. There is no-
thing else like it; nothing so good, certainly. It
is a challenge and a triumph, and has a morning
freshness and élan. Read the chapter on his
“bean-field.”” One wants to go forthwith and plant
a field with beans, and hoe them barefoot. It is
a kind of celestial agriculture. ‘When my hoe
tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the
woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to
my labor which yielded an instant and immeasur-
able crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor
I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much
pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaint-
ances who had gone to the city to attend the ora-
torios.” ‘On gala days the town fires its great
guns, which echo like pop-guns to these woods,
and some waif of martial music occasionally pene-
trated thus far. To me, away there in my bean-
field and the other end of the town, the big guns
sounded as if a puff-ball had burst; and when there
was a military turn-out of which I was ignorant, I
have sometimes had a vague sense all day, —of
some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as

30 INDOOR STUDIES

if some eruption would break out there soon, either
scarlatina or canker-rash, —until at length some
more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the
fields and up the Wayland road, brought me infor-
mation of the ‘ trainers!’ ”

What visitors he had, too, in his little hut —
what royal company ! — “especially in the morning,
when nobody called.” ‘One inconvenience I some-
times experience in so small a house, — the difficulty
of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest
when we began to utter the big thoughts in big
words.” “The bullet of your thought must have
overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen
into its last and steady course before it reaches the
ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through
the side of his head.” He bragged that Concord
could show him nearly everything worth seeing in
the world or in nature, and that he did not need to
read Dr. Kane’s “Arctic Voyages” for phenomena
that he could observe at home. WHe declined all
invitations to go abroad, because he should then
lose so much of Concord. As much of Paris, or
London, or Berlin as he got, so much of Concord
should he lose. He says in his journal: ‘It would
be a wretched bargain to accept the proudest Paris
in exchange for my native village.” “At best,
Paris could only be a school in which to learn to
live here, —a stepping-stone to Concord, a school
in which to fit for this university.” “The sight
of a marsh-hawk in Concord meadows is worth more
to me than the entry of the Allies into Paris.”

HENRY D. THOREAU 31

This is very Parisian and Victor Hugoish, except
for its self-consciousness and the playful twinkle in
the author’s eye.

Thoreau had humor, but it had worked a little,
— it was not quite sweet; a vinous fermentation
had taken place more or less in it. There was too
much acid for the sugar. It shows itself especially
when he speaks of men. How he disliked the aver-
age social and business man, and said his only
resource was to get away from them! He was sur-
prised to find what vulgar fellows they were.
“They do a little business commonly each day, in
order to pay their board, and then they congregate
in sitting-rooms, and feebly fabulate and paddle in _
the social slush; and when I think that they have
sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared to see them
steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to
their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth.” Me-
thinks there is a drop of aquafortis in this liquor.
Generally, however, there is only a pleasant acid or
sub-acid flavor to his humor, as when he refers to
a certain minister who spoke of God as if he en-
joyed a monopoly of the subject; or when he says
of the good church-people that ‘they show the
whites of their eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks
all the rest of the week.” He says the greatest
bores who visited him in his hut by Walden Pond
were the self-styled reformers, who thought that he
was forever singing, —

“This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built.

32 INDOOR STUDIES

But they did not know that the third line was, —
These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.
I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no
chickens, but I feared the men-harriers rather.”

What sweet and serious humor in that passage in
“Walden” wherein he protests that he was not
lonely in his hermitage: —

“T have occasional visits in the long winter even-
ings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls
in the wood, from an old settler and original pro-
ptietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond
and stoned it, and fringed it with pine-woods; who
tells me stories of old time and of new eternity;
and between us we manage to pass a cheerful even-
ing with social mirth and pleasant views of things,
even without apples or cider, —a most wise and
humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps
himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whal-
ley; and though he is thought to be dead, none
can show where he is buried. An elderly dame,
too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most
persons, in whose odorous herb-garden I love to
stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to
her fables; for she has a genius of unequaled fertil-
ity, and her memory runs back farther than my-
thology, and she can tell me the original of every
fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for
the incidents occurred when she was young. A
ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all
weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all
her children yet.”

HENRY D. THOREAU 33

Emerson says Thoreau’s determination on natural
history was organic, but it was his determination
on supernatural history that was organic. Natural
history was but one of the doors through which he
sought to gain admittance to this inner and finer
heaven of things. He hesitated to call himself a
naturalist; probably even poet-naturalist would not
have suited him. He says in his journal: “The
truth is, I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a
natural philosopher to boot,” and the least of these
is the natural philosopher. He says: “Man can-
not afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature
directly, but only with the side of his eye. He
must look through and beyond her. To look at her
is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa, It
turns the man of science to stone.” It is not look-
ing at Nature that turns the man of science to stone,
but looking at his dried and labeled specimens, and
his dried and labeled theories of her. Thoreau
always sought to look through and beyond her, and
he missed seeing much there was in her; the jealous
goddess had her revenge. I do not make this
remark as a criticism, but to account for his failure
to make any new or valuable contribution to natural
history. He did not love Nature for her own sake,
or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, or
with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert
White did, for instance, but for what he could
make out of them. He says: “The ultimate ex-
pression or fruit of any created thing is a fine efflu-
ence which only the most ingenuous worshiper per-

34 INDOOR STUDIES

ceives at a reverent distance from its surface even.” 1
This “fine effluence” he was always reaching after,
and often grasping or inhaling. This is the mythi-
cal hound and horse and turtle-dove which he says
in ‘ Walden” he long ago lost, and has been on
their trail ever since. He never abandons the
search, and in every woodchuck-hole or muskrat
den, in retreat of bird, or squirrel, or mouse, or
fox that he pries into, in every walk and expedition
to the fields or swamps or to distant woods, in
every spring note and call that he listens to so
patiently, he hopes to get some clew to his lost
treasures, to the effluence that so provokingly eludes
him.

Hence, when we regard Thoreau simply as an
observer or as a natural historian, there have been
better, though few so industrious and persistent.
He was up and out at all hours of the day and
night, and in all seasons and weathers, year in and
year out, and yet he saw and recorded nothing new.
It is quite remarkable. He says in his journal
that he walked half of each day, and kept it up
perhaps for twenty years or more. Ten years of
persistent spying and inspecting of nature, and no
, new thing found out; and so little reported that
is in itself interesting, that is, apart from his de-
scription of it. J cannot say that there was any
felicitous and happy seeing; there was no inspira-
tion of the eye, certainly not in the direction of
natural history. He has added no new line or

1 Early Spring in Massachusetts, p. 83.

HENRY D. THOREAU 35

touch to the portrait of bird or beast that I can
recall, — no important or significant fact to their
lives. What he saw in this field everybody may
see who looks; itis patent. He had not the detec-
tive eye of the great naturalist; he did not catch
the clews and hints dropped here and there, the
quick, flashing movements, the shy but significant
gestures by which new facts are disclosed, mainly
because he was not looking for them. His eye was
not penetrating and interpretive. It was full of
speculation; it was sophisticated with literature,
sophisticated with Concord, sophisticated with him-
self. His mood was subjective rather than objec-
tive. He was more intent on the natural history
of his own thought than on that of the bird. To
the last, his ornithology was not quite sure, not
quite trustworthy. In his published journal he
sometimes names the wrong bird; and what short
work a naturalist would have made of his night-
warbler, which Emerson reports Thoreau had been
twelve years trying to identify! It was perhaps his
long-lost turtle-dove, in some one of its disguises.
From his journal it would seem that he was a long
time puzzled to distinguish the fox-colored sparrow
from the tree or Canadian sparrow, —a very easy
task to one who has an eye for the birds. But he
was looking too intently for a bird behind the bird,
— for a mythology to shine through his ornithology.
“The song sparrow and the transient fox-colored
sparrow, -—have they brought me no message this
year? Is not the coming of the fox-colored spar-

36 INDOOR STUDIES

row something more earnest and significant than
I have dreamed of? Have I heard what this tiny
passenger has to say while it flits thus from tree
to tree?” “TI love the birds and beasts because
they are mythologically in earnest.” 1

If he had had the same eye for natural history
he possessed for arrow-heads, what new facts he
would have disclosed! But he was looking for
arrow-heads. He had them in his mind; he thought
arrow-heads; he was an arrow-head himself, and
these relics fairly kicked themselves free of the
mould to catch his eye.

“Tt is surprising how thickly-strewn our soil is
with arrow-heads. I never see the surface broken
in sandy places but I think of them. I find them
on all sides, not only in corn, grain, potato, and
bean fields, but in pastures and woods, by wood-
chucks’ holes and pigeon beds, and, as to-night,
in a pasture where a restless cow had pawed the
ground.”

Thoreau was a man eminently “preoccupied of
his own soul.” He had no self-abandonment, no
self-forgetfulness; he could not give himself to the
birds or animals: they must surrender to him. He
says to one of his correspondents: ‘Whether he
sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether
he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked
eye, a man never discovers anything, never over-
takes anything, or leaves anything behind, but him-
self.” This is half true of some; it is wholly true

1 Early Spring in Massachusetts, p. 286.

HENRY D. THOREAU 37

of others. It is wholly true of Thoreau. Nature
was the glass in which he saw himself. He says the
partridge loves peas, but not those that go into the
pot with her! All the peas Thoreau loved had been
in the pot with him and were seasoned by him.

I trust I do not in the least undervalue Thoreau’s
natural history notes; I only wish there were more
of them. What makes them so valuable and charm-
ing is his rare descriptive powers. He could give
the simple fact with the freshest and finest poetic
bloom upon it. If there is little or no felicitous
seeing in Thoreau, there is felicitous description:
he does not see what another would not, but he
describes what he sees as few others can; his happy
literary talent makes up for the poverty of his
observation. That is, we are never surprised at
what he sees, but are surprised and tickled at the
way he tells what he sees. He notes, for instance,
the arrival of the high-hole in spring; we all note
it, every schoolboy notes it, but who has described
it as Thoreau does: “The loud peop of a pigeon
woodpecker is heard, and anon the prolonged loud
and shrill cackle calling the thin-wooded hillsides
and pastures to life. It is like the note of an alarm-
clock set last fall so as to wake Nature up at exactly
this date,— up, up, up, up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up,
up!” He says: “The note of the first bluebird
in the air answers to the purling rill of melted snow
beneath. It is evidently soft and soothing, and, as
surely as the thermometer, indicates a higher tem-
perature. It is the accent of the south wind, its
vernacular.”

38 INDOOR STUDIES

Often a single word or epithet of his tells the
whole story. Thus he says, speaking of the music
of the blackbird, that it has a “split-whistle;” the
note of the red-shouldered starling is “ gurgle-ee.”
Looking out of his window one March day, he says
he cannot see the heel of a single snowbank any-
where. He does not seem to have known that the
shrike sings in the fall and winter as well as in the
spring; and is he entirely sure he saw a muskrat
building its house in March (the fall is the time
they build); or that he heard the whip-poor-will
singing in September; or that the woodchuck dines
principally upon crickets? With what patience and
industry he watched things for a sign! From his
journal it would appear that Thoreau kept nature
about Concord under a sort of police surveillance
the year round. He shadowed every flower and
bird and musquash that appeared. His vigilance
was unceasing; not a mouse or a squirrel must leave
its den without his knowledge. If the birds or
frogs were not on hand promptly at his spring roll-
call, he would know the reason; he would look
them up; he would question his neighbors. He
was up in the morning and off to some favorite haunt
earlier than the day-laborers; and he chronicled his
observations on the spot, as if the case was to be
tried in court the next day and he was the princi-
pal witness. He watched the approach of spring
as a doctor watches the development of a critical
case. He felt the pulse of the wind and the tem-
perature of the day at all hours. He examined the

HENRY D. THOREAU 39

plants growing under water, and noted the radical
leaves of various weeds that keep green all winter
under the snow. He felt for them with benumbed
fingers amid the wet and the snow. The first sight
of bare ground and of the red earth excites him.
The fresh meadow spring odor was to him like the
fragrance of tea to an old tea-drinker. In early
March he goes to the Corner Spring to see the tufts
of green grass, or he inspects the minute lichens
that spring from the bark of trees. “It is short
commons,” he says, “and innutritious.” He brings
home the first frog-spittle he finds in a ditch and
studies it in a tumbler of water. The first water-
beetle that appears he makes a note of, and the first
skunk-cabbage that thrusts its spathe up through
the mould is of more interest to him than the latest
news from Paris or London. “I go to look for
mud-turtles in Heywood’s meadow,” he says, March
23, 1853. The first water-fowl that came in the
spring he stalked like a pot-hunter, crawling through
the swamps and woods or over a hill on his stomach
to have a good shot at them with his — journal.
He is determined Nature shall not get one day the
start of him; and yet he is obliged to confess that
“no mortal is alert enough to be present at the first
dawn of spring;” still he will not give up trying.
“Can you be sure,” he says, “that you have heard
the first frog in the township croak?” A lady
offered him the life of Dr. Chalmers to read, but he
would not promise. The next day she was heard
through a partition shouting to some one who was

40 INDOOR STUDIES

deaf: ‘Think of it, —he stood half an hour to-day
to hear the frogs croak, and he would n’t read the
life of Chalmers!” He would go any number of
miles to interview a muskrat or a woodchuck, or to
keep an “appointment with an oak-tree;” but he
records in his journal that he rode a dozen miles
one day with his employer, keeping a profound
silence almost all the way. “I treated him simply
as if he had bronchitis and could not speak, — just
as I would a sick man, a crazy man, or an idiot.”

Thoreau seems to have been aware of his defect
on the human side. He says: “If I am too cold
for human friendship, I trust I shall not soon be
too cold for natural influences;’” and then he goes
on with this doubtful statement: “It appears to
be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy
with both man and nature. Those qualities which
bring you near to the one estrange you from the
other.” One day he met a skunk in the field, and
he describes its peculiar gait exactly when he says:
“Tt runs, even when undisturbed, with a singular
teter or undulation, like the walking of a Chinese
lady.” He ran after the animal to observe it, keep-
ing out of the reach of its formidable weapon, and
when it took refuge in the wall he interviewed it
at his leisure. If it had been a man or a woman
he had met, he would have run the other way.
Thus he went through the season, Nature’s reporter,
taking down the words as they fell from her lips,
and distressed if a sentence was missed.

The Yankee thrift and enterprise, that he had so

HENRY D. THOREAU 41

little patience with in his neighbors, he applied to
his peculiar ends. He took the day and the season
by the foretop. “How many mornings,” he says
in “Walden,” “summer and winter, before yet any
neighbor was stirring about his business, have I
been about mine!” He had an eye to the main
chance, to a good investment. He probed the
swamps like a butter-buyer, he sampled the plants
and the trees and lichens like a tea-taster. He
made a burning-glass of a piece of ice; he made
sugar from a pumpkin and from the red maple, and
wine from the sap of the black birch, and boiled
rock-tripe for an hour and tried it as food. If he
missed any virtue or excellence in these things or
in anything in his line, or any suggestion to his
genius, he felt like a man who had missed a good
bargain. Yet he sometimes paused in this peeping
and prying into nature, and cast a regretful look
backward. ‘Ah, those youthful days,” he says
in his journal, under date of March 30, 1853, “are
they never to return? when the walker does not too
enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents,
tastes, and feels only himself, the phenomena that
showed themselves in him, his nding body, his
snialists Soul” Np wore or inet quadruped
or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded uni-
verse was his. A bird has now become a mote in
his eye.” Then he proceeds to dig out a wood-
chuck.

In “Walden” Thoreau pretends to quote the
following passage from the Gulistan, or Rose Gar-

42 INDOOR STUDIES

den of Sadi of Shiraz, with an eye to its application
to hig own case; but as he evidently found it not
in, but under, Sadi’s lines, it has an especial sig-
nificance, and may fitly close this paper: —

“They asked a wise man, saying: ‘Of the many
celebrated trees which the Most High God has
created, lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad,
or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit;
what mystery is there in this?’ He replied: ‘ Hach
has its appropriate produce and appointed season,
during the continuance of which it is fresh and
blooming, and during their absence dry and with-
ered: to neither of which states is the cypress
exposed, being always flourishing; and of this na-
ture are the azads, or religious independents. Fix
not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the
Dijlah or Tigris will continue to flow through Bag-
dad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand
has plenty, be liberal as the date-tree; but if it
affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free
man, like the cypress.’ ”

II
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE

NTERESTED as I am in all branches of natural
science, and great as is my debt to these things,
yet I suppose my interest in nature is not strictly
a scientific one. I seldom, for instance, go into a
natural history museum without feeling as if I were
attending a funeral. There lie the birds and ani-
mals stark and stiff, or else, what is worse, stand
up in ghastly mockery of life, and the people pass
along and gaze at them through the glass with the
same cold and unprofitable curiosity that they gaze
upon the face of their dead neighbor in his coffin.
The fish in the water, the bird in the tree, the
animal in the fields or woods, what a different im-
pression they make upon us!

To the great body of mankind, the view of nature
presented through the natural sciences has a good
deal of this lifeless funereal character of the speci-
mens in the museum. It is dead dissected nature,
a cabinet of curiosities carefully labeled and classi-
fied. ‘Every creature sundered from its natural
surroundings,” says Goethe, “and brought into
strange company, makes an unpleasant impression
on us, which disappears only by habit.” Why is

44 INDOOR STUDIES

it that the hunter, the trapper, the traveler, the
farmer, or even the schoolboy, can often tell us
more of what we want to know about the bird, the
flower, the animal, than the professor in all the
pride of his nomenclature? Why, but that these
give us a glimpse of the live creature as it stands
related to other things, to the whole life of nature,
and to the human heart, while the latter shows it
to us as it stands related to some artificial system
of human knowledge.

“The world is too much with us,” said Words-
worth, and he intimated that our science and our
civilization had put us ‘out of tune ” with nature.

“Great God ! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn,
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

To the scientific mind such language is simply
nonsense, as are those other lines of the bard of
Grasmere, in which he makes his poet —

“Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.”

Enjoyment is less an end in science than it is in
literature. A poem or other work of the imagina-
tion that failed to give us the joy of the spirit
would be of little value, but from a work of science
we expect only the satisfaction which comes with
increased stores of exact knowledge.

Yet it may be questioned if the distrust with
which science and literature seem to be more and

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 45

more regarding each other in our day is well
founded. That such distrust exists is very evident.
Professor Huxley taunts the poets with “sensual
caterwauling,” and the poets taunt the professor
and his ilk with gross materialism.

Science is said to be democratic, its aims and
methods in keeping with the great modern move-
ment; while literature is alleged to be aristocratic
in its spirit and tendencies. Literature is for the
few; science is for the many. Hence their oppo-
sition in this respect.

Science is founding schools and colleges from
which the study of literature, as such, is to be
excluded; and it is becoming clamorous for the
positions occupied by the classics in the curriculum
of the older institutions. As a reaction against
the extreme partiality for classical studies, the study
of names instead of things, which has so long been
shown in our educational system, this new cry is
wholesome and good; but so far as it implies that
science is capable of taking the place of the great
literatures as an instrument of high culture, it is
mischievous and misleading.

About the intrinsic value of science, its value as
a factor in our civilization, there can be but one
opinion; but about its value to the scholar, the
thinker, the man of letters, there is room for very
divergent views. It is certainly true that the great
ages of the world have not been ages of exact sci-
ence; nor have the great literatures, in which so
much of the power and vitality of the race have

46 INDOOR STUDIES

been stored, sprung from minds which held correct
views of the physical universe. Indeed, if the
growth and maturity of man’s moral and intellectual
stature were a question of material appliances or
conveniences, or of accumulated stores of exact
knowledge, the world of to-day ought to be able
to show more eminent achievements in all fields of
human activity than ever before. But this it can-
not do. Shakespeare wrote his plays for people
who believed in witches, and probably believed in
them himself; Dante’s immortal poem could never
have been produced in a scientific age. Is it likely
that the Hebrew Scriptures would have been any
more precious to the race, or their influence any
deeper, had they been inspired by correct views of
physical science ?

It is not my purpose to write a diatribe against
the physical sciences. I would as soon think of
abusing the dictionary. But as the dictionary can
hardly be said to be an end in itself, so I would
indicate that the final value of physical science is its
capability to foster in us noble ideals, and to lead
us to new and larger views of moral and spiritual
truths. The extent to which it is able to do this
measures its value to the spirit, — measures its value
to the educator.

That the great sciences can do this, that they are
capable of becoming instruments of pure culture,
instruments to refine and spiritualize the whole
moral and intellectual nature, is no doubt true; but
that they can ever usurp the place of the humani-

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 47

ties or general literature in this respect is one of
those mistaken notions which seem to be gaining
ground so fast in our time.

Can there be any doubt that contact with a great
character, a great soul, through literature, immensely
surpasses in educational value, in moral and spirit-
ual stimulus, contact with any of the forms or laws
of physical nature through science? Is there not
something in the study of the great literatures of
the world that opens the mind, inspires it with
noble sentiments and ideals, cultivates and develops
the intuitions, and reaches and stamps the character,
to an extent that is hopelessly beyond the reach of
science? They add something to the mind that is
like leaf-mould to the soil, like the contribution
from animal and vegetable life and from the rains
and the dews. Until science is mixed with emo-
tion, and appeals to the heart and imagination, it
is like dead inorganic matter; and when it becomes
so mixed and so transformed it is literature.

The college of the future will doubtless lay much
less stress upon the study of the ancient languages;
but the time thus gained will not be devoted to the
study of the minutiz of physical science, as contem-
plated by Mr. Herbert Spencer, but to the study of
man himself, his deeds and his thoughts, as illus-
trated in history and embodied in the great litera-
tures.

“Microscopes and telescopes, properly consid-
ered,” says Goethe, “put our human eyes out of
their natural, healthy, and profitable point of view.”

48 INDOOR STUDIES

By which remark he probably meant that artificial
knowledge obtained by the aid of instruments, and
therefore by a kind of violence and inquisition, a
kind of dissecting and dislocating process, is less
innocent, is less sweet and wholesome, than natural
‘knowledge, the fruits of our natural faculties and
perceptions. And the reason is that physical sci-
ence pursued in and for itself results more and more
in barren analysis, becomes more and more sepa-
rated from human and living currents and forces, —
in fact, becomes more and more mechanical, and
rests in a mechanical conception of the universe.
And the universe, considered as a machine, how-
ever scientific it may be, has neither value to the
spirit nor charm to the imagination.

The man of to-day is fortunate if he can attain
as fresh and lively a conception of things as did
Plutarch and Virgil. How alive the ancient ob-
servers made the world! They conceived of every-
thing as living, being, — the primordial atoms, space,
form, the earth, the sky. The stars and planets
they thought of as requiring nutriment, and as
breathing or exhaling. To them, fire did not con-
sume things, but fed or preyed upon them, like an
animal. It was not so much false science, as a
livelier kind of science, which made them regard the
peculiar quality of anything as a spirit. Thus there
was a spirit in snow; when the snow melted the
spirit escaped. This spirit, says Plutarch, “is no-
thing but the sharp point and finest scale of the con-
gealed substance, endued with a virtue of cutting

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 49

and dividing not only the flesh, but also silver and
brazen vessels.” “Therefore this piercing spirit,
like a flame” (how much, in fact, frost is like
flame!) “seizing upon those that travel in the snow,
seems to burn their outsides, and like fire to enter
and penetrate the flesh.” There is a spirit of salt,
too, and of heat, and of trees. The sharp, acrimo-
nious quality of the fig-tree bespeaks of a fierce and
strong spirit which it darts out into objects.

To the ancient philosophers, the eye was not a
mere passive instrument, but sent forth a spirit, or
fiery visual rays, that went to codperate with the
rays from outward objects. Hence the power of
the eye, and its potency in love matters. ‘The
mutual looks of nature’s beauties, or that which
comes from the eye, whether light or a stream of
spirits, melt and dissolve the lovers with a pleasing
pain, which they call the bitter-sweet of love.”
“There is such a communication, such a flame raised
by one glance, that those must be altogether un-
acquainted with love that wonder at the Median
naphtha that takes fire at a distance from the flame.”
“Water from the heavens,” says Plutarch, “is light
and aerial, and, being mixed with spirit, is the
quicker passed and elevated into the plants by rea-
son of its tenuity.” Rain-water, he further says,
“is bred in the air and wind, and falls pure and
sincere.” Science could hardly give an explanation
as pleasing to the fancy as that. And it is true
enough, too. Mixed with spirit, or the gases of the
air, and falling pure and sincere, is undoubtedly the

50 INDOOR STUDIES

main secret of the matter. He said the ancients
hesitated to put out a fire because of the relation it
had to the sacred and eternal flame. ‘‘ Nothing,”
he says, ‘bears such a resemblance to an animal as
fire. It is moved and nourished by itself, and by
its brightness, like the soul, discovers and makes
everything apparent; but in its quenching it prin-
cipally shows some power that seems to proceed
from our vital principle, for it makes a noise and
resists like an animal dying or violently slaugh-
tered.”

The feeling, too, with which the old philosophers
looked upon the starry heavens is less antagonistic
to science than it is welcome and suggestive to the
human heart. Says Plutarch in his “Sentiments
of Nature Philosophers delighted in: ” “To men, the
heavenly bodies that are so visible did give the
knowledge of the Deity; when they contemplated
that they are the causes of so great an harmony,
that they regulate day and night, winter and sum-
mer, by their rising and setting, and likewise con-
sidered these things which by their influence in the
earth do receive a being and do likewise fructify.
It was manifest to men that the Heaven was the
father of those things, and the Earth the mother:
that the Heaven was the father is clear, since from
the heavens there is the pouring down of waters,
which have their spermatic faculty; the Earth the
mother because she receives them and brings forth.
Likewise men, considering that the stars are run-
ning in a perpetual motion, and that the sun and

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 51

moon give us the power to view and contemplate,
they call them all Gods.”

The ancients had that kind of knowledge which
the heart gathers; we have in superabundance that
kind of knowledge which the head gathers. If much
of theirs was made up of mere childish delusions,
how much of ours is made up of hard, barren, and
unprofitable details, — a mere desert of sand where no
green thing grows or can grow! How much there
is in books that one does not want to know, that it
would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit
to know; how much of modern physical science is
a mere rattling of dead bones, a mere threshing of
empty straw! Probably we shall come round to as
lively a conception of things by and by. Darwin
has brought us a long way toward it. At any rate,
the ignorance of the old writers is often more capti-
vating than our exact but more barren knowledge.

The old books are full of this dew-scented know-
ledge, — knowledge gathered at first hand in the
morning of the world. In our more exact scientific
knowledge this pristine quality is generally miss-
ing; and hence it is that the results of science are
far less available for literature than the results of
experience.

Science is probably unfavorable to the growth of
literature because it does not throw man back upon
himself and concentrate him as the old belief did; it
takes him away from himself, away from human re-
lations and emotions, and leads him on and on. We
wonder and marvel more, but we fear, dread, love,

52 INDOOR STUDIES

sympathize less. Unless, indeed, we finally come
to see, as we probably shall, that after science has
done its best the mystery is as great as ever, and the
imagination and the emotions have just as free a
field as before.

Science and literature in their aims and methods
have but little in common. Demonstrable fact is
the province of the one; sentiment is the province
of the other. “The more a book brings sentiment
into light,” says M. Taine, “the more it is a work
of literature ;” and, we may add, the more it brings
the facts and laws of natural things to light, the
more it is a work of science. Or, as Emerson says
in one of his early essays, “literature affords a plat-
form whence we may command a view of our pres-
ent life, a purchase by which we may move it.” In
like manner science affords a platform whence we
may view our physical existence, a purchase by
which we may move the material world. The value
of the one is in its ideality, that of the other in its
exact demonstrations. The knowledge which liter-
ature most loves and treasures is knowledge of life;
while science is intent upon a knowledge of things,
not as they are in their relation to the mind and
heart of man, but as they are in and of themselves,
in their relations to each other and to the human
body. Science is a capital or fund perpetually re-
invested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward
by every new man. Every man of science has all
the science before him to go upon, to set himself
up in business with. What an enormous sum Dar-

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 53

win availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in
literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still
the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of
his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a
fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-
grown. Wherein science furthers the eye, sharpens
the ear, lengthens the arm, quickens the foot, or
extends man farther into nature in the natural bent
and direction of his faculties and powers, a service
is undoubtedly rendered to literature. But so far
as it engenders a habit of peeping and prying into
nature, and blinds us to the festive splendor and
meaning of the whole, our verdict must be against it.

It cannot be said that literature has kept pace
with civilization, though science has; in fact, it may
be said without exaggeration that science is civiliza-
tion— the application of the powers of nature to
the arts of life. The reason why literature has not
kept pace is because so much more than mere know-
ledge, well-demonstrated facts, goes to the making
of it, while little else goes to the making of pure
science. Indeed, the kingdom of heaven, in litera-
ture as in religion, ‘‘cometh not with observation.”
This felicity is within you as much in the one case
as in the other. It is the fruit of the spirit, and
not of the diligence of the hands.

Because this is so, because modern achievements
in letters are not on a par with our material and
scientific triumphs, there are those who predict for
literature a permanent decay, and think the field it
now occupies is to be entirely usurped by science.

54 INDOOR STUDIES

But this can never be. Literature will have its
period of decadence and of partial eclipse; but the
chief interest of mankind in nature or in the uni-
verse can never be for any length of time a merely
scientific interest, —an interest measured by our
exact knowledge of these things; though it must
undoubtedly be an interest consistent with the sci-
entific view. Think of having one’s interest in a
flower, a bird, the landscape, the starry skies, de-
pendent upon the stimulus afforded by the text-
books, or dependent upon our knowlege of the struc-
ture, habits, functions, relations of these objects!
This other and larger interest in natural objects,
to which I refer, is an interest as old as’ the race
itself, and which all men, learned and unlearned
alike, feel in some degree, —an interest born of our
relations to these things, of our associations with
them. It is the human sentiments they awaken
and foster in us, the emotion of love or admiration,
or awe or fear, they call up; and is in fact the in-
terest of literature as distinguished from that of
science. The admiration one feels for a flower, for
a person, for a fine view, for a noble deed, the pleas-
ure one takes in a spring morning, in a stroll upon
the beach, is the admiration and the pleasure litera-
ture feels and art feels; only in them the feeling is
freely opened and expanded which in most minds is
usually vague and germinal. Science has its own
pleasure in these things; but it is not, as a rule, a
pleasure in which the mass of mankind can share,
because it is not directly related to the human affec-

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 55

tions and emotions. In fact, the scientific treatment
of nature can no more do away with or supersede
the literary treatment of it —the view of it as seen
through our sympathies and emotions, and touched
by the ideal, such as the poet gives us—than the
compound of the laboratory can take the place of
the organic compounds found in our food, drink,
and air.

If Audubon had not felt other than a scientific
interest in the birds, —namely, a human interest,
an interest born of sentiment, — would he have ever
written their biographies as he did?

It is too true that the ornithologists of our day for
the most part look upon the birds only as so much
legitimate game for expert dissection and classifica-
tion, and hence have added no new lineaments to
Audubon’s and Wilson’s portraits. Such a man as
Darwin was full of what we may call the sentiment
of science. Darwin was always pursuing an idea,
always tracking a living, active principle. He is
full of the ideal interpretation of fact, science fired
with faith and enthusiasm, the fascination of the
power and mystery of nature. All his works have
a human and almost poetic side. They are un-
doubtedly the best feeders of literature we have yet
had from the field of science. His book on the earth-
worm, or on the formation of vegetable mould, reads
like a fable in which some high and beautiful phi-
losophy is clothed. How alive he makes the plants
and the trees! shows all their movements, their
sleeping and waking, and almost their very dreams

56 INDOOR STUDIES

— does, indeed, disclose and establish a kind of rudi-
mentary soul or intelligence in the tip of the radicle
of plants. No poet has ever made the trees so hu-
man. Mark, for instance, his discovery of the value
of cross-fertilization in the vegetable kingdom, and
the means Nature takes to bring it about. Cross-
fertilization is just as important in the intellec-
tual kingdom as in the vegetable. The thoughts of
the recluse finally become pale and feeble. With-
out pollen from other minds, how can one have a
race of vigorous seedlings of his own? Thus all
Darwinian books have to me a literary or poetic
substratum. The old fable of metamorphosis and
transformation he illustrates afresh in his “Origin
of Species,” in the “Descent of Man.” Darwin’s
interest in nature is strongly scientific, but our in-
terest in him is largely literary; he is tracking a
principle, the principle of organic life, following it
through all its windings and turnings and doub-
lings and redoublings upon itself, in the air, in the
earth, in the water, in the vegetable, and in all
the branches of the animal world; the footsteps of
creative energy; not why, but how; and we follow
him as we would follow a great explorer, or general,
or voyager like Columbus, charmed by his candor,
dilated by his mastery. He is said to have lost his
taste for poetry, and to have cared little for what is
called religion. His sympathies were so large and
comprehensive; the mere science in him is so per-
petually overarched by that which is not science, but
faith, insight, imagination, prophecy, inspiration, —

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 57

“substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen;” his love of truth so deep and
abiding; and his determination to see things, facts,
in their relations, and as they issue in principle, so
unsleeping, — that both his poetic and religious emo-
tions, as well as his scientific proclivities, found
full scope, and his demonstration becomes almost a
song. It is easy to see how such a mind as Goethe’s
would have followed him and supplemented him,
not from its wealth of scientific lore, but from its
poetic insight into the methods of nature.

Again, it is the fine humanism of such a man as
Humboldt that gives his name and his teachings
currency. Men who have not this humanism, who
do not in any way relate their science to life or to
the needs of the spirit, but pile up mere technical,
desiccated knowledge, are for the most part a waste
or a weariness. Humboldt’s humanism makes him
a stimulus and a support to all students of nature.
The noble character, the poetic soul, shines out in
all his works and gives them a value above and be-
yond their scientific worth, great as that undoubtedly
is. To his desire for universal knowledge he added
the love of beautiful forms, and his “Cosmos” is an
attempt at an artistic creation, a harmonious repre-
sentation of the universe that should satisfy the
zsthetic sense as well as the understanding. It is a
graphic description of nature, not a mechanical one.
Men of pure science look askant at it, or at Hum-
boldt, on this account. A sage of Berlin says he
failed to reach the utmost height of science because

58 INDOOR STUDIES

of his want of ‘“ physico-mathematical knowledge ; ”
he was not sufficiently content with the mere dead
corpse of nature to weigh and measure it. Lucky
for him and for the world that there was something
that had a stronger attraction for him than the al-
gebraic formulas. Humboldt was not content till
he had escaped from the trammels of mechanical
science into the larger and more vital air of litera-
ture, or the literary treatment of nature. What
keeps his “Views of Nature” and his “Scientific
Travels” alive is not so much the pure science
which they hold as the good literature which they
embody. The observations he records upon that
wonderful tropical nature, that are the fruit of his
own unaided perceptions, betraying only the wiser
hunter, trapper, walker, farmer, etc., how welcome
it all is! But the moment he goes behind the beauti-
ful or natural reason and discourses as a geologist,
mineralogist, physical geographer, etc., how one’s
interest flags! It is all of interest and value to
specialists in those fields, but it has no human and
therefore no literary interest or value. When he
tells us that ‘monkeys are more melancholy in pro-
portion as they have more resemblance to man;”
that “their sprightliness diminishes as their intel-
lectual faculties appear to increase,” — we read with
more attention than when he discourses as a learned
naturalist upon the different species of monkeys.
It is a real addition to our knowledge of nature to
learn that the extreme heat and dryness of the sum-
mer, within the equatorial zone in South America,

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 59

produces effects analogous to those produced by the
cold of our northern winters. The trees lose their
leaves, the snakes and crocodiles and other reptiles
bury themselves in the mud, and many phases of
life, both animal and vegetable, are wrapped in a
long sleep. This is not strictly scientific knowledge ;
it is knowledge that lies upon the surface, and that
any eye and mind may gather. One feels inclined
to skip the elaborate account of the physical fea-
tures of the lake of Valencia and its surroundings,
but the old Mestizo Indian who gave the travelers
goat’s milk, and who, with his beautiful daughter,
lived on a little island in its midst, awakens lively
curiosity. He guarded his daughter as a miser
guards his treasure. When some hunters by chance
passed a night on his island, he suspected some de-
signs upon his girl, and he obliged her to climb up
a very lofty acacia-tree, which grew in the plain at
some distance from the hut, while he stretched him-
self at the foot of the tree, and would not permit
her to descend till the young men had departed.
Thus, throughout the work, when the scientific in-
terest is paramount, the literary and human interest
fail, and vice versa.

No man of letters was ever more hospitable to
science than Goethe; indeed, some of the leading
ideas of modern science were distinctly foreshad-
owed by him; yet they took the form and texture
of literature, or of sentiment, rather than of exact
science. They were the reachings forth of his spirit;
his grasping for the ideal clews to nature, rather

60 INDOOR STUDIES

than logical steps of his understanding; and his
whole interest in physics was a search for a truth
above physics, —to get nearer, if possible, to this
mystery called nature. “The understanding will
not reach her,” he said to Eckermann; “man must
be capable of elevating himself to the highest reason
to come in contact with this divinity, which mani-
fests itself in the primitive phenomena, which dwells
behind them, and from which they proceed.” Of
like purport is his remark that the common obser-
vations which science makes upon nature and its
procedure, “in whatever terms expressed, are really
after all only symptoms which, if any real wisdom
is to result from our studies, must be traced back to
the physiological and pathological principles of which
they are the exponents.”

Literature, I say, does not keep pace with civ-
ilization. That the world is better housed, bet-
ter clothed, better fed, better transported, better
equipped for war, better armed for peace, more
skilled in agriculture, in navigation, in engineering,
in surgery, has steam, electricity, gunpowder, dyna-
mite, —all of this, it seems, is of little moment to
literature. Are men better? Are men greater?
Is life sweeter? These are the test questions.
Time has been saved, almost annihilated, by steam
and electricity, yet where is the leisure? The more
time we save the less we have. The hurry of the
machine passes into the man. We can outrun the
wind and the storm, but we cannot outrun the de-
mon of Hurry. The farther we go the harder he

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 61

spurs us. What we save in time we make up in
space; we must cover more surface. What we gain
in power and facility is more than added in the
length of the task. The needlewoman has her
sewing-machine, but she must take ten thousand
stitches now where she took only ten before, and it
is probably true that the second condition is worse
than the first. In the shoe factory, knife factory,
shirt factory, and all other factories, men and wo-
men work harder, look grimmer, suffer more in mind
and body, than under the old conditions of indus-
try. The iron of the machine enters the soul;
man becomes a mere tool, a cog or spoke or belt or
spindle. More work is done, but in what does it
all issue? Certainly not in beauty, in power, in
character, in good manners, in finer men and wo-
men; but mostly in giving wealth and leisure to
people who use them to publish their own unfitness
for leisure and wealth.

It may be said that science has added to the
health and longevity of the race; that the progress
in surgery, in physiology, in pathology, in thera-
peutics, has greatly mitigated human suffering and
prolonged life. This is unquestionably true; but
in this service science is but paying back with one
hand what it robbed us of with the other. With
its appliances, its machinery, its luxuries, its im-
munities, and its interference with the law of natu-
ral selection, it has made the race more delicate and
tender, and, if it did not arm them better against
disease also, we should all soon perish. An old

62 INDOOR STUDIES

physician said. that if he bled and physicked now, as
in his early practice, his patients would all die.
Are we stronger, more hardy, more virile than our
ancestors? We are more comfortable and better
schooled than our fathers, but who shall say we are
wiser or happier? “Knowledge comes, but wisdom
lingers,” just as it always has and always will.
The essential conditions of human life are always the
same; the non-essential change with every man and
hour.

Literature is more interested in some branches of
science than in others; more interested in meteor-
ology than in mineralogy; more interested in the
superior sciences, like astronomy and geology, than
in the inferior experimental sciences; has a warmer
interest in Humboldt the traveler than in Hum-
boldt the mineralogist; in Audubon and Wilson
than in the experts and feather-splitters who have
finished their task; in Watts, Morse, Franklin, than
in the masters of theories and formulas; and has a
greater stake in virtue, heroism, character, beauty,
than in all the knowledge in the world. There is
no literature without a certain subtle and vital blend-
ing of the real and the ideal.

Unless knowledge in some way issues in life, in
character, in impulse, in motive, in love, in virtue,
in some live human quality or attribute, it does not
belong to literature. Man, and man alone, is of
perennial interest to man. In nature we glean only
the human traits, — only those things that in some
way appeal to, or are interpretative of, the meaning

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 63

or ideal within us. Unless the account of your
excursion to field and forest, or to the bowels of the
earth, or to the bottom of the sea, has some human
interest, and in some measure falls in with the fes-
tival of life, literature will none of it.

All persons are interested in the live bird and in
the live animal, because they dimly read themselves
there, or see their own lives rendered in new charac-
ters on another plane. Flowers, trees, rivers, lakes,
mountains, rocks, clouds, the rain, the sea, are far
more interesting to literature, because they are more
or less directly related to our natural lives, and
serve as vehicles for the expression of our natural
emotions. That which is more directly related to
what may be called our artificial life, our need for
shelter, clothing, food, transportation — such as the
factory, the mill, the forge, the railway, and the
whole catalogue of useful arts, — is of less interest,
and literature is shyer of it. And it may be ob-
served that the more completely the thing is taken
out of nature and artificialized, the less interest
we take in it. Thus the sailing vessel is more
pleasing to contemplate than the steamer; the old
grist-mill, with its dripping water-wheel, than the
steam-mill; the open fire than the stove or regis-
ter. Tools and implements are not so interesting as
weapons; nor the trades as the pursuit of hunting,
fishing, surveying, exploring. A jackknife is not so
interesting as an arrow-head, a rifle as a war-club,
a watch as an hour-glass, a threshing-machine as the
flying flail. Commerce is less interesting to litera-

64 INDOOR STUDIES

ture than war, because it is more artificial; nature
does not have such full swing in it. The black-
smith interests us more than the gunsmith; we see
more of nature at his forge. The farmer is dearer
to literature than the merchant; the gardener than
the agricultural chemist; the drover, the herder, the
fisherman, the lumberman, the miner, are more in-
teresting to her than the man of more elegant and
artificial pursuits.

The reason of all this is clear to see. We are em-
bosomed in nature; we are an apple on the bough, a
babe at the breast. In nature, in God, we live and
move and have our being. Our life depends upon
the purity, the closeness, the vitality of the con-
nection. We want and must have nature at first
hand; water from the spring, milk from the udder,
bread from the wheat, air from the open. Vitiate
our supplies, weaken our connection, and we fail.
All our instincts, appetites, functions, must be kept
whole and normal; in fact, our reliance is wholly
upon nature, and this bears fruit in the mind. In
art, in literature, in life, we are drawn by that
which seems nearest to, and most in accord with,
her. Natural or untaught knowledge, — how much
closer it touches us than professional knowledge!
Keep me close to nature, is the constant demand of
literature; open the windows and let in the air, the
sun, let in health and strength; my blood must
have oxygen, my lungs must be momentarily filled
with the fresh unhoused element. I cannot breathe
the cosmic ether of the abtruse inquirer, nor, thrive

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 65

on the gases of the scientist in his laboratory; the
air of hill and field alone suffices.

The life of the hut is of more interest to litera-
ture than the life of the palace, except so far as the
same Nature has her way in both. Get rid of the
artificial, the complex, and let in the primitive and
the simple. Art and poetry never tire of the plow,
the scythe, the axe, the hoe, the flail, the oar; but
the pride and glory of the agricultural warehouse, —
can that be sung? The machine that talks and
walks and suffers and loves is still the best. Arti-
fice, the more artifice there is thrust between us and
Nature, the more appliances, conductors, fenders, the
less freely her virtue passes. The direct rays of
the open fire are better even for roasting a potato
than conducted heat.

What we owe to science, as tending to foster a
disinterested love of truth, as tending to clarify the
mental vision, or sharpen curiosity, or cultivating
the spirit of fearless inquiry, or stimulating the
desire to see and know things as they really are,
would not be easy to determine. A great deal, no
doubt. But the value of the modern spirit, the
modern emancipation, as a factor in the production
of a great literature, remains to be seen.

Science will no doubt draw off, and has already
drawn off, a vast deal of force and thought that has
heretofore found an outlet in other pursuits, perhaps
in law, criticism, or historical inquiries; but is it
probable that it will nip in the bud any great poets,
painters, romancers, musicians, orators? Certain

66 INDOOR STUDIES

branches of scientific inquiry drew Goethe strongly,
but his aptitude in them was clearly less than in his
own chosen field. Alexander Wilson left poetry
for ornithology, and he made a wise choice. He
became eminent in the one, and he was only medi-
ocre in the other. Sir Charles Lyell also certainly
chose wisely in abandoning verse-making for geol-
ogy. In the latter field he ranks first, and in in-
terpreting ‘‘Nature’s infinite book of secrecy,” as it
lies folded in the geological strata, he found ample
room for the exercise of all the imagination and
power of interpretation he possessed. His conclu-
sions have sky-room and perspective, and give us a
sort of poetic satisfaction,

The true poet and the true scientist are not es-
tranged. They go forth into nature like two friends.
Behold them strolling through the summer fields
and woods. The younger of the two is much the
more active and inquiring; he is ever and anon
stepping aside to examine some object more mi-
nutely, plucking a flower, treasuring a shell, pur-
suing a bird, watching a butterfly; now he turns
over a stone, peers into the marshes, chips off a
fragment of a rock, and everywhere seems intent on
some special and particular knowledge of the things
about him, The elder man has more an air of leis-
urely contemplation and enjoyment, — is less curious
about special objects and features, and more desirous
of putting himself in harmony with the spirit of
the whole. But when his younger companion has
any fresh and characteristic bit of information to

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE 67

impart to him, how attentively he listens, how sure
and discriminating is his appreciation! The inter-
ests of the two in the universe are widely different,
yet in no true sense are they hostile or mutually
destructive.

III
SCIENCE AND THE POETS

ike is interesting to note to what extent the lead-

ing literary men of our time have been influ-
enced by science, or have availed themselves of
its results. A great many of them not at all, it
would seem. Among our own writers, Bryant,
Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, show little
or no trace of the influence of science. The later
English poets, Arnold, Swinburne, Rossetti, do not
appear to have profited by science. There is no
science in Rossetti, unless it be a kind of dark,
forbidden science, or science in league with sor-
cery. Rossetti’s muse seems to have been drugged
with an opiate that worked inversely and made it
morbidly wakeful instead of somnolent. The air
of his “House of Life” is close, and smells not
merely of midnight oil, but of things much more
noxious and suspicious.

Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landor seem to have
owed little or nothing directly to science; Coleridge
and Wordsworth probably more, though with them
the debt was inconsiderable. Wordsworth’s great
ode shows no trace of scientific knowledge. Yet
Wordsworth was certainly an interested observer of

70 INDOOR STUDIES

the scientific progress of his age, and was the first
to indicate the conditions under which the poet
could avail himself of the results of physical science.
“The Poet,” he says, ‘writes under one restriction
only, namely, that of the necessity of giving im-
mediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that
information which may be expected from him, not
as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer,
or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.” “The
knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Sci-
ence,” he again says, “is pleasure: but the know-
ledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part
of our existence, our natural and unalienable in-
heritance; the other, as a personal and individual
acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual
and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-
beings.” In reaching his conclusion, he finally says:
“The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Bot-
anist, or Mineralogist will be as proper objects of
the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be em-
ployed, if the time should ever come when these
things shall be familiar to us, and the relations
under which they are contemplated by the followers
of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and
palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering
beings. If the time should ever come when what
is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall
be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and
blood, the Poet will lend this divine spirit to aid
the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being
thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the

SCIENCE AND THE POETS 71

household of man.” To clothe science with flesh
and blood, to breathe into it the breath of life, is a
creative work which only the Poet can do. Several
of the younger poets, both in this country and in
England, have made essays in this direction, but
with indifferent success. It is still science when
they have done with it, and not poetry. The trans-
figuration of which Wordsworth speaks is not per-
fect. The inorganic has not clearly become the
organic. Charles DeKay has some good touches,
but still the rock is too near the surface. The
poetic covering of vegetable mould is too scanty.
More successful, but still rather too literal, are sev-
eral passages in Mr. Nichols’s “Monte Rosa.” A
passage beginning on page 9,

“Of what was doing on earth
Ere man had come to see,’’

is good science and. pretty good poetry.

“ And that unlettered time slipped on,
Saw tropic climes invade the polar rings,
The polar cold lay waste the tropic marge;
Saw monster beasts emerge in ooze and air,
And run their race and stow their bones in clay;
Saw the bright gold bedew the elder rocks,
And all the gems grow crystal in their caves;
Saw plant wax quick, and stir to moving worm,
And worm move upward, reaching toward the brute ;
Saw brute by habit fit himself with brain,
And startle earth with wondrous progeny;
Saw all of these, and still saw no true man,
For man was not, or still so rarely was,
That as a little child his thoughts were weak,
Weak and forgetful and of nothing worth,
And Nature stormed along her changeful ways
Unheeded, undescribed, the while man slept
Infolded in his germ, or with fierce brutes,

72 INDOOR STUDIES

Himself but brutal, waged a pigmy war,
Unclad as they, and with them housed in caves,
Nor knew that sea retired or mountain rose.”
Whether the science in this and similar passages,
with which Mr. Nichols’s epic abounds, has met
with a change of heart and become pure poetry, may
be questioned. There is a more complete absorp-
tion of science and the emotional reproduction of it
in Whitman, as there is also in Tennyson. “In
Memoriam ” is full of science winged with passion.
Tennyson owes a larger debt to physical science
than any other current English poet; Browning, the
largest debt to legerdemain, or the science of jug-
glery. Occasionally Tennyson puts wings to a fact
of science very successfully, as in his “The Two
Voices: 7” —
“To-day I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.

“ An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.
¢

“He dried his wings: like gauze they grew:
Thro’ crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew.”

Keats’s touches are often accurate enough for sci-
ence, and free and pictorial enough for poetry.

“Here are sweet peas, on tiptoe for a flight;
With wings of gentle flush o’er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things,

To bind them all about with tiny rings.”

Or this by a “streamlet’s rushy banks: ” —

“Where swarms of minnows show their little heads,
Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams,

SCIENCE AND THE POETS 73

To taste the luxury of sunny beams

Temper’d with coolness, how they ever wrestle
With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle
Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand !”?

Only a naturalist can fully appreciate Keats’s owl,
— ‘‘the downy owl,” as the quills and feathers of
this bird are literally tipped with down, making it
soft to the hand and silent in its flight.

On the other hand, it takes a poet to fully ap-
preciate Linnzus’s marriage of the plants, and his
naming of the calyx the thalamus, or bridal cham-
ber; and the corolla, the tapestry of it.

The two eminent poets of our own language whose
attitude toward science is the most welcome and
receptive are undoubtedly Emerson and Whitman.
Of the latter in this connection I have spoken else-
where. Of Emerson I think it may be said that no
other imaginative writer has been so stimulated and
aroused by the astounding discoveries of physics.
There was something in the boldness of science, in
its surprises, its paradoxes, its affinities, its attrac-
tions and repulsions, its circles, its compensations,
its positive and negative, its each in all, its all in
each, its subtle ethics, its perpetuity and conserva-
tion of forces, its spores and invisible germs in the
air, its electricity, its mysteries, its metamorphoses,
its perceptions of the unity, the oneness of nature,
etc., — there was something in all these things that
was peculiarly impressive to Emerson. They were
in the direction of his own thinking; they were
like his own startling affirmations. He was con-
stantly seeking and searching out the same things

74 INDOOR STUDIES

in the realm of ideas and of morals. In his labora-
tory you shall witness wonderful combinations, sur-
prising affinities, unexpected relations of opposites,
threads and ties unthought of.

Emerson went through the cabinet of the scien-
tist as one goes through a book-stall to find an odd
volume to complete a set; or through a collection
of pictures, looking for a companion piece. He
took what suited him, what he had use for at home.
He was a provident bee exploring all fields for
honey, and he could distill the nectar from the
most unlikely sources. Science for its own sake
he perhaps cared little for, and on one occasion
refers rather disdainfully to “this post-mortem
science.” Astrology, he says, interests us more,
“for it tied man to the system. Instead of an iso-
lated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt
the star.” ‘The human heart concerns us more
than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than
can be measured by the pompous figures of the
astronomer.” But where he could turn science
over and read a moral on the other side, then he
valued it, —then the bud became a leaf or a flower
instead of a thorn.

While in London in 1848 he heard Faraday lec-
ture in the Royal Institute on dia, or cross mag-
netism, and Emerson instantly caught at the idea as
applicable in metaphysics. “ Diamagnetism,” he
says, “is a lawof the mind to the full extent of
Faraday’s idea; namely, that every mind has a new
compass, a new north, a new direction of its own,

SCIENCE AND THE POETS v5)

differencing genius and aim from every other mind.”
In chemistry, in botany, in physiology, in geology,
in mechanics, he found keys to unlock his enigmas.
No matter from what source the hint came, he was
quick to take it. The stress and urge of expres-
sion with him was very great, and he would fuse
and recast the most stubborn material. There is
hardly a fundamental principle of science that he
has not turned to ideal uses. ‘The law of nature
is alternation for evermore. ach electrical state
superinduces the opposite.” ‘‘The systole and dia-
stole of the heart are not without their analogy in
the ebb and flow of love,” and so on, In “Spir-
itual Laws” he gives a happy turn to the law of
gravitation: —

“Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always
works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe it
falls. When the fruit is dispatched, the leaf falls.
The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walk-
ing of man and all animals is a falling forward. All
our manual labor and works of strength, as prying,
splitting, digging, rowing, and so forth, are done
by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth,
moon, comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever.”

He is an evolutionist, not upon actual proof like
Darwin, but upon poetic insight. “Man,” he says,
“carries the world in his head, the whole astron-
omy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Be-
cause the history of Nature is charactered in his
brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of
her secrets. Every known fact in natural science

76 INDOOR STUDIES

was divined by the presentiment of somebody be-
fore it was actually verified.” Thus that stupendous
result of modern experimental science, that heat is
only a mode of motion, was long before (in 1844) a
fact in Emerson’s idealism. ‘A little heat, that
is a little motion, is all that differences the bald,
dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth
from the prolific tropical climates. All changes
pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal
conditions of boundless space and boundless time.
Geology has initiated us into the secularity of na-
ture, and taught us to disuse our dame-school meas-
ure and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes
for her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for
want of perspective. Now we learn what patient
periods must round themselves before the rock is
formed; then before the rock is broken, and the
first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest exter-
nal plate into soil, and opened the door for the re-
mote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in.
How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quad-
tuped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly
arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a
long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to
Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the
soul. Yet all must come as surely as the first atom
has two sides.”

Indeed, most of Emerson’s writings, including his
poems, seem curiously to imply science, as if he had
all these bold deductions and discoveries under his
feet, and was determined to match them in the

SCIENCE AND THE POETS V7

ideal. He has taken courage from her revelations.
He would show another side to nature equally won-
derful. Such men as Tyndall confess their obliga-
tion to him. His optics, his electricity, his spec-
trum analysis, his chemical affinity, his perpetual
forces, his dynamics, his litmus tests, his germs in
the air, etc., are more wonderful than theirs. How
much he makes of circles, of polarity, of attraction
and repulsion, of natural selection, of
“The famous might that lurks

In reaction and recoil,

Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil.’

He is the astronomer and philosopher of the
moral sentiment. He is full of the surprises and
paradoxes, the subtle relations and affinities, the
great in the little, the far in the near, the sublime
in the mean, that science has disclosed in the world
about us. He would find a more powerful fulmi-
nant than has yet been discovered. He likes to see
two harmless elements come together with a concus-
sion that will shake the roof. It is not so much for
material that Emerson is indebted to science as for
courage, example, inspiration.

When he used scientific material he fertilized it
with his own spirit. This the true poet will always
do when he goes to this field. Hard pan will not
grow corn; meteoric dust will not nourish melons.
The poets adds something to the hard facts of science
that is like vegetable mould to the soil, like the con-
tributions of animal and vegetable life, and of the
rains, the dews, the snows.

78 INDOOR STUDIES

Carlyle’s debt to science is much less obvious than
that of Emerson. He was not the intellectual miser,
the gleaner and hoarder of ideas for their own sake,
that Emerson was, but the prophet and spokesman
of personal qualities, the creator and celebrator of
heroes. So far as science ignored or belittled man
or the ethical quality in man, and rested with a mere
mechanical conception of the universe, he was its
enemy. Individuality alone interested him. Not
the descent of the species, but the ascent of personal
attributes, was the problem that attracted him. He
was unfriendly to the doctrine of physical evolution,
yet his conception of natural selection and the sur-
vival of the fittest as applied to history is as radical
as Darwin’s. He had studied astronomy to some
purpose. The fragment left among his papers called
“Spiritual Optics,” and published by Froude in his
life of him, shows what a profound interpretation
and application he had given to the cardinal astro-
nomical facts, His sense of the reign of law, his
commanding perception of the justice and rectitude
inherent in things, of the reality of the ideal, of
the subordination of the lesser to the greater, the
tyranny of mass, power, etc., have evidently all been
deepened and intensified by his absorption of the
main principles of this department of physical
science. What disturbed him especially was any
appearance of chaos, anarchy, insubordination; he
. wanted to see men governed and duly obedient to
the stronger force, as if the orbs of heaven were his
standard. He seemed always to see man and human

SCIENCE AND THE POETS 79

life in their sidereal relations, against a background
of immensity, depth beyond depth, terror beyond
terror, splendor above splendor, surrounding them,
Indeed, without the light thrown upon the universe
by the revelations of astronomy, Carlyle would prob-
ably never have broken from the Calvinistic creed
of his fathers. By a kind of sure instinct he
spurned all that phase of science which results in
such an interpretation of the universe as is embodied
in the works of Spencer, — works which, whatever
their value, are so utterly barren to the literary and
artistic mind.

The inquisitions of science, the vivisections, the
violent, tortuous, disrupting processes, are not al-
ways profitable. Wherein nature answers the most
easily, cheerfully, directly, we find our deepest in-
terest; where science just anticipates the natural
sense, as it were, or shows itself a little quicker-
witted than our slow faculties, as in the discovery of
the circulation of the blood for instance. The real
wonder is that mankind should not always have
known and believed in the circulation of the blood,
because circulation is the law of nature. Everything
circulates, or finally comes back to its starting-point.
Stagnation is death. The sphericity of the earth,
too, —how could we ever believe anything else?
Does not the whole system of things centre into
balls, — every form in nature strive to be spherical ?
The sphere is the infinity of form, that in which all
specific form is merged and lost, or into which it
escapes or gets transformed. The doctrine of the

80 INDOOR STUDIES

correlation and conservation of forces is pointed to
by the laws of the mind. The poets have always
said it, and all men have felt it; why await scien-
tific proof? The spectroscope has revealed the uni-
versality of chemistry, that the farthermost star, as
compared with our earth, is bone of her bone and
flesh of her flesh. This is a poetic truth as well as
a scientific, and is valuable to all men, because the
germ of it always lay in their minds. It is a com-
fort to know for a certainty that these elements are
cosmic; that matter is the same, and spirit, or law,
the same everywhere ;, and that, if we were to visit
the remotest worlds, we should not find the men
rooted to the ground and the trees walking about,
but life on the same terms as here. The main facts
of natural history also lie in the main direction of
our natural faculties, and are proper and welcome to
allmen. So much of botany, so much of biology,
so much of geology, of chemistry, of natural phi-
losophy, as lies within the sphere of legitimate ob-
servation, or within the plane of man’s natural
knowledge, is capable of being absorbed by litera-
ture, and heightened to new significance.

IV
MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM

i aes Matthew Arnold, during his visit to
this country in 1883-84, delivered himself
upon Emerson and Carlyle, he criticised two men
who belong to quite a different order of mind from his
own, — men who are the prophets of the intuitions
and the moral sense, as he himself is the apostle of
culture and clear intelligence. merson and Car-
lyle were essentially religious, and were filled with
the sentiment of the infinite, which M. Renan re-
gards as the chief gift of mediwvalism to the modern
world; while Arnold is essentially critical, and is
filled with the sentiment or idea of culture, which
is the chief gift to the world of Greek civilization.
What he had to say of these two men I shall con-
sider in another chapter. At present I wish to take
a general view of Arnold’s criticism as a whole.
Probably the need for the urbanity and: clear
reason which Arnold brings is just as urgent as the
need for the moral fervor and conviction which Car-
lyle brings; if not to us in this country, where the
conscience of man needs stimulating more than his
intellect needs clearing, then certainly in England,
where the popular mind is less quick and flexi-

82 INDOOR STUDIES

ble than in America. And it is against England,
against British civilization, that the force of <Ar-
nold’s criticism has been directed.

The application to America of the main drift of
his criticism of British civilization is lessened not
only for the reason above hinted at, — namely, that
the race refines and comes into shape in this country
faster than in Britain, faster, perhaps, than the due
proportion between character and faculty will war-
rant, — but because class distinctions are practically
abolished here, and because, in general, there is not
the same cramped, inflexible, artificial, and congested
state of things in the United States as cause all the
woe of England. The defects in our civilization
which Arnold pointed out in a paper printed just
before he died, — namely, that our country, or our
doings in it, are not interesting, that our people are
wanting in the discipline of awe and reverence, that
we are given to self-glorification, that our newspa-
pers are flippant and sensational, etc. —are self-evi-
dent to all candid observers. “In what concerns
the solving of the political and social problem, they
[the people of the United States] see clear and think
straight; in what concerns the higher civilization,
they live in a fool’s paradise.” It seems to me that
the last part of this sentence is just as true as the
first part. From the point of view of a good din-
ner, —a point of view not to be despised by any
means, — our country and our achievements in it are
very interesting; but from a high and disinterested
point of view — the point of view of art and litera-

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 83

ture, of the best that is known and thought in the
world — it is not interesting.

It could hardly be otherwise. America is the
product of the commercial and industrial age, the
age of prose. Nearly all its features are the out-
come of a spirit that makes little account of taste or
the beautiful —the spirit of gain. The spirit that
still rules it, and rules more or less all modern
European nations, is the spirit of gain, the greed of
wealth, and nothing but the ugly, the prosaic, can
be born of this spirit. The Old World is the pro-
duct of quite a different spirit, the religious spirit
and the spirit of chivalry and feudalism. Life seems
much riper and fuller there, — has much more flavor,
and one can well see how a cultivated European
would find America almost intolerable.

Yet the two principles of which Arnold makes so
much, Hellenism and Hebraism, the power of ideas
and the power of conduct, are doubtless more evenly
blended in our people than among those of Great
Britain. Indeed, it often appears that, if we need
more of either, it is of the latter rather than of the
former, a little more of the old Hebrew’s reverence
and depth and solemnity of character, rather than
of the Hellene’s flexibility and desire to hear or to
tell some new thing.

The equality, also, for which Arnold pleads, we
already practically have; and the Irish question, the
Church and the State question, and the burning
question, May a man marry his deceased wife’s sis-
ter? we have not. But the question of culture,

84 INDOOR STUDIES

of taste, of literature, of institutions, of science, of
obedience, and of a just mean and measure in life,
we have, and shall always have, and may the time
be far removed when a man who cherishes such
lofty ideals upon all these subjects as did Matthew
Arnold shall not find eager and improving listeners
among us. Arnold meant authority as distinctly as
Carlyle did, but the authority of the gentler reason,
and not of the hero.

In connecting his name with that of Carlyle, let
us note here that he stood as much alone in his ar-
raignment of his countrymen as the great Scotchman
did, and was as little identified with any party, sect,
or movement. He was just as fearless and whole-
sale in his criticisms, but far more cool and dispas-
sionate. Carlyle can hardly be said to have been a
reasonable being; the secret of his influence was not
his reason, but his genius and religious fervor: but
there is no getting away from Arnold’s reasonable-
ness (not always or commonly a “sweet reasonable-
ness;” there is often a bitter or acrid flavor to it),
the clearness and fullness of his demonstration.
Hence he was probably more of a thorn in the side
of John Bull than was Carlyle; his criticism is
harder to answer, and he applied it with an air of
teasing deference and simplicity, or of restrained
scorn and contempt, which makes it far more irritat-
ing than the Scotchman’s explosions of wrath and
picturesque indignation. Carlyle is much the greater
force, much the more impressive and stimulat-
ing, but he is also much the more bewildering and

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 85

misleading. Arnold has reduced the Scotchman’s
strange mixture of wrath and tenderness, poetry and
eloquence, prophecy and philosophy, to a system,
and has drawn out of it the pure metal available for
a sharp and telling criticism. Culture and Anarchy,
Friendship’s Garland, the Mixed Essays, the Irish
Essays, are but the Latter-day Pamphlets and Past
and Present running pure and clear. What was
like a mountain of mixed ores in the latter, becomes
weapons of polished steel in the former. Take this
passage from Past and Present: —

“Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter,—
oftentimes the force of dullness can no farther go.
You stand silent, incredulous, as over a platitude
that borders on the Infinite. The man’s Church-
isms, Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, Col-
lege Philosophies, Fashionable Literatures, are un-
exampled in this world. Fate’s prophecy is fulfilled;
you call the man an ox or an ass. But get him
once to work, — respectable man! His spoken sense
is next to nothing, nine tenths of it palpable non-
sense; but his unspoken sense, his inner silent feel-
ing of what is true, what does agree with fact, what
is doable and what is not doable, —this seeks its
fellow in the world. A terrible worker; irresistible
against marshes, mountains, impediments, disorder,
incivilization ; everywhere vanquishing disorder, leav-
ing it behind him as method and order. He ‘ retires
to his bed three days,’ and considers! ”

In this passage of strong Carlylese, and in many
more like it, lies the germ of Arnold’s indictment

86 INDOOR STUDIES

of his countrymen, that they lack intelligence, or
Geist, ability to deal with ideas, and that they are
great only in deeds, in works, or are Hebraic
rather than Hellenic.

Carlyle himself was terribly given to Hebraizing,
to praising work, energy, force, and to spurning
ideas, except when embodied in a man or hero.
With him the man of theory, or of ideas, cuts a
sorry figure beside the man of practice or of deeds.

“How one loves to see the burly figure of him,
—this thick-skinned, seemingly opaque, perhaps
sulky, almost stupid Man of Practice, pitted against
some light, adroit Man of Theory, all equipped with
clear logic, and able everywhere to give you Why
for Wherefore. The adroit Man of Theory, so light
of movement, clear of utterance, with his bow full-
bent, and his quiver full of arrow arguments — surely
he will strike down the game, transfix everywhere
the heart of the matter, triumph everywhere, as he
proves that he shall and must do? To your aston-
ishment it turns out oftenest No. The cloudy-
browed, thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no
logic utterance, in silence mainly, with here and
there a low grunt or growl, has in him what tran-
scends all logic utterance; a Congruity with the
Unuttered, the Speakable, which lies atop, as a
superficial film, or outer skin, is his or is not his;
but the Doable, which reaches down to the world’s
centre, you find him there.”

Here is the voice of Hebraism, strong and trium-
phant, as in Arnold we have the voice of Hellenism,

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 87

clear and triumphant. Yet Carlyle was not so much
on the side of the man of deeds as opposed to the
man of ideas, as he was on the side of reality as
opposed to shams. His mistake probably was too
great haste in pronouncing all theories shams, and
all force beneficent.

The keynote of Arnold’s criticism of his country-
men might also be found in Emerson’s “English
Traits.” Emerson charges the English with the
same want of ideas, and credits them with the same
noble Hebraizing tendency. The English do not
look abroad into universality, he said, quoting
Bacon. Bacon, he said, marked the influx of
idealism into England. ‘‘He had imagination, the
leisure of the spirit, and basked in an element of
contemplation.” ‘‘ German science comprehends
the English.” The latter is “void of imagination
and free play of thought,” using the very phrase
which Arnold has made so telling and significant.
Arnold shows his genius in the way he seizes upon
and expands these ideas. What was a casual
thought or remark with others, in his hands becomes
the axis of a great critical system. What was wit,
or poetry, or a happy characterization with Carlyle
and Emerson, furnishes him the start for a most
searching and original analysis.

Arnold was preéminently a critical force, a force
of clear reason and of steady discernment. He is
not an author whom we read for the man’s sake, or
for the flavor of his personality, — for this is not al-
ways agreeable, — but for his unfailing intelligence

88 INDOOR STUDIES

and critical acumen; and because, to borrow a sen-
tence of Goethe, he helps us to “attain certainty and
security in the appreciation of things exactly as they
are.” Everywhere in his books we are brought
under the influence of a mind which indeed does not
fill and dilate us, but which clears our vision, which
sets going a process of crystallization in our thoughts,
and brings our knowledge, on a certain range of
subjects, to a higher state of clearness and purity.

Let us admit that he is not a man to build upon;
he is in no sense a founder; he lacks the broad,
paternal, sympathetic human element that the first
order of men possess. He lays the emphasis upon
the more select, high-bred qualities. All his sym-
pathies are with the influences which make for
correctness, for discipline, for taste, for perfection,
rather than those that favor power, freedom, origi-
nality, individuality, and the more heroic and pri-
mary qualities.

It is to be owned that there is a quality, a stimu-
lus, and helpfulness, which we must not expect of
Arnold; a power of poetry which his poems, perfect
as they are, do not afford us, but which we get in
much greater measure from poets far his inferior in
intelligence and thoroughness of culture, as in a few
poems of Keats; a power of prose which his lucid
sentences do not hold; and a power of criticism
which his coolness and disinterestedness do not
attain to. But this last we must probably go out-
side of English literature to find.

Arnold was a civilizing and centralizing force.

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 89

Out of the spirit which he begets, and which begat
him, do not come the great leaders and reformers,
the one-sided, headstrong, fanatical men, men that
serve as the plowshare of the destinies to break up
the stubborn glebe of the world; but the wise, the
correct, the urbane, the flexible men, the men who
reap and enjoy and beautify the world. He says,
in effect, there are enough insisting upon force, upon
genius, upon independence, upon rights; he will lay
the stress upon culture, and upon duties, and upon
those things that make for perfection.

The more vital and active forces of English liter-
ature of our century have been mainly forces of ex-
pansion and revolution, or Protestant forces; our
most puissant voices have been voices of dissent, and
have been a stimulus to individuality, separatism,
and to independence. But here is a voice of an-
other order; a voice closely allied to the best spirit
of Catholicism; one from which we will not learn
hero-worship, or Puritanism, or nonconformity, or
catch the spark of enthusiasm, or evolution, but
from which we learn the beauty of urbanity, and
the value of clear and fresh ideas.

One never doubts Arnold’s ability to estimate a
purely literary and artistic force, but one sees that it
is by no means certain that he will fully appreciate
a force of character, a force of patriotism, of con-
science, of religion, or any of the more violent revo-
lutionary forces, — that is, apart from a literary rep-
resentation of them, — because his point of view does
not command these things so completely as it does

90 INDOOR STUDIES

the other. Emerson was a literary force, but above
and beyond that he was a religious force, a force of
genius and of good breeding. The dissenters, the
English Puritans, the French Huguenots, embody
a force of conscience. Carlyle was a force of Puri-
tanism, blended with a force antagonistic to it, the
force of German culture, — two forces that did not
work well together and which gave him no rest.

Arnold was a literary force of a very high order,
but was he anything else? Will he leave any per-
manent mark upon the conscience, upon the politics,
upon the thought of his countrymen? His works,
as models of urbanity and lucidity, will endure; still
they do not contain the leaven which leavens and
modifies races and times.

The impression that a fragmentary and desultory
reading of Arnold is apt to give one, — namely, that
he is one of the scorners, a man of “a high look
and a proud heart,” — gradually wears away as one
grows, familiar with the main currents of his teach-
ings. He does not indeed turn out to be a large,
hearty, magnetic man, but he proves to be a
thoroughly serious and noble one, whose calmness
and elevation are of great value. His writings, as
now published in a uniform edition, embrace ten
volumes, to wit: two volumes of poems; two vol-
umes of literary essays, “Essays in Criticism” and
a volume made up of “Celtic Literature” and “On
Translating Homer;” a volume of mixed essays,
mainly on Irish themes; a volume called “Culture
and Anarchy” containing also “Friendship’s Gar-

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 91

land,” mainly essays in political and social criticism ;
three volumes of religious criticism, namely, “ Liter-
ature and Dogma,” ‘God and the Bible,” and “St,
Paul and Protestantism,” with “Last Essays;” and
one volume of ‘ Discourses in America.” Of this
body of work the eight volumes of prose are pure
criticism, and by criticism, when applied to Arnold,
we must mean the scientific passion for pure truth,
the passion for seeing the thing exactly as it is
carried into all fields. “I wish to decide nothing as
of my own authority,” he says in one of his earlier
essays; “the great art of criticism is to get one’s self
out of the way and to let humanity decide.” He
would play the réle of a disinterested observer. Apro-
pos of his political and social criticisms, he says: —

“T do not profess to be a politician, but simply
one of a disinterested class of observers, who, with
no organized and embodied set of supporters to
please, set themselves to observe honestly and to
report faithfully the state and prospects of our civ-
ilization.”

He urges that criticism in England has been too
“directly polemical and controversial ;” that it has
been made to subserve interests not its own, — the
interest of party, of a sect, of a theory, or of some
practical and secondary consideration. His own
effort has been to restore it to its “pure intellectual
sphere,” and to keep its high aim constantly before
him, ‘which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction
which is retarding and vulgarizing; to lead him
towards perfection by making his mind dwell upon

92 INDOOR STUDIES

what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty
and fitness of things.”

The spirit in which he approaches Butler’s
“ Analogy” is a fair sample of the spirit in which
he approaches most of his themes: —

“Elsewhere I have remarked what advantage But-
ler had against the Deists of his own time in the
line of argument which he chose. But how does
his argument in itself stand the scrutiny of one who
has no counter-thesis, such as that of the Deists, to
make good against Butler? How does it affect one
who has no wish at all to doubt or cavil, like the
loose wits of fashionable society who angered Butler,
still less any wish to mock, but who comes to the
‘Analogy ’ with an honest desire to receive from it
anything which he finds he can use?”

Matthew Arnold was probably the most deeply
imbued with the spirit of Greek culture of any Eng-
lish man of letters of our time. It is not that he
brings a modern mind to classic themes, as has been
so often done by our poets and essayists, but that he
brings a classic mind to modern themes, herein differ-
ing so widely from such a writer, for instance, as
Mr. Addington Symonds, who has written so much
and so well upon classic subjects, but in the modern
romantic spirit, rather than with the pure simplicity
of the antique, — in the spirit whose ruling sense is
a sense of the measureless, rather than of measure.
“Hellenic virtue,” says Dr. Curtius, the German
historian of Greece, “consisted in measure,” — “a
wise observance of right measure in all things.”

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 93

Arnold divides the forces that move the world into
two grand divisions, — Hellenism and Hebraism, the
Greek idea and the Jewish idea, the power of intel-
lect and the power of conscience. ‘‘The uppermost
idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really
are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct
and obedience. Nothing can do away with this in-
effaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the
body and its desires is that they hinder right think-
ing; the Hebrew quarrel with them is that they
hinder right acting.” ‘An unclouded clearness of
mind, an unimpeded play of thought,” is the aim of
the one; ‘‘strictness of conscience,” fidelity to prin-
ciple, is the mainspring of the other. As, in this
classification, Carlyle would stand for unmitigated
Hebraism, so Arnold himself stands for pure Hellen-
ism; as the former’s Hebraism upon principle was
backed up by the Hebraic type of mind, its grandeur,
its stress of conscience, its opulent imagination, its
ery for judgment and justice, etc., so Arnold’s con-
viction of the superiority of Hellenism as a remedy
for modern ills is backed up by the Hellenic type of
mind, its calmness, its lucidity, its sense of form and
measure. Indeed, Arnold is probably the purest
classic writer that English literature, as yet, has to
show; classic not merely in the repose and purity of
his style, but in the unity and simplicity of his
mind. What primarily distinguishes the antique
mind from the modern mind is its more fundamental
singleness and wholeness. It is not marked by the
same specialization and development on particular

94 INDOOR STUDIES

lines. Our highly artificial and complex modern
life leads to separatism; to not only a division of
labor, but almost to a division of man himself.
With the ancients, religion and politics, literature
and science, poetry and prophecy, were one. These
things had not yet been set apart from each other and
differentiated. When to this we add vital unity and
simplicity, the love of beauty, and the sense of
measure and proportion, we have the classic mind
of Greece, and the secret of the power and charm of
those productions which have so long ruled supreme
in the world of literature and art. Arnold’s mind
has this classic unity and wholeness. With him
religion, politics, literature, and science are one, and
that one is comprehended under the name of culture.
Culture means the perfect and equal development of
man on all sides.

“Culture,” he says, giving vent to his Hellenism,
“is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with
poetry: ” the dominant idea of poetry is ‘the idea
of beauty and of a human nature perfect in all its
sides;” this idea is the Greek idea. ‘“‘ Human life,”
he says, “in the hands of Hellenism, is invested
with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy ;
it is full of what we call sweetness and light.”
“The best art and poetry of the Greeks,” he says,
“in which religion and poetry are one, in which the
idea of beauty and of human nature perfect on all
sides adds to itself a religious and devout energy, and
works in the strength of that, is on this account of
such surpassing interest and instructiveness for us.”

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 95

But Greece failed because the moral and religious
fibre in humanity was not braced and developed also.

“But Greece did not err in having the idea of
beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection so
present and paramount. It is impossible to have
this idea too present and paramount; only, the
moral fibre must be braced, too. And we, because
we have braced the moral fibre, are not on that ac-
count in the right way, if at the same time the idea
of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection
is wanting or misapprehended amongst us; and evi-
dently it is wanting or misapprehended at present.
And when we rely, as we do, on our religious organi-
zations, which in themselves do not and cannot give
us this idea, and think we have done enough if we
make them spread and prevail, then I say we fall into
our common fault of overvaluing machinery.”

From the point of view of Greek culture, and the
ideal of Greek life, there is perhaps very little in
the achievements of the English race, or in the ideals
which it cherishes, that would not be pronounced
the work of barbarians. From the Apollinarian
standpoint, Christianity itself, with its war upon
our natural instincts, is a barbarous religion. But
no born Hellene from the age of Pericles could
pronounce a severer judgment upon the England of
to-day than Arnold has in his famous classification
of his countrymen into Barbarians, Philistines, and
Populace, — an upper class materialized, a middle
class vulgarized, and a lower class brutalized. Ar-
nold had not the Hellenic joyousness, youthfulness,

96 INDOOR STUDIES

and spontaneity. His is a ‘‘sad lucidity of soul,”
whereas the Greek had a joyous lucidity of soul.
“QO Solon, Solon!” said the priest of Egypt, “you
Greeks are always children.” But the Englishman
had the Greek passion for symmetry, totality, and
the Hellenic abhorrence of the strained, the fantas-
tic, the obscure. His were not merely the classi-
cal taste and predilections of a scholar, but of an
alert, fearless, and thoroughgoing critic of life; a
man who dared lay his hands on the British constitu-
tion itself and declare that “with its compromises,
its love of facts, its horror of theory, its studied
avoidance of clear thought, it sometimes looks a co-
lossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines.”
Milton was swayed by the Greek ideals in his
poetry, but they took no vital hold of his life; his
Puritanism and his temper in his controversial writ-
ings are the farthest possible remove from the seren-
ity and equipose of the classic standards. But
Arnold, a much less poetic force certainly than Mil-
ton, was animated by the spirit of Hellenism on all
occasions; it was the shaping and inspiring spirit
of his life. It was not a dictum with him, but
a force. Yet his books are thoroughly of to-day,
thoroughly occupied with current men and meas-
ures, and covered with current names and allusions,

Arnold’s Hellenism speaks very pointedly all
through “Culture and Anarchy,” in all those as-
saults of his upon the ‘‘hideousness and rawness” of
so much of British civilization, upon the fierceness
and narrowness, the Jacobinism of parties, upon

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 97

“the Dissidence of Dissent, and the Protestantism
of the Protestant religion;” in his efforts to divest
the mind of all that is harsh, uncouth, impenetrable,
exclusive, self-willed, one-sided; in his efforts to ren-
der it more flexible, tolerant, free, lucid, with less
faith in individuals and more faith in principles.
They speak in him when he calls Luther a Philis-
tine of genius; when he says of the mass of his
countrymen that they have “a defective type of re-
ligion, a narrow range of intellect and knowledge, a
stunted sense of beauty, a low standard of manner;”
that “Puritanism was a prison which the English
people entered and had the key turned upon its
spirit there for two hundred years;”’ when he tells
the dissenters that in preferring their religious ser-
vice to that of the established church they have
shown a want of taste and of culture like that of
preferring Eliza Cook to Milton. “A public rite
with a reading of Milton attached to it is another
thing from a public rite with a reading from Eliza
Cook.”

His ideas of poetry as expressed in the preface to
his poems in 1853 are distinctly Greek, and they led
him to exclude from the collection his long poem
called “Empedocles on Etna,” because the poem
was deficient in the classic requirements of action.
He says: —

“The radical difference between the poetic theory
of the Greeks and our own is this: that with them
the poetical character of the action in itself, and the
conduct of it, was the first consideration; with us,

98 INDOOR STUDIES

attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate
thoughts and images which occur in the treatment
of an action, They regarded the whole; we regard
the parts. We have poems which seem to exist
merely for the sake of single lines and passages, not
for the sake of producing any total impression.
We have critics who seem to direct their attention
merely to detached expressions, to the language about
the action, not to the action itself. I verily think
that the majority of them do not in their hearts
believe that there is such a thing as a total im-
pression to be derived from a poem at all, or to
be demanded from a poet; they think the term a
commonplace of metaphysical criticism. They will
permit the poet to select any action he pleases, and
to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he
gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writ-
ing, and with a shower of isolated thoughts and
images. That is, they permit him to leave their
poetical sense ungyratified, provided that he gratifies
their rhetorical sense and their curiosity.”

Here we undoubtedly have the law as deducible
from the Greek poets, and perhaps as deducible from
the principles of perfect taste itself. Little wonder
Arnold found Emerson’s poems so unsatisfactory,
— Emerson, the most unclassical of poets, with no
proper sense of wholeness at all, no continuity, no
power to deal with actions. Emerson has great pro-
jectile power, but no constructive power. His aim
was mainly to shoot a thought or an image on a line
like a meteor athwart the imagination of his reader,

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 99

to kindle and quicken his feeling for beautiful and
sublime truths. Valuable as these things are, it is
to be admitted that those poems that are concrete
wholes, like the organic products of nature, will
always rank the higher with a pure artistic taste.

Whatever be our opinion of the value of his criti-
cism, we must certainly credit Arnold with a steady
and sincere effort to see things whole, to grasp the
totality of life, all the parts duly subordinated
and brought into harmony with one another. His
watchword on all occasions is totality, or perfection.
He has shown us the shortcomings of Puritanism, of
Liberalism, and of all forms of religious dissent,
when tried by the spirit of Hellenism. We have
been made to see very clearly wherein John Bull
is not a Greek, and we can divine the grounds
of his irritation by the comparison. It is because
the critic could look in the face of his great achieve-
ment in the world and blame him for being John
Bull. The concession that after all he at times in
his history exhibited the grand style, the style of
the Homeric poems, was a compliment he did not
appreciate.

“English civilization, the humanizing, the bring-
ing into one harmonious and truly human life of
the whole body of English society, — that is what
interests me. I try to be a disinterested observer
of all which really helps and hinders that.”

He recognizes four principal needs in the life of
every people and community, — the need of conduct,
the need of beauty, the need of knowledge, and the

100 INDOOR STUDIES

need of social life and manners. The English have
the sense of the power of conduct, the Italians the
sense of the power of beauty, the Germans the
sense of the power of knowledge or science, the
French the sense of the power of social life and
manners. All these things are needed for our
complete humanization or civilization; the ancient
Greeks came nearer possessing the whole of them,
and of moving on all these lines, than any other
people. The ground of his preference for the his-
toric churches, the Catholic and the Anglican, over
the dissenting churches is that, while they all have
a false philosophy of religion, the former address
themselves to more needs of human life than the
latter.

“The need for beauty is a real and now rapidly
growing need in man: Puritanism cannot satisfy
it; Catholicism and the English Church can. The
need for intellect and knowledge in him, indeed,
neither Puritanism, nor Catholicism, nor the Eng-
lish Church, can at present satisfy. That need has
to seek satisfaction nowadays elsewhere, — through
the modern spirit, science, literature.”

He avers that Protestantism has no intellectual
superiority over Catholicism, but only a moral su-
periority arising from greater seriousness and ear-
nestness. Neither have the Greek wholeness and
proportion. The attitude of the one towards the
Bible is as unreasoning as the attitude of the other
towards the church.

“The mental habit of him who imagines that

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 101

Balaam’s ass spoke, in no respect differs from the
mental habit of him who imagines that a Madonna,
of wood or stone, winked.”

The most that can be claimed for each sect, each
church, each party, is that it is free from some special
bondage which still confines the mind of some other
sect or party. Those, indeed, are free whom the
truth makes free; but each sect and church has only
a fragment of the truth, a little here and a little
there. Both Catholic and Protestant have the germ
of religion, and both have a false philosophy of the
germ.

“But Catholicism has the germ invested in an
immense poetry, the gradual work of time and na-
ture, and of the great impersonal artist, Catholic
Christendom.”

The unity or identity of literature and religion, as
with the Greeks, — this is the animating idea of “ Lit-
erature and Dogma.” In this work Arnold brings
his Hellenism to bear upon the popular religion and
the dogmatic interpretation of the Bible, upon which
the churches rest; and the result is that we get
from him a literary interpretation of the Bible, a
free and plastic interpretation, as distinguished from
the hard, literal, and historical interpretation. He
reads the Bible as literature, and not as history or
science. He seeks its verification in an appeal to
taste, to the simple reason, to the fitness of things.
He finds that the Biblical writers used words in a
large and free way, in a fluid and literary way, and
not at all with the exactness and stringency of science

102 INDOOR STUDIES

or mathematics; or, as Sir Thomas Browne said of
his own works, that many things are to be taken in
a “soft and flexible sense.”

In other words, the aim of Arnold’s religious criti-
cism is to rescue what he calls the natural truth of
Christianity from the discredit and downfall which
he thinks he sees overtaking its unnatural truth, its
reliance upon miracles and the supernatural. The
ground, he says, is slipping from under these things;
the time spirit is against them; and unless something
is done the very heart and core of Christianity itself,
as found in the teachings of Christ, will be lost to
the mass of mankind. Upon this phase of Arnold’s
criticism I have this to remark: it is difficult to see
how Christianity, as a people’s religion, can be pre-
served by its natural or verifiable truth alone. This
natural truth the world has always had; it bears
the same relation to Christianity that the primary
and mineral elements bear to a living organism:
what is distinctive and valuable in Christianity is
the incarnation of these truths in a living system of
beliefs and observances which not only take hold
of men’s minds, but which move their hearts.

We may extract the natural truth of Christianity,
a system of morality or of ethics, and to certain
minds this is enough; but it is no more Christianity
than the extract of lilies or roses is a flower-garden.
“Religion,” Arnold well says, “is morality touched
with emotion.” It is just this element of emotion
which we should lose if we reduced Christianity to
its natural truths, Show a man the natural or

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 103

scientific truth of answer to prayer, that is, that an-
swer to prayer is a purely subjective phenomenon,
and his lips are sealed; teach him the natural truth
of salvation by Jesus Christ, namely, that self-re-
nunciation, that love, that meekness, that dying for
others, is saving, and the emotion evaporates from
his religion.

It is, he says, the natural truth of Christianity
that he is after: but it is not the natural truth that
the world wants; it is not this that has saved men
and that still saves them, that is, holds them up
to the standard of their better selves and sustains
them in a life of solitude and virtue. It is the
legendary or artificial truth of Christianity which
does this, that which the human heart, in its fear,
its faith, its hope, its credulity, or in all combined,
supplies. It is what Arnold calls extra-belief, or
Aberglaube, the part he is trying to get rid of, that
makes Christianity a power for good over the mass
of mankind. <Aderglaube, Goethe said, is the po-
etry of life, and it is just this superadded element to
Christianity that to the mass of mankind give its
charm, its attraction, its truth to their hearts and im-
aginations. It is this that touches the natural truth
of Christianity with emotion and makes it fruitful.
It is true that this Aberglaube or superstition is
not science, though it perpetually imagines itself to
be so, but it is nevertheless real to the hearts and
faiths of men. To show them that it is not real, that
it is not science, is to strip the tree of its leaves:
the tree will perish; the natural truth of Chris-

104 INDOOR STUDIES

tianity will not save it to the masses. They can do
nothing with the natural truth; the fairy tale, the
extra-belief, or the superstition, — whatever you
please to call it, — must be added. Arnold himself
says: ‘That the spirit of man should entertain
hopes and anticipations, beyond what it actually
knows and can verify, is quite natural.” Yes, and
beyond what is actually true. ‘Human life could
not have the scope, and depth, and progress it has
were this otherwise.”

The reader’s mind does not pass readily from Ar-
nold’s disbelief in what is called revealed religion to
his advocacy of any church or form of worship; from
his scientific passion, his effort to see things exactly
as they are, to his defense of empty and unmeaning
forms. There is a break here, a fault in his mind.
There is no logical connection between his attitude
in reference to the interpretation of the Bible and
his advocacy of a form of religious worship upheld
by the state.

If we give up the dogma, we must give up the rite
founded upon the dogma. Our churches must be-
come halls of science or temples of art. Can we
worship an impersonal law or tendency? If public
worship is to be continued, if church organization is
still to go on, as Mr. Arnold advocates, it is impos-
sible to see how the natural truth of Christianity
will alone suffice. The truths of the Bible differ
from the truths of science just as a picture or a par-
able differs from an exact statement; not that they
are any more true, but that they are true in a way

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 105

that makes them take a deeper hold upon the spirit.
Science knows as clearly as religion that ‘‘the face
of the Lord is against them that do evil,” but does
it know it in just the intimate and personal way?
It knows it only as it knows the truth of one of
Kepler’s laws, by a process of cool ratiocination ; but
religion knows it through an emotional process, into
which the personal elements of love and fear enter.
I am not discussing the superiority of one mode of
belief over the other; I only urge that worship has
its rise in the latter and not in the former. Reason
is not the basis of a national religion, and never has
been. It is very doubtful if the disclosure of a
scientific basis for the truths of religion would not
be a positive drawback to the religious efficacy of
those truths, because this view of them would come
in time to supplant and to kill the personal emo-
tional view which worship requires.

It is therefore considered as religion, as the basis
of public worship, that Arnold does injustice to the
popular faith, As science, or philosophy, what he
has to offer may be much more acceptable to certain
advanced minds, but to the race as a whole a sub-
limated extract of Christianity can never take the
place of the old palpable concrete forms. In fact,
getting at the natural truths of a people’s religion is
very much like burning their temples and their idols
and offering them the ashes.

Another form which Arnold’s Hellenism takes is
that it begets in him what we may call the spirit of

106 INDOOR STUDIES

institutionalism, as opposed to the spirit of individ-
ualism. Greek culture centres in institutions, and
the high character of their literary and artistic pro-
ductions was the expression of qualities which did
not merely belong to individuals here and there, but
were current in the nation as a whole. With the
Greek the state was supreme. He lived and died
for the state. He had no private, separate life and
occupation, as has the modern man. ‘The arts, ar-
chitecture, sculpture, existed mainly for public uses.
There was probably no domestic life, no country
life, no individual enterprises, as we know them.
The individual was subordinated. ‘Their greatest
men were banished or poisoned from a sort of jeal-
ousy of the state. The state could not endure such
rivals. Their games, their pastimes, were national
institutions. Public sentiment on all matters was
clear and strong. There was a common standard,
an unwritten law of taste, to which poets, artists,
orators appealed, Not till Athens began to decay
did great men appear, who, like Socrates, had no
influence in the state. This spirit of institutional-
ism is strong in Matthew Arnold; and it is not
merely an idea which he has picked up from the
Greek, but is the inevitable outcropping of his in-
born Hellenism. This alone places him in opposi-
tion to his countrymen, who are suspicious of the
state and of state action, and who give full swing to
the spirit of individualism. It even places him in
hostility to Protestantism, or to the spirit which be-
gat it, to say nothing of the dissenting churches, It

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 107

makes him indifferent to the element of personalism,
the flavor of character, the quality of unique indi-
vidual genius, wherever found in art, literature, or
religion. It is one secret of his preference of the
establishment over the dissenting churches. The
dissenter stands for personal religion, religion as a
private and individual experience: the established
churches stand for institutional religion, or religion as
a public and organized system of worship; and when
the issue is between the two, Arnold will always be
found on the side of institutionalism. He always
takes up for the state against the individual, for
public and established forms against private and per-
sonal dissent and caprice. “It was by no means in
accordance with the nature of the Hellenes,” says
Dr. Curtius, “mentally to separate and view in the
light of contrast such institutions as the state and
religion, which in reality everywhere most inti-
mately pervaded one another.”

What Arngld found to approve in this country
was our institutions, our success in solving the social
and political problems, and what he found to criti-
cise was our excessive individualism, our self-glorifi-
cation, the bad manners of our newspapers, and, in
general, the crude state of our civilization.

One would expect Arnold to prefer the religion
of the Old Testament to that of the New, for, as he
himself says: “The leaning, there, is to make re-
ligion social rather than personal, an affair of out-
ward duties rather than of inward dispositions; ” and,
to a disinterested observer, this is very much like

108 INDOOR STUDIES

what the religion of the Anglican Church appears
to be.

Arnold always distrusts the individual; he sees
in him mainly a bundle of whims and caprices.
The individual is one-sided, fantastical, headstrong,
narrow. He distrusts all individual enterprises in
the way of schools, colleges, churches, charities;
and, like his teacher, Aristotle, pleads for state ac-
tion in all these matters. “Culture,” he says (and
by culture he means Hellenism), “will not let us
rivet our attention upon any one man and his do-
ings;” it directs our attention rather to the ‘“natu-
ral current there is in human affairs;” and assigns
“to systems and to system-makers a smaller share in
the bent of human destiny than their friends like.”

“T remember, when I was under the influence of
a mind to which I feel the greatest obligations, the
mind of a man who was the very incarnation of
sanity and clear sense, a man the most considerable,
it seems to me, whom America has yet produced,
— Benjamin Franklin, —I remember the relief with
which, after long feeling the sway of Franklin’s im-
perturbable common-sense, I came upon a project of
his for a new version of the Book of Job, to replace
the old version, the style of which, says Franklin,
has become obsolete, and hence less agreeable. ‘I
give,’ he continues, ‘a few verses, which may serve
as a sample of the kind of version I would recom-
mend.’* We all recollect the famous verse in our

1 It turns out that this was only a joke of Franklin’s, and it is
very curious that Arnold did not see it.

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 109

translation: ‘Then Satan answered the Lord, and
said, Doth Job fear God for nought?’ Franklin
makes this: ‘Does your Majesty imagine that Job’s
good conduct is the effect of mere personal attach-
ment and affection?’ I well remember how, when
first I read that, I drew a deep breath of relief,
and said to myself: ‘After all, there is a stretch of
humanity beyond Franklin’s victorious good sense!’
So, after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as the
renovator of modern society, and Bentham’s mind
and ideas proposed as the rulers of our future, I
open the ‘Deontology.’ There I read: ‘ While
Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teach-
ing geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking non-
sense under pretense of talking wisdom and moral-
ity. This morality of theirs consisted in words;
this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters
known to every man’s experience.’ From the mo-
ment of reading that, I am delivered from the bond-
age of Bentham! the fanaticism of his adherents can
touch me no longer. I feel the inadequacy of his
mind and ideas for supplying the rule of human
society, for perfection.”

The modern movement seems to me peculiarly a
movement of individualism, a movement favoring
the greater freedom and growth of the individual,
as opposed to outward authority and its lodgment in
institutions. It is this movement which has given
a distinctive character to the literature of our cen-
tury, a movement in letters which Goethe did more
to forward than any other man, — Goethe, who said

110 INDOOR STUDIES

that in art and poetry personal genius is everything,
and that “in the great work the great person is al-
ways present as the great factor.” Arnold seems
not to share this feeling; he does not belong to this
movement. His books give currency to another
order of ideas. He subordinates the individual, and
lays the emphasis on culture and the claims of the
higher standards. He says the individual has no
natural rights, but only duties. We never find him
insisting upon originality, self-reliance, character, in-
dependence, but, quite the contrary, on conformity
and obedience. He says that at the bottom of the
trouble of all the English people lies the notion of
its being the prime right and happiness for each of
us to affirm himself and to be doing as he likes.
One of his earliest and most effective essays was to
show the value of academies, of a central and au-
thoritative standard of taste to a national literature;
and in all his subsequent writings the academic note
has been struck and adhered to. With him right,
reason, and the authority of the state areone. “In
our eyes,” he says, “the very framework and exte-
rior order of the state, whoever may administer the
state, is sacred.” ‘Every one of us,” he again
says, “has the idea of country, as a sentiment;
hardly any one of us has the idea of the state as a
working power. And why? Because we habitually
live in our ordinary selves, which do not carry us
beyond the ideas and wishes of the class to which
we happen to belong.” Which is but saying be-
cause we are wrapped so closely about by our indi-

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 111

vidualism. His remedy for the democratic tenden-
cies of the times, tendencies he does not regret, is
an increase of the dignity and authority of the state.
The danger of English democracy is, he says, “that
it will have far too much its own way, and be left
far too much to itself.” He adds, with great force
and justness, that ‘‘nations are not truly great solely
because the individuals composing them are numer-
ous, free, and active, but they are great when these
numbers, this freedom, and this activity are em-
ployed in the service of an ideal higher than that of
an ordinary man taken by himself.” Or, as Aris-
totle says, these things must be in “‘obedience to
some intelligent principle, and some right regula-
tion, which has the power of enforcing its de-
crees.”

When the licensed victualers or the commercial
travelers propose to make a school for their children,
Arnold is unsparing in his ridicule. He says that
to bring children up “in a kind of odor of licensed
victualism or of bagmanism is not a wise training to
give to children.” The heads and representatives
of the nation should teach them better, but they do
nothing of the kind; on the contrary they extol the
energy and self-reliance of the licensed victualers or
commercial travelers, and predict full success for
their schools. John Bull is suspicious of centraliza-
tion, bureaucracy, state authority, which carry things
with such a high hand on the Continent. Anything
that threatens, or seems to threaten, his individual
liberty, he stands clear of. ‘The sense of the na-

112 INDOOR STUDIES

tion spoke in the words lately uttered through the
“Times” by Sir Auberon Herbert. He says: —

“ All creat state systems stupefy ; you cannot make
the state a parent without the logical consequence
of making the people children. Official regulation
and free mental perception of what is right and wise
do not and cannot coexist. I see no possible way
in which you can reconcile these great state services
and the conditions under which men have to make
true progress in themselves.”

But to preach such notions in England, Arnold
would say, is like carrying coals to Newcastle. They
would be of more service in France, where state
action is excessive. In England the dangers are
the other way.

“Our dangers are in exaggerating the blessings of
self-will and of self-assertion; in not being ready
enough to sink our imperfectly formed self-will in
view of a large general result.”

There seems to be nothing in Hellenism that sug-
gests Catholicism, and yet evidently it is Arnold’s
classical feeling for institutions that gives him his
marked Catholic bias. The Catholic Church is a
great institution, —the greatest and oldest in the
world. It makes and always has made short work
of the individual. It is cold, stately, impersonal.
Says Emerson: —

“Tn the long time it has blended with everything
in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves
through a zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every day
of the year, every town and market and headland and

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 1138

monument, and has coupled itself with the almanac,
that no court can be held, no field plowed, no horse
shod, without some leave from the church.”

It appeals to Arnold by reason of these things,
and it appeals to him by reason of its great names,
its poets, artists, statesmen, preachers, scholars;
its imposing ritual, its splendid architecture, its cul-
ture. Jt has been the conserver of letters. For
centuries the priests were the only scholars, and its
ceremonial is a kind of petrified literature. Ar-
nold clearly speaks for himself, or from his own bias,
when he says that “the man of imagination, nay,
and the philosopher, too, in spite of her propensity
to burn him, will always have a weakness for the
Catholic Church;” ‘it is because of the rich treas-
ures of human life which have been stored within
her pale.” Indeed, there is a distinct flavor of Ca-
tholicism about nearly all of Matthew Arnold’s writ-
ings. One cannot always put his finger on it: it is
in the air, it is in that cool, haughty impersonalism,
that ex cathedra tone, that contempt for dissenters,
that genius for form, that spirit of organization.
His mental tone and temper ally him to Cardinal
Newman, who seems to have exerted a marked in-
fluence upon him, and who is still, he says, a great
name to the imagination. Yet he says Newman
“has adopted, for the doubts and difficulties which
beset men’s minds to-day, a solution, which, to
speak frankly, is impossible.” What, therefore, re-
pels Arnold in Catholicism, and keeps him without
its fold, is its “‘ultramontanism, sacerdotalism, and

114 INDOOR STUDIES

superstition.” Its cast-iron dogmas and its bigotry
are too much for his Hellenic spirit; but no more
so than are the dogmas and bigotry of the Protestant
churches. It is clear enough that he would sooner
be a Catholic than a Presbyterian or a Methodist.

The real superiority of the Catholic Church, he
says, is in “its charm for the imagination, — its
poetry. I persist in thinking that Catholicism has,
from this superiority, a great future before it; that
it will endure while all the Protestant sects (in
which I do not include the Church of England) dis-
solve and perish. I persist in thinking that the
prevailing form for the Christianity of the future
will be the form of Catholicism, but a Catholicism
purged, opening itself to the light and air, having
the consciousness of its own poetry, freed from its
sacerdotal despotism, and freed from its pseudo-
scientific apparatus of superannuated dogma. Its
forms will be retained, as symbolizing with the force
and charm of poetry a few cardinal facts and ideas
simple indeed, but indispensable and inexhaustible,
and on which our race could lay hold only by mate-
rializing them.”

All this may well be questioned. To the disinter-
ested observer, the ritual and the imposing ceremo-
nial of the Catholic Church have about them little
of the character of true poetry or of true beauty.
These things appeal to a low order of imagination and
mentality, and are one secret of the church’s influ-
ence over the vulgar masses. A man of true taste is
no more touched by them than by any rite of pagan

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 115

faiths. True, the great cathedrals are a part of
the ceremonial of the church, and here the height
of true poetry is reached, and the imagination is
aroused, as it is also by her great names, her poets,
artists, scholars, preachers, of the Middle Ages.
But the secret of all these things has now passed
from the Catholic Church. She is as impotent in
art and architecture, in literature and in the pul-
pit, as are the Protestant churches. Raphaels, and
Dantes, and Fénelons, and Pascals, and Bossuets no
longer appear within her pale. Should we not
rather look for the real superiority of the Catholic
Church, as an active force in the world, to its au-
thority, its vast overshadowing power as an institu-
tion? In this respect it is nearly perfect, and does
indeed touch the imagination. It is as thorough as
nature, as searching as fate. It lays its hands upon
every force of human life. It is wonderfully adapted
to the weakness, the ignorance, and the helplessness
of mankind. It establishes the ways, it prescribes
your belief, it settles doubts and misgivings. Dr.
Johnson said he could easily see how many good but
timid and credulous persons “might be glad to be of
a church where there are so many helps to get to
heaven;” and he adds of himself, “I would be a
Papist if I could; I have fear enough, but an obsti-
nate rationality prevents me.” It is, indeed, easy
to get to heaven by way of the Catholic Church.

It is as complete as Noah’s Ark, in which such a
motley crew found lodgment. The inmates are
housed from the winds, the waves, the storms.

116 INDOOR STUDIES

Protestantism has taken to the open boats, while
some of the sects have hardly a plank beneath them.
Yes, if you are no swimmer, and must needs make
the voyage with the least possible trouble and ex-
posure, embark in the great mother church. You
have little more to do than a passenger on board of
one of the Altantic steamers. Herein we strike the
secret of the power of the Catholic Church, and the
secret of its hopes for the future. After one has
passed through a certain course of experience and
development, it is easy to see how men tire of the
open boat or single plank mode of navigation, and
desire the repose and security of a vessel that has
withstood the elements so long. Then people left to
themselves do make such wretched work with the
Bible, do belittle and vulgarize it so! They take a
text here and a text there, and brood over them,
and make a great noise over a nest full of addled
eggs; for a text, wrenched from its context and read
in any spirit but that in which it was written be-
comes as an addled egg. Mormonism is one of the
legitimate fruits of Protestantism. The Catholic
Church puts an end to all this; there are no more
noisy sects and isms; the Bible is authoritatively
interpreted. This alone commends her to men of
taste.

Arnold’s Hellenism is the source of both his
weakness and his strength; his strength, because it
gives him a principle that cannot be impeached. In
all matters of taste and culture the Greek standards

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 117

are the last and highest court of appeal. In no
other race and time has life been so rounded and
full, and invested with the same charm. “They
were freer than other mortal races,” says Professor
Curtius, “from all that hinders and oppresses the
motions of the mind.”

It is the source of his weakness, or ineffectual-
ness, because he has to do with an unclassical age
and unclassical people. It is interesting and salu-
tary to have the Greek standards applied to modern
polities and religion, and to the modern man, but
the application makes little or no impression save
on the literary classes. Well might Arnold say,
in his speech at the Authors’ Club in New York,
that only the literary class had understood and sus-
tained him. The other classes have simply been ir-
ritated or bewildered by him. His tests do not ap-
peal to them. The standards which the philosopher,
or the political economist, or the religious teacher
brings, impress them more.

The Greek flexibility of intellect cannot be too
much admired, but the Greek flexibility of charac-
ter and conscience is quite another thing. Of the
ancient Hellenes it may with truth be said that they
were the “wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.”
Such fickleness, treachery, duplicity, were perhaps
never before wedded to such esthetic rectitude and
wholeness. They would bribe their very gods.
Such a type of character can never take deep hold
of the British mind.

When Arnold, reciting the episode of Wragg, tells

118 INDOOR STUDIES

his countrymen that “by the Ilissus there was
no Wragg, poor thing,” will his countrymen much
concern themselves whether there was or not?
When the burden of his indictment of the English
Liberals is that they have worked only for political
expansion, and have done little or nothing for the
need of beauty, the need of social life and man-
ners, and the need of intellect and knowledge, will
the English Liberals feel convicted by the charge?
‘When he says of the Pilgrim fathers that Shake-
speare and Virgil would have found their company
intolerable, is Puritanism discredited in the eye of
English Puritans? Indeed, literary standards, ap-
plied to politics or religion, are apt to be ineffec-
tual with all except a very limited circle of artistic
spirits.

‘Whether it be a matter for regret or for congrat-
ulation, there can be little doubt that man and all
his faculties are becoming more and more special-
ized, more and more differentiated; the quality of
unique individual genius is more and more valued,
so that we are wandering farther and farther from
the unity, the simplicity, and the repose of the an-
tique world.

This fact may afford the best of reasons for the
appearance of such a man as Arnold, who opposes
so squarely and fairly this tendency, and who draws
such fresh courage and strength from the classic
standards. But it accounts in a measure for the gen-
eral expression of distaste with which his teachings
have been received. Still, he has shown us very

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 119

clearly how British civilization looks to Hellenic
eyes, Where it needs pruning and where it needs
strengthening; and he has doubtless set going cur-
rents of ideas that must eventually tell deeply upon
the minds of his countrymen.

It is undoubtedly as a critic of literature that Ar-
nold is destined to leave his deepest mark. In this
field the classic purity and simplicity of his mind,
its extraordinary clearness, steadiness, and vitality,
are the qualities most prized. His power as a critic
is undoubtedly his power of definition and classi-
fication, a gift he has which allies him with the
great naturalists and classifiers. Probably no other
English critic has thrown into literature so many
phrases and definitions that are likely to become a
permanent addition to the armory of criticism as has
Arnold. Directness and definiteness are as proper
and as easy to him as to a Greek architect. He is
the least bewildering of writers. With what ad-
mirable skill he brings out his point on all occasions!
Things fall away from it till it stands out like a tree
in a field, which we see all around. His genius for
definition and analysis finds full scope in his works
on “Celtic Literature,” wherein are combined the
strictness of scientific analysis with the finest literary
charm. The lectures, too, on “Translating Homer,”
seem as conclusive as a scientific demonstration.

A good sample of his power to pluck out the heart
of the secret of a man’s influence may be found in
his essay on Wordsworth.

““Wordsworth’s poetry is great because of the

120 INDOOR STUDIES

extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels
the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us
in simple elementary affections and duties, and be-
cause of the extraordinary power with which, in case
after case, he shows us this joy and renders it so as
to make us share it.”

Arnold has been compared to Sainte-Beuve, but
the resemblance is not very striking. Arnold has
not the vivacity of mind of the Frenchman, nor the
same power to efface himself and his opinions. It
is not an easy matter for an Englishman to efface
himself on any occasion. Sainte-Beuve is the better
instrument, but Arnold is the greater force.

In power of concentration and in power of defini-
tion, the English critic surpasses his French master.
Sainte-Beuve’s power is a power of interpretation;
he can adjust himself more closely and happily to a
wide diversity of minds than can Arnold. He was
not a critic of opinions, doctrines, teachings, but an
interpreter of genius in all its forms. No matter
what a man taught, so that he taught it well. He
has the same pleasure with Pope or Franklin as with
Pascal or Massillon. “One loves, one adopts with
pleasure,” he says, “every kind of genius, every
new talent.” His mind flows around and around
his subject, and envelops it on all sides, and renders
the clearest and fullest image of it. He is a pure,
disembodied critical spirit, indulging itself to the
utmost in the mere pleasure of criticising, of inter-
preting; taking possession of every form or kind of
genius with like ease and enjoyment, blending itself

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 121

with it and drawing out its secret by a kind of lit-
erary clairvoyance.

Arnold has not, in the same measure, this kind of
power. He is less sympathetic and more analytical
in his method, and more given to definition and to
final judgments. He is also fuller of the spirit of
reproof and discipline than the Frenchman. The
force of nature and character are less with him, and
the authority of the rules and standards more. One
would rather submit a bold and original genius to
the judgment of the Frenchman; he would see more
reason for justifying it upon its own grounds, for
allowing it to be a law unto itself; but for a com-
parative judgment, to know where your original
genius departs from the highest standards, wherein
he transgresses the law, etc., one would go to Ar-
nold.

A recent English reviewer says that there are but
two English authors of the present day whose works
are preéminent for quality of style, namely, John
Morley and Cardinal Newman. But one would say
that the man of all others among recent English
writers who had in a preéminent degree the gift of
what we call style — that quality in literature which
is like the sheen of a bird’s plumage — was Matthew
Arnold. That Morley has this quality is by no
means so certain. Morley is a vigorous, brilliant,
versatile writer, but his quality is not distinctively
literary, and his sentences do not have a power and
a charm by virtue of their very texture and sequence
alone. Few writers, of any time or land, have had

122 INDOOR STUDIES

the unity, transparency, centrality of Arnold’s mind,
— the piece or discourse is so well cast, it is so homo-
geneous, it makes such a clear and distinct im-
pression. Morley’s vocabulary is the more copious;
more matters are touched upon in any given space;
he is more fruitful of ideas and suggestions; his
writings may have a greater political, or religious,
or scientific value than Arnold’s. But in pure lit-
erary value they, in my opinion, fall far below.
Arnold’s work is like cut glass; it is not merely
clear, it has a distinction, a prestige, which belongs to
it by reason of its delicate individuality of style.
The writings of Cardinal Newman have much of the
same quality, — the utmost lucidity combined with a
fresh, distinct literary flavor. They are pervaded
by a sweeter, more winsome spirit than Arnold’s;
there is none of the scorn, contemptuousness, and
superciliousness in them that have given so much
offense in Arnold; and while his style is not so crisp
as the latter’s, it is perhaps more marvelously flex-
ible and magnetic.

Arnold is, above all things, integral and consec-
utive. He seems to have no isolated thoughts, no
fragments, nothing that begins and ends in a mere
intellectual concretion; his thoughts are all in the
piece and have reference to his work as a whole;
they are entirely subordinated to plan, to structure,
to total results. He values them, not as ends, but
as means. In other words, we do not come upon
those passages in his works that are like isolated
pools of deep and beautiful meaning, and which

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM 123

make the value to us of writers like Landor, for in-
stance, but we everywhere strike continuous currents
of ideas that set definitely to certain conclusions;
always clear and limpid currents, and now and then
deep, strong, and beautiful currents. And, after all,
water was made to flow and not to stand, and those
are the most vital and influential minds whose ideas
are working ideas, and lay hold of real problems,
Certainly a man’s power to put himself in com-
munication with live questions, and to take vital
hold of the spiritual and intellectual life of his age,
should enter into our estimate of him. We shall ask
of a writer who lays claim to high rank, not merely
has he great thoughts, but what does he do with
his great thoughts? Is he superior to them? Can
he use them? Can he bring them to bear? Can
he wield them to clear up some obscurity or bridge
over some difficulty for us, or does he sit down amid
them and admire them? A man who wields a great
capital is above him who merely hoards it and keeps
it. Let me refer to Landor again in this connection,
because, in such a discussion, one wants, as they say
in croquet, a ball to play on, and because Landor’s
works have lately been in my hands, and I have
noted in them a certain remoteness and ineffectual-
ness which contrast them well with Arnold’s. Lan-
dor’s sympathies were mainly outside his country
and times, and his writings affect me like capital
invested in jewels and precious stones, rather than
employed in any great and worthy enterprise. One
turns over his beautiful sentences with a certain

124 INDOOR STUDIES

admiration and enjoyment, but his ideas do not
fasten upon one, and ferment and grow in his mind,
and influence his judgments and feelings. It is not
a question of abstraction or of disinterestedness,
but of seriousness of purpose. Emerson is more
abstract, more given up to ideal and transcendental
valuations, than Landor; but Emerson is a power,
because he partakes of a great spiritual and intellec-
tual movement of his times; he is unequivocally of
to-day and of New England. So with Arnold, he
is unequivocally of to-day; he is unequivocally an
Englishman, but an Englishman thoroughly imbued
with the spirit of Greek art and culture. The sur-
prise in reading Arnold is never the novelty of his
thought or expression, or the force with which his
ideas are projected, but in the clearness and nearness
of the point of view, and the steadiness and consist-
ency with which the point of view is maintained.
He is as free from the diseases of subtlety and over-
refinement of thought or expression, and from any-
thing exaggerated or fanciful, as any of the antique
authors. His distinguishing trait is a kind of finer
common-sense. One remembers his acknowledgment
of his indebtedness to the sanity and clear sense of
Franklin. It is here the two minds meet; the lead-
ing trait of each is this same sanity and clear sense,
this reliance upon the simple palpable reason.
Arnold’s reliance upon the near and obvious rea-
son, and his distrust of metaphysical subtleties and
curious refinements, are so constant that he has been
accused of parading the commonplace. But the

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 125

commonplace, when used with uncommon cleverness
and aptness, is always the most telling. He thinks
the great weakness of Christianity at the present
time is its reliance, or pretended reliance, upon the
preternatural, and the whole burden of his own effort
in this field is to show its basis upon common-sense,
upon a universal need and want of mankind. For
ingenious, for abstruse reasons Arnold has no taste
at all, either in religion, in literature, or in politics,
and the mass of readers will sympathize with him.
“At the mention of that name metaphysics,” he
says, “lo, essence, existence, substance, finite and
infinite, cause and succession, something and nothing,
begin to weave their eternal dance before us, with
the confused murmur of their combinations filling
all the region governed by her who, far more in-
disputably than her late-born rival, political econ-
omy, has earned the title of the Dismal Science.”
The dangers of such steadiness and literary con-
servatism as Arnold’s are the humdrum and the
commonplace; but he is saved from these by his
poetic sensibility. How homogeneous his page is,
like air or water! There is little color, little vari-
ety, but there is an interior harmony and fitness,
that are like good digestion or good health. Viva-
city of mind he is not remarkable for, but in single-
ness and continuity he is extraordinary. His seri-
ousness of purpose seldom permits him to indulge in
wit; humor is a more constant quality with him.
But never is there wit for wit’s sake, nor humor for
humor’s sake; they are entirely in the service of the

126 INDOOR STUDIES

main argument. The wit is usually a thrust, as
when he says of the Nonconformist that he “has
worshiped his fetich of separatism so long that he is
likely to wish to remain, like Ephraim, ‘a wild ass
alone by himself.’ ”” The book in which he uses the
weapons of wit and humor the most constantly he
calls, with refined sarcasm, ‘‘ Friendship’s Garland,”
—a garland made up mainly of nettles. Like all
of his books, it is aimed at the British Philistine,
but it is less Socratic than the other books and con-
tains more of Dean Swift. Arnold is always a mas-
ter of the artful Socratic method, but this book has,
in addition, a playful humor and a nettle-like irony
—an itch which ends in a burn —that are more
modern. What a garland he drops by the hand of
his Prussian friend Arminius upon the brow of Hep-
worth Dixon in characterizing his style as “‘ Middle-
class Macaulayese: ?—

““* JT call it Macaulayese,’ says the pedant, ‘ because
it has the same internal and external characteristics
as Macaulay’s style; the external characteristic being
a hard metallic movement with nothing of the soft
play of life, and the internal characteristic being a
perpetual semblance of hitting the right nail on the
head without the reality. And I call it middle-
class Macaulayese because it has these faults without
the compensation of great studies, and of conver-
sance with great affairs, by which Macaulay partly
redeemed them.’ ”

By the hand of another character he crowns Mr.
Sala thus: —

MATTHEW ARNOLD’S CRITICISM 127

“But his career and genius have given him some-
how the secret of a literary mixture novel and
fascinating in the last degree: he blends the airy
epicureanism of the salons of Augustus with the
full-bodied gayety of our English Cider-cellar.”

Most of the London newspapers, too, receive
their garlands. That of “The Times” is most
taking: —

“<* Nay,’ often this enthusiast continues, getting
excited as he goes on, ‘ “The Times” itself, which
so stirs some people’s indignation,— what is ‘The
Times” but a gigantic Sancho Panza, following by
an attraction he cannot resist that poor, mad,
scorned, suffering, sublime enthusiast, the modern
spirit; following it, indeed, with constant grum-
bling, expostulation, and opposition, with airs of pro-
tection, of compassionate superiority, with an inces-
sant by-play of nods, shrugs, and winks addressed
to the spectators; following it, in short, with all the
incurable recalcitrancy of a lower nature, but still
following it?’ ”

In “Friendship’s Garland” many of the shafts
Arnold has aimed at his-countrymen in his previous
books are refeathered and repointed and shot with
a grace and playful mockery that are immensely di-
verting. He has perhaps never done anything so
artistic and so full of genius. It fulfills its purpose
with a grace and a completeness that awaken in one
the feeling of the delicious; it is the only one of
his books one can call delicious.

128 INDOOR STUDIES

Anything like passion, or heat of the blood, Ar-
nold is especially shy of. As Marcus Aurelius said
of his imperial father, on all occasions he “ stops short
of the sweating point.” Heat begets fumes and
fumes cloud the sky, and Arnold’s strength is al-
ways in his unclouded intelligence. An unclouded
intelligence is among the supreme gifts, but it is not
all. Arnold makes us so in love with it that we
quite forget the broader and more intensely human
qualities, and the part they play in our highest men-
tal operations. Truly, as he says in “Youth and
Calm,” —

“Calm ’s not life’s crown, though calm is well.’

Arnold’s desire for calm, for tranquillity, for
perfection, probably stands in the way of his full
appreciation of certain types of men. All great
movements and revolutions are at the expense of
calm, of measure, proportion, etc. A certain bias,
a certain heat and onesidedness, are necessary to
break the equilibrium and set the currents going.
The master forces of this world, like Luther in
religion, or Cromwell in politics, or Victo Hugo or
Shakespeare in literature, or Turner in art, are not
nicely measured and adjusted. In the modern
world, especially, is man onesided, unclassical, frag-
mentary; a great talent here, another there, but
nowhere the wholeness and totality Arnold pleads
for.

Vv
ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE

URING Matthew Arnold’s first visit to this
country, in 1883-84, he lectured in various
cities upon Emerson, with whose name he linked
that of Carlyle. I had the pleasure of hearing him
in New York on the occasion of the second or third
repetition of his lecture in that city. Some weeks
previously I had met him at a reception at the house
of a friend. In my note-book I find I made the
following note of the impression he made upon me
on this occasion: “ Liked him better than I expected
to. A large, tall man with black hair streaked with
gray, black close-cut side-whiskers, prominent nose,
large coarse (but pure) mouth and muscular neck.
In fact a much coarser man than you would expect
to see, and stronger-looking. A good specimen of
the best English stock, plenty of color, a wholesome
coarseness and open-air look. One would say that
he belonged to a bigger and more powerful race
than the rest of the people inthe room. His voice
was more husky, more like a sailor’s, I thought,
than the other voices I heard. When he talks to
you he throws his head back (the reverse of Emer-
son’s manner), and looks out from under his heavy

130 INDOOR STUDIES

eyelids, and sights you down his big nose — draws
off, as it were, and gives you his chin. It is the
critical attitude, not the sympathetic. Yet he does
not impress one as cold and haughty, but quite the
contrary.”

He was not an entertaining speaker; his voice
was too thick and foggy. One would rather read
his discourse than hear it.

To one who knows Arnold’s devotion to the
classic standards, the calm and moderation of Greek
art, his verdict upon such writers as Emerson and
Carlyle will not be much of a surprise. Tried by
the classic standards, both these illustrious men are
undoubtedly barbarians. Emerson has indeed the
lofty serenity of Greek art, but his fragmentary
character, his mysticism, his exaggeration, his cease-
less effort to surprise, are anything but classical.
The distinctive features of classic literature, its re-
pose, its measure, its subordination of parts, and
hence its wholeness, he probably cared little for.
Speaking in one of his essays of how Greek sculp-
ture has melted away like ice and snow in the spring,
he says: “The Greek letters last a little longer, but
are always passing under the same sentence, and
tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation
of new thought opens for all that is old.” Carlyle
is a barbarian in his style, his uncouthness, his ve-
hemence, his despair, his prejudices, and in the open
conflict and incongruity between his inherited and
his acquired traits, — between his German culture,
which was from without, and his Scotch Presbyteri-

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 131

anism, which was from within. Carlyle had no tran-
quillity ; the waters of his soul were lashed into fury
the whole time. The Greek was at ease in Zion,
as Mr. Arnold somewhere says, but think of Carlyle
being at ease in Zion! Indeed, one must put his
classic standards behind. him when he gives an un-
qualified admiration to either Emerson or Carlyle as
men of letters.

The force of Arnold’s criticism came from the fact
that it was by a man who had a real and tangible
point of view of his own, and who, therefore, gave
a real and consistent account of the subject he dis-
cussed. His view of Emerson was not the view of
Emerson generally held in this country, but it was
such a view of him as puts any man who holds a
contrary one upon his mettle, and challenges him to
give as good an account of his own faith. Much of
the writing upon Emerson had been indiscriminat-
ing, and by men who had no definite point of view
of their own. Even Mr. Morley’s essay recently
published is not so satisfying a piece of work as
Arnold’s, though he arrives at nearly the same con-
clusions; but he wanders more in reaching them;
his course is not so direct and steady; in fact, the
point of view is not so clear and definite. He may
conduct us to as commanding a height, but there is
often a tangle of words and fine phrases in the way.

But it is the great merit of Matthew Arnold as a
critic that he always has a clear and unmistakable
point of view, that he always knows his point of
view and never wanders far from it. The opening

132 INDOOR STUDIES

passages of Arnold’s lecture were in a strain of such
noble and impressive eloquence that I must indulge
myself in transcribing some of them here.

“Forty years ago,” he began, ‘when I was an
undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air then
which haunt my memory still. Happy the man
who in that susceptible season of youth hears such
voices! they are a possession to him forever. No
such voices as those we heard in our youth at Ox-
ford are sounding there now. Oxford has more crit-
icism now, more knowledge, more light; but such
voices as those of our youth it has no longer. The
name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the
imagination still; his genius and his style are still
things of power. But he is over eighty years old;
he is in the Oratory at Birmingham; he has adopted
for the doubts and difficulties which beset men’s
minds to-day a solution which, to speak frankly, is
impossible.” . . . “But there were other voices
sounding in our ears besides Newman’s. There was
the puissant voice of Carlyle, so sorely strained,
overused, and misused since, but then fresh, com-
paratively sound, and reaching our hearts with true
pathetic eloquence.”. . . “A greater voice still —
the greatest voice of the century —came to us in
those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice of
Goethe.” . . . “And beside those voices there came
to us in that old Oxford time a voice also from this
side of the Atlantic, — a clear and pure voice, which,
for my ear at any rate, brought a strain as new, and
moving, and unforgettable as the strain of Newman

ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 133

or Carlyle or Goethe. Mr. Lowell has well de-
scribed the apparition of Emerson, to your young
generation here, in the distant time of which I am
speaking, and of his workings upon them. He was
your Newman, your man of soul and genius visible
to you in the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, —a
present object for your heart and imagination. That
is surely the most potent of all influences! nothing
can come up to it. Tous at Oxford, Emerson was
but a voice speaking from three thousand miles
away. But so well he spoke that from that time
forth Boston Bay and Concord were names invested
to my ear with a sentiment akin to that which
invests for me the names of Oxford and Weimar;
and snatches of Emerson’s strain fixed themselves
in my mind as imperishably as any of the eloquent
words which I have been just now quoting.”

A lofty and eloquent introduction was that, and
one well worth the subject and the occasion. The
disappointment and irritation which his hearers felt
as the lecturer proceeded arose from the fact that
the critic was at much less pains to justify this
favorable view of Emerson, which he had sounded
in his opening note, than he was to establish the ad-
verse view of him as a poet and philosopher which
he felt sure would in time be taken. The gist of
the speaker’s view of Emerson was briefly as fol-
lows: Emerson was not a great poet, was not to be
ranked among the legitimate poets, because his
poetry had not the Miltonic requirements of simpli-
city, sensuousness, and passion, He was not even a

134 INDOOR STUDIES

great man of letters, because he had not a genius and
instinct for style; his style had not the requisite
wholeness of good tissue. Who were the great men
of letters? They were Plato, Cicero, Voltaire, La
Bruyére, Milton, Addison, Swift, — men whose
prose is by a kind of native necessity true and
sound, Emerson was not a great philosopher, be-
cause he had no constructive talent, — he could not
build a system of philosophy. What, then, was his
merit? He was to be classed with Marcus Aurelius,
who was “the friend and aider of those who would
live in the spirit.” This was Emerson’s chief
merit and service: he was the friend and aider of
those who would live in the spirit. The secret of
his influence was not in his thought; it was in his
temper, his unfaltering spirit of cheerfulness and
hope.

In the opinion of the speaker, even Carlyle was
not a great writer, and his work was of much less
importance than Emerson’s. As Wordsworth’s po-
etry was the most important work done in verse in
our language during the nineteenth century, so
Emerson’s essays were, in the lecturer’s view, the .
most important work done in prose. Carlyle was
not a great writer, because he was too impatient, too
willful, too vehement; he did not work his material
up into good literary form.

In his essay on Joubert, Arnold says, following
a remark of Sainte-Beuve, that as to the estimate
of its own authors every nation is the best judge
(the positive estimate, not the comparative, as regards

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 1385

the authors of other countries), and that, therefore,
a foreigner’s judgments about the intrinsic merits of
a nation’s authors will generally, when at complete
variance with that nation’s own, be wrong. Ar-
nold’s verdict upon Emerson’s intrinsic merits was
certainly at variance with that of the best judges
among Emerson’s countrymen, and is likely, there-
fore, according to the above dictum, to be wrong.
But whether it was or not, it is no doubt true that
every people possesses a key to its own great men,
or to those who share its tendencies and hopes, that
a foreigner cannot possess, whatsoever keys of an-
other sort he may bring with him.

From. Arnold’s point of view, his criticism of
Emerson was just and consistent; but he said he
spoke not of himself, but assumed to anticipate the
verdict of time and fate upon this man. But time
and fate have ways of their own in dealing with
reputations, and the point of view of the future
with reference to this subject is, I imagine, as likely
to be different from Mr. Arnold’s as it is to be one
with it.

In the view which the speaker took of Emerson
and Carlyle, it seems to me that he laid too little
stress upon their intrinsic quality of genius and of
the real force and stimulus they left embodied in
literary forms, —imperfect or inadequate forms if
you will, but still diterary forms. Did the speaker
draw out for us and impart to us what of worth and
significance there was in these men? Did he convey
to us a lively impression of their genius? I think

136 INDOOR STUDIES

not. And yet he has told us in his essay on Jou-
bert that this is the main matter; he asks, ‘ What
is really precious and inspiring, in all that we get
from literature, except this sense of an immediate
contract with genius itself, and the stimulus toward
what is true and excellent which we derive from it?”
Like all other writers, when Arnold speaks from the
traditions of his culture and the influence of his
environment, he is far less helpful and satisfactory
than when he speaks from his native genius and in-
sight, and gives free play to that wonderfully clear,
sensitive, flexible, poetic mind of his. And in this
verdict upon Emerson and Carlyle, it seems to me,
he speaks more from his bias, more from his dislike
of nonconformists, than from his genius.

We have had much needed service from Arnold;
he has taught his generation the higher criticism, as
Sainte-Beuve taught it to his. A singularly logical
and constructive mind, yet a singularly fluid and in-
terpretative one, giving to his criticism charm, as
well as force and penetration.

All readers of his know how free he is from any-
thing strained or fantastic or paradoxical, and how
absolutely single his eye is. His page flows as lim-
pid and tranquil as a meadow brook, loitering under
this bank and under that, but yet really flowing,
really abounding in continuous currents of ideas that
lead to large and definite results. His works fur-
nish abundant illustrations of the principle of evo-
lution in literature which he demands of others.
He makes no use of the Emersonian method of sur-

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 187

prise; his ideas never suddenly leap out full-grown
from his brain, but slowly develop and unfold be-
fore you, and there are no missing links. Any given
thought is continuous with him, and grows and ex-
pands with new ramifications and radiations, from
year to year. This gives a wonderful consecutive-
ness and wholeness to his work, as well as great
clearness and simplicity. Yet one sometimes feels
as if his keen sense of form and order sometimes
stood between him and the highest truths. I believe
the notions we get from him of the scope and func-
tion of poetry, and of the value and significance of
style, are capable of revision.

Less stringency of form is to be insisted upon, less
servility to the classic standards. We live in an age
of expansion, not of concentration, as Arnold long
ago said; “like the traveler in the fable, therefore,
we begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely.”
In literature we are coming more and more to look
beyond the form into the substance; yea, into the
mood and temper that begat the substance.

“The chief trait of any given poet,” says a re-
cent authority, “is always the spirit he brings to the
observation of humanity and nature, — the mood out
of which he contemplates his subject. What kind
of temper and what amount of faith reports these
things?”

Of like purport is the well-known passage of
Sainte-Beuve, wherein, after referring to the de-
mands and standards of the classic age, he says that
for us to-day “the greatest poet is not he who has

138 INDOOR STUDIES

done the best,” — that is, written the most perfect
poem from the classic standpoint; “it is he who sug-
gests the most, — he, not all of whose meaning is at
first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to
explain, to study, much to complete in your turn.”

In the decay of the old faiths, and in the huge
agerandizement of physical science, the refuge and
consolation of serious and truly religious minds is
more and more in literature, and in the free escapes
and outlooks which it supplies. The best modern
poetry and the best modern prose take down the
bars for us and admit us to new and large fields of
moral and intellectual conquest in a way the antique
authors could not and did not aim to do. New
wants, and therefore new standards, have arisen.
Purely literary poets like Shakespeare and Milton,
priceless as they are, are of less service to mankind
in an age like ours, when religion is shunned by the
religious soul, than the more exceptional poets and
writers, like Goethe and Carlyle, or Wordsworth
and Emerson, — the wise physicians and doctors who
also minister to our wants as moral and spiritual
beings.

The type of men of which Emerson and Carlyle
are the most pronounced and influential examples in
our time, it must be owned, is comparatively a new
turn-up in literature, — men whose highest distince-
tion is the depth and fervor of their moral convic-
tion, whose greatness of character is on a par with
their greatness of intellect; a new style of man writ-
ing poems, essays, criticisms, histories, and filling

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 139

these forms with a spirit and a suggestiveness far
more needful and helpful to us in these times than
the mere spirit of perfection in letters, — the classic
spirit, which Mr. Arnold himself so assiduously cul-
tivates.

To say that Carlyle is not a great writer, or, more
than that, a supreme literary artist, is to me like
denying that Angelo and Rembrandt were great
painters, or that the sea is a great body of water.
His life of herculean labor was entirely given to
letters, and he undoubtedly brought to his tasks the
greatest single equipment of pure literary talent Eng-
lish prose has ever received. Beside some of the
men named by the lecturer, his illuminating power
is like the electric light beside a tallow dip. Nota
perfect writer certainly, nor always an agreeable one;
but he exhibited at all times the traits which the
world has consented to call great. He bequeathed
to mankind an enormous intellectual force and weight
of character, embodied in enduring literary forms.

I know it has become the fashion to disparage Car-
lyle’s histories; it is said he has been superseded
by the more scientific historians. When the scien-'
tific artist supersedes Michael Angelo, and the sci-
entific poet supersedes Shakespeare, then probably
the scientific historian will supersede Carlyle. The
scientific spirit, when applied to historical problems,
is — like chemistry applied to agriculture — valuable,
but great results have been achieved in quite another
spirit. Scientific method can exhume the past, but
cannot breathe the breath of life into it, as Carlyle

140 INDOOR STUDIES

did. Your scientific critic is usually a wearisome
creature. We do not so much want history ex-
plained after the manner of science as we want it
portrayed and interpreted after the manner of liter-
ature. And the explanations of these experts is
usually only clever thimble-rigging. If they ferret
the mystery out of one hole, they run it to cover in
another. How clever, for instance, is Taine’s ex-
planation of those brilliant epochs in the history of
nations when groups of great men are produced, and
literatures and arts get founded! Why, it is only
the result of a “hidden concord of creative forces; ”
and the opposite periods, the periods of sterility, are
the result of “inward contrarieties.” Truly, a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet. What
causes the hidden concord, etc., so that we can lay
our hand upon the lever and bring about the splen-
did epochs at a given time, the astute Frenchman
does not tell us. I like better the explanation
of the old Roman, Paterculus, namely, emulation
among men; yes, and emulation in Nature herself.
One great orator or poet will make others. Or
Emerson’s suggestion, which is just as near the
truth, and much more taking to the imagination: —

‘Heats or genial periods arrive in history, or,
shall we say, plenitudes of Divine Presence, by
which high tides are caused in the human spirit, and
great virtues and talents appear, as in the eleventh,
twelfth, thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, when the nation (England)
was full of genius and piety.”

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 141

Carlyle’s bias does not, in my opinion, mar his
histories at all, and we can always allow for it when
he writes upon any subject, — upon America, for in-
stance, or “Shooting Niagara.” It does not mar
his “Cromwell,” but lends zest to it. He was
himself the fiery partisan he was portraying. It
does not mar “Frederick,” though the author’s par-
tialities and prepossessions crop out on every page.
What vivid portraiture, what rapid grouping, what
reality, what exhaustless wit and humor, what en-
tertainment for both heart and head, this book holds!

Most readers of “ Frederick,” I imagine, find the
work too long, and at times feel a strong inclination
to ‘‘skip,” an inclination which the author himself
favors by putting his less important matter in finer
type. A little more rigid selection and abridgment,
and a little more patient fusing of the material so as
to have brought the work within the compass of one
third less space, and within the compass of the au-
thor’s best time and strength, and literature would
have been the gainer.

Carlyle’s prose has its defects most assuredly.
His periods are often like those swelled bricks that
have got too much of the fire, — crabbed and perverse.
His earnestness, his fury of conviction, made it too
hot for them; his style becomes distorted. In the
best prose there is always a certain smoothness and
homogeneity. “In the very torrent, tempest, and
(as I may say) whirlwind of your passion,” says
Hamlet in his address to the players, “you must
acquire and beget a temperance that will give it

142 INDOOR STUDIES

smoothness.” If not external smoothness, then cer-
tainly internal, — a fusion or blending that is like
good digestion. Carlyle does not always have this;
Emerson does not always have it; Whitman does
not always have it, probably does not always strive
for it; Browning rarely or never has it. There is a
good deal in Carlyle that is difficult, not in thought
but in expression. To the reader it is a kind of
mechanical difficulty, like walking over bowlders.
In his best work, like the life of Sterling, his essays
on Johnson and Voltaire, and the battle-pieces in
“Frederick,” there is the least of this.

There isa point of perfection in art,” says La
Bruyére, “as there is of goodness and ripeness in
nature. He who feels and loves it has perfect taste ;
he who feels it not, who loves something beneath
or beyond it, has faulty taste.” In the life of Ster-
ling, more completely than in any other one of his
books, Carlyle attains to this goodness and ripeness
of nature. He is calm and mellow; there is nothing
to inflame him, but everything to soften and quiet
him; and his work is of unrivaled richness in all the
noblest literary qualities. But at other times he was
after something beneath or beyond the point of per-
fection in art. He was not primarily a critical or
literary force like Arnold himself, but a moral force
working in and through literature. He was the con-
science of his country and times, wrought up to an
almost prophetic fervor and abandonment, and to cut
deep was more a point with him than to cut smooth.

Again, his defects as a writer probably arose out

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 143

of his wonderful merits as a talker. He was in the
first instance a talker, and he came finally to write
as he talked, so that the page, to retain all its charm
and effectiveness, needs the Carlyle voice and man-
ner, and the Carlyle laugh superadded. These would
give it smoothness and completion. One rather likes
a certain roughness in a man’s style, but it must be
a smooth roughness; the roughness of a muscular
arm, and not of a malformed or an ill-shapen one.

Of course all these considerations tell against Car-
lyle’s claim to be considered a great writer; yet one
may freely admit them and still call him a great
writer. Style alone does not make the great writer,
any more than faultless tactics make the great gen-
eral; and the upshot of Carlyle’s literary life is an
array of volumes, not without serious blemishes, it
is true, like the campaigns of Frederick or Welling-
ton or Grant, but which, nevertheless, represent a
solidity and splendor of achievement such as the
world calls great.

Arnold criticised what he called Carlyle’s “ per-
verse attitude towards happiness,” but it was only
a cheap, easy happiness that Carlyle railed against.
He taught that there was a higher happiness,
namely, blessedness — the spiritual fruition that
comes through renunciation of self, the happiness
of heroes that comes from putting thoughts of happi-
ness out of sight; and that the direct and persistent
wooing of fortune for her good gifts was selfish and
unmanly, — a timely lesson at all seasons.

Emerson, too, is a great figure in modern literary

144 INDOOR STUDIES

history, and to his worth and significance, in this
connection, the speaker did very inadequate justice.
We know there is much in Emerson’s works that
will not stand rigid literary tests; much that is too
fanciful and ethereal, too curious and paradoxi-
cal, —not real or ¢rwe, but only seemingly so, or so
by a kind of violence and disruption. The weak
place in him as a literary artist is probably his want
of continuity and the tie of association,—a want
which, as he grew old, became a disease, and led to
a break in his mind like that of a bridge with one
of the piers gone, and his power of communication
was nearly or quite lost. Anything like architectural
completeness Emerson did not possess. There is no
artistic conception that runs the length and breadth
of any of his works; no unity of scheme or plan like
that of an architect, or of a composer, that makes
an inevitable whole of any of his books or essays;
seldom a central and leading idea of which the rest
are but radiations and unfoldings. His essays are
fragmentary, — successions of brilliant and startling
affirmations or vaticinations, with little or no logi-
cal sequence. In other words, there are seldom any
currents of ideas in Emerson’s essays, but sallies and
excursions of the mind, as if to get beyond the re-
gion of rational thinking into the region of surmise
and prophecy, — jets and projectiles of thought
under great pressure, the pressure of the moral
genius. He says, speaking more for himself than
for others: ‘We learn to prefer imperfect theories
and sentences, which contain glimpses of the truth,

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 145

to digested systems which have no one valuable
suggestion.” It would be almost impossible to
condense any of his essays; they are the last results
of condensation; we can only cut them up and
abridge them. So far as this criticism tells against
Emerson as a literary artist, it must be allowed.
Emerson speaks slightingly of logic, but his own
prose is undoubtedly the best when it is the most
logical, — that is, the most consecutive and flow-
ing. Logic in this sense is no more the enemy of
spontaneity than his method of bold guessing is.
“Togic,” he says, “is the procession or proportion-
ate unfolding of the intuition.” This “unfolding”
is indispensable to all good prose, and Arnold did
not lay too much stress upon it. Emerson’s prose
does not always have it; and just in proportion
as it is without it, is it unsound prose. When the
reader comes upon a continuous passage in the
Essays, one in which the thought is unfolded and
carried along from point to point, how easily and
joyously the mind passes over it! It is like a con-
tinuous path, after we have been picking our way
from one isolated stone to another. The first chap-
ter in “Representative Men,” on the use of great
men, is a stony and broken path; the mind labors
more or less in getting through it; but the chapters
that follow have much more unity and wholeness, —
much more smoothness and continuity of thought.
So has “English Traits” more consecutiveness and
unity than the essays. Among the essays those
on Books, on Immortality, on Nature, on Beauty,

146 INDOOR STUDIES

on Self-Reliance, have more logical sequence and
evolution than certain others.

Emerson’s style is best when he is dealing with
something real and tangible before him, as in his
biographical and descriptive papers, his “ English
Traits,” etc., and poorest in his “Dial” papers, etc.
His letters often seem stilted and affected, but they
nevertheless contain many samples of his best prose.
Take this from a letter to Carlyle about “ Fred-
erick: ” “But the manner of it! — the author sitting
as Demiurgus, trotting out his manikins, coaxing
and bantering them, amused with their good per-
formance, patting them on the back, and rating the
naughty dolls when they misbehave; and commu-
nicating his mind ever in measure, just as much
as the young public can understand; hinting the
future, when it would be useful; recalling now and
then illustrative anecdotes of the actor, impressing
the reader that he is in possession of the entire his-
tory centrally seen, that his investigation has been
exhaustive, and that he descends, too, on the petty
plot of Prussia from higher and cosmical surveys.”

Who will say that the pen which wrote that is
not capable of good and sound prose as well as of
very acute and telling criticism? Carlyle’s egotism
and patronizing ways in his histories have never been
better touched off.

If Emerson did not have the gift of style in the
rather exclusive sense in which Arnold uses the
term, he had something which is a very good substi-
tute for it, —he had a fresh, tonic quality of mind

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 147

which he imparted to nearly everything he wrote.
A man’s use of language reveals the very fibre and
texture of his mind. Silk is silk and hemp is
hemp, and the hand knows the difference wherever
it touches them; but in literature the same words are
silk or hemp according to the mind that uses them.
Emerson’s page nearly always makes the impression
of this finer and more precious quality, and, what-
ever may be its defects, belongs to literature pure
and simple.

Probably the best test of good prose is this: It
is always creative; it begets in the mind of the
reader a deep and pervading sense of life and real-
ity. Now that Arnold is gone, how many writers
of creative prose are there in England? Now that
Emerson is gone, how many are there in America?
Is Mr. Gladstone’s prose creative? Far from it,
I think. Is Mr. Ruskin’s? With all his bril-
lianey, I think Ruskin lacks the creative touch.
Emerson falls short of it many times, but at his best
the creative power of the best prose was assuredly
his. He often had that felicity of utterance that
diffuses such light and joy in the mind.

The greatness of his work consists in the meas-
ure of pure genius and of inspiration to noble and
heroic conduct which it holds. As a writer he had
but one aim, namely, to inspire, to wake up his
reader or hearer to the noblest and the highest
there was in him; and it was no part of his plan to
enter into competition with the Addisonian writers
for the production of perfect literary work, — perfect

148 INDOOR STUDIES

from the standpoint of extrinsic form, argument,
logic, evolution. His purpose did not require it,
his genius did not demand it. He was to scatter the
seed-germs of nobler thinking and living, not to
rear a temple to the Muses; and from our point of
view the former is by far the more important ser-
vice. To get at the full worth of Emerson, I say,
we must appraise him for his new and fundamental
quality of genius, not for his mere literary accom-
plishments, great as these were.

Tf it is replied that this is just what the lecturer
did, I say the word of highest praise, all through
the discourse, was given to the master of mere lit-
erary form. There was a tone of disparagement
toward Emerson as a man of letters, when there
should have been generous approval of the quicken-
ing and liberating spirit he brought to letters.

Emerson’s message is of the highest importance,
and he renders it with rare effectiveness and charm.
His page is an enticement to the esthetic sense of
the intellect, and a stimulus and tonic to the ethical
sense of the moral nature.

The essay makes no unit of impression, but un-
doubtedly the personality of the writer does; and
this, I think, largely makes up, in such a writer
as Emerson, for the want of inclosing design to
which I have referred. The design that gives unity
and relevancy to these isolated paragraphs is the
personality of Emerson, his peculiar type and idi-
osynerasy. This is the plan, the theme which these
musical periods illustrate. The artist, says Goethe,

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 149

“make what contortions he will, can only bring to
light his own individuality.” Of men of the Emer-
sonian and Wordsworthian stamp, this is preémi-
nently true; and it is this which finally interests us
and gives the totality of impression in their works.
The flavor of character is over all; the features of
the man are stamped upon every word. From this
point of view, much faultless and forcible writing
— the writer always under the sway of Arnold's law
of pure and flawless workmanship — is destitute of
intrinsic style, because it is destitute of individual-
ity. In the case of Emerson, the only new thing in
the book is the man; this is the surprising discov-
ery, but this makes all things new; we see the
world through a new personal medium.

Everything Emerson wrote belongs to literature,
and to literature in its highest and most serious
mood. If not a great man of letters, then a great
man speaking through letters, and delivering him-
self with a charm and a dignity few have equaled.
We cannot deny him literary honors, though we
honor him for much more than his literary accom-
plishments. No more could a bird fly without
wings than could Emerson’s thought have reached
and moved Arnold, in his early Oxford days, with-
out rare qualities of literary style.

All Emerson’s aspirations were toward greatness
of character, greatness of wisdom, nobility of soul.
Hence, in all his writings and speakings, the great
man shines through and eclipses the great writer.
The flavor of character is stronger than the flavor of
letters, and dominates the pages.

150 INDOOR STUDIES

If he is “the friend and aider of those who would
live in the spirit,” he is equally the friend and
aider of those who would found a great state, a
great literature, a great art. The spirit he brought
to his task, and which he displayed through his life,
is a stimulus and a support to all noble endeavor,
of whatever kind or in whatever field.

Yet it is to be said that neither Emerson nor
Carlyle was a typical literary man. They both had
too great moral vehemence, or bent, to be the doc-
tors and professors of mere literature for and of
itself. They both belong to that class of writers
who are not so much critics of life as feeders and
reinforcers of life; who gather in from wide-lying
realms, not always with nice judgment or wise selec-
tion, but always with bold, strong hands, much that
nourishes and fertilizes the very roots of the tree
Igdrasil. Such writers were Emerson and Carlyle.
Such a writer is not Mr. Arnold, though his func-
tion as pruner and cultivator of the tree is scarcely
less in importance.

Disinterestedness is to be demanded of the critic,
but the creative imagination may have free play
within the limits of a strong intellectual bias. The
charm and value of Darwin is his disinterestedness,
but Darwin is a critic of the scheme of creation: he
is interested only in finding and stating the largest
truth, in outlining the theory that will cover the
greatest multitude and the widest diversity of facts.
But the charm and value of such a writer as Abram
Cowley, or Mr. Ruskin, or our Thoreau, is largely

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 151

given by a peculiar moral and mental bias. It is
Thoreau’s stoicism and vehement partiality to nature
that gives his page such a fillip and genial provoca-
tion. And what would Mr. Ruskin be without his
delightful onesidedness and bright unreasonableness ?

Few men eminent in literature have been free
from some sort of bias. Arnold himself has the
academic bias. ‘There is in him a slight collegiate
contemptuousness and aloofness which stands a little
in the way of his doing full justice, say, to the
nonconformist, and to the bereaved mortal who
wants to marry his deceased wife’s sister, and in
the way of his full acceptance by his countrymen,
to which he is justly entitled. Was he not also
just a little interested in giving our pride in Emer-
son a fall, at least a shaking up? Milton is biased
by his Puritanism; his ‘Paradise Lost” is the
pageant or drama of the Puritan theology; but he
is undoubtedly best as a poet when he forgets his
Puritanism. Wordsworth has the didactic bias;
his steed of empyrean is yoked with another of
much commoner clay. Carlyle’s bias is an over-
weening partiality for heroes; he cuts all his cloth
to this one pattern. Among our own writers, Bry-
ant, Longfellow, Irving, have little or no bias;
they are disinterested witnesses, but’ they are not
men of the first order. Our younger corps of writers
are free from bias, which is less a merit than their
want of earnestness is a defect.

Arnold’s view of Emerson as a poet is not en-
tirely new, though perhaps it has never before been

152 INDOOR STUDIES

set forth in quite so telling and authoritative a
form. The British literary journals have been in
the habit of saying for years, whenever the subject
was up, that Emerson was not a poet. An able
London critic likened him to a Druid who wanders
among the bards, and smites the harp with even
more than bardic stress. And a poet on the usual
terms we must admit Emerson was not. He truly
had a druidical cast. His song is an incantation.
Not a minstrel at the feast of life is he, but a
chanter of runes at life’s shrine. Arnold gave us
the worst that could be said of Emerson as a poet,
namely, that he lacked concreteness, sensuousness,
and passion. Perhaps the best that can be said of
him as a poet is that, notwithstanding these defi-
ciencies, there is usually a poetic stress in his verse,
a burden and an intensity of poetic appeal, that
would be hard to match in any other poet. He
had the eye and ear of the poet preternaturally
sharpened, but lacked the full poetic utterance. It
would seem as if he besieged the Muses with all
the more seriousness and eloquence because of the
gifts that had been denied him. His verse is full
of disembodied poetic values, of “melody born of
melody.” Compared with the other poets, he is
like an essence compared to fruits or flowers. He
pierced the symbol, he discarded the corporeal; his
science savors of magic, his power of some mysteri-
ous occult force. Yet to say he is not a true poet
implies too much; he does not stop short of the
achievements of other poets, but goes beyond them.

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 1538

He would get rid of the bulk, the mass, and save
the poetry; get rid of the concrete and catch the
ideal; in other words, turn your mountain of carbon
into diamonds.

As a rule, the qualities we miss from his verse
he did not aim to put there; he did not himself
value them in poetry. He knew the classic models
were not for him. He valued only the memorable
passages, the lightning strokes of genius, the line
that

“Overleapt the horizon’s edge,”
and
“Searched with Apollo’s privilege.”

He hung his verses in the wind: —

“ All were winnowed through and through,
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot
Than the South more fierce and hot;
These the siroc could not melt,

Fire their fiercer flaming felt,

And the meaning was more white
Than July’s meridian light.
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.
Have you eyes to find the five
Which five hundred did survive ?”’

This was Emerson’s method, —not to write a
perfect poem, a poem that should be an inevitable
whole, as Arnold would have him, but to write the
perfect line, to set the imagination ablaze with a
single verse, leaving the effects of form, of propor-
tion, to be achieved by those who were equipped
for it. His poetry is undoubtedly best when it is
most concrete, as in the ‘‘ Humble-Bee,” ‘ Rhodora,”

154 INDOOR STUDIES

“Sea-Shore,” ‘The Snow-Storm,” ‘The Problem,”
“The Titmouse,” and like poems, and poorest in
“Woodnotes,” “The Celestial Love,” etc. ‘Un-
less the heart is shook,” says Landor, “the gods
thunder and stride in vain;” and the heart is sel-
dom shook by Emerson’s poetry. It has heat, but
it is not that of English poetical literature, the heat
of the blood, of the affections, the emotions; but
arises from the ecstasy of contemplation of the uni-
versality of the moral law.

It is hard to reconcile Arnold’s criticism of
Emerson’s poetry with what many of us feel to be
its beauty and value. It is irritating to Emerso-
nians to be compelled to admit that his strain lacks
any essential quality. I confess that I would rather
have his poetry than all Milton, Cowper, Gray,
Byron, and many others ever wrote, but doubtless
in such a confession I am only pointing out my
own limitations as a reader of the poets. This is
the personal estimate which Arnold condemns. I
see the grounds upon which Milton’s poetry is con-
sidered greater, but I do not care for it, all the
same. Emerson’s poetry does not dilate me, as
Wordsworth’s does, because the human emotional
element in it is weaker. It has not the same touch
of nature that makes the whole world kin, the touch
of commonalty heightened and vivified.

Whether we know it or not, we doubtless love
Emerson all the more because he is not a legitimate
poet or the usual man of letters, but an exceptional
one. We do not love Shakespeare in the same

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 155

way, because he is of no special and peculiar service
to us as men and moral beings; he is not dear to
any man, but generously beloved by all men. He
is in the midst of the great currents of life and
nature. ’T is the universal air, the universal water,
we get here. But Emerson stands apart.

We go to him as we go to a fountain to drink,
and to a fountain of peculiar virtues, a fountain that
contains iron, or sulphur, or some other medicinal
property. Hence, while to criticism Emerson is
less than Gray or Milton, to us who need his moral
and spiritual tonics he is more, vastly more. We
live in a sick age, and he has saved the lives of
many of us. So precious has his service been, so
far beyond the reach of mere literature, that we are
irritated, I say, when we hear the regular literary
men placed above him. When I think of Emerson,
I think of him as a man, not as an author; it was
his rare and charming personality that healed us
and kindled our love. When he died, it was not
as a sweet singer, like Longfellow, who had gone
silent; but something precious and paternal had
departed out of nature; a voice of hope and courage,
and inspiration to all noble endeavor, hard ceased to
speak,

As a prose-writer, there is one note in Emerson
which we get with the same emphasis and clearness
in no other writer. JI mean the heroic note, the
note of manhood rising above the accidents of for-
tune and the tyranny of circumstances, the inspira-
tion of courage and self-reliance. It is in Carlyle,

156 INDOOR STUDIES

but is often touched by his ill-humor. When
Teufelsdréckh fulminates his “Everlasting No” in
“Sartor,” it rings out like a thunder-peal; this is
the wrath and invincibility of the hero at bay. If,
in Emerson’s earlier essays, this note seems to us
now a little too pronounced, savoring just a little
of “tall talk,” it did not seem so when we first read
them, but was as clear, and frank, and sweet as the
note of a bugle. Carlyle once defined poetry as the
“heroic of speech,” a definition that probably would
not suit Mr. Arnold, but which describes much of
Emerson’s verse, and many of those brave sentences
in his essays.

If in Addison the note is that of genial urbanity,
in Franklin that of worldly prudence (“There is a
flower of religion, a flower of honor, a flower of
chivalry,” says Sainte-Beuve, ‘which must not be
required from Franklin”), in Bacon of large wis-
dom, in Pope of polished common-sense, in Arnold
himself the classical note or note of perfection, in
Emerson we come at once upon the chivalrous, heroic
attitude and temper. No scorn, no contempt, no
defiance, but a bright and cheerful confronting of
immense odds. In other writers there are words of
prudence, words of enlightenment, words of grave
counsel, words that divide one thing from another
like a blade, words of sympathy and love; but in
Emerson more than in any other there are words
that are like banners leading to victory, symbolical,
inspiring, rallying, seconding, and pointing the way
to your best endeavor. “‘Self-trust,” he says, “is

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 157

the essence of heroism,” and this martial note pulses
through all his utterances. It is found in others,
too, but it is the leading note in him. In others
it is often the inspiration of conduct; in him it is
the inspiration of morals.

The quality I refer to is in this passage from
Marcus Aurelius: —

“Suppose that men kill thee — cut thee in pieces
—curse thee. What, then, can these things do to
prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober,
just?”

It is in these lines from Beaumont and Fletcher’s
“Sea Voyage,” quoted by Emerson himself: —

“Julietta. Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.

“Master. Very likely. ’Tisin our power, then, to be hanged,
and scorn ye.”’

Tt is the salt of this passage of another poet: —

“How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!
How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before
a man’s or woman’s look!”

It is in the reply of the Spartan soldier who,
when the threatening Persian told him their arrows
would darken the sun, answered: “Very well, then;
we will fight in the shade.” Emerson sounds the
same note throughout his essays, takes the same
attitude toward circumstances, toward conventions,
toward tradition, toward theological dogma, toward
everything that would hamper and limit him. It
shines in his famous boast: —

“Give me health and a day, and I will make the
pomp of emperors ridiculous.”

158 INDOOR STUDIES

There is a glint of it in this passage, which might
have been written to comfort John Brown, or reas-
sure a certain much-abused poet, had it not been
before the fact, a prophecy and not a counsel: —

“‘ Adhere to your own act, and congratulate your-
self if you have done something strange and extrav-
agant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.”

Here it takes another key: —

“Tf we dilate on beholding the Greek energy,
the Roman pride, it is that we are already domes-
ticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for
this great guest in our small houses. ‘The first
step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our
superstitious associations with places and times,
with number and size. Why should these words,
Athenian, Roman, Asia, and England, so tingle in
the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses,
there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography
of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and
Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear
loves names of foreign and classical topography.
But here we are; and, if we will tarry a little,
we may come to learn that here is best. See to it
only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope
and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being
shall not be absent from the chamber where thou
sittest.”

Half the essays are to this tune. ‘‘ Books,” he
said, ‘are for nothing but to inspire;” and in writ-
ing his own he had but one purpose in view: to be,
as Arnold so well says, “the friend and aider of

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 159

those who would live in the spirit,” — in the spirit
of truth, in the spirit of virtue, in the spirit of
heroism.

The lecturer was unfortunate in what he said of
Emerson’s “Titmouse.” We do not learn, he said,
what his titmouse did for him; we are reduced to
guessing; he was not poet enough to tell us. But
the bird sounded the heroic note to the poet, and
inspired him with courage and hope when he was
about to succumb to the cold: —

“ Here was this atom in full breath,
Hurling defiance at vast death;
Henceforth I ieee ae stripe but thine:
Ashes and jet all hues outshine.

I think old Cresar saat have heard
In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,
And, echoed in some frosty wold,
Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.
Peon ! Veni, vidi, pe

It is one of Emerson’s most characteristic poems.
Burns, the speaker said, would have handled the
subject differently, thinking probably of Burns’s
“Mouse.” Certainly he would. He was pitched
in a different key. The misfortunes of his mouse
touched his sympathy and love, appealed to his
human tenderness, and called up the vision of his
own hard lot. Each poet gives us the sentiment
proper to him; the heroic from Emerson, the hu-
man from Burns. The lecturer was right in saying
that the secret of Emerson’s influence is his temper,
but it is not merely his good temper, his cheer-

160 INDOOR STUDIES

fulness, hopefulness, benevolence, etc. These he
shared with the mass of his countrymen. The
American temperament is sanguine and turns con-
fidently to the future. But it is again his heroic
temper, his faith in “the ideal tendencies,” in the
value of personal force and character, in the gran-
deur of the present moment, the present opportu-
nity; a temper he shares with but few, but shares,
say, with his friend and master, Carlyle: —
“One equal temper of heroic hearts; ””
and more especially in Carlyle’s case,

“Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

It has long been clear to me that Carlyle and
Emerson were in many important respects closely
akin, notwithstanding the wrath and melancholy of
the one, and the serenity and hopefulness of the
other. Their main ground of kinship is the heroic
sentiment which they share in common. Their
effects upon the mind are essentially the same: both
have the “tart cathartic virtue” of courage and self-
reliance; both nourish character and spur genius.
Carlyle does not communicate the gloom he feels;
’*tis the most tonic despair to be found in literature.
There is a kind of felicity in it. For one thing, it
sprang from no personal disappointment or selfish-
ness. It always has the heroic tinge. In a letter
to Emerson he refers to it as a “kind of imperial
sorrow that is almost like felicity, —so completely
and composedly wretched, one is equal to the very
gods.” His wretchedness was a kind of sorrow ;

ARNOLD’S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE 161

that is always its saving feature. One’s unhappi-
ness may be selfish and ignoble, or it may be noble
and inspiring; all depends upon the sentiment from
which it springs. Men selfishly wretched never
laugh, except in derision. Carlyle was a man of
sorrow, and sorrow springs from sympathy and love.
A sorrowing man is a loving man. His is the Old
World sorrow, the inheritance of ages, the grief of
justice and retribution over the accumulated wrongs
and sufferings of centuries. In him it became a
kind of poetic sentiment, a fertile leaf-mould that
issued at last in positive verdure and bloom. Not
happiness, but a kind of blessedness, he aspired to,
the satisfaction of suffering in well-doing. How
he loves all the battling, struggling, heroic souls!
Whenever he comes upon one such in his histories,
no matter how obscure, he turns aside to lay a
wreath upon his tomb. It was his own glory that
he never flinched; that his despair only nerved him
to work the harder; the thicker the gloom, the
more his light shone. Hope and heart never left
him; they were of the unquenchable, the inextin-
guishable kind, like those ragged jets of flame the
traveler used to see above the oil wells or gas wells
in Pennsylvania, which the wildest tempest could
not blow out, so tenaciously and desperately did the
flame cling.

Carlyle’s lamentations are loud; a little of his
own doctrine of silence would have come in well
here. What he said of Voltaire the world is bound
to say o: himself: “Truly M. de Voltaire had a

162 INDOOR STUDIES

talent for speech, but lamentably wanted that of
silence.” But he worked like a Hercules. He
does not charm the demons away like Emerson, but
he defies them. Emerson wins them over, but Car-
lyle explodes them with their own sulphur. Each
man rendered his age and country a signal service,
and to rule them out of the company of the great
authors is to rob that company of the two names
of this century it can least afford to lose.

VI
GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK

L WAS moved to take down my White’s “Sel-

borne” and examine it again for the source of
the delight I had had in it, on hearing a distin-
guished literary man, the late Richard Grant White,
say it was a book he could not read with any degree
of pleasure: to him its pages were a bare record of
uninteresting facts. It was not because he felt no
interest in or sympathy with the kind of literature
to which White’s “Selborne” belongs, for he con-
fessed a liking for certain other writers in this field,
but because both White’s matter and manner were
void of interest to him. The book was doubtless
pitched in too low a key for him: it was tame and
commonplace, like the country itself. There is
indeed something a little disappointing in White’s
book when one takes it up for the first time, with
his mind full of its great fame. It is not seasoned
quite up to the modern taste. White is content
that the facts of nature should be just what they
are; his concern alone is to see them just as they
are. When I myself first looked into his book,
many years ago, I found nothing in it that attracted
me, and so passed it by. Much more recently it

164 INDOOR STUDIES

fell into my hands, when I felt its charm and value
at once. Indeed, the work of the Selborne natu-
ralist belongs to the class of books that one must
discover for himself: their quality is not patent; he
that runs may not read them. Like certain fruits,
they leave a lingering flavor in the mouth that is
much better than the first taste promised. In some
congenial mood or lucky moment you find them out.
I remember I had the little book of Essays of Abra-
ham Cowley some years before I succeeded in read-
ing it. One summer day I chanced to take it with
me on my walk to the woods, and at the foot of a
waterfall in a very secluded place I suddenly discov-
ered that the essays had a quality and a charm that
I had never suspected they possessed. The book
was the fruit of a certain privacy and seclusion from
the world, and it required in the reader the frame
of mind which these beget to enter fully into it. I
suspect that some such auspicious moment or prepa-
ration is necessary to a full appreciation of White’s
letters. It is necessary, in the first place, that you
be a born countryman, capable of a certain fellow-
ship and intimacy with your brute neighbors and
with the various shows of rural nature. Then a
quiet, even tenor of life, such as can be had only
in the country, is also necessary, —a way of life
that goes slow, and lingers upon the impression of
the moment, and returns to it again and again, that
makes much of little things, and is closely observant
of the face of the day and of the landscape, and
into which the disturbing elements of the great

GILBERT WHITE’S BOOK 165

hurly-burly outside world do not enter. Being thus
surrounded and thus inclined, in the fall, when you
first build a fire in your grate and begin to feel
again like browsing along the old paths, open
White’s “Selborne,” and read a chapter here and
there, and bend your ear attentively to his quiet,
cheerful, but earnest talk. Each letter shall seem
addressed to you personally with news from the
fields and byways you so lately visited. The pas-
toral quiet and sweetness and harmony of the Eng-
lish landscape pervade them all, with just that tinge
of reminiscence, that flavor of human sympathy and
human absorption, that English fields suggest. The
style is like a rich, tender sward, simple and unob-
trusive, with scarcely a flower of rhetoric anywhere,
but very pleasing and effective and entirely ade-
quate: it is nature and art perfectly married, each
seconding the other. Its brevity, its directness, its
simplicity, its dealings with familiar and near-at-
hand objects, shows, occurrences, etc., make it a
book which never sates and never tires the reader.
It is little more than an appetizer, but as such it
takes high rank. As a stimulus and spur to the
study of natural history, it has no doubt had more
influence than any other work of the century. Its
merits in this direction alone would perhaps account
for its success. But, while it has other merits, and
great ones, it has been a fortunate book: it has had
little competition; it has had the wind always with
it, so to speak. It furnished a staple the demand
for which was always steady and the supply small.

166 INDOOR STUDIES

There was no other book of any merit like it for
nearly a hundred years. It contains a great deal
of good natural history and acute observations upon
various rural subjects, put up in a cheap and port-
able form. The contemporary works of Pennant
are voluminous and costly, — heavy sailing-craft
only that come to port in the great libraries, while
this is animble, light-draught vessel that has found
a harbor on nearly every man’s book-shelf.

Hence we say that while it is not one of the
great books, it is one of the very real books, one of
the very live books, and has met and supplied a
tangible want in the English reading world. It
does not appeal to a large class of readers, and yet
no library is complete without it. It is valuable as
a storehouse of facts, it is valuable as a treatise on
the art of observing things, and it is valuable for
its sweetness and charm of style.

What an equable, harmonious, and gracious spirit
and temper pervade the book, and withal what an
air of summer-day leisure and sequestration! The
great world is far off. Its sound is less than the
distant rumble of a wagon heard in the midst of
the fields. The privacy and preoccupation of the
author are like those of the bird building her nest,
or of the bee gathering her sweets. He was eager
for news, but it was only for news from the earth
and the air, or from the dumb life about him. Yet
it would not be safe to affirm that White was not
an interested and sympathetic spectator of the
events of his time, like other men, for doubtless he

iy

GILBERT WHITE’S BOOK 167

was. ‘There is no evidence that he was anything
like the petulant recluse and man-hater that our
own Thoreau at times was. He had the wide,
generous eye, and his love of nature was not in any
sense a running away from thé world. But he was
not the historian of his time, nor even of his own
moods and fancies, but the chronicler of the unob-
served life of nature about him; and as such he
attained a pure result. And this is one secret of
his keeping qualities, —a pure result, untainted
and unrefracted by any peculiarity of the medium
through which it came. Mankind, in the long run,
cares less what you think, unless your plummet
goes very deep, than what you feel, and are, and
experience. White valued his facts for what they
were, not for any double meaning he could wring
out of them, or any airy structure he could build
upon them, He loved the bird, or the animal, or
a walk in the fields, directly and for its own sake,
and his book makes a distinct impression, like any
of the creatures or any of the phases and products
of nature of which it treats. The perennial and
antiseptic quality in literature or art is something as
simple as water or milk, or as the oxygen of the
air: it does not come from afar; it is more common
and familiar than we are apt to think. One may
not say dogmatically that it is this or that, but I
think it safe to say that it is inseparable from per-
fect seriousness and singleness of purpose. This
singleness and seriousness of purpose White had.
He is as honest and direct as the rain or the wind.

168 INDOOR STUDIES

No levity, no seeing double, no intellectual as-
tigmatism, no make-believe, no spinning of webs,
hardly any conscious humor, no o’erripe sentiment,
but a steady effort and purpose to see and record
the simple fact. It is not more what he has put
into his book than what he has kept out of it that
has made it keep a hundred years. Carlyle says of
a certain celebrated Frenchman, that he was always
at the top less by power of swimming than by light-
ness in floating. In no disparaging sense is this
true of White’s “Selborne.” It has an inherent
principle of buoyancy like a bird. It is a light
book in the best sense. It makes no severe de-
mand upon the reader’s time or attention. It is as
easy reading as the letters of a friend. The episto-
lary form of the chapters —a form that lends itself
so readily, almost inevitably, to directness and sim-
plicity of statement — is no doubt one secret of the
book’s charm. Dullness in private letters is per-
haps rarer than dullness in any other species of
writing. Plenty of persons write fresh and enter-
taining letters who are lead itself in the essay or
the sermon. White is less pleasing in his “ Obser-
vations of Nature” than in his letters. It is a
great matter to have a fair and definite mark to aim
at, and a good reason for obtruding the personal
pronoun. White was tle type of the true observer.
He had the alert, open sense, the genial, hospitable
habit of mind, the healthful objectivity and recep-
tivity, that at once placed him in right relations
with outward nature. He had great curiosity and

GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK 169

genuine enthusiasm, and permitted no moods, or
humors, or bias, or what not, to stand between him
and what he saw. His mind transmitted clearly;
the image is exact. To be a good observer is not
merely to see things: it is to see them in their rela-
tions and bearings; it is to separate one thing from
another, the wheat from the chaff, the significant
from the unimportant. The sagacity of the hound
is in his scent, the skill of the musician seems in
his hands and fingers, the mind of the observer is
in his eye. To untrained perceptions the color of
the clouds is this or that, gray, or blue, or drab;
the artist picks out the primary tints, the separate
colors of which this hue is composed. In like
manner the true observer, the true eye-poet or an-
alyst, disentangles the facts and threads of meaning
of the dumb life about him, and gives you a dis-
tinct impression. It is true that White made a
business of observing. For more than forty years
he went out daily to take note of what was going
on in his open-air parish. He knew his ground by
heart, and every new move at once caught his eye.
If a new bird appeared upon the scene he was sure
to be on hand to take note of it; or if a swallow
lingered a little later than usual, or came a day or
two earlier, the fact did not escape him. The pine
grosbeak is a rare visitant in England, as it is in
the United States, yet if one came it was pretty
sure to report to White at an early day.

The hoopoe is also a rare bird there; but one
summer a pair took up their abode in an ornamen-

170 INDOOR STUDIES

tal piece of ground that joined White’s garden.
One can imagine how eagerly he watched them.
“They used to march about in a stately manner,”
he says, “feeding in the walks many times a day,
and seemed disposed to breed in my outlet, but were
frightened and persecuted by idle boys, who would
never let them be at rest.” The grasshopper-lark-
is one of the shyest of British birds, and one of the
most baffling to the observer. It creeps around
under the thorns and bushes and in the bottom of
the hedge-rows, like a mouse or a weasel. Its note
or song was thought to proceed from a grasshopper;
and White says the country people laugh when told
it is a bird. But the sharp-eyed curate could not
be baffled: he would watch the bird till he saw it
in the very act. His eye was not only quick, it
was patient and tenacious, and would not let go till
it had the secret. He saw the fern-owl feed itself
while on the wing; he saw swallows feed their
young in the air, which few people have perhaps
ever seen. He timed the white owls that nested
under the eaves of his church, and, with watch in
hand, found that one or the other of them returned
about every five minutes with food for the young.
They did not proceed directly to the nest, but
always perched upon the roof of the chancel first.
He quickly saw what this was for: it was to shift
the mouse from the claws to the bill, that their feet
might be free to aid them in climbing to the nest.
His observation is often of the minutest character.
“When redstarts shake their tails,” he says, “they

GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK 171

move them horizontally, as dogs do when they
fawn; the tail of a wagtail when in motion bobs up
and down like that of a jaded horse.” “Most birds
drink sipping at intervals; but pigeons take a long-
continued draught, like quadrupeds.” When he
saw the stilt-plover, he observed at once that it had
no back toe, and must therefore be a bad walker.
“Without that steady prop to support its steps, it
must be liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacilla-
tions, and seldom able to preserve the true centre
of gravity.” There is a sly, humorous twinkle in
this passage that our author seldom indulges in.
White’s interest and curiosity in every phase of
natural history were so lively and his habit of mind
was so frank and open that much came in his way
to record that would otherwise have been passed
by. His neighbor had a hog which he kept to an
advanced age, and our curate writes to Mr. Barring-
ton one of his characteristic letters about it. ‘‘The
natural term of a hog’s life,” he begins, ‘“‘is little
known, and the reason is plain, — because it is
neither profitable nor convenient to keep that tur-
bulent animal to the full extent of its time: how-
ever, my neighbor, a man of substance, who had
no occasion to study every little advantage to a
nicety, kept an half-bred Bantam sow, who was as
thick as she was long, and whose belly swept on
the ground, till she was advanced to her seventeenth
year, at which period she showed some tokens of
age by the decay of her teeth and the decline of her
fertility.” Two or three of his most charming let-

172 INDOOR STUDIES

ters are devoted to the “old family tortoise.” What
a clear and vivid impression we get of the creature!
and what a lively interest we feel in his stupid
ways! ‘‘No part of its behavior,” says White,
“ever struck me more than the extreme timidity it
always expresses with regard to rain; for, though
it has a shell that would secure it against the wheel
of a loaded cart, yet does it discover as much solici-
tude about rain as a lady dressed in all her best
attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings and
running its head up in a corner.” The old tortoise
begins to dig a hole in the ground to go into winter
quarters early in November. “It scrapes out the
ground with its fore-feet,” says the historian, ‘and
throws it up over its back with its hind; but the
motion of its legs is ridiculously slow, little exceed-
ing the hour-hand of a clock.” “This creature not
only goes under the earth from the middle of No-
vember to the middle of April, but sleeps great part
of the summer; for it goes to bed in the longest
days at four in the afternoon, and often does not
stir in the morning till late. Besides, it retires to
rest for every shower, and does not move at all in
wet days.” Though so stupid and sleepy most of
the time, “‘yet there is a season of the year (usually
the beginning of June) when his exertions are
remarkable. He then walks on tiptoe, and is stir-
ring by five in the morning, and, traversing the
garden, examines every wicket and interstice in the
fences, through which he will escape, if possible,
and often has eluded the care of the gardener and

GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK 173

wandered to some distant field. The motives that
impel him to undertake these rambles seem to be of
the amorous kind; his fancy then becomes intent
on sexual attachments, which transport him beyond
his usual gravity and induce him to forget for a
time his ordinary solemn deportment.”

Not less graphic and interesting is his account of
the idiot boy who had a passion for bees and honey,
— was, in fact, a veritable bee-eater, seeking the
bees in the field and about the hives, and, as he ran
about, making a humming noise with his lips that
resembled the buzzing of bees. Nothing, in fact,
escaped White’s attention, and his interest in things
is so sane and natural, and at the same time so
lively, that his pages never become obsolete.

The American reader of his book will hardly fail
to give many of his notes and observations an appli-
cation at home, and see wherein our own familiar
natural history agrees with or differs from that of
the mother country. The toad appears to be a
common reptile in England, yet White confessed
his ignorance of its manner of propagation, —
whether it laid eggs or brought forth its young
alive, — and could get no light from the authorities
of his time upon the subject. But the fact with
regard to frogs, he said, was notorious to everybody.
With us, the fact with regard to toads is just as
obvious. Their spawning habits may be noticed in
the spring in every marsh and roadside pool, the
large, sedate, grandmotherly female toad bearing the
pert, dapper little male, looking like her ten-year-

174 INDOOR STUDIES

old grandson, upon her back. It is apparently a
copartnership between a dwarf and a giant. When
the female is disturbed, she plunges to the bottom
of the pool, and buries herself in the mud, carrying
the clinging male with her, as if he was a very
slight appendage indeed. The chain of eggs that
trails behind, and that may be many yards in length,
looks like a knitted black yarn in a cord of transpar-
ent jelly. White says of the British frogs, that as
soon as they have passed out of the tadpole state
they take to the land, and that at times the lanes,
paths, and fields swarm with myriads of them on
their travels. A similar phenomenon may be wit-
nessed in this country, except that the tiny trav-
elers are toads, and not frogs, and they are not
migrating, but are out only when it rains, and then
to wet their jackets. I have never seen them
except along the highway upon gravelly hills in
early summer. They are then scarcely as large as
bumblebees.

White repeatedly speaks of the house swallow,
which corresponds to our barn swallow, as a fine
songster. In soft, sunny weather, he says, it sings
both perching and flying. If this is so, it is a
point in favor of the British bird. Our swallow is
not a songster; and yet the epithet which Virgil
applies to the swallow — garrula — fits our bird.
It twitters and squeaks and calls; but is that sing-
ing? Our cliff swallow does the same; and yet
White says the English martin, or martlet, which
is like our bird, is not a songster, though it twitters

Pa

GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK 175

in a pretty, inward, soft manner in its nest. Again,
the swift, which answers to our chimney swallow,
he says, has only a harsh, screaming note or two.
But our swift has a very pretty chippering note or
call, which it indulges in on the wing, and which
approaches very nearly to a song, On the whole,
I conclude from White’s account that the common
European swallow has more music in him than ours
has, while our swift and martin are more musical
than the corresponding species in that country.
There is this marked difference between the habits
of the birds in the two hemispheres: the swallow
that in Europe builds in chimneys, and is called
the house or chimney swallow, in this country
builds in barns and other outhouses, and is called
the barn swallow; while the swift, which builds in
chimneys here, and uses as material small twigs
gathered from the tops of dry trees, in England
builds in crannies of castles and towers and steeples,
and uses for material dry grasses and feathers, —
which, however, it seems to gather on the wing, as
our bird does its twigs.

White says that birds that build on the ground
do not make much of their nests, — that is, I sup-
pose, are not much attached to them. But this
observation would not hold in this country. Our
song sparrow and field sparrow, our bobolink, and
oven-bird, and chewink, and brown thrasher, and
Canada warbler, show as strong an attachment for
their nests as do the tree-builders, and use as many
arts to decoy the intruder away from them. They

176 INDOOR STUDIES

build quite as elaborate nests, too; which does not
seem to be the case with ground-builders in Europe.
There are few finer and neater architects among the
birds than our song sparrow and snowbird.

White lays it down “as a maxim in ornithology
that as long as there is any incubation going on
there is music.” This is true of our birds also:
they continue in song until the young are hatched.
But the converse of the proposition is not true, that
there is incubation as long as there is music. Cer-
tain species continue in song long after the last
brood has flown. I am convinced that more birds
continue in song in late summer and in early au-
tumn in this country than do in England.

The main features of White’s country are appar-
ently but little changed since his time. The Hanger
is there, with its noble beeches, and a large part of
‘Wolmer Forest still remains. I passed two rainy
days and one night at Selborne in June, 1882. At
the hotel where I stopped, a copy of White’s book
could not be produced. The village is small, com-
pact, and humble. The postman handed me my
letters upon the street without remark, as if I was
the only stranger in the place, — which was proba.
bly true. The soil of that part of England is a
heavy, greasy clay. On the steepest part of the
Hanger the boys ride or slide down the hill in sum-
mer. The turf is removed, and the slippery clay
is a fair substitute for ice. White’s house had
been recently much changed. It stands in the
midst of the village, close to the street, and not

GILBERT WHITE’S BOOK 177

amid spacious grounds, as one has been led to be-
lieve. I looked a long time for his tomb amid the
graves that surrounded the old church, and finally
found a plain slab with “G. W.” upon it, and. that
was all. There was no mark that indicated that
the grave was more frequently visited than any
other. The church is essentially the same as in
White’s time, and the immense yew that stands
near the entrance must date back several hundred
years. The yew is a striking-looking tree. In
this country the species is represented by a low,
reclining bush, which reaches out laterally, with
but a slight tendency upward. In England the
lateral tendency of growth is still very marked, the
trunk being short and squat, and by its ridgy, cor-
rugated character looking more like a bundle or
sheaf of smaller trees than like a single bole.

Thus far White stands alone among English
writers in his field. Much pleasant literature has
of late years been inspired by nature-studies in
Great Britain, but the new books have not quite
the sweetness and charm, not quite the sincerity,
of that of the Selborne parson.

VII
A MALFORMED GIANT}

E QUINCEY somewhere remarks that the
Roman mind was great in the presence of
man, never in the presence of nature. JI am not
going to undertake to say whether or not this obser-
vation is wholly true. Undoubtedly there is truth
in it. I remember Gibbon says that to the Ro-
mans the ocean was an object of terror rather than
of curiosity, and that that warlike people was never
“actuated by the enterprising spirit which had
prompted the navigators of Tyre, of Carthage, and
even of Marseilles to enlarge the bounds of the
world, and to explore the most remote coasts of the
ocean.” But empire upon the land came easy to
the Roman. He was great in war, in government,
in jurisprudence, and in the administration of all
human affairs.
De Quincey’s distinction came to my mind in
1 Perhaps I ought to apologize to my reader for the polem-
ical tone of the latter part of this essay. It was written many
years ago in reply to an able critic, the late William D. O’Connor,
who had resented my epithet of “mad-dog’’ as applied to Victor
Hugo’s nature, and I find it impossible to change it now. Asa
protest against the glaring vice of Hugo’s art I think it well

enough; I would only change its vehement and controversial
tone and temper.

180 INDOOR STUDIES

meditating upon Victor Hugo. Here, I said, is a
great man, unquestionably a great man, who shows
to least advantage in his dealings with nature. He
seems to feel something of the Roman dread and
horror in the presence of the ocean. Great in deal-
ing with social problems or historical events, great
in describing Waterloo, or the sewers of Paris, or
Paris itself, tremendous in the realism of his char-
acters, in the presence of storms or tempests, or of
any phase of elemental nature, his imagination runs
away with him. MHis nature is a kind of mad-dog
nature, and the physical universe, in his handling
of it, seems smitten with hydrophobia. The con-
tinence, the moderation, the self-denial which the
Anglo-Saxon temperament loves, and which charac-
terizes nearly all first-class poets and artists, are
nowhere to be found. If he mentions the song of
the skylark, he must call upon the infinite and the
immensities to bear witness. One fully understands
what Heine means when he speaks of Hugo’s “huge
and tasteless excrescences.” Yet it is impossible
not to feel the man’s power even in the poorest
translation of his books. He is about the only
writer of his country who impresses one as a man
who rises above the literature, whose love of letters
is dominated by his love of country, his love of
man, his love of liberty and right, —a fact which
makes him a great moral and political force aside
from his influence in the region of letters. There
is somewhat aboriginal and elemental in him, as in
all first-class men. ‘The bare conception of ‘The

A MALFORMED GIANT 181

Man who Laughs” is tremendous. Only the first
order of minds can conjure up such material and
deal with such a motif. It is like the granite rock.
But oh the absurdities and anachronisms in the
working of itup! “The Toilers,” too, faces reali-
ties of the largest kind, but there are things in it
which, as Robert Louis Stevenson well says, simply
make the reader cover his face with his hands, the
artistic falsehoods are so glaring. The description
of the storm which overtakes Gilliat just as his task
is about finished resembles the work of the great
artists about as nearly as a nightmare resembles the
reality. Yet in all these romances everything is
large, elemental; no hair-splitting, nothing petty
or over-refined. It is the work of a giant, but one
malformed. Hugo at once strikes a louder, stronger
key than any of his contemporaries. His voice
rises above all others, and is as full of cheer and
hope as it is full of denunciation and wrath. He
was like dynamite and giant powder, which make
themselves heard and felt afar. He had no repose,
and this is one reason why he is so irritating to the
English mind. Another reason is his want of self-
restraint. As a literary artist he out-Herods Herod.
In the torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of his passion,
all goes by the board. ‘‘The modesty of nature,”
which Hamlet laid such stress upon in his address
to the players, is not only “o’erstepped,” it is out-
rageously insulted. Probably never before in the
history of literature has a master spirit cut such
fantastic tricks before the high heaven of literary art.

\

v

182 INDOOR STUDIES

He illustrates in his field excesses and violences as
great as those which have marked the history of
the French people. His offenses against good taste,
against one’s sense of fitness and proportion, are, in
their way, on a par with the monstrous doings of
the French Revolution. The writer shocks one’s
artistic perceptions, as the people shock one’s reason
and humanity. And in both cases it was rebellion
run mad, The revolt of the people against the
authority of the state and of the priests became
frenzy, and the revolt of Hugo against the classic
standards became rodomontade. He was a roman-
ticist, which he construed to mean just the contrary
of the classicist. One law of Greek art and of
Greek life was, nothing in excess, — a wise measure
in all things; therefore Hugo piles on the agony:
the classic authors were calm, they avoided every-
thing sensational, all undue emphasis; therefore
will Hugo rave and be sensational: they cultivated
a sobriety and temperance which instinctively
avoided everything that was calculated to weaken
an impression; therefore does the Frenchman give
free reign to his rhetoric and ride roughshod over
all such tame consideration. Relevancy, harmony
of parts, unity of impression, — these are some of
the excellences of the classics; but ‘‘Les Miséra-
bles,” with all its power and effectiveness, is like
a man with elephantiasis in some of his members.
When about a third of it is cut away the story has
some unity. Where the classics are dramatic, Hugo
is melodramatic, — note Gilliat in “The Toilers”

A MALFORMED GIANT 183

sitting himself upon the shore to be drowned by the
tide, and his head disappearing under the water at
the moment the sloop he is watching drops behind
the horizon. Where the old writers are simple, he
is sensational. The Anglo-Saxon mind, and every
other normal and healthful type of mind, is classi-
cal in this: it loves proportion, restraint, self-denial,
and has a lively sense of the fitness of things; does
not like any trifling with the centre of gravity, and
keeps close to the simple truth. Let a man fire
hot shot if he will, but let him keep his own guns
cool. In nearly all Victor Hugo’s political tracts
and manifestoes the gun is hotter than the shot
which it throws, and we are more concerned for the
writer than we are for his enemy. He will spur
his earnestness until it becomes frenzy, and his rhet-
oric until it becomes rodomontade. Note his mani-
festo to the Prussians during the siege of Paris.
To see him rending his flesh, livid with rage and
almost foaming at the mouth, read certain pages in
his ‘‘Napoleon the Little;” or to see him again,
under a different pressure, beating the air wildly,
and goading his imagination after his climax is
reached, like a rider burying his rowel into his
steed after the poor beast has long done its best,
read the concluding parts of his description of the
battle of Waterloo, or the last stages of the storm
that overtakes Gilliat in “The Toilers,” or the
threefold agony of the rhetoric of a similar descrip-
tion in ‘‘The Man who Laughs” (the machine that
grins, a friend says). To be great in the presence

184 INDOOR STUDIES

of nature, to be great in any presence, is to stand
firmly on your feet, to use all gently, and in the
very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirl-
wind of your passion, acquire and beget a temper-
ance that will give it smoothness. In the case of
Victor Hugo, when the pressure of his passion
mounts to a certain pitch, he invariably flies from
his orbit and from being planetary, as AUschylus
and Shakespeare always are, becomes cometary and
lawless, losing fervor in fury and reason in riot.
He would have every storm a cyclone, every fish a
monster, every clown a gnome, a medusa; and if
they are not so it is not his fault. He “pushes
the passions till the bond of nature snaps and all
the furies come screeching in.” Let me explain
myself further. Close alongside of the sphere of
the normal lies the sphere of the abnormal; of the
sane, lies the insane; of pleasure, lies disgust; of
cohesion, lies dissolution; of the grotesque, lies the
hideous; of the sublime, lies the ridiculous; of
power, lies plethora; of sense, lies twaddle, ete.
Take but a step sometimes and you pass from one
to the other, from a shout to a scream, from the
heroic to the vainglorious. Victor Hugo, in his
imaginative flights, is forever hovering about this
dividing line, fascinated, spellbound by what lies
beyond, and in his reachings after it outraging the
“modesty of nature” till the very soul blushes. It
would seem as if he loved the unnatural simply
because it is the unnatural, and the malformed sim-
ply because it is the malformed. He loves to push

A MALFORMED GIANT 185

the normal till it becomes the abnormal, the dra-
matic till it becomes the melodramatic, the intense
till it becomes the hysterical; he loves to push
anger, jealousy, remorse, grief, till the bond snaps
and Termagant is o’erdone. His characters rave,
gnash, rend their hair, froth at the mouth, and
even die in paroxysms of passion. No doubt, in
the opinion of Victor Hugoites like Swinburne,
there is no reason why their eyes should not leap
from their sockets, their flesh wither on their bones,
or serpents hiss from their ears, nose, and mouth,
if the “imperial fantasy ” of the novelist orders it.
I am not now thinking of his poems, some of which
I regard as truly great, but of his leading character-
istics as a novelist; of ‘“ Bug-Jargal” and “Notre
Dame.” How fares the modesty of nature in these
volumes? The former is not so well known, but
what shall we say of the latter? Let us examine
it a little, since this is one of his masterpieces.
As a work of art what is it a faithful transcript of?
It is full of monstrosities, both moral and physical,
full of distorted passions, unhallowed lusts, fiendish
brutality, diabolical ravings, writhing agonies, hide-
ous grimaces, sepulchral wailings, — full of all man-
ner of underground horrors and aboveground abomi-
nations. It is a carnival of the loathsome. If,
underneath these things, and inclosing them, one
recognized the great remedial forces of nature, or
the compensations of time and history, there would
be some refuge, some escape. But the earth is
rotten, the sunshine pestiferous, the waters stygian,

186 INDOOR STUDIES

Paris a den of cutthroats and thieves, love is lech-
ery, and religion death. ‘This fact alone quashes
all minor excellence. No work is permissible that
flies in the teeth of the established order of the uni-
verse. It is the business of the artist, above all
else, to preserve the balance of things. Creation is
not by one element alone. Tire alone consumes;
earth, air, water, are also necessary.

In struggling through the blistering, arid wastes
of Hysteria that abound in this novel, one remem-
bers with profound emotion the silence of Ajax in
Hell, and sees with Longinus that it was more
impressive than anything he could have said; or
the soldier of Waterloo, who, when asked to sur-
render in that crater of fire and death, could find
but one word in which to express his scorn and
defiance and that a word of filth, not permissible in
print. (Is there any doubt about how the same
spirit would greet Hugo’s grand burst over the
circumstances ?)

The action of the story of “Notre Dame” per-
haps culminates when the monster Quasimodo
defends the church of Notre Dame against the
midnight assault of about six thousand Truands —
the nocturnal human vermin of Paris during the
Middle Ages — composed of thieves, harlots, mur-
derers, beggars, gypsies, —a reeking, fetid, scrofu-
lous, chaotic mass, that smelled to heaven. As
they surge about the building in the darkness, the
Hunchback hurls upon them from a height of nearly
two hundred feet, first a huge beam, that spatters

A MALFORMED GIANT 187

them in fragments about; then bricks, stones, rocks,
that bury themselves in their heads. Finally, not
being able to make an impression on this nightmare
of a mob, he kindles a huge fire in one of the towers
and piles upon it sheets of lead, and presently two
huge gutters vomit upon the assailants a shower of
molten metal which is represented as burning them
to cinders. In any less vivid imagination than
Victor Hugo’s, molten lead, after running some
distance over stone gutters and falling one hundred
and eighty feet through a cool atmosphere, would
have resulted in a shower of bullets, — to say no-
thing of its burning people to cinders.

But this is, no doubt, an instance in which he
exercises the prerogative of his “imperial fantasy.”

In the same assault a mere youth heavily laden
with armor is represented as bringing with celerity
a ladder which must have been seventy feet long,
and not only carrying it but placing it in position.
Quite a feat for a mere youth, what indeed ten men
could not do (allowing that a single ladder of that
length was ever made, which of course is absurd),
but a mere straw to the imperial fantasy of Victor
Hugo. It was the same imperial fantasy, no
doubt, that kept the naked feet, to say nothing of
his half-clad body, of the boy Gwynplaine from
freezing in that four or six hours’ ramble over the
Portland hills through the snow and bitter cold,
now on the ice, now in the water, now floundering
through drifts, his rags stiff, the icy edges chafing
the flesh till the blood comes (?). The same fan-

188 INDOOR STUDIES

tastic sovereignty causes the cylone in the northern
hemisphere to revolve in the direction of the hands
of a watch, and sends an unincumbered sailor, when
he leaps from a sinking wreck to swim to a distant
rock, several fathoms under water and sets him
groping around on the submarine ledges before he
rises to the surface in order that the apocryphal
devil-fish may get hold of him.

But to continue the review of “Notre Dame.”
In the concluding chapters of this novel the author
indulges to the utmost his love for the monstrous
and abnormal exhibitions of the human passions,
and there is no escape; not even does the stern
visage of Justice loom above the scene, or the
grander visage of Destiny.

In the distance a man ascends a ladder to a per-
manent gibbet, carrying a female figure on his
shoulder, —a young girl clad in white. The noose
is adjusted, the ladder kicked away, and the deli-
cate form is launched into the air with the figure of
a man squatted upon its shoulders.

At this moment, in the foreground, on one of
the towers of Notre Dame, a priest who is contem-
plating the scene with outstretched neck, starting
eyeballs, and livid visage, being driven to the verge
of insanity by sheer brutal lust for the girl, but
thwarted in his designs by her horror of himself
and her love for another, is suddenly set upon from
behind by the enraged Hunchback, who it seems
is also in love with the girl, and precipitated over
the balustrade into the abyss. But the gutter

A MALFORMED GIANT 189

arrests his fall, and he clings to it with desperate
grip.

Here Hugo dallies with him and gloats over him.
He is suspended two hundred feet above the pave-
ment, and cannot long maintain his hold, It is a
startling situation, and Hugo loves startling situa-
tions. He contemplates him panting, perspiring,
his nails bleeding against the stones, his knees
grazing the wall, the lead pipe gradually yielding,
his strength failing, his hands slipping, his vitals
freezing, till the inevitable moment comes, and he
falls through the void to the earth beneath. We
repeat that there would be no objection to all this
if it contained food for the imagination, if it opened
any ideal depths in the mind or was relieved by any
background; but, excepting that the verbal work-
manship is vastly better, it ranks no higher as art
than the blood-and-thunder stories of the weekly
novelette.

If a man is drawn into the maelstrom, or falls
into a volcano, or is lost at sea, or goes down in
battle, or meets suffering and death in a heroic man-
ner, there is room for the imagination to work; but
art would have little interest in a man being sawed
in two, or roasted alive, or crushed under a weight,
or dangling at the end of a rope. If the ‘“Prome-
theus” of Aischylus had nothing to recommend it
but the aspect of physical torture which it depicts,
however vividly painted it would at once lose its
value as a work of art.

There is therefore this final remark to be made

190 INDOOR STUDIES

upon the element of the hideous and the monstrous
that figures so largely in Victor Hugo’s novels, and
that is this: It has little or no artistic value, be-
cause it has little or no interest to the imagination.
When employed by the old artists and poets, these
things are so charged and surcharged with meaning
and power that the literal import is lost sight of, and
the mind breathes a higher atmosphere.

Hugo’s novels are marked by a feverish, preter-
natural intensity, not so much good, human, soul-
shaking emotion as a sort of psychological typhoon
and hurricane that means death to every green thing
and to every sane impulse. I am aware that a
microscopical examination of his works reveals many
fine passages, green spots, idyllic touches here and
there (but even in these I can smell the sulphur),
but to say they are characteristic of him is as absurd
as it would be to say that humor is characteristic of
him because he made a “machine that grins.”

The Bishop in “Les Misérables” is perhaps
Hugo’s most serious attempt to paint (for he does
not create) a lofty character. And what is the
Bishop’s attitude toward the All-mother? “ The
universe appeared to him like a vast disease,” for
aught I know as if “smitten with hydrophobia.”
His tenderness toward nature is so excessive as to
become silliness. ‘‘One day he received a sprain
rather than crush an ant.” ‘One morning he was
in his garden and thought himself alone, but his
sister was walking behind him: all at once he
stopped and looked at something on the ground;

A MALFORMED GIANT 191

it was a large, black, hairy, horrible spider. His
sister heard him say: ‘Poor thing! it is not his
fault.’” A galley slave whom he had hospitably
fed and lodged in his house makes off in the night
with his silver. In the morning he is walking in
the garden again, when his “women folks” make
the discovery and raise the alarm; but, so far from
sharing in the surprise or the indignation which
was quite proper on the occasion, he thinks only of
a little flower that the man had crushed in passing
out, and bends over it with a look of sadness and
pity. There may be persons to whom this sort of
thing is impressive and grand, but for my part I
cannot see how it can ever be possible to one hav-
ing a genuine feeling or appreciation of nature.

The mighty poet does not recreate nature in any
radical sense. He redistributes, remoulds, remar-
ries, when occasion requires, always bearing in
mind the almighty edict, “Thus far shalt thou go
and no farther.” And it is the final test and glory
of his work that though vast and imposing it falls
easily within the scope of the natural universal.

VIII
BRIEF ESSAYS

I

THE BIOLOGIST’S TREE OF LIFE.

Ou of the most helpful and satisfactory con-

ceptions of modern biological science is the
conception of the animal life of the globe under
the image of a tree, —a tree which has its root and
trunk in the remote past, and its outermost twigs
and branches in our own day; and, moreover, a
tree which has attained its growth, which has
reached its maturity, and whose history in the far
future must be marked by a slow decline. This is
the Tree of Life of the evolutionist, and affords the
key to the natural classification of the animal king-
dom as taught by Darwin and others, and as op-
posed to the artificial or arbitrary classification of
Cuvier and the older naturalists. This tree first
emerges into view in the Silurian age, probably not
less than fifty million years ago, and emerges as a
pretty well-developed tree, that is, as having many
branches. Its trunk is beyond our ken, hidden in
still more remote ages. No fossils have been found
in rocks older than the Silurian. But if evolution

194 INDOOR STUDIES

is true, it is pretty certain that there must have
been life on the globe long before that date. Our
tree must have started as a single shoot, but this
single stem, our first parent form, has not been
found. The biologist is convinced that the very
first forms of life were soft and very perishable, and
that therefore no record of them could be preserved
in the sedimentary rocks. But the later forms,
which led up to and were the parents of those which
emerge into view in the Silurian age, must have
been capable of fossilization, A record of them
doubtless exists somewhere, and may, in time, be
brought to light. Darwin thought the record was
probably in the rocks beneath the sea, as it is cer-
tain the sea and the land have changed places. Or
the record may be in the Arctic regions, where
some naturalists believe life first began, seeing this
part of the earth’s surface would be the first to cool
and become of a temperature that admitted of ani-
mal life. In any case but a mere fraction of the
record — hardly more than a few pages out of many
large volumes — is accessible and has been subject
to scrutiny. The roots and trunk of our tree must
be assumed to have existed. We assume that lan-
guage began in rude sounds and grunts and signs,
as we see it begin in a child, though of course no
record of them could be preserved, and that it has
developed from these into the marvelous structure
which we now behold, branching and refining and
specializing almost endlessly.

In the Silurian age, then, we strike the top of

BRIEF ESSAYS 195

our tree of life. All the great branches are repre-
sented, all the important classes of animals have
made their appearance, even the vertebrates being
represented in the upper Silurian by fishes. Of
this tree the sub-kingdoms represent the great
branches, the classes represent their division, the
orders theirs, the family theirs, and so up to
species which represents the terminal twigs. The
abundance of specialized forms in the Silurian age,
that is, the many smaller branches that appear, and
the absence of two generalized forms, or main
branches, that must have preceded them, is one of
the main obstacles in the way of the evolution the-
ory, a theory of generic descent; but those parent
branches, as I have said, are hidden, the record of
them has not been found, probably never can be
found.

It is very certain, not only from direct evidence,
but in the light of analogy, that the forces of nature,
vital and other, were much more active in the early
geologic ages than they are now. It was the youth
of the world; why should they not be more active?
Why should there not have been more fluids and
gases and more rapid growths and changes? There
was more heat, doubtless more rapid evaporation,
and more copious ‘precipitation, Our rivers and
lakes and watercourses are but a fraction of what
they were in comparatively recent geologic times.
This tree of life grew rapidly in those warm, moist
May and June days of the Silurian and Devonian
epochs. New species appeared with comparative

196 INDOOR STUDIES

suddenness; the life of the globe was full and
riotous. Enormous forms began to appear, — flying
dragons and terrible and grotesque monsters of the
deep. There was a plethora of power, an excess of
mere animal life.

But as the ages rolled on, Nature began to sober
down: her pace became slower and more deliber-
ate, and she began to rise on stepping-stones of her
dead self. The higher forms of life began to ap-
pear. Birds emerged, mammals came forth. In
the Tertiary age the brains of mammals, according
to Marsh, began to increase in size; henceforth the
struggle was not to be one of physical strength
merely, but intelligence began to play a part. The
maturity of the tree of life was approaching.

That the geological changes were more rapid in
the earlier history of the earth than they are now,
seems to me to admit of no doubt. The forces of
the globe were more restless and titanic. They had
not yet attained to the equilibrium and the repose
that we now see. ‘The crust of the earth was thin-
ner; the internal fires were nearer; the solid ground
was less solid than that we now walk upon. Vol-
canoes were more active, earthquakes more fre-
quent. The crust of the earth still throbs and
palpitates under the influence of lunar and solar
attraction and of unequal atmospheric pressure.
Think, then, how much more it must have done
so, say in the Silurian age. The cataclysmal theo-
ries of the earlier geologists have been much modi-
fied by Lyell and his school, but, so far as they

BRIEF ESSAYS 197

imply greater volume and activity in past ages of
the physical forces that have shaped the earth, they
are doubtless true. In the Tertiary age these forces
became much more gentle and uniform in their
workings. As changes in the earth’s surface would
be the most powerful factor in bringing about
changes of species, we see why new species seem to
have made their appearance so suddenly in early
geologic times.

There can be but little doubt that the earth has
at last reached the maturity of her powers. She is
like a ripe apple upon the bough. Henceforth its
excellence must slowly decline. The game of life
upon this planet has been essentially played. That
is, no new developments remain, no new species on
any extended scale, as in the past, are to appear.
The bird has been evolved from the reptile, but the
bird is doubtless the top of that branch of our tree
of life; no new form is to be evolved from the
bird. We know pretty well the evolution of the
horse; he has arisen through various lower and
lesser forms, but probably nothing is to come after
the horse. The same with other forms. No higher
form is to succeed man, as he has succeeded the
lower. Monkeys and ourangs are left behind; they
will not give birth to a being superior to them-
selves; they are twigs that have been outstripped
by other and more favored branches. Man is the
last of the series. Superior races may arise, but not
a new and superior type of being. And it is very
doubtful about the superior race; there are those

198 INDOOR STUDIES

who believe the race culminated in the Greeks over
two thousand years ago. After the earth has been
thoroughly subdued and possessed by the dominant
races, as it will be in a few hundred years more,
this topmost branch of the tree will probably begin
to fail in vitality and fruitfulness. But just what
form the decline will take can be only a matter of
speculation. We only know that all things have
their periods, and are safe in inferring that the life
of the globe as a whole will have its period, just
as surely as any tree in the forest or any plant in
the fields has its period. Why should it not be
so? We know any and every single form perishes;
why should not the earth itself grow old and die?
The life of a man is typical of the life of the earth.
The stages of an orb’s life, say the astronomers,
are stages of cooling. So are the stages of man’s
life. Jt is a process of cooling and hardening from
youth to age. Think of the gaseous, nebulous
youth out of which the man is gathered and consoli-
dated! Fiery, stormy, vapory, at first, then cold,
hard, sterile at last.

II
DR. JOHNSON AND CARLYLE

Glancing at a remark in the London “Times,”
the author of “Obiter Dicta,” in his late essay on
Dr. Johnson, asks: “Is it as plain as the ‘old hill
of Howth’ that Carlyle was a greater man than
Johnson? Is not the precise contrary the truth?”
There are very many people, I imagine, who would

BRIEF ESSAYS 199

be slow to admit that the “precise contrary ” was
the truth; yet it is a question not to be decided
offhand. Both were great men, unquestionably,
apart from their mere literary and scholastic accom-
plishments. Each made a profound impression by
virtue of his force of character, his weight and au-
thority as a person. As to which was the greater
moral, or literary, or political force, as embodied in
his works, it seems to me there can be but one
opinion. But the quantity of manhood each gave
evidence of in his life, and the quantity of genius
he gave evidence of in his books, — these of course
are two different questions. As regards the genius,
Carlyle ranks far above Johnson,

Indeed, the intellectual equipment of the two
men, and the value of their contributions to litera-
ture, admit of hardly any comparison. But the
question still is of the man, not of the writer.
Which was the greater and more helpful force as a
human being? which bore himself the more nobly
and victoriously through life? — in short, which was
the greater man? Mr. Birrell seems to base his
conviction that Johnson was the greater upon the
latter’s simple resignation and acceptance of the ills
of life: —

“ Johnson was a man of strong passions, unbend-
ing spirit, violent temper; as poor as a church
mouse and as proud as the proudest of church dig-
nitaries; endowed with the strength of a coal-heaver,
the courage of a lion, and the tongue of Dean
Swift, he could knock down booksellers and silence

200 INDOOR STUDIES

bargees; he was melancholy almost to madness,
‘radically wretched,’ indolent, blinded, diseased.
Poverty was long his portion; not that genteel pov-
erty that is sometimes behindhand with its rent,
but that hungry poverty that does not know where
to look for its dinner, Against all these things
had this ‘old struggler’ to contend; over all these
things did this ‘old struggler’ prevail. Over even
the fear of death, the giving up of this ‘ intellectual
being,’ which had haunted his gloomy fancy for a
lifetime, he seems finally to have prevailed, and to
have met his end as a brave man should.”

This is excellently said, and is true enough.
This kind of victory is one test of character cer-
tainly; but if it is the highest test by which to try
a man’s claims to greatness, then is the world full
of silent heroes greater than either Johnson or
Carlyle. How many men and women receive an
avalanche of the ills of life upon their heads and
shoulders, and die and make no sign! How many
nameless ‘old strugglers” there are in nearly every
community, who fight a losing battle with fortune all
their lives and utter no complaint! And it is not
always, or commonly, because they are made of
pure adamant: it is oftener because they are stolid
and insensible. If stolidity and insensibility are
terms too strong to apply to Johnson, yet we must
admit there was a kind of dullness and sluggishness
about him, which he in vain spurred with good
resolutions, and which shielded him from the acute
suffering that Carlyle’s almost preternatural activ-

BRIEF ESSAYS 201

ity and sensibility laid him open to. If a man is
born constitutionally unhappy, as both these men
seem to have been, his suffering will be in propor-
tion to the strength and vividness of the imagina-
tion; and Carlyle’s imagination, compared with
Johnson’s, was like an Arctic night with its stream-
ing and flashing auroras, compared with the mid-
night skies of Fleet Street.

Carlyle fought a Giant Despair all his life, and
never for a moment gave an inch of ground. In-
deed, so far as the upshot of his life was concerned,
the amount of work actually done, and its value as
a tonic and a spur to noble endeavor of all kinds,
it is as if he had fought no Giant Despair at all,
but had been animated and sustained by the most
bright and buoyant hopes. The reason of this
probably is that his gloom and despair did not end
in mere negation. If he fulminated an Everlasting
No, he also fulminated an Everlasting Yes. John-
son fought many lesser devils, such as moroseness,
laziness, irritability of temper, gloominess, and ten-
dency to superstition, ete. ‘‘My reigning sin,” he
says in his journal, “to which perhaps many others
are appendant, is a waste of time and general slug-
gishness to which I was always inclined, and, in
part of my life, have been almost compelled by
morbid melancholy and disturbance of mind. Mel-
ancholy has had in me its paroxysms and remissions,
but I have not improved the intervals, nor suffi-
ciently resisted my natural inclination, or sickly
habits.” He was always resolving to rise at eight

202 INDOOR STUDIES

o’clock in the morning, but does not seem ever to
have been able to keep the resolution. What takes
one in Johnson is his serious self-reproof and the
perfect good faith in which he accuses himself of
idleness, forbidden thoughts, a liking for strong
liquors, a shirking of church-going, and kindred
sins. His sense of duty, and in particular of his
duty, never slumbered for a moment. On the 21st
of April, 1764, he got up at three in the morning
to accuse himself thus: “My indolence since my
last reception of the Sacrament has sunk into grosser
sluggishness, and my dissipation spread into wider
negligence. My thoughts have been clouded with
sensuality, and, except that from the beginning of
this year I have in some measure forborne excess of
strong drink, my appetites have predominated over
my reason. A kind of strange oblivion has over-
spread me, so that I know not what has become of
the last year,” etc. This earthiness, these frailties
of Johnson through which his pious hopes and
resolutions shine so clearly, is a touch of nature
which makes him kin to all the world. Carlyle
does not touch us in just this way, because his ills
are more imaginary and his language more exag-
gerated. What takes one in Carlyle is the courage
and helpfulness that underlie his despair, the hu-
mility that underlies his arrogance, the love and
sympathy that lie back of his violent objurgations
and in a way prompt them. He was a man of sor-
row, and felt the “burthen and the mystery of all
this unintelligible world” as Johnson never felt it,
nor ever could feel it.

BRIEF ESSAYS 203

Again, Johnson owed much more to his times
than Carlyle did to his. Both his religion and his
politics were the religion and the politics of his age
and country, and they were like ready-made high-
ways along which his mind and soul traveled. In
comparison, Carlyle was adrift in the wilderness,
where the way and the bridges had to be built by
himself. What gulfs he encountered, what quag-
mires he floundered through! Johnson ‘stood by
the old formulas,” says Carlyle; and adds signifi-
cantly, “the happier was it for him that he could
so stand.” What would the great hulking hypo-
chondriac have done in such a world as Carlyle trav-
ersed, the ground cut clean from under him by
German thought and modern science, awful depths
opening where before was solid earth?

Johnson has survived his works. Mr. Birrell
declares very emphatically that they are still alive,
and are likely to remain so; but the specimens he
gives, whether of prose or of verse, are not at all
reassuring. But our interest in the man seems
likely to be perennial. This is probably because
he was a much greater and more picturesque force
personally than he was intellectually. His power
was of a kind that could not fully be brought to
bear in literature, that is to say, he is greater as a
talker in personal encounter than in his writings, or
in the depth of his thought. He said that “no
man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”
But the man who writes for money alone, it is
pretty sure, will not make a deep and lasting im-

204 INDOOR STUDIES

pression with his pen. ‘The saying is like another
one of his, —namely, that “a man seldom thinks
with more earnestness of anything than he does of
his dinner.” When Johnson wrote his famous
letter to Lord Chesterfield, it is safe to say he did
not write for money, and that he was thinking of
something more earnestly than he was wont to
think of his dinner; and it is the one piece of his
prose that is likely to live. But these remarks of
his, and others like them — this, for instance, that
“oreat abilities are not requisite for an historian;
for in historical composition all the greatest powers
of the human mind are quiescent,’ — such remarks,
I say, of themselves show his limitations in the
direction of literature. Johnson lives through Bos-
well; without Boswell his fame would hardly have
reached our time, except as a faint tradition. In
the pages of his biographer the actual man lives for
us; we can almost see his great chest heave, and
hear the terrible “Sir!” with which he held his
interlocutor at good striking distance. If some
Boswell had done the same thing for Coleridge, is
it probable that he would have lived in the same
way? Ithink not. As a personality Coleridge was
much less striking and impressive than Johnson.
As an intellectual force he is, of course, much more
so. But it is hardly possible to feel a deep interest
in or admiration for him on personal grounds alone.

Is it possible to feel as deep an interest in and
admiration for Carlyle, apart from his works, as we
do in Johnson? Different temperaments will an-

BRIEF ESSAYS 205

swer differently. Some people have a natural anti-
pathy to Carlyle, based largely, no doubt, on mis-
conception. But misconception is much easier in
his case than in Johnson’s. He was more of an
exceptional being. He was pitched in too high a
key for the ordinary uses of life. He had fewer
infirmities than Johnson, moral and _ physical.
Johnson was a typical Englishman, and appeals to
us by all the virtues and faults of his race. Car-
lyle stands more isolated, and held himself much
more aloof from the world, On this account, among
others, he touches us less nearly. Women are
almost invariably repelled by Carlyle; they instince-
tively flee from a certain hard, barren masculinity
in him. If not a woman-hater, he certainly had
little in his composition that responded to the
charms and allurements peculiar to the opposite sex;
while Johnson’s idea of happiness was to spend his
life driving briskly in a postchaise with a pretty
and intelligent woman. Both men had the same
proud independence, the same fearless gift of
speech, the same deference to authority or love of
obedience. In personal presence, the Englishman
had the advantage of mere physical size, breadth,
and a stern forbidding countenance. Johnson’s
power was undoubtedly more of the chest, the
stomach, and less of the soul, than Carlyle’s, and
was more of a blind, groping, unconscious force;
but of the two men he seems the more innocent and
childlike. His journal is far less interesting and
valuable as literature than Carlyle’s; but in some

206 INDOOR STUDIES

way his fervent prayers, his repeated resolutions to
do better, to conquer his laziness, “to consult the
resolve on Tetty’s coffin,” “to go to church,” “to
drink less strong liquors,” “to get up at eight
o’clock,” “to reject or expel sensual images and idle
thoughts,” “to read the Scriptures,” etc., touch one
more nearly than Carlyle’s exaggerated self-re-
proaches and loud bemoanings of the miseries of
life. Yet the fact remains that Johnson lived and
moved and thought on a lower plane than Carlyle,
and that he cherished less lofty ideals of life and of
duty. It is probably true, also, that his presence
and his conversation made less impression on his
contemporaries than did Carlyle’s; but, through
the wonderful Boswell, a livelier, more lovable,
and more real image of him is likely to go down to
succeeding ages than of the great Scotchman through
his biographer.

III
LITTLE SPOONS US. BIG SPOONS

When I was in England, whether in lodgings or
in a hotel, one of the hardest things to get at table
was a teaspoon to eat my dessert or sweetmeats with.
They always brought a dessert spoon, which usually
seems large and awkward to the American mouth.
Neither were there any small dishes, such as we
have at home. They brought you jam, or preserves,
or strawberries, on a plate as large as a dinner plate.
This fact would not be worth mentioning, were it
not characteristic of much one sees there. In Eng-

BRIEF ESSAYS 207

land, nearly all the arts and appliances of life show,
to American eyes, a superabundance of material,
There is more timber and iron in the wagon, more
bulk in the horse that draws the wagon, and more
leather in the harness the horse wears. Yes, and
more hair in the horse’s coat. Our domestic ani-
mals, our tools, our vehicles, our architecture, and
our women look trim and slim compared with the
English. There is probably material enough in an
English van to make two of our farm wagons. It
is a sight to behold. It looks like a pontoon boat
mounted upon huge artillery wheels. It is usually
drawn by three horses tandem, with a boy walking
by their side or riding the foremost. It would be
quite useless in this country, as on our poorly made
dirt roads it would be a load in itself. The run-
ning works of the English dog-cart, a pleasure
vehicle, would be considered nearly heavy enough
for a light farm-cart in this country. Easy roads
and heavy vehicles are the rule in England, and
poor roads and light vehicles with us. John Bull
would hardly trust himself in our cobweb “bug-
gies;” certainly not upon our outlandish roads. He
does not know the virtues of hickory, a tree na-
tive to this country. Hickory gives us the most
strength with the least bulk, and this is no doubt
one reason of the lightness and slenderness of our
tools and vehicles. Compare an English axe with
an American axe: how crude and awkward the
former looks beside the latter; how shapely our
tool is! Our tools suggest a more deft and supple

208 INDOOR STUDIES

and a lighter race. The tendency in us to pare
down and cut away every superfluous ounce is very
marked. We are great whittlers. Have we not
whittled away at the hulls of our ships until we
have made the swiftest sailing vessels in the world?

The English, in most things, seem to like the
look of mass and strength; we like best the look of
lightness and speed. Even the type in which their
books, newspapers, and magazines are printed is
larger than the type in which ours are printed.
Indeed, it would seem as if there was not room
enough in our great country for generous-sized type.
English houses and other buildings all have a look
of greater solidity than ours; their walls are thicker,
their tiles heavier. What would they think of our
balloon frames over there? What would our grand-
fathers think of them? Dickens said the houses in
this country looked as if made of pasteboard.

This lightness and airiness is becoming a fixed
national trait, and is in keeping with the general
tendency of all natural forms in this country.
Nearly all organic growths here show greater refine-
ment of form than in the British Isles. Our wild
flowers are more graceful and delicate. Our climb-
ing plants, the foliage of our trees, the trees them-
selves, our grasses and wild weedy growths, are all
more slender and fluent in form than the correspond-
ing English species. English trees, English groves,
have a wonderful expression of solidity and repose.
The leaves are larger and stiffer, and adjust them-
selves with more ease to the fainter light. Even

BRIEF ESSAYS 209

the British bumblebee is a coarser and more hairy
creature than ours; and the fox and the squirrel, as
well as the domestic animals, are less sleek and
trim than with us. Our bright, sharp climate has
its effect upon all things, but it is only up to a
certain point that this effect is matter for con-
gratulation. All European forms are refined here,
but presently there is danger that they may become
attenuated and weakened. The children of Euro-
pean parents born here—TIrish, English, German
-—are, as a rule, much more shapely and clear-cut
in feature than when born in the same rank of
life in Europe. But they are less robust and virile,
especially the girls; while, probably, the next gen-
eration will be still less so. Here comes in the
setback. What appears to be the most serious dan-
ger now threatening the American race is just this
tendency to over-refinement, and the consequent
failure in reproduction.

This tendency has set its stamp upon our men-
tality, so that our literary and scientific works, and
all the varied outcomes of our mental life, are char-
acterized by clearness, quickness, aptness, rather
than by force, or depth, or real mastery. Our lit-
erature, as such; has less bulk than the English or
German, less body and more grace and refinement.
Compare Emerson with Carlyle, or Fiske with
Spencer, or Hawthorne with Scott, or Prescott
with Macaulay, or Howells with George Eliot. Up
to a certain point this deftness and clearness of
our authors gives them the advantage; but when

210 INDOOR STUDIES

great tasks are to be undertaken, our lightness and
brightness are less telling. Our second considerable
crop of authors, born (say) since 1825, has less
force, less body, less breadth, than our first great
crop, which included Cooper, Bryant, Irving, Emer-
son, Longfellow, Whittier, etc. There are things
in Stedman that have the old breadth and generos-
ity, but there are not enough of them. It seems
to me that we are refining now at the expense of
strength. Our poets and critics, like our “bug-
gies” and pleasure vehicles, lack timber, lack mass.
Our popular novelists have point but lack body.
The workmanship is admirable, but the material
upon which it is expended is abominable. What
a boon to them would be a little of Scott’s or
Dickens’s power and heartiness, or of Turgénef’s
grasp of the fundamental human qualities! The
men and women turned out are by no means the
equal of those one meets daily among all ranks of
the people, except perhaps in the single qualities of
wit and “smartness.” The rank, primary, inarticu-
late human qualities are suffering decay among us;
there can be little doubt of that. Probably they
are suffering —or are threatened with —the same
decay in Europe. A cheap press, much and hasty
reading, rapid communication, tend to give us sur-
face dominion without corresponding depth.

Yet, as contrasted with the American, the Eng-
lishman reaps great advantage in his greater stolid-
ity, inertia, mass, depth of character, because these
things make a solid ground to build upon; and

BRIEF ESSAYS 211

when faculty and insight are added, they give that
weight and force which have made the English race
what it is. There is one notable exception in our
later literature to this American tendency to over-
refinement of form, which I am not likely to for-
get; and that is furnished by Walt Whitman.
Mass and strength, and all the primary qualities of
both body and mind, are fully attended to by him.
Probably this, more than anything else, is the rea-
son why his poems are so distasteful to the majority
of his countrymen, and why his reception abroad
has been more cordial than at home. It is, at any
rate, the ground upon which his appearance in our
literature has always been regarded by myself as so
suggestive and so welcome.

Iv
THE ETHICS OF WAR

Why is it that we look so much more compla-
cently upon war, upon a fight between two nations,
than we do upon a fight between two individuals?
If my neighbor and I have a difficulty or a misun-
derstanding and proceed to settle it with clubs, or
pistols, or with our fists, in the opinion of all
decent people we behave shamefully, wickedly, and
reduce ourselves to a level with the brutes. But
when nations settle their difficulties by an appeal to
arms, and thousands upon thousands of lives are
sacrificed, and millions upon millions of treasure
squandered, we take quite a different view of the
matter. We may say, ‘‘ What a pity!” or “How

212 INDOOR STUDIES

unwise!” but we do not experience the same feel-
ing of contempt and disgust that we do in the case
of personal encounters brought about by like provo-
cation. If two men of rival trades or interests
came into collision, and the victor robbed the other
of his purse to indemnify himself for his scratches
and bruises and torn clothes, he would at once for-
feit any sympathy and respect which the justness of
his cause might have inspired in the spectators.
Instead of a hero we should look upon him as a
robber. Yet Germany beats France in battle, and
indemnifies herself for her bruises and torn clothes
by a large slice of French territory and many mil-
lions of French treasure, and we do not feel that
she has sacrificed her honor. Does might make
right between nations, while the principle will not
hold good at all as between individuals?

It is certainly true that we do not apply the same
standard of morality in the one case that we do in
the other, — certainly true that we do not look for
the same acts of generosity or magnanimity between
nations that we expect to be shown between neigh-
bors. Nations are invariably selfish, and they are
rarely as honest as their individual citizens. Legis-
lative bodies have deliberately done things, or re-
frained from doing things, that the individual mem-
bers composing them would blush to be found guilty
of. What meanness, narrowness, selfishness, has
not England been guilty of? and yet the individual
Englishman is by no means insensible to the obliga-
tions of truth and fair play. States and communi-

BRIEF ESSAYS 213

ties in this country have repudiated their honest
debts in a way that would have ruined the standing
of any business man in them had he resorted to the
same trick to defraud his creditors. The American
Congress had for more than fifty years behaved in
the most shameful and dishonest manner in refusing
to authorize the payment of the French spoliation
claims. The precepts of religion have had little or
no influence upon the policy of nations. Love your
neighbor as yourself; do unto others as you would
that others should do unto you; think no evil,
etc., — what should we think if governments acted
upon these principles? Is the nation, then, a rem-
nant of barbarism that the moral law should not
apply to it? that religion should not affect it?

It is because nations are not as civilized as indi-
viduals, and, probably, never will be, that war is
still possible. The nation is still the tribe, and
the tribal instincts for self-preservation are still
active; tribal jealousies and animosities are still
easily kindled. Our admiration for war is the same
as our admiration for the virtues of the stern heroic
ages, —courage, self-sacrifice, contempt of death,
personal prowess, great leadership. The nation, as
such, still rests upon these qualities. Genius and
power always take us, and war is a great field for
the display of genius and power.

All readers of “Sartor Resartus” will remember
the striking, though not quite just, light in which
Carlyle sets war: —

“What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is

214 INDOOR STUDIES

the net purpose and upshot of war? To my own
knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil in the
British village of Dumdrudge usually some five
hundred souls. From these, by certain natural
enemies of the French, there are successively se-
lected during the French war, say thirty able-bodied
men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled
and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty
and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even
trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, an-
other build, another hammer, and the weakest can
stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Neverthe-
less, amid much weeping and swearing, they are
selected; all dressed in red, and shipped away on
the public charges some two thousand miles, or say
only to the south of Spain; and fed there till
wanted. And now to that same spot in the south
of Spain are thirty similar French artisans, from a
French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending; till
at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come
into actual juxtaposition; and thirty stands fronting
thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway
the word ‘ Fire!’ is given; and they blow the souls
out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk,
useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses
which it must bury and anew shed tears for. Had
these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not
the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were
the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a universe,
there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some
mutual helpfulness between them. How then?

BRIEF ESSAYS 215

Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and,
instead of shooting one another, had the cunning
to make these poor blockheads shoot.”

This is very witty, but is it a true picture of
modern war? The Governors of these sixty men
had not fallen out; they had no personal quarrel;
they may even have had a warm feeling of friend-
ship for each other; it was in their representative
capacities that they had a quarrel; the two nations
quarreled through them, and it is fit the two nations
should send men to fight it out, and that the Gov-
ernors themselves should keep out of harm’s way.
It is the narrow feeling of patriotism, of sectional-
ism, and race prejudices that make wars possible.
The European nations are jealous and suspicious of
each other, like African tribes. Did they all form
one federation, and see that the best interests of
one were in the end the best interests of all, war
between them would be impossible.

Our admiration for war, then, is a mixed feeling,
in some of its elements laudable, in others question-
able. Our love of the heroic overrides our humani-
tarian feelings; our attraction for power blunts our
sense of right. If a man steals a chicken we hold
him in contempt, but if he steals a railroad we feel
quite differently toward him. Anybody can rob
a henroost, but it requires a genius and capacity
to steal a great corporate interest. But there are
grounds upon which our admiration for war is laud-
able. In the first place war is not personal, as a
quarrel between individuals is; the personal feel-

216 INDOOR STUDIES

ings of anger, hatred, etc., which brutalize men in
personal conflicts, are not appealed to, It is a
school of discipline in all the more manly and
heroic virtues. It begets courage, coolness, self-
control. It is a great game between great forces,
in which the clearest and longest heads win. It
fosters patriotism and the feeling of nationality.
It is said of certain African tribes that those that
are the most warlike as nations are the least so as
individuals, and vice versa. Quarrelsome and vin-
dictive men do not make good soldiers. The most
peaceable and high-minded make the best. The
more brutal qualities that seek personal encounter
are not the qualities that mspire a great soldiery.
It is not an encounter between men wherein one
seeks in a passion of anger to overthrow the other
and aggrandize himself; it is a collision of the great
forces that rule men. Moral force does as much,
or more, than physical force. The great passion or
inspiration of heroism has play; men are called on
to face great odds; they are called upon to offer
their lives for others. Men who lead a charge and
do not flinch or turn back have achieved the noblest
victory over themselves, whether they break the
enemy or not. The element of destiny comes in.
Large bodies of men are subject to laws and condi-
tions that touch not the individual. Their wrath
is not as the wrath of a man; their blood-shedding
is not as the crime of a person. So many elements
enter into a great battle beside the personal element;
all the forces of nature take part. It often hap-

BRIEF ESSAYS 217

pened in the ancient wars that the army was de-
feated that had the sun in its eyes. Often some
false rumor, some accidental cry, turns the tide,
The morale of an army is everything: faith in
their general and in the justness of their cause, —
there are no reinforcements like these. Indeed,
every impulse that is manly and noble and elevating
tells tremendously in war.

These are perhaps some of the considerations that
lead us to judge war between nations by a different
standard from the one we apply to individual en-
counters. It has not the demoralizing element of
base anger. There must be something that vastly
more than offsets the brutal element in it, else the
good could never have flowed from it that we know
has flowed. Men who settle their differences by
blows and blood are always the worse for it. But
nations are often the better for it. It sets new and
larger currents going. The nation is above the in-
dividual, and the national life is often cemented
and strengthened by the blood of the best citizens,

e
SOLITUDE

Emerson says, “Now and then a man exquisitely
made can live alone, and must; but coop up most
men and you undo them.” Solitude tries a man in
a way society does not; it throws him upon his
own resources, and if these resources be meagre, if
the ground he occupies in and of himself be poor
and narrow, he will have a sorry time of it, Hence

218 INDOOR STUDIES

we readily attribute some extra virtue to those
persons who voluntarily embrace solitude, who live
alone in the country or in the woods, or in the
mountains, and find life sweet. We know they
cannot live without converse, without society of
some sort, and we credit them with the power of
invoking it from themselves, or else of finding more
companionship with dumb things than ordinary
mortals. In any case they give evidence of re-
sources which all do not possess. If not “exqui-
sitely made,” hermits generally have a fine streak
in them, which preserves them in solitude. If a
man wants to get away from himself or from a
guilty conscience he does not retreat into the coun-
try, he flees to the town. If he is empty, the town
will fill him; if he is idle, the town will amuse
him; if he is vain, here is a field for his vanity;
if he is ambitious, here are dupes waiting to be
played upon; but if he is an honest man, here he
will have a struggle to preserve his integrity. The
rapid growth of cities in our time has its dark side.
Every man who has a demon to flee from, a vice to
indulge, an itching for notoriety to allay, money to
squander, or a dream of sudden wealth to cherish,
flees to the city, and, as most persons have one or
the other of these things, the city outstrips the
country. It is thought that the more a man is
civilized, the more his tastes are refined, the more
he will crave city life and the more benefit he will
get from it. But this may be questioned. It is
not, as a rule, a refined taste that takes men to

BRIEF ESSAYS 219

cities, but a craving for a vain superficial elegance,
the pride of dress, of equipage, of fashion, of fast
living, and the shams and follies of the world.
The more simple and refined taste loves the serious-
ness and sobriety of the country.

People find country life dull because they are
empty and frivolous; having only themselves on
their hands, they can extract no entertainment from
such a subject. How can a man profitably com-
mune with himself if the self is small and frivolous
and unworthy? He will not go to his own garden
for fruit if there be only thorns there.

The finest spirits are not gregarious; they do not
love a crowd. Crows and wolves go in flocks and
packs, but the eagle and the lion are solitary in
their habits.

Solitude is not for the young; the young have
no thoughts or experience, but only unsatisfied de-
sires; it is for the middle-aged and the old, for
a man when he has ripened and wants time to mel-
low his thoughts. A man who retires into solitude
must have a capital of thought and experience to
live upon, or his soul will perish of want. This
capital must be reinvested in the things about him,
or it will not suffice. Either as a farmer or as a
student and lover of nature, or as both, can he live
as it were on the interest of his stored-up wisdom.

“There are things that never show themselves
till you are alone,” said an old recluse in Mexico
to an American traveler who had claimed the hos-
pitality of his hut; “but if you once make up your

220 INDOOR STUDIES

mind that there is no harm in them, you find out
that they are pretty good company.” The old re-
cluse knew what he was saying. Things do show
themselves when one is alone; they emerge on all
sides; they come in troops from all points of the
compass, and one is only master of the situation
when he can make good company of them. How
your misdeeds find you out! the still small voice of
conscience, which you could not hear amid the roar
of the town, makes itself heard now; all the past
beleaguers you, — whether with an army of angels or
of demons, depends upon what your past has been.
The old recluse above referred to, the traveler
found living in a hut alone in the mountains. He
‘had lived there many years, with no companionship
but his dogs. An Irishman by birth, he had tried
many parts of the world, and seen many phases of
life, and had at last found his place in the solitude
of the Mexican mountains. He had learned the
art of dreaming with his eyes open, which is the
charm of solitude. A man who cannot dream with
his eyes open had better not court solitude. Such
an old dreamer was found the other day by some
railroad surveyors on a mountain in North Carolina.
He had lived there in his hut for fifty years. He,
too, had for companion a dog. If Thoreau had
made friends with a dog to share his bed and board
in his retreat by Walden Pond, one would have
had more faith in his sincerity. The dog would
have been the seal and authentication of his retreat.
A man who has no heart for a dog, — how can he

BRIEF ESSAYS 221

have a heart for Nature herself? For many reasons
women seldom voluntarily face solitude, but in my
boyhood I knew an aged widow who lived all alone
on her little farm, in her little brown house, for
many years. She kept five or six cows, which she
took care of herself winter and summer. She hired
her hay gathered, her wood cut, and that was all.
She was a gentle and pious little woman, and her
house was as neat as a pin. But think of those
long years of solitary life; the nights, the morn-
ings, the meals, the Sundays, the week days, and
no sound but what you made yourself! How inti-
mately acquainted with one’s self one must become
in such a life! If one’s self was not a pretty good
fellow, how cordially one would learn to dislike his
company! One Sunday, as my people were passing
the house on their way to church, they saw her
washing. “Hello, Aunt Debby! don’t you know
it is Sunday?” Behold the consternation of the
old dame! She had lost her reckoning, and had
kept Sabbath on Saturday. The last time I passed
that way I saw only a little grassy mound where
Aunt Debby’s house used to stand.

The poet of solitude is Wordsworth. What a
sense of the privacy of fields and woods there is
over all his poetry; what stillness, what lonesome
dells, what sounds of distant waterfalls! How
fondly he lingers upon the simple objects of nature,
upon rural scenes and events, and how perpetually
he returns upon his own heart! His companionship
with hills and trees and rocks and shepherds does

222 INDOOR STUDIES

not relieve, but rather sets off, his loneliness. He
is encompassed with solitude wherever he goes: —
“In November days,

When vapors rolling down the valley make

A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods

At noon; and mid the calm of summer nights,

When by the margin of the trembling lake,

Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went

In solitude;”’
and has the same sweet and fruitful fellowship
with nature and with his own heart. In his “A
Poet’s Epitaph ” he has drawn his own portrait: —

“He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noonday grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

“The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

“Tn common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart, —
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.”
Wordsworth was solitary because of his profound

seriousness, and because great thoughts or deep emo-
tions always create a solitude of their own. What
is communing with nature but communing with
ourselves? Nature gives back our thoughts and
feelings, as we see our faces reflected in a pool.
Wordsworth found himself whenever he walked;
all nature was Wordsworthian. Another man of
equal profundity and sympathy finds nature stamped
with his image.

BRIEF ESSAYS 223

Wordsworth felt akin to all solitary things; he
is drawn by every recluse and wanderer; he loves
to contemplate beggars, and dwellers or watchers in
secluded dells, and to sing the praises of “The Soli-
tary Reaper.” A solitary flower, a solitary scene
of almost any kind, never failed to move him.
What a charm of seclusion in the poem begin-
ning, —

“T wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills.”

Or in this other, —

“TJ heard a thousand blended notes
While in a grove I sat reclined
In that sweet mood where pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.”
Or again in this immortal song, —

“She dwelt among the untrodden ways,
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
. And very few to love:

“A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.”

Before Wordsworth, solitude had a lover and poet
in Abraham Cowley. Through nearly all his essays
there runs a desire to escape from the world, and to
be alone with nature and with his own thoughts.
And who has better expressed this desire and the
satisfaction which its fulfillment brings? He longed
for the country as an exile longs for home. He
says to Evelyn that he had never had any other
desire so strong and so like to covetousness as the

224 INDOOR STUDIES

one he had always had, namely, to be master at
last of a small house and a large garden, with very
moderate conveniences joined to them, and there to
dedicate the remainder of his life only to the cul-
ture of them and to the study of nature.

He says: ‘‘As far as my memory can return back
into my past life, before I knew or was capable of
guessing what the world or the glories or business
of it were, the natural affections of my soul gave
me a secret bent of aversion from them.” When
he was a boy at school he was wont to leave his
play-fellows, and walk alone into the fields. How
charmingly he praises “Obscurity,” and how pun-
gently he sets forth the “Dangers of an honest man
in much company!”

He knew well the virtues which solitude necessi-
tated and implied.

“The truth of the matter is, that neither he who
is a fop in the world is a fit man to be alone; nor
he who has set his heart much upon the world,
though he have never so much understanding: so
that solitude can be well fitted and sit 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; if the mind be
possessed with any lust or passion, a man had better
be in a fair than in a wood alone.”

But, after all has been said about the solitude of
nature, that is the best solitude that comes clothed
in the human form, — your friend, your other self,
who leaves you alone, yet cheers you; who peoples

BRIEF ESSAYS 225

your house or your field and wood with tender re-
membrances; who stands between your yearning
heart and the great outward void that you try in
vain to warm and fill; who in his own person and
spirit clothes for you, and endows with tangible
form, all the attractions and subtle relations and
meanings that draw you to the woods and fields,
What the brooks and the trees and the birds said
so faintly and vaguely, he speaks with warmth and
directness. Indeed, your friend complements and
completes your solitude, and you experience its
charm without its desolation. I cannot, therefore,
agree with Marvell that

“Two paradises are in one,

To live in paradise alone.”

T should want at least my friend to share it with me.

vI
AN OPEN DOOR

How the revelations of science do break in upon
the sort of private and domestic view of the uni-
verse which mankind have so long held! To many
minds it is like being fairly turned out into the
cold, and made to face without shield or shelter the
eternities and the infinities of geologic time and
sidereal space. We are no longer cozily housed in
pretty little anthropomorphic views of things. The
universe is no longer a theatre constructed expressly
for the drama of man’s life and salvation. The
race of man becomes the mere ephemera of an hour,
like insects of a summer day. In an hour of the

226 INDOOR STUDIES

summer of the earth’s geologic history he appears,
and in an hour he is gone; a few hours more and
all is gone, and the earth itself is frozen into the
everlasting death and night of the winter of the
solar system. Science says in just so many words,
“there is no reason to deny the final cessation of
the sun’s activity, and the consequent death of the
system.”

Our hearts, our affections, all our peculiarly hu-
man attributes, draw back from many of the deduc-
tions of science. We feel the cosmic chill. We
cannot warm or fill the great void. The universe
seems orphaned. This is the reason why many
people, who accept science with their understand-
ing, still repudiate it in their hearts; the religious
beliefs of their youth still meet a want of their
natures.

It makes a great difference whether we look upon
things from the point of view of our personal wants
and needs, or from the point of view of reason. It
takes mankind, as it takes every individual man,
a long and hard struggle to break away from the
former standpoint, and to gain the mountain-top
implied in the latter. When I look upon the sun
from my place and surroundings, he seems to be a
mere appurtenance of the earth. How he seems to
attend us, and to swing around us to give light and
warmth! How immense seems the earth; how
small, comparatively, the sun! See him setting
behind the hills or riding up out of the wave!
Xenophanes, according to Plutarch, thought the

BRIEF ESSAYS 227

earth had many suns and many moons. An eclipse
of the sun, he said, happened when the orb of the
sun, falling upon some part of the world which is
uninhabited, wandered in a vacuum and became
eclipsed. Herodotus also looked upon the sun as
something ‘thus special to the earth. On the ap-
proach of winter, he says, he grows feeble and
retreats to the south, because he can no longer face
the cold and the storms of the north, One is
reminded of these things when he sees the good
people appropriate God to themselves in a way they
are perpetually doing. What a special interest He
takes in their lives!’ Their well-being or their ill-
being seems his main concern. All the early races
—the Bible races—do this. How the old He-
brews claimed God! He was the Lord God of
Israel and of no one else. How imminent, how
personal, He is in their Scriptures; how cruel, how
terrible, how jealous, —a magnified and heaven-
filling despot and king! All the good old pious
people still refer the events of their daily lives
to Providence. Indeed, the popular conception. of
God is still essentially Ptolemaic. Our religion is
built upon the notion that man and man’s life are
the objects of his especial care and solicitude. And
so they are, but not just in the way we are so fond
of thinking.

Astronomers figure out for us the infinitesimal
fraction of the sun’s light which our earth inter-
cepts in the infinite void; in the same way and to
the same extent does the providence of God tran-

228 INDOOR STUDIES

scend not only the wants of our little lives, but
the life of the globe itself. Yet each and all get
enough. The sun seems near to us, —is near by
its power. The light that floods our houses, that
shines upon our fields, — how potent it is! What
marvelous transformations it works! If the sun
did, indeed, shine for this world alone, and was
only just there behind the horizon as it seems, we
could not be better looked after.

To all intents and purposes, God is and exists
for each one of us alone. His providence is exem-
plified in every movement of our lives. Out of
the abuse of this feeling or faith comes our arrogat-
ing to ourselves special providences, special inter-
ference in our petty affairs. But until the sun does
shoot some special ray for you, and the attraction
of gravity make some exception in your favor,
count not upon God’s doing so. Our very life, the
beating of our very hearts, depend upon the sun,
not because the sun is special, but because the sun
is universal; not because it is adjusted and adapted
to us, but because we are adjusted and adapted to
it. Its bounty and power extend in every direction
alike; it shoots into the void myriads of rays as
vivifying as those that make our blood flow. The
same with this power we call God. In it we live
and move and have our being, but it is not an
attendant of our lives; we are an accident of it; it
is imminent to us, because it is imminent every-
where. Light was not made for the eye, but we
have eyes because there is light. The outward

BRIEF ESSAYS 229

world is not accommodated to us, but vice versa.
There are no special acts of Providence that have
reference to you and to me, to this or to that event
of our lives, any more than the North Star was
placed there for the guidance of mariners, or that
anything in nature was made for the use of man.
Was water made to quench thirst? No; we have
thirst because there is water. Were the beauties
and harmonies of nature made to delight our senses
or for our edification? No; we have the sense of
the beautiful because beauty exists. The beneficent
forces of nature brought us forth and sustain us,
therefore we love beneficence. The loving-kind-
ness and the tender mercies of God, of which we
hear so much, are such not because they are directed
to us, but because they are directed to all, — because
the laws of the universe are so, and not otherwise,
God answers prayer, not by a particular providence,
but by a general providence. You may light your
fire by focusing the sun’s rays with a burning-glass ;
but the rays are no different; they are the same as
those that are shot into space on all sides at all
times. Still, Providence is imminent in human
affairs, not by special acts, but by universal, eter-
nal, unceasing acts. Does it rain to make things
grow and to fill our wells and cisterns? We are
apt to take this view of things, but I noticed that
it rained at sea the same as upon the land. Men
and nations at war with each other, each seeking
to slay or overthrow the other, pray to the same
God for victory. And God helps one just as much

230 INDOOR STUDIES

as He helps the other, not by special providences,
but by general providences, like the rain or snow,
or light or gravitation. His laws prevail, and
whoso obeys them (his will) best triumphs; God
gives him the victory. I notice that when the
children of Israel are defeated, or suffer any disas-
ter, God is always against them; but when they
triumph it is God who gives the victory, and it is
all true in a strict scientific sense.

A clergyman on the wrecked train thanked God
most fervently that the train did not go into the
river. It was clearly the hand of Providence that
saved them, he said. One would have thought that
if God had interested himself at all in the incident
He would have interested himself to have prevented
it. If not, we must either suppose He was unable
to prevent it, or else unwilling, and either horn of
the dilemma is a bad horn. At New Hamburg
afew years ago, when a passenger train ran into
an oil train, and hundreds of people perished, He
seems to have taken no hand at all in the matter.
Why should He save this crowd and not that? Or
the Ashtabula horror, — where was God then? Hid-
ing from the disaster He might have averted? Ah
me! as soon as we make God out to be a person
who interferes in the events of this world, into
what straits are we forced! We are forced to con-
clude either that He is not omnipotent, or else that
He is a monster of cruelty, — that He is capricious
and changeable, or an ogre that delights in human
suffering and blood. I know the well-known text

BRIEF ESSAYS 231

we take shelter under, — the ways of Providence are
past finding out; but that is begging the question.
You presume to know them and to have found
them out when you say He chose to throw the train
on the upper side of the track instead of on the
lower. No, He is not that kind of a God. The
only way He interferes or takes a hand in is through
the eternal laws which He has established. In
this case the laws of force, the laws of resistance
and of matter, were the hand of God that threw the
train against the bank; had the forces clashed a
little differently, the train would have gone into the
river. No miracle was performed to prevent it.
A good engineer could tell you exactly how it hap-
pened. And yet the feeling to thank God in such
a case is a natural one and a worthy one; it pro-
ceeds from a true religious attitude of the soul.

The balance, the adjustment, the equipoise which
we see in the physical world, and which we see in
the world of man, too, was not brought about by
any guidance or principle of action that bears the
slightest resemblance to human methods and aims,
but is the result of eons upon eons of conflict, of
clashing, of waste and destruction, the fittest or the
luckiest surviving. What principle of benevolence,
or of justice, or of wise foresight has regulated the
distribution of the various human races upon the
globe, or determined the relative ascendency of the
various nationalities? Just the principle that deter-
mines which of a hungry. pack of dogs shall get and
keep the bone you toss them. Think of the wrongs,

232 INDOOR STUDIES

the cruelties, the waste, the slaughters of history.
Think of that mad carnival of lust and power which
the history of the Roman Empire alone shows,
The past of the race is knee-deep with blood, largely
innocent blood, and the past of nature is black with
convulsion and struggle. Admitted that good has
come out of it all, yet how unlike has been the
method to anything we know as goodness or benevo-
lence! Good has come out of it because our consti-
tutions are adapted to it. To us it is good; to dif-
ferently constituted beings it might be bad. The
principle or power which underlies all things is like
the principle of gravitation, which is exerted equally
in all directions, and which spares no crashing or
crushing, no floods of water or downfall of moun-
tains, or subsidence of continents, in bringing about
the equilibrium which we behold. Some things
sink and some things swim; but whichever it be,
gravity has its way. There is no waste in nature;
waste in nature is but taking out of one pocket and
putting into the other.

Prayer is practically a belief in miracles or special
providences, —a belief that the world is governed,
not by immutable law, but by a being whose favor
may be won, whose anger may be appeased, or
whose purpose may be changed, like that of a great
monarch or king. “Most men, in their prayers,”
says Turgénef, ‘‘ask God that two and two may not
make four.” ‘The best prayers,” says Joubert,
“are those which have nothing distinct, and which
thus partake of adoration. God listens but to

BRIEF ESSAYS 233

thoughts and sentiments.” “To ask is to receive,
when we ask for a genuine good,” because the gen-
uine good is in the devout and sincere asking; but
convince your orthodox neighbor of this, and he
will probably cease to pray. Prayer with him is
a petition to some power external to himself for
some definite, tangible, measurable good. He will
pray for rain or for sun; and the faith which
prompts him is a stay to him, whether the rain
comes or not. The wisest man cannot pray, has
no need of prayer, because his whole life is an aspi-
ration toward, and a desire for, the supreme good
of the world.

In every emergency that requires courage and
presence of mind, the great danger is in the fear of
danger. The man who, lost in the woods or on the
plains, or going into battle, prays earnestly to God
for help and guidance, has his wits and senses sharp-
ened and his courage strengthened by that act of
faith. Because this is so, because mankind have
in all ages, the pagan as well as the Christian, been
blessed by sincere prayer to their gods, they have
come finally to pervert and vulgarize prayer by ask-
ing for outward material good. To pray for rain
is like praying for a change in the moon or in the
tides and seasons. All Christendom prayed for
President Garfield, but without avail, because the
wound was mortal. Did prayer ever stop the yel-
low fever before frost came? Is it ever safe to let
your piety offset sanitary observances? If sewer
gas gets into your house, will holiness keep the dis-

234 INDOOR STUDIES

temper out? No; and vaccination is a better safe-
guard against smallpox than prayer, however fer-
vent and serious.

What remains, then, for those who cannot pray;
who cannot look upon God as a being apart from
themselves, a supreme parent, seated somewhere in
the universe, and withholding or bestowing gifts
and goods upon man? This alone, and this is
enough: To love virtue, to love truth, to cherish
a lofty ideal, to keep the soul open and hospitable
to whatsoever things are true, to whatsoever things
are beautiful, to whatsoever things are of good
report.

VII
THE TRUE REALISM

Without at all aiming to impeach the value of
what is known in current criticism as realism in
art, I think it may safely be said that any imagina-
tive work, or any work aspiring to the rank of
literature, which does not afford a sure and a speedy
escape into the ideal, is of little value.

The true literary artist is not afraid of the real,
the concrete; indeed, he loves real things as the
painter his pigments, but they are only a means to
an end, and that end is not the literal truth, but
the ideal truth. Strict fidelity to nature, to fact,
is to be demanded, and equal fidelity to the spirit,
the imagination. The artist must give us a true
picture, but he must give us much more than that;
he must give us himself.

It is the province of literature to make us free of

BRIEF ESSAYS 235

the ideal, and of science to make us acquainted with
demonstrable fact. It seems to me it matters little
whether a writer draws his material from what we
call the real, or from the ideal, so that the result
be good literature. Why exalt the realist at the
expense of the idealist? Why commend Zola’s
method over that of Hawthorne, when both are
failures unless they reach and move the imagina-
tion, and both succeed when they do move it?

If in such a connection one may be allowed to
speak of his own work, I may say that I should
think much more meanly of my own books than I
do, if I did not believe that my account of bird, or
flower, or forest, or stream, contained some stimu-
lus or quality, or suggestion, which the reality
itself does not hold, and which is purely the gift
of the spirit. Your fact or observation is not liter-
ature until it is put in some sort of relation to the
soul.

There probably never was a time when the crav-
ing for the real in art — the real as opposed to the
fantastic, the impossible, or visionary — was more
acute than it is now; but the need and the demand
are equally urgent for that real to be set in such a
light, or in such relation to the mind, that it fuse
readily with the spirit and become one with it.
The soul of man is the source and the only source
of that charm which a true work of art possesses.
The real itself, however faithfully set forth, has no
charm. A photograph is barren; the rudest sketch
of the same, seen by a true artist, has far more

236 INDOOR STUDIES

power to touch and move the soul. Only the man
who looks upon the real with passion, with emotion,
will succeed in transmuting it into something higher,
and thus permanently interest mankind in it. And
if he looks upon the imaginary, the fantastic, with
passion and emotion, he will interest mankind in
that also. He will make that real and living to us.

“The highest problem of any art,” says Goethe,
“is to produce by semblance the illusion of some
higher reality. But it is a false endeavor to realize
the appearance until at last only something com-
monly real remains.”

I think the complaint one has to make of the
current realistic fiction is that it fails to produce
this “illusion of some higher reality.” It rests
with the ‘commonly ” or meanly realistic. After
we have finished the book, we feel as if we had
been in the company of people whose acquaintance
was not worth the making. They are or may be
copied from our friends and acquaintances, but
there is this difference: In real life, there is some-
thing, it may not be easy to say just what, that
gives pathos and significance to the most humdrum
and frivolous, — something that points to the higher
reality; but in the story the people are cut off,
isolated, and we feel only their pettiness or silliness.
It is often said that the commonest and dullest life,
if truly written, would have something of perennial
interest ; but it must be sympathetically written, and
shown off against a proper background. ‘There are
few more commonplace characters in themselves in

BRIEF ESSAYS 237

fiction than Partridge in “Tom Jones,” but Par-
tridge witnessing his first play at the theatre is
immortal. The meanest life has poetry in it, but
it takes a poet to bring the poetry out. In writing
“Werther,” Goethe said he succeeded in breathing
into the work ‘‘all that warmth which leaves no
distinction between the poetical and the actual.”
Whether or not it was realistic, in the sense that it
was a faithful picture of the life of his times, is of
little moment compared with the question: Was it
vital and serious, or informed with real passion?
And if the passion of the story or poem is real, do
we care for any other reality? If the mood and
temper in which an author contemplates his subject
are genuine, his realism will take care of itself.
Paradoxical as it may seem, it is only the idealist
who can adequately deal with the real, _—who can
fuse it and use it and bring out its full significance.
There may be a barren realism, just as well as a
barren idealism; the proper marriage of the two is
the end and aim of art. To make the idea tangible
to us, whether in poetry or in prose, so that the
mind can rest upon it, and feel braced and excited
by it, —is not that also an end to be aimed at?
And, on the other hand, to make the actual, the
concrete, fluidand plastic, and inform it with mean-
ing and power, —is not that also to be striven for?
In the same proportion in which literature is real,
must it also be ideal; just so much earth as there
is, just so much sky must arch over it. The actual
must be transmuted, the ideal must be embodied;

238 INDOOR STUDIES

both must be brought within the sphere of the spir-
itual faculty and fixed there. If the novelist trans-
fers to his page the real life about him and adds no
charm or illusion or suggestion from his own spirit,
he is less arealist than he is a materialist; his work
has little value. The writers who can describe the
actual and make it real to us, that is, make us share
their experience and their emotion, are very rare.
They tell us what they saw or what they felt, but
they do not put the reader in the presence of the
actual thing or occurrence. How many historians
make the past alive again for us? Only the man
with an enormous grasp of the ideal, or great im-
aginative power, can do it. Shakespeare can do it,
Carlyle can do it. What a sense of reality in all
Carlyle’s histories! The dead reality is not enough;
it must be made alive again. Equally few are the
writers who can make the ideal tangible or warm
to us.

In any case, whatever the theme, the first requi-
site in the mind of the writer is a vivid sense of
reality. I sometimes think this sense of reality
the main thing which distinguishes the master from
the tyro. In the great writer, in whatever field,
we encounter real things, real values, real differ-
ences, real emotions, real impressions; his sense of
reality always saves him from phantoms. The
mind in which this sense of reality is weak, no
matter whether it deals with the concrete or the
abstract, will always fail to make an impression.

For my part I want no better realists than the

BRIEF ESSAYS 239

great masters of the ideal, from Homer down to
Hawthorne and Turgénef. How they all differ
both in their material and treatment! but in the
page of each you encounter that reality, that sense
of substance and vitality, which are to the mind
what the ground is to the foot, or the air to the
lungs.
VIII
LITERARY FAME

Goldsmith, according to Boswell, said that he
had come too late into the world; that Pope and
other poets had carried off all the literary prizes,
etc. Dr. Johnson confirmed the remark, and said
it was difficult to get literary fame, and was every
day becoming more and more difficult. This is
probably the feeling of all writers who have reached
the measure of their powers; they mistake the
limits of their own tether for the end of the world.
The possibilities that are not open to them they
think do not exist. A man of genius and power
makes the world his own, and when he is done
with it he fancies there is nothing left. Every one
of us repeats the same experience on a different
scale. As our careers draw to a close, we fancy we
have exhausted the whole of life, and that there
will be nothing left for those who are to come after
us. But life is always new to the new man.
Think of the great names in British literature since
Goldsmith and Johnson; think of Burns, Words-
worth, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Macaulay, Carlyle,
Arnold, etc., each one of whom, probably, in ex-

240 INDOOR STUDIES

hausting his own possibilities fancied he had ex-
hausted the possibilities of nature.

Probably literary fame is no more difficult of
achievement at one time than at another, just as
easy to Thackeray as it was to Goldsmith; and this
notwithstanding an achievement that would have
given a measure of fame a century ago would attract
far less attention to-day. Is it at all likely that if
the “Spectator” essays were written to-day they
would attract any considerable notice, or that “The
Idler” and ‘ Adventurer” would find any readers?
But the writer of to-day has all this past to stand
upon, he profits by all these accumulated achieve-
ments. A man is largely the creature of his times;
he is strong by the strength of the age in which he
lives. An invention that would have seemed mar-
velous a century ago might be a very tame affair
to-day ; and yet the same genius, the same power in
achieving a noteworthy result to-day, would prob-
ably have no more obstacles to overcome, or mys-
teries to solve, than one hundred years ago. He has
a great fund to work with; he sees farther because
he stands higher. If the achievement is measured
by the standard of to-day, it is to be remembered
that the achiever is strong by the strength of to-day.
The same in science. Now the quarry is so thor-
oughly opened, larger and more valuable results
ought to be easier than ever before. Of course the
poet or literary man cannot avail himself of the
results of the labor of others in the same way
the man of science can and does, but he cannot

BRIEF ESSAYS 241

escape the general lift of the age in which he lives;
he shares in the momentum, moral and intellectual,

of his contemporaries. In a certain sense, also, he

inherits, as an available personal fund, what others

have done before him. It is the common mind

which has been refined and enlarged, and of this

advantage he partakes. Literature is an investment

of genius which pays dividends to all subsequent

times.

If nature were guilty of endless repetition in
turning out men of exceptional powers, of course
every new man would find his task already done in
the world; but nature forever varies the pattern so
that the new man has a new standpoint and sees
things in new combinations and discovers new val-
ues, and he is never forestalled by those who have
gone before him. Every new genius is an impossi-
bility until he appears; we cannot forecast his type.
He is a revelation, and through his eyes we shall
see undreamed-of effects. It is doubtful if contem-
porary writers of original power ever stand in each
other’s way. There is always room and demand
for any number of original men. The lesser poets
of course suffer in competition with the greater;
the large stars draw our eyes away from the smaller;
we should make more of Bayard Taylor, for in-
stance, if he were our only poet; but is it probable
that Longfellow or Whittier or Bryant or Emerson
ever intercepted any portion of the fame due and
within reach of the other? Have Tennyson or
Browning in any sense ever been rivals? Literary

242 INDOOR STUDIES

fame is not a limited quantity which must lessen in
proportion as it is divided up, but, like the sun-
light, each man may have it all and not rob his
neighbor. Inventors and discoverers and men of
science may anticipate each other, but literary gen-
ius can never be anticipated; the value of the gift
which it brings is in its uniqueness. I heard it
remarked the other day of one of our promising
young poets that his work lacked flavor. It is this
flavor which is indispensable, and which can never
be forestalled by another. There is rivalry in the
trades and the professions, but you poet, or you
novelist, or you essayist, if your work has flavor or
character of its own, your chance for fame is just
as good as if there were no competitors in the field.
It is not a vacant niche in the Temple of Fame
which you are striving for, and which only one can
fill: it is a niche in the hearts of men, where the
room is boundless.

Goldsmith felt himself under the shadow of
Pope’s great fame, but of course he was a gainer
from Pope’s career. His performance was as unique
as Pope’s, and has probably been of more service to
mankind. But Pope cleared and sharpened the
mind of his age; dull wits found less acceptance
after than before him, and in this benefit Gold-
smith, like others, was a sharer.

IX
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER

A FEW years ago the editor of a popular maga-

zine inveigled a good many people, myself
among the number, into writing about themselves
and their experiences in life. None of us, I im-
agine, needed very much persuading, for as a rule
there is no subject which a man or woman is more
ready or willing to talk about than him or her self.
One’s ailments are always a favorite subject; next
to that, one’s luck or ill-luck in his last undertak-
ing; then one’s experiences, one’s likes and dis-
likes; and lastly, self-analysis and criticism. And
it has been said that a man “is never so sure to
please as when he writes of himself with good faith,
and without affectation.” Aye, there ’s the rub; to
write of one’s self without affectation! A false
note of this kind is fatal to the interest and value
of the criticism.

In a certain sense, a man of the literary or artistic
temperament never portrays or writes of anything
but himself; that is, he gives us things as seen
through the intimate personal medium which he
himself is. All things reflect his hue and quality.
This is the bane of science, but it is the life of

244 INDOOR STUDIES

literature. I have probably unwittingly written
myself in my books more fully and frankly than I
ever can by any direct confession and criticism; but
the latter may throw some side light at least, and,
on looking over what I wrote for the editor above
referred to, I find that portions of it possess a cer-
tain interest and value to myself, and therefore I
trust may not seem entirely amiss to my reader.

If a man is not born into the environment best
suited to him, he, as a rule, casts about him until
he finds such environment. My own surroundings
and connections have been mainly of the unliterary
kind. I was born of and among people who neither
read books nor cared for them, and my closest asso-
ciations since have been with those whose minds
have been alien to literature and art. My unliter-
ary environment has doubtless been best suited to
me. Probably what little freshness and primal
sweetness my books contain is owing to this circum-
stance. Constant intercourse with bookish men
and literary circles I think would have dwarfed or
killed my literary faculty. This perpetual rubbing
of heads together, as in the literary clubs, seems to
result in literary sterility. In my own case at least
what I most needed was what I had, —a few books
and plenty of real things. JI never had any apti-
tude for scholarly attainments; my verbal or artifi-
cial memory, so to speak, was poor, but my mind
always had a certain magnetic or adhesive quality
for things that were proper to it and that belonged
to me.

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 245

I early took pleasure in trying to express myself
upon paper, probably in my sixteenth or seventeenth
year. In my reading I was attracted by everything
of the essay kind. In the libraries and bookstores
I was on the lookout for books of essays. And I
wanted the essay to start, not in a casual and incon-
sequential way, but the first sentence must be a
formal enunciation of a principle. I bought the
whole of Dr. Johnson’s works at a second-hand
bookstore in New York, because, on looking into
them, I found his essays appeared to be of solid
essay-stuff from beginning to end. I passed by
Montaigne’s Essays at the same time, because they
had a personal and gossipy look. Almost my first
literary attempts were moral reflections, somewhat
in the Johnsonian style. I lived on the ‘Ram-
bler” and the “Idler” all one year, and tried to
produce something of my own in similar form. As
a youth I was a philosopher; as a young man I was
an Emersonian; as a middle-aged man I am a liter-
ary naturalist; but always have I been an essayist.

It was while I was at school, in my nineteenth
year, that I saw my first author; and I distinctly
remember with what emotion I gazed upon him,
and followed him in the twilight, keeping on the
other side of the street. He was of little account,
—a man who had failed as a lawyer, and then had
written a history of Poland, which I have neven
heard of since that time; but to me he was the
embodiment of the august spirit of authorship, and
I looked upon him with more reverence and enthu-

»

246 INDOOR STUDIES

siasm than I had ever before looked upon any man.
I do not think I could have approached and spoken
to him on any consideration. I cannot at this date
divine why I should have stood in such worshipful
fear and awe of this obscure individual, but I sup-
pose it was the instinctive tribute of a timid and
imaginative youth to a power which he was just
beginning vaguely to see, — the power of letters.

It was at about this time that I first saw my own
thoughts in print, —a communication of some kind
to a little country paper published in an adjoining
town. In my twenty-second or twenty-third year,
I began to send rude and crude essays to the maga-
zines and to certain New York weekly papers, but
they came back again pretty promptly. I wrote on
such subjects as “ Revolutions,” “A Man and his
Times,” “Genius,” “Individuality,” ete. At this
period of my life I was much indebted to Whipple,
whose style, as it appears in his earlier essays and in
the thin volume of lectures published by Ticknor,
Reed & Fields about 1853 is, in my judgment,
much better than in his later writings. It was
never a good style, not at all magnetic or penetrat-
ing, but it was clear and direct, and, to my mind
at that period, stimulating. Higginson had just
begun to publish his polished essays in the “ Atlan-
tic,” and I found much help in them also. They
were a little cold, but they had the quality which
belongs to the work of a man who looks upon litera-
ture as a fine art. My mind had already begun to
turn to outdoor themes, and Higginson gave me a

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 247

good send-off in this direction. But the master-
enchanter of this period of my life and of many
following years was Emerson. While at school, in
my nineteenth year, in my search for essays I had
carried to my room one volume of his, but I could
do nothing with it. What, indeed, could a John-
sonian youth make of Emerson? A year or so later
I again opened one of his books in a Chicago book-
store, and was so taken with the first taste of it
that I then and there purchased the three volumes,
—the Essays and the Miscellanies. All that sum-
mer I fed upon them and steeped myself in them:
so that when, a year or two afterwards, I wrote an
essay on “ Expression” and sent it to the “‘Atlan-
tic,” it was so Emersonian that the editor thought
some one was trying to palm off on him an early
essay of Emerson’s which he had not seen. Satis-
fying himself that Emerson had published no such
paper, he printed it in the November number of
1860. It had not much merit. JI remember this
sentence, which may contain some truth aptly put:
“Dr. Johnson’s periods act like a lever of the third
kind: the power applied always exceeds the weight
raised.”

It was mainly to break the spell of Emerson’s
influence and get upon ground of my own that I
took to writing upon outdoor themes. I wrote half
a dozen or more sketches upon all sorts of open-air
subjects, which were published in the New York
“Leader.” The woods, the soil, the waters, helped
to draw out the pungent Emersonian flavor and

248 INDOOR STUDIES

restore me to my proper atmosphere. But to this
day I am aware that a suggestion of Emerson’s
manner often crops out in my writings. His mind
was the firmer, harder substance, and was bound to
leave its mark upon my own. But, in any case,
my debt to him is great. He helped me to better
literary expression, he quickened my perception of
the beautiful, he stimulated and fertilized my reli-
gious nature. Unless one is naturally more or less
both of a religious and of a poetic turn, the writings
of such men as Emerson and Carlyle are mainly lost
upon him. ‘Two thirds of the force of these writers,
at least, is directed into these channels. It is the
quality of their genius, rather than the scope and
push of their minds, that endears them to us.
They quicken the conscience and stimulate the
character as well as correct the taste. They are
not the spokesmen of science or the reason, but of
the soul.

About this period I fell in with Thoreau’s ‘ Wal-
den,” but I am not conscious of any great debt to
Thoreau: I had begun to write upon outdoor themes
before his books fell into my hands, but he un-
doubtedly helped confirm me in my own direction.
He was the intellectual child of Emerson, but
added a certain crispness and pungency, as of wild
roots and herbs, to the urbane philosophy of his
great neighbor. But Thoreau had one trait which
I always envied him, namely, his indifference to
human beings. He seems to have been as insensi-
ble to people as he was open and hospitable to

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 249

nature. It probably gave him more pleasure to
open his door to a woodchuck than to a man.

Let me confess that I am too conscious of per-
sons, —feel them too much, defer to them too
much, and try too hard to adapt myself to them.
Emerson says, “A great man is coming to dine with
me: I do not wish to please him, I wish that he
should wish to please me.” I should be sure to
overdo the matter in trying to please the great man:
more than that, his presence would probably take
away my appetite for my dinner.

In speaking of the men who have influenced me,
or to whom I owe the greatest debt, let me finish
the list here. Iwas not born out of time, but in
good time. The men I seemed to need most were
nearly all my contemporaries; the ideas and influ-
ences which address themselves to me the most
directly and forcibly have been abundantly current
in my time. Hence I owe, or seem to owe, more
to contemporary authors than to the men of the
past. I have lived in the present time, in the
present hour, and have invested myself in the ob-
jects nearest at hand. Besides the writers I have
mentioned, I am conscious of owing a debt to Whit-
man, Ruskin, Arnold, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Tennyson. To Whitman I owe a certain liberaliz-
ing influence, as well as a lesson in patriotism
which I could have got in the same measure from
no other source. Whitman opens the doors, and
opens them wide. He pours a flood of human
sympathy which sets the whole world afloat. He

250 INDOOR STUDIES

is a great humanizing power. ‘There is no other
personality in literature that gives me such a sense
of breadth and magnitude in the purely human and
personal qualities. His poems are dominated by a
sense of a living, breathing man as no other poems
are. This would not recommend them to some
readers, but it recommends them to such as myself,
who value in books perennial human qualities above
all things. To put a great personality in poetry is
to establish a living fountain of power, where the
jaded and exhausted race can refresh and renew
itself.

To a man in many ways the opposite of Whit-
man, who stands for an entirely different, almost
antagonistic, order’ of ideas, — to wit, Matthew
Arnold, —I am indebted for a lesson in clear think-
ing and clean expression such as I have got from
no other. Arnold’s style is probably the most
lucid, the least embarrassed by anything false or
foreign, of that of any writer living. His page is
as clear as science and as vital and flexible as poetry.
Indeed, he affords a notable instance of the cool,
impartial scientific spirit wedded to, or working
through, the finest poetic delicacy and sensibility.

I have not been deeply touched or moved by any
English poet of this century save Wordsworth.
Nearly all other poetry of nature is tame and insin-
cere compared with his. But my poetic sympathies
are probably pretty narrow. I cannot, for instance,
read Robert Browning, except here and there a
short poem. The sheer mechanical effort of read-

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 251

ing him, of leaping and dodging and turning sharp
corners to overtake his meaning, is too much for
me. It makes my mental bones ache. It is not
that he is so subtile and profound, for he is less in
both these respects than Shakespeare, but that he
is so abrupt and elliptical and plays such fantastic
tricks with syntax. His verse is like a springless
wagon on a rough road. He is full of bounce and
vigor, but it is of the kind that bruises the flesh
and makes one bite his tongue. Swinburne has lilt
and flow enough, certainly, and yet I cannot read
him. He sickens me from the opposite cause: I
am adrift in a sea of melodious words, with never
an idea to cling to. There is to me something
grewsome and uncanny about Swinburne’s poetry,
like the clammy and rapidly-growing fungi in na-
ture. It is not health, but disease; it is not inspi-
ration, but a mortal flux. The “Saturday Review,”
in noticing my last volume, “Signs and Seasons,”
intimates that I might have found better specimens
of sea-poetry to adorn the chapter called “A Salt
Breeze” in Mr. Swinburne than those I have
given, and quotes the following stanzas from him as
proof: —

“Hardly we saw the high moon hanging,
Heard hardly through the windy night
Far waters ringing, low reefs clanging,
Under wan skies and waste white light.

“With chafe and change of surges chiming,
The clashing channels rocked and rang
Large music, wave to wild wave timing,
And all the choral waters sang.’’

le

252 INDOOR STUDIES

Words, words, words! and all struck with the lep-
rosy of alliteration. Such poetry would turn my
blood to water. ‘Wan skies and waste white
light,””—are there ever any other skies or any
other light in Swinburne ?

But this last is an ill wind which I fear can blow
no good to any one. I have lived long enough to
know that my own private likes and dislikes do not
always turn out to be the decrees of the Eternal.
Some writers confirm one and brace him where he
stands; others give him a lift forward. I am not
aware that more than two American writers have
been of the latter service to me, —Emerson and
Whitman. Such a spirit as Bryant is confirmatory.
I may say the same of Whittier and Longfellow.
I owe to these men solace and encouragement, but
no new territory.

Still, the influences that shape one’s life are
often so subtile and remote, and of such small
beginning, that it will not do to be too positive
about these matters. At any rate, self-analysis is
a sort of back-handed work, and one is lucky if he
comes at all near the truth.

As such a paper must of necessity be egotistical,
let me not flinch in any part of my task on that
account.

What little merit my style has is the result of
much study and discipline. I have taught myself
always to get down to the quick of my mind at
once, and not fumble about amid the husks at the
surface. Unless one can give the sense of vitality

‘

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 253

in his pages, no mere verbal brightness or scholarly
attainments will save him. In the best writing,
every sentence is filled with the writer’s living,
breathing quality, just as in the perfected honey-
comb every cell is filled with honey. But how
much empty comb there is even in the best books!
I wish to give an account of a bird, or a flower, or
of any open-air scene or incident. My whole effort
is to see the thing just as it was. I ask myself,
“Exactly how did this thing strike my mind? What
was prominent? What was subordinated?” I have
been accused of romancing at times. But it is not
true. Iset down the thing exactly as it fell out.
People say, ‘Ido not see what you do when I take
awalk.” But for the most part they do, but the fact
as it lies there in nature is crude and raw: it-needs
to be brought out, to be passed through the heart
and mind and presented in appropriate words. This
humanizes it and gives it an added charm and sig-
nificance. This, I take it, is what is meant by
idealizing and interpreting nature. We do not add
to or falsely color the facts: we disentangle them,
and invest them with the magic of written words.
To give anything like vitality to one’s style, one
must divest one’s self of any false or accidental or
factitious mood or feeling, and get down to his real
self, and speak as directly and sincerely as he does
about his daily business or affairs, and with as
little affectation. One may write from the outside
of his mind, as it were, write and write, glibly and
learnedly, and make no impression; but when one

254 INDOOR. STUDIES

speaks from real insight and conviction of his own,
men are always glad to hear him, whether they
agree with him or not. So much writing or speak-
ing is like mere machine-work, as if you turned a
crank and the piece or discourse came out. It is
not the man’s real mind, his real experience. This
he does not know how to get at; it has no connec-
tion with his speaking or writing faculty. How
rare are real poems, — poems that spring from real
feeling, a real throb of emotion, and not from a
mere surface-itching of the mind for literary expres-
sion! The world is full of “rhyming parasites,”
as Milton called them. The great mass of the
poetry of any age is purely artificial, and has no
root in real things. It isa kind of masquerading.
The stock poetic forms are masks behind which the
poetlings hide their real poverty of thought and
feeling. In prose one has no such factitious aids;
here he must stand upon his own merits; he has
not the cloak of Milton, or Tennyson, or Spenser,
to hide in.

It is, of course, the young writer who oftenest
fails to speak his real mind, or to speak from any
proper basis of insight and conviction. He is car-
ried away by a fancy, a love of novelty, or an
affectation of originality. The strange things, the
novel things, are seldom true. Look for truth under
your feet. To be original, Carlyle said, is to be
sincere. When one is young, how many discover-
ies he makes, — real mares’-eggs, which by and by
turn out to be nothing but field-pumpkins!

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 255

Men who, like myself, are deficient in self-asser-
tion, or whose personalities are flexible and yield-
ing, make a poor show in politics or business, but
in certain other fields these defects have their
advantages. In action, Renan says, one is weak
by his best qualities, — such, I suppose, as tender-
ness, sympathy, religiousness, etc.,—and strong
by his poorer, or at least his less attractive, quali-
ties. But in letters the reverse is probably true.
How many of us owe our success in this field to
qualities which in a measure disqualified us for an
active career! A late writer upon Carlyle seeks to
demonstrate that the “open secret of his life” was
his desire to take a hand in the actual affairs of
English politics; but it is quite certain that the
traits and gifts which made him such a power in
literature — namely, his tremendous imagination and
his burdened prophetic conscience — would have
stood in his way in dealing with the coarse affairs
of this world.

In my own case, what hinders me with the world
helps me with impersonal nature. I do not stand
in my own light. My will, my personality, offer
little resistance: they let the shy delicate influences
pass. I can surrender myself to nature without
effort, but am more or less restrained and self-con-
scious in the presence of my fellows. Bird and
beast take to me, and I to them. I can look in
the eye of an ugly dog and win him, but with an
ugly man I have less success.

I have unmistakably the feminine idiosyncrasy.

256 INDOOR STUDIES

Perhaps this is the reason that my best and most
enthusiastic readers appear to be women. In the
genesis of all my books, feeling goes a long way
before intellection. What I feel I can express,
and only what I feel. If I had run after the birds
only to write about them, I never should have writ-
ten anything that any one would have cared to
read. I must write from sympathy and love, or
not at all: I have in no sort of measure the gift of
the ready writer who can turn his pen to all sorts
of themes; or the dramatic, creative gift of the great
poets, which enables them to get out of themselves
and present vividly and powerfully things entirely
beyond the circle of their own lives and experiences.
I go to the woods to enjoy myself, and not to report
them; and if I succeed, the expedition may by and
by bear fruit at my pen. When a writer of my
limited range begins to “make believe,” or to go
outside of his experience, he betrays himself at
once. My success, such as it is, has been in put-
ting my own personal feelings and attractions into
subjects of universal interest. I have loved Nature
no more than thousands upon thousands of others
have, but my aim has been not to tell that love to
my reader, but to tell it to the trees and the birds
and to let them tell him. I think we all like this
indirect way the best. It will not do in literature
to compliment Nature and make love to her by open
profession and declaration: you must show your
love by your deeds or your spirit, and by the sincer-
ity of your service to her.

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 257

For my part, I can never interview Nature in the
reporter fashion: I must camp and tramp with her
to get any good, and what I get I absorb through
my emotions rather than consciously gather through
my intellect. Hence the act of composition with
me is a kind of self-exploration to see what hidden
stores my mind holds. If I write upon a favorite
author, for instance, I do not give my reader some-
thing which lay clearly defined in my mind when I
began to write: I give him what I find, after closest
scrutiny, in the sub-conscious regions, —a result as
unknown to me as to him when I began to write.
The same with outdoor subjects. I come gradually
to have a feeling that I want to write upon a given
theme, —rain, for instance, or snow, — but what I
may have to say upon it is as vague as the back-
ground of one of Millet’s pictures; my hope is
entirely in the feeling or attraction which draws
my mind that way; the subject is congenial, it
sticks to me; whenever it recurs to me, it awakens
as it were a warm personal response.

Perhaps this is the experience of all other writ-
ers: their subjects find them, or bring the key to
their hidden stores. Great poets, like Milton,
however, cast about them and deliberately choose
a theme: they are not hampered by their sympa-
thies, nor are they prisoners of their own personali-
ties, like writers who depend upon this pack of
unconscious impressions at their back. An experi-
ence must lie in my mind a certain time before I
can put it upon paper, —say from three to six

258 INDOOR STUDIES

months. If there is anything in it, it will ripen
and mellow in that time. I rarely take any notes,
and I have a very poor memory, but rely upon the
affinity of my mind for a certain order of truths or
observations. What is mine will stick to me, and
what is not will drop off. When I returned from
England after a three months’ visit in the summer
of 1882, I was conscious of having brought back
with me a few observations that I might expand
into two or three short essays. But when I began
to open my pack the contents grew so upon my
hands that it reached many times the measure I at
first proposed. Indeed, when I look back over my
seven volumes I wonder where they have all come
from. Iam like a boy who at the close of the day
looks over his string of fish curiously, not one of
which did he know of in the morning, and every
one of which came to his hand from depths beyond
his ken by luck and skill in fishing. I have often
caught my fish when I least expected to, and as
often my most determined efforts have been entirely
unavailing.

It is a wise injunction, “Know thyself,” but
how hard to fulfill! This unconscious region in
one, this unconscious setting of the currents of his
life in certain directions, —how hard to know
that! The influences of his family, his race, his
times, his environment, are all deeper than the
plummet of his self-knowledge can reach. Yet
how we admire the ready man, the man who always
has complete control of his resources, who can speak

AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 259

the right word instantly! My own wit is always
belated. After the crisis is past, the right word or
the right sentence is pretty sure to appear and mock
me by its tardiness.

There is, no doubt, a great difference in men with
reference to this knowledge and command of their
own resources. Some writers seem to me to be like
those military states wherein every man is numbered,
drilled, and equipped, and ready for instant service:
the whole male population is a standing army.
Then there are men of another type who have no
standing army. ‘They are absorbed in mere living,
and, when the occasion requires, they have to
recruit their ideas slowly from the vague, uncertain
masses in the background. Hence they never cut
a brilliant figure upon paper, though they may be
capable of doing real heartfelt work.

INDEX

Achievement and fame, 239-242.

Addison, Joseph, 156.

America, Matthew Arnold’s criti-
cism of, 82, 83, 107.

Ancients, science of the, 48-51.

Arnold, Matthew, 69; essentially a
critic and filled with the senti-
ment of culture, 81; his criticism
of British civilization, 81, 82, 87,
95-97, 99, 100, 117-119; his criti-
cism of America, 82, 83, 107 ; com-
pared and contrasted with Car-
lyle, 84-87, 93; preéminently a
critical force, 87, 88; a civilizing
and centralizing force, 88-90; a
serious and noble man, 90; his
published works, 90, 91; on criti-
cism, 91, 92; his Hellenism, 92-
119; a classic writer, 93, 94; his
devotion to culture, 94 ; on poetry
97-99; on religion and religious
worship, 100-105, 125; his advo-
cacy of institutionalism, 105-116 ;
on Benjamin Franklin, 108, 109;
on Jeremy Bentham, 109; his ad-
miration of the Catholic Church,
112-116; effect of his teaching,
116-118 ; asa critic of literature,
119-121, 131; his Celtic Litera-
ture, 119 ; his Translating Homer,
119; on Wordsworth, 119; com-
pared with Saint-Beuve, 120, 121;
his style, 121, 122; consecutive-
ness of his ideas, 122-124, 136, 187;
his common-sense, 124, 125; his wit
and humor, 125-127; his Friend-
ship’s Garland, 126, 127; his
calm, unclouded intelligence, 127,
128 ; his personal appearance, 129,
130; on Emerson, 129-136, 144,
145, 148, 151-154 ; on Carlyle, 129-
132, 143; on Cardinal Newman,
132; 150 ; his academic bias, 151 ;
156; the author’s debt to, 250;
quotations from, 91-102, 104, 107-
114, 118, 119, 125-128, 132, 133,
136, 137, 143.

Arrow-heads, Indian, 15, 36.
Astronomy, ancient, 50.
Audubon, John James, 55.
Autobiography, 243, 244,

Bacon, Francis, 87, 156.

Bentham, Jeremy, 109.

Bible, the, Matthew Arnold on, 100,

3 116.

Birds, ground-building birds and
their nests, 175, 176; length of
the song season, 176; evolution
of, 196, 197.

Birrell, Augustine, on Dr. Johnson
and Carlyle, 198-200, 203.

Blackbird, red-winged. See Star-
ling, red-shouldered.

Bluebird (Sialia sialis), notes of,

37.
ei (Dolichonyx oryzivorus),

Brown, Captain John, 6-8.

Browning, Robert, 72, 142; his in-
volved style, 250, 251.

Pema, William Cullen, 69, 151,

Bumblebee, 209.

Burns, Robert, 159.

Burroughs, John, early and later
associations, 244; begins to write,
245-247 ; fondness for essays, 245 ;
sees his first author, 245, 246;
comes under the influence of
Emerson’s writings, 247, :
takes to writing outdoor sketches,
247,248; conscious of persons, 248,
249; his debts to various authors,
249-252 ; his style, 252, 253; his
deficiency in self-assertion and its
compensating advantages, 255;
must write from sympathy and
love, or not at all, 256; act of
composition a kind of self-explora-
tion, 257, 258; his knowledge and
command of his resources, 258,

9.
Butler, Joseph, his Analogy be-

262

tween Natural and Revealed Re-
ligion, 92.
Byron, Lord, 69.

Carlyle, Thomas, his debt to sci-
ence, 78, 79; his Spiritual Optics,
78; 81; compared and contrasted
with Matthew Arnold, 84-87, 93;
90; Arnold’s criticism of, 129-
132, 143; an unclassical writer,
130, 131 ; 138 ; a great writer, 139 ;
his histories, 139-141, 146; his
Oliver Cromwell, 141; his Fred-
erick the Great, 141, 146 ; his style,
141-143 ; his Life of John Ster-
ling, 142; his attitude towards
happiness, 143; not a typical lit-
erary man, 150; 151, 155, 156; his
heroic sorrow, 160, 161; his ser-
vice to his age and country, 162;
168; compared and contrasted
with Dr. Johnson, 198-206; his
imagination, 200, 201 ; his despair,
201, 202; 238, 255; quotations
from, 85, 86, 156, 160, 161, 203,
213-215.

Catholicism, Matthew Arnold on,
100, 101, 112-116.

Chewink, or towhee (Pipilo ery-
throphthalmus), 175.

Christianity, 95; Matthew Arnold
on, 102-105, 125.

Church, the English, Matthew Ar-
nold on, 100; 108. See Catholi-
cism, Protestantism, and Puritan-

ism.
City, the, 218.
Cock, crowing of the, 28.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 69, 204.
Cowley, Abraham, his essays, 164;
a lover of solitude, 223, 224; quo-
tations from, 224,
Culture, Arnold’s idea of, 94.

Darwin, Charles, 51, 52; full of the
sentiment of science, 55-57 ; 150,
193, 194.

DeKay, Charles, 71.

De Quincey, Thomas, 179.

Dixon, Hepworth, 126.

Dragon-fly, in Tennyson’s poem, 72.

Earth, the, future of, 197, 198. See
Geology.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 5, 8, 12,
25, 33; his attitude towards sci-
ence, 73-78; 81; his English
Traits, 87 ; 90; the most unclassi-
cal of poets, 98; 124; Matthew
Arnold’s criticism of, 129-186, 144,

INDEX

145, 148, 151-154; an unclassical
writer, 130, 131; 138, 142; his
lack of continuity as a writer, 144,
145; his Representative Men, 145;
his English Traits, 145, 146; his
style, 146, 147; his inspiring mes-
sage, 147, 148 ; flavor of character
strongest in his writing, 148, 149;
the spirit of his work, 150; asa
poet, 151-156; his personality,
155 ; his heroic note, 155-160 ; his
Titmouse, 159 ; his service to his
age and country, 162; influence
of his writings on the author, 247,
248, 252 ; quotations from, 52, 74-
77, 87, 112, 130, 140, 144-146, 153,
156-159, 217, 249.

England, 81, 82, 111, 112; some
points of difference between her
natural history and that of New
England and New York, 173-176 ;
things and people larger, heavier,
stronger, and coarser than in
ae 206-209; vehicles in,

English, the, Emerson on, 87; Mat-
thew Arnold on, 81, 82, 87, 95-
97, 99, 100, 117-119,

English literature, superior in
breadth and heartiness to Ameri-
can, 209-211.

Evolution, geology and, 193-198.

Eye, the spirit of the, 49.

Fame and achievement, 239-242.
Fire, the ancient idea of, 50.
Flicker. See High-hole.

Heaney Benjamin, 108, 109, 124,

Friend in solitude, a, 224, 225.
Frogs, British, 174.

Geology, Emerson on, 76; evolu-
tion and, 193-198,
Gibbon, Edward, quotation from,

God, the nature of, 227-231.

Goethe, 57 ; his scientific ideas, 59,
60; 66, 103, 109, 132, 133, 138;
quotations from, 43, 47, 88, 149,

236, 237.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 239, 240, 242.
Greece. See Hellenism.
Grosbeak, pine (Pinicola enuclea-
tor), 169.

Hanger, the, 176.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 69.
Heat, as a form of motion, 76.
Hebraism, 83, 86, 87, 93.

INDEX

Hellenism, 83, 86, 87, 93-101, 106-
108, 116-119.

Herodotus, his view of the sun, 227.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, his
essays, 246.

High-hole, or flicker (Colaptes au-
ratus), notes of, 37.

History, 139, 140.

Hog, 171.

Hoopoe, 169, 170.

Hugo, Victor, his treatment of na-
ture, 180, 190, 191; a great man,
180; his riotous sensationalism,
181-190; his The Man _ who
Laughs, 181, 183 ; his The Toilers
of the Sea, 181-183; his Les Mis-

rables, 182, 190, 191; his Napo-
leon the Little, 183; his Bug Jar-
gal, 185; his Notre Dame, 185-
189; quotations from, 190, 191.

Humboldt, Baron von, his human-
ism, 57-59.

Idiot boy, an, 173,
ina and his daughter, an old,

59.
Individualism, Matthew Arnold op-
posed to the spirit of, 106-112.
Institutionalism, 105-116.
Irving, Washington, 69, 151.

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, compared and
contrasted with Carlyle, 198-206 ;
an *‘old struggler,”’ 199, 200; his
sluggishness, 200-202; his sense
of duty, 202; his human frailties,
202 ; his religion and politics, 203 ;
agreater and more picturesque
force personally than intellectu-
ally, 203, 204; lives through Bos-

well, 204, 206; 239; quotations

from, 115, 201-204, 206.

— slate-colored. See Snow-

ird.

Keats, John, 69, 72, 73, 88; quota-
tions from, 72, 73.

Landor, Walter Savage, 69, 123, 124;
quotation from, 154.
me grasshopper, 170; notes of,
70.

Linnzus, 73.

Literature, contrasted with science,
44, 45, 51-53; not to be sup-
planted by science, 45-47, 53-55 ;
inthe works of scientists, 55-59 ;
does not keep pace with civiliza-
tion, 60-62; man alone of per-
ennial interest in, 62; things di-

263

rectly related to our natural lives
most interesting to, 63-65 ; future
effect of science on, 65, 66; not
incompatible with science, 66, 67 ;
use of science in, 69-80; American
possessed of more grace and re-
finement and less bulk than the
English or German, 209-211; ne-
cessity of sincerity in, 253, 254.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 69,

Lyell, Sir Charles, 66.

Man, evolution of, 197, 198.

Martin, English house, or martlet,
notes of, 174.

Marvell, Andrew, quotation from,

Mestizo Indian and his daughter, an
old, 59.

Milton, John, 96, 134, 138 ; his bias
of Puritanism, 151, 154.

Morley, John, 121, 122, 131.

Muskrat (Fiber zibethicus), 38.

Nations, selfishness and dishonesty
of, 212, 213.

Nature, man’s dependence on, 64;
Victor Hugo’s treatment of, 180,
190, 191; the great poet’s use of,
191 ; communion with, 222.

Newman, Cardinal, 113; his style,
121, 122 ; Matthew Arnold on, 132,

Nichols, Starr H., his Monte Rosa:
the Epic of an Alp, 71, 72.

Ornithologists, 55.
Sees. (Seiurus aurocapillus),
vt

Owl, the, of Keats, 73.

Owl, fern, 170.

Owl, white, feeding its young, 170;
nest of, 170.

a a their manner of drinking,
1

Plover, stilt, 171.
Plutarch, 48; quotations from, 48-
50.

Poet, the, and the scientist, 66, 67 ;
his use of the discoveries of sci-
ence, 70; his use of material, 77 ;
his use of nature, 191.

Poetry, the Greek theory of, 97-99;
Carlyle’s definition of, 156.

Pope, Alexander, 239, 242.

Prayer, 232-234.

Protestantism, Matthew Arnold on,
100, 101, 114, 116.

Providences, special, 228-232.

264

Puritanism, Matthew Arnold on,
97, 100, 118.

Rain-water, the ancient idea of,
9.

49,
Realism, the true, 234-239.
Recluse in Mexico, a, 219, 220.
Redstart, European, 170.
Religious belief, effect of science on,
225-234.
Romans, in the presence of nature,
179.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 69.
Ruskin, John, 147, 150, 151.

Sadi of Shiraz, the Gulistan or
Rose Garden of, 41, 42.

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 120,
121, 134, 136; quotations from,
137, 138, 156.

Sala, George Augustus, 126, 127.

Science, lifeless character of its
view of nature, 43, 44; contrasted
with literature, 44, 45, 51-53;
cannot take the place of litera-
ture, 45, 47, 53-55; artificial
knowledge, 47, 48; of the an-
cients, 48-51 ; poetic spirit in, 55-
60; certain branches of interest
to literature, 62; future effect on
literature, 65, 66; not incompat-
ible with literature, 66, 67; many
poets not influenced by, 69;
Wordsworth on, 69, 70; its influ-
ence on certain poets, 71-77 ; Car-
lyle’s debt to, 78, 79 ; poetic truths
in, 79, 80; its effect on religious
beliefs, 225-234.

Selborne, 176, 177.

Shakespeare, 46, 138, 154, 155, 184,
238 ; quotations from, 25, 141.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 69.

Shrike (Lanius sp.), notes of, 38.

Skunk (Mephitis mephitica), inter-
viewed by Thoreau, 40.

Snow, the spirit of, 48, 49.
Snowbird, or slate-colored junco
(Junco hyemalis), nest of, 176.
Solitude, pleasant and profitable to
certain natures, 217-221 ; the liter-
aiure of, 221-225 ; a friend in, 224,

Sow, an aged, 171.
aa fox (Passerella iliaea),

Sparrow, song (Melospiza fasci-
ata), 35,175; nest of, 176.

Sparrow, tree, or Canada (Spizella
monticola), 35.

Spencer, Herbert, 79.

INDEX

Starling, red-shouldered, or red-
winged blackbird (Agelaius
pheniceus), notes of, 38.

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 210.

Sun, the, not the special appurte-
nance of the earth, 226-228.

Swallow, barn (Chelidon erythro-
gaster), notes of, 174; nest of,
175

Swallow, chimney, or chimney swift
(Chetura pelagica), notes of, 175 ;
nest of, 175.

Swallow, cliff (Petrochelidon luni-
Jrons), notes of, 174.

Swallow, European house or chim-
ney, notes of, 174, 175; nest of,

75.

Swallows, 170.

Swift, chimney. See Swallow, chim-
ney.

Swift, European,‘ notes of, 175;
nest of, 175.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 69,
185'; his poetry, 251, 252; quota-
tion from, 251.

Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, 140.

Tennyson, Alfred, his debt to physi-
eal science, 72; quotation from,
72.

Thoreau, Henry David, his journal,
1-3, 38; his 4 Week on the Concord
and Merrimac Rivers, 2; his
Walden, 2, 29-32; his private
letters, 3; his fame steadily in-
creasing, 3,4; his individuality,
4, 5; not a skulker, 5-8; his plea
for John Brown, 6,7; Brown’s
spiritual brother, 8; not a leader
of men, 8,9 ; his gift to the world,
9,10; his strength of character
and devotion to principle, 10, 11;
a wild man and a lover of the
wild, 11-16 ; his heritage, 12; his
feeling for the Indian, 15, 16; his
refinement and sensitiveness, 16,
17; his stubbornness and spirit
of antagonism, 17, 18; his griefs,
18, 19 ; love and hatred seemingly
inseparable in his mind, 19, 20;
his passion for storms, 21, 22; his
playful perversity, 22; his atti-
tude towards men, 22, 23, 40, 248,
249; on Walt Whitman, 23; his
exaggeration of statement, 23-28 ;
his bragging, 28-30; his humor,
31, 32; his attitude towards na-
ture, 33-37; as an observer, 34-
41; his eye for arrow-heads, 36 ;
his rare descriptive powers, 37,

INDEX

38; an azad or free man, 42; 150,
161, 220, 248; quotations from,
1, 4, 7-9, 12, 14-22, 24, 27-33, 35-
42,

Thrasher, brown (Harporhynchus
rufus), 175.

Times, The, 127.

Toad, breeding of, 173, 174; young
of, 174, 7

Tortoise, Gilbert White’s, 172, 173.

Towhee. See Chewink.

Turgénef, quotation from, 232,

Virgil, 48.

Wagtail, 171.

War, the ethics of, 211-217.

Warbler, Canada (Sylvania cana-
densis), 175.

Whipple, Edwin Percy, 246.

Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus voci-
Jerus), song of, 38.

White, Gilbert, 33; source of his
charm, 163-168; as an observer,
168-173 ; some points of difference
between the natural history of

265

New England and New York and
that of England, as exhibited in
White’s Selborne, 173-176; his
house and haunts, 176; his tomb,
177; his place in literature, 177 ;
quotations from, 170-173, 176,

White, Richard Grant, 163.

Whitman, Walt, Thoreau on, 23 ; 72,
78, 142; an exception to the
American tendency to over-refine-
ment, 211; the author’s debt to,
249, 250, 252.

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 69, 252.

Wilson, Alexander, 55, 66.

Women, as hermits, 221.

Miged ene (Arctomys monaz), 14,

Wordsworth, William, his attitude
towards science, 69, 70; Matthew
Arnold on, 119, 134; 138; his di-
dactic bias, 151; 154 ; the poet of
solitude, 221-223 ; 250; quotations
from, 44, 222, 223.

Yew, American, 177.
Yew, English, 177.

Stave