MY STUDY WINDOWS BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, A.M. PROFESSOR OF BELLES-LETTRES IN HARVARD COLLEGE THIRD EDITION LONDON SAMPSON LOW, SON, AND MARSTON CROWN BUILDINGS, 188 FLEET STREET 1871 I CONTENTS. PAGE MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE . ' , . . j A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER 1 8 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS . .... 4! A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER . . . . . . 63 CARLYLE £S ABRAHAM LINCOLN , . . , . . . .114 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES TERCIVAL . .135 THOREAU 145 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES 157 CHAUCER 168 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 214 EMERSON, THE LECTURER 274 POPE 2Sl fs 2320 A) Mftl/V/ MY STUDY WINDOWS. MY GARJDEN- ACQUAINTANCE. ONE of the most delightful books in my father's library was White's Natural History of Selborne. For me it has rather gained in charm with years. I used to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure I found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of the simple expe dients of this natural magic. Open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially garrulous Fellow of Oriel. and find refreshment instead of fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him as he ambles along on his hobby horse, now pointing to a pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In ^simplicity of taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton ; in tenderness toward what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descriptions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me familiar with his neighbourhood. Since I first read him, I have walked over some of his favourite haunts, but I still see them through his eyes rather than by any recollection of actual and personal vision. The book has also the delight- fulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems never to have had any harder work to do than to study the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of his peaches on the wall. His volumes are the journal of Adam in Paradise, Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. B 2 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his. It is vastly better than to — See great Diocletian walk In the Salonian garden's noble shade, for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the noises of Rome, while here the world has no entrance. No rumour of the revolt of the American Colonies seems to have reached him. l The natural term of an hog's life ' has more interest for him than that of an empire. Burgoyne may surrender and welcome ; of what consequence is that compared with the fact that we can explain the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over 'to scratch themselves with one claw J ? All the couriers in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. White's little Chartreuse ; but the arrival of the house-martin a day earlier or later than last year is a piece of news worth sending express to all his correspon dents. Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent humour, so much the more delicious because unsuspected by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity in adding to the list of the British, and still more of the Sel- bornian, fauna! I believe he would gladly have consented to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that means the occasional presence within the parish limits of either of these anthropophagous brutes could have been established. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by * having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl. Most of us have known our share of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been thought worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charddnus himan- topust with no back toe, and therefore 'liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations ' ! I wonder, by the way, if meta physicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the ac quaintance in Sussex of * an old family tortoise,' which had then been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means of tracing the growth of his passion, but in 1780 we find him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. 'The rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when I MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3 turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my garden.' It reads like a Court Journal : ' Yesterday morning H.R.H. the Princess Alice took an airing of half an hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle.' This tortoise might have been a member of the Royal Society, if he could have condescended to so ignoble an ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface inclined at -a certain angle with the plane of the horizon took more of the sun's rays. The tortoise had always known this (though he unostenta tiously made no parade of it), and used accordingly to tilt himself up against the garden- wall in the autumn. He seems to have been more of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for nothing but to get under a cabbage- leaf when it rained, or the sun was too hot, and to bury him self alive before frost — a four-footed Diogenes, who carried his tub on his back. There are moods in which this kind of history is infinitely refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to look down upon as tne drudges of instinct are members of a common wealth whose constitution rests on immovable bases. Never any need of reconstruction there ! They never dream of settling it by vote that eight hours are equal to ten, or that one creature is as clever as another and no more. They do not use their poor wits in regulating God's clocks, nor think they cannot go astray so long as they carry their guide-board about with them — a delusion we often practise upon our selves with our high and mighty reason, that admirable finger-post which points every way and always right. It isv good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr.l White's, where Man is the least important of animals. Butv one who, like me, has always lived in the country and always on the same spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sym pathies. Do we not share his indignation at that stupid Martin who had graduated his thermometer no lower than 4° above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our fingers just as they were closing upon it? No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteoro logical ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbours. With us descendants of B 2 4 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. the Puritans especially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value thermometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The other day (July 5) I marked 98° in the shade, my high- water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen it before. I happened to meet a neighbour; as we mopped our brows at each other, he told me that he had just cleared 100°, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own) ; but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a-tip- toe, could look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that he had a true country-gentleman's interest in the wea thercock ; that his first question on coming down of a morn ing was, like Barabas's, Into what quarter peers my halcyon's bill ? It is an innocent and healthful employment of the mind, distracting one from too continual study of himself, and lead ing him to dwell rather upon the indigestions of the elements than his own. ' Did the wind back round, or go about with the sun ? ' is a rational question that bears not remotely on the making of hay and the prosperity of crops. I have little doubt that the regulated observation of the vane in many different places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate observation, whatever its object, that has not its final use and value for some one or other, It is even to be hoped that the speculations of our newspaper editors and their myriad correspondents upon the signs of the poll- MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 5 tical atmosphere may also fill their appointed place in a well- regulated universe, if it be only that of supplying so many more jack-o'-lanterns to the future historian. Nay, the ob servations on finance of an M. C. whose sole knowledge of the subject has been derived from a lifelong success in getting a living out of the public without paying any equivalent therefor, will perhaps be of interest hereafter to some explorer of our cloaca maxima, whenever it is cleansed. For many years I have been in the habit of noting down some of the leading events of my embowered solitude, such as the coming of certain birds and the like, — a kind of memoires pour servir, after the fashion of White, rather than properly digested natural history. I- thought it not impossible that a few simple stories of my winged acquaintances might be found entertaining by persons of kindred taste. There is a common notion that animals are better meteoro logists than men, and I have little doubt that in immediate weather-wisdom they have the advantage of our sophisticated senses (though I suspect a sailor or shepherd would be their match), but I have seen nothing that leads me to believe their minds capable of erecting the horoscope of a whole season, and letting us know beforehand whether the winter will be severe or the summer rainless. I more than suspect that the clerk of the weather himself does not always know very long in advance whether he is to draw an order for hot or cold, dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce likely to be wiser. I have noted but two days' difference in the coming of the song-sparrow between a very early and a very backward spring. This very year I saw the linnets at work thatching, just before a snow-storm which covered the ground several inches deep for a number of days. They struck work and left us for a while, no doubt in search of food. Birds fre quently perish from sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of which they had no foreboding. More than thirty years ago, a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window, was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of mingled rain and snow, which probably killed many of them. It should seem that their coming was dated by the height of the sun, which betrays them into unthrifty matrimony; So nature pricketh them. in their corages ; but their going is another matter. The chimney-swallows O MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. leave us early, for example, apparently so soon as their latest fledglings are firm enough of wing to attempt the long row ing-match that is before them. On the other hand, the wild- geese probably do not leave the North till they are frozen out, for I have heard their bugles sounding southward so late as the middle of December. What may be called local migrations are doubtless dictated by the chances of food. I have once been visited by large flights of cross-bills ; and whenever the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat the berries on my hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the local, or rather geographical partialities of birds. Never before this summer (1870) have the king-birds, handsomest of flycatchers, built in my orchard; though I always know where to find them within half a mile. The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird in Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here till last July, when I found a female busy among my raspberries and surprisingly bold. I hope she was prospecting with a view to settlement in our garden. She seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit, and I would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win over so delightful a neighbour. The return of the robin is commonly announced by the newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering-place, as the first authentic notification of spring. And such his appearance in the orchard and garden un doubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I have seen him when the thermometer marked 1 5 degrees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably within, like Emerson's Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The robin has a bad reputation among people who do not value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is, I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle Js a' that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly for feited that superiority which belongs to the children of nature. MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 7 He has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from many successive committees of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and freely exercises his right of eminent domain. His is the earliest mess of green peas ; his all the mulberries I had fancied mine. But if he gets also the lion's share of the raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones in the woods that solace the pedestrian and give a mo mentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White Hills. He keeps a strict eye over one's fruit, and knows to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long enough in the sun. During the severe drought a few years ago, the robins wholly vanished from my garden. I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. Meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing, seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched them from day to day till they should have secreted sugar enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind that I would celebrate my vintage the next morning. But the robins too had somehow kept note of them. They must have sent out spies, as did the Jews into the promised land, before I was stirring. When I went with my basket, at least a dozen of these winged vintagers bustled out from among the leaves, and alighting on the nearest trees interchanged some shrill remarks about me of a derogatory nature. They had fairly sacked the vine. Not Wellington's veterans made cleaner work of a Spanish town ; not Federals or Confede rates were ever more impartial in the confiscation of neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them a profounder secret to her than I had meant. The tattered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest-home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my basket, as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an eagle's nest ! I could not help laughing ; and the robins seemed to join heartily in the merriment. There was a native grape-vine close by, blue with its less refined abundance, but my cunning thieves preferred the foreign flavour. Could I tax them with want of taste ? The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, as, like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return of light and warmth to the world, is unrivalled. There are a 8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. hundred singing like one. They are noisy enough then, and sing, as poets should, with no afterthought. But when they come after cherries to the tree near my window, they muffle their voices, and their faint pip, pip, pop! sounds far away at the bottom of the garden, where they know I shall not suspect them of robbing the great black-walnut of its bitter- rinded store.* They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in the sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green of the fringe-tree ! After they have pinched and shaken all the life out of an earthworm, as Italian cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. ' Do / look like a bird that knows the flavour of raw vermin ? I throw myself upon ajuryof my peers. Ask anyrobiri if he ever ate anything less ascetic than the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer that his vow forbids him.7 Can such an open bosom cover such depravity ? Alas, yes ! I have no doubt his breast was redder at that very moment with the blood of my raspberries. On the whole, he is a doubtful friend in the garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries, and is not averse from early pears. But when we remember how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in an incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaustless in her invention of new insects hostile to vegetation, perhaps we may reckon that he does more good than harm. For my own part, I would rather have his cheerfulness and kind neighbourhood than many berries. For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer regard. Always a good singer, he sometimes nearly equals the brown thrush, and has the merit of keeping up his music later in the evening than any bird of my familiar acquaintance. Ever since I can remember, a pair of them have built in a gigantic syringa, near our front door, and I have known the male to sing almost uninterruptedly during the evenings of early summer till twilight duskened into dark. They differ greatly in vocal talent, but all have a delightful way of * The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the most beguiling mockery of distance. MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 9 crooning over, and, as it were, rehearsing their song in an undertone, which makes their nearness always unobtrusive. Though there is the most trustworthy witness to the imitative propensity of this bird, I have only once, during an intimacy of more than forty years, heard him indulge it. In that case, the imitation was by no means so close as to deceive, but a free reproduction of the notes of some other birds, especially of the oriole, as a kind of variation in his own song. The catbird is as shy as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his nest or his fledglings are approached does he become noisy and almost aggressive. I have known him to station his young in a thick cornel-bush on the edge of the raspberry-bed, after the fruit began to ripen, and feed them there for a week or more. In such cases he shows none of that conscious guilt which makes the robin contemptible. On the contrary, he will maintain his post in the thicket, and sharply scold the intruder who ventures to steal his berries. After all, his claim is only for tithes, while the robin will bag your entire crop if he get a chance. Dr. Watts's statement that ' birds in their little nests agree,' like too many others intended to form the infant mind, is very far from being true. On the contrary, the most peaceful relation of the different species to each other is that of armed neutrality. They are very jealous of neighbours. A few years ago, I was much interested in the housebuilding of a pair of summer yellow-birds. They had chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall white lilac, within easy eye-shot of a chamber window. A very pleasant thing it was to see their little home growing with mutual help, to watch their industrious skill interrupted only by little flirts and snatches of endearment, frugally cut short by the common-sense of the tiny housewife. They had brought their work nearly to an end, and had already begun to line it with fern-down, the gathering of which demanded more distant journeys and longer absences. But, alas ! the syringa, immemorial manor of the catbirds, was not more than twenty feet away, and these 'giddy neighbours' had, as it appeared, been all along jealously watchful, though silent, witnesses of what they deemed an intrusion of squatters. No sooner were the pretty mates fairly gone for a new load of lining, than To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots Came stealing. IO MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. Silently they flew back and forth, each giving a vengeful dab at the nest in passing. They did not fall-to and delibe rately ^ destroy it, for they might have been caught at their mischief. As it was, whenever the yellow-birds came back, their enemies were hidden in their own sight-proof bush. Several times their unconscious victims repaired damages, but at length, after counsel taken together, they gave it up. Perhaps, like other unlettered folk, they came to the con clusion that the Devil was in it, and yielded to the invisible persecutions of witchcraft. The robins, by constant attacks and annoyances, have suc ceeded in driving off the blue-jays who used to build in our pines, their gay colours and quaint noisy ways making them welcome and amusing neighbours. I once had the chance of doing a kindness to a household of them, which they re ceived with very friendly condescension. I had had my eye for some time upon a nest, and was puzzled by a constant fluttering of what seemed full-grown wings in it whenever I drew nigh. At last I climbed the tree, in spite of angry pro tests from the old birds against my intrusion. The mysteiy had a very simple solution. In building the nest, a long piece of packthread had been somewhat loosely woven in. Three of the young had contrived to entangle themselves in it, and had become full-grown without being able to launch themselves upon the air. One was unharmed ; another had so tightly twisted the cord about its shank that one foot was curled up and seemed paralyzed ; the third, in its struggles to escape, had sawn through the flesh of the thigh and so much harmed itself that I thought it humane to put an end to its misery. When I took out my knife to cut their hempen bonds, the heads of the family seemed to divine my friendly intent. Suddenly ceasing their cries and threats, they perched quietly within reach of my hand, and watched me in my work of manumission. This, owing to the fluttering terror of the prisoners, was an affair of some delicacy ; but ere long I was rewarded by seeing one of them fly away to a neigh bouring tree, while the cripple, making a parachute of his wings, came lightly to the ground, and hopped off as well as he could with one leg, obsequiously waited on by his elders. A week later I had the satisfaction of meeting him in the pine-walk, in good spirits, and already so far recovered as to be able to balance himself with the lame foot. I have MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. II no doubt that in his old age he accounted for his lameness by some handsome story of a wound received at the famous Battle of the Pines, when our tribe, overcome by numbers, was driven from its ancient camping-ground. Of late years the jays have visited us only at intervals ; and in winter their bright plumage, set off by the snow, and their cheerful cry, are especially welcome. They would have furnished ALsop with a fable, for the feathered crest in which they seem to take so much satisfaction is often their fatal snare. Country boys make a hole with their finger in the snow-crust just large enough to admit the jay's head, and, hollowing it out somewhat beneath, bait it with a few kernels of corn. The crest slips easily into the trap, but refuses to be pulled out again, and he who came to feast remains a prey. Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted a settlement in my pines, and twice have the robins, who claim a right of pre-emption, so successfully played the part of border-ruffians as to drive them away, — to my great regret, for they are the best substitute we have for rooks. At Shady Hill (now, alas ! empty of its so long loved household) they build by hundreds, and nothing can be more cheery than their creak ing clatter (like a convention of old-fashioned tavern-signs) as they gather at evening to debate in mass meeting their windy politics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events of the day. Their port is grave, and their stalk across the turf as martial as that of a second-rate ghost in Hamlet. They never meddled with my corn, so far as I could discover. For a few years I had crows, but their nests are an irre sistible bait for boys, and their settlement was broken up. They grew so wonted as to throw off a great part of their shyness, and to tolerate my near approach. One very hot day I stood for some time within twenty feet of a mother and three children, who sat on an elm bough over my head, gasping in the sultry air, and holding their wings half-spread for coolness. All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover, and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint Preux standard has something the effect of a Missis sippi boatman quoting Tennyson. Yet there are few things 12 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. to my ear more melodious than his caw of a clear winter morning as it drops to you filtered through five hundred fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all smaller birds makes the moral character of the crow, for all his deaconlike demeanour and garb, somewhat questionable. He could never sally forth without insult. The golden robins, espe cially, would chase him as far as I could follow with my eye, making him duck clumsily to avoid their importunate bills. I do not believe, however, that he robbed any nests hereabouts, for the refuse of the gas-works, which, in our free-and-easy community, is allowed to poison the river, supplied him with dead alewives in abundance. I used to watch him making his periodical visits to the salt-marshes and coming back with a fish in his beak to his young savages, who, no doubt, like it in that condition which makes it savoury to the Kanakas and other corvine races of men. Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have seen seven males flashing about the garden at once. A merry crew of them swing their hammocks from the pendulous boughs. During one of these latter years, when the canker-worms stripped our elms as bare as winter, these birds went to the trouble of rebuilding their unroofed nests, and chose for the purpose trees which are safe from those swarming vandals, such as the ash and the button-wood. One year a pair (dis turbed, I suppose, elsewhere) built a second nest in an elm, within a few yards of the house. My friend, Edward E. Hale, told me once that the oriole rejected from his web all strands of brilliant colour, and I thought it a striking example of that instinct of concealment noticeable in many birds, though it should seem in this instance that the nest was amply protected by its position from all marauders but owls and squirrels. Last year, however, I had the fullest proof that Mr. Hale was mistaken. A pair of orioles built on the lowest trailer of a weeping elm, which hung within ten feet of our drawing-room window, and so low that I could reach it from the ground. The nest was wholly woven and felted with ravellings of woollen carpet in which scarlet predomi nated. Would the same thing have happened in the woods ? Or did the nearness of a human dwelling perhaps give the birds a greater feeling of security? They are very bold, by the way, in quest of cordage, and I have often watched them MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 13 stripping the fibrous bark from a honeysuckle growing over the Very door. But, indeed, all my birds look upon me as if I were a mere tenant at will, and they were landlords. With shame I confess it, I have been bullied even by a humming bird. This spring, as I was cleansing a pear-tree of its lichens, one of these little zigzagging blurs came purring toward me, couching his long bill like a lance, his throat sparkling with angry fire, to warn me off from a Missouri- currant whose honey he was sipping. And many a time he has driven me out of a flower-bed. This summer, by the way, a pair of these winged emeralds fastened their mossy acorn-cup upon a bough of the same elm which the orioles had enlivened the year before. We watched all their pro ceedings from the window through an opera-glass, and saw their two nestlings grow from black needles with a tuft of down at the lower end, till they whirled away on their first short experimental flights. They became strong of wing in a surprisingly short time, and I never saw them or the male bird after, though the female was regular as usual in her visits to our petunias and verbenas. I do not think it ground enough for a generalization, but in the many times when I watched the old birds feeding their young, the mother always alighted, while the father as uniformly remained upon the wing. The bobolinks are generally chance visitors, tinklingthrough the garden in blossoming-time, but this year, owing to the long rains early in the season, their favourite meadows were flooded, and they were driven to the upland. So I had a pair of them domiciled in my grass-field. The male used to perch in an apple-tree, then in full bloom, and, while I stood perfectly still close by, he would circle away, quivering round the entire field of five acres, with no break in his song, and settle down again among the blossoms, to be hurried away almost immediately by a new rapture of music. He had the volubility of an Italian charlatan at a fair, and, like him, appeared to be proclaiming the merits of some quack re medy. Opodeldoc-opodeldoc-try-Doctor-Lincoln's-opodeldoc / he seemed to repeat over and over again, with a rapidity that would have distanced the deftest-tongued Figaro that ever rattled. I remember Count Gurowski saying once, with that easy superiority of knowledge about this country which is the monopoly of foreigners, that we had no singing-birds ! Well 14 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. well, Mr. Hepworth Dixon has found the typical America in Oneida and Salt Lake City. Of course, an intelligent Euro pean is the best judge of these matters. The truth is there are more singing-birds in Europe because there are fewer forests. These songsters love the neighbourhood of man because hawks and owls are rarer, while their own food is more abundant. Most people seem to think, the more trees the more birds. Even Chateaubriand, who first tried the primitive-forest-cure, and whose description of the wilderness in its imaginative effects is unmatched, fancies the 'people of the air singing their hymns to him.' So far as my own observation goes, the farther one penetrates the sombre soli tudes of the woods, the more seldom does he hear the voice of any singing-bird. In spite of Chateaubriand's minuteness of detail, in spite of that marvellous reverberation of the de crepit tree falling of its own weight, which he was the first to notice, I cannot help doubting whether he made his way very deep into the wilderness. At any rate, in a letter to Fon- tanes, written in 1804, he speaks of mes chevaux paissant d quelque distance. To be sure Chateaubriand was apt to mount the high horse, and this may have been but an after thought of the grand seigneur, but certainly one would not make much headway on horseback toward the druid fast nesses of the primeval pine. The bobolinks build in considerable numbers in a meadow within a quarter of a mile of us. A houseless lane passes through the midst of their camp, and in clear westerly weather, at the right season, one may hear a score of them singing at once. When they are breeding, if I chance to pass, one of the male birds always accompanies me like a constable, flitting from post to post of the rail-fence, with a short note of reproof continually repeated, till I am fairly out of the neighbourhood. Then he will swing away into the air and run down the wind, gurgling music without stint over the unheeding tussocks of meadow-grass and dark clumps of bulrushes that mark his domain. We have no bird whose song will match the nightin gale's in compass, none whose note is so rich as that of the European blackbird; but for mere rapture I have never heard the bobolink's rival. But his opera-season is a short one. The ground and tree sparrows are our most constant performers. It is now late in August, and one of the latter MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 15 sings every day and all day long in the garden. Till within a fortnight, a pair of indigo-birds would keep up their lively duo for an hour together. While I write, I hear an oriole gay as in June, and the plaintive may-be of the goldfinch tells me he is stealing my lettuce-seeds. I know not what the experience of others may have been, but the only _bird I have ever heard sing in the night has been the chip-bird. I should say he sang about as often during the darkness as cocks crow. One can hardly help fancying that he sings in his dreams. Father of light, what sunnie seed, What g_lance of day hast thou confined Into this bird ? To all the breed This busie ray thou hast assigned ; Their magnetism works all night, And dreams of Paradise and light On second thought, I remember to have heard the cuckoo strike the hours nearly all night with the regularity of a Swiss clock. The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to that end, bring us the flicker every summer, and almost daily I hear his wild scream and laugh close at hand, himself invisible. He is a shy bird, but a few days ago I had the satisfaction of studying him through the blinds as he sat on a tree within a few feet of me. Seen so near and at rest, he makes good his claim to the title of pigeon-woodpecker. Lumberers have a notion that he is harmful to timber, digging little holes through the bark to encourage the settlement of insects. The regular rings of such perforations which one may see in almost any apple-orchard seem to give some probability to this theory. Almost every season a solitary quail visits us, and, unseen among the currant-bushes, calls Bob White, Bob White, as if he were playing at hide-and-seek with that ima ginary being. A rarer visitant is the turtle-dove, whose plea sant coo (something like the muffled crow of a cock from a coop covered with snow) I have sometimes heard, and whom I once had the good luck to see close by me in the mulberry- tree. The wild-pigeon, once numerous, I have not seen for many years.* Of savage birds, a hen-hawk now and then quarters himself upon us for a few days, sitting sluggish in a tree after a surfeit of poultry. One of them once offered me a near shot from my study- window one drizzly day for several * They made their appearance again this summer (1870). 1 6 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE, hours. But it was Sunday, and I gave him the benefit of it§ gracious truce of God. Certain birds have disappeared from our neighbourhood within my memory. I remember when the whippoorwill could be heard in Sweet Auburn. The night-hawk, once common, is now rare. The brown thrush has moved farther up country. For years I have not seen or heard any of the larger owls, whose hooting was one of my boyish terrors. The cliff-swallow, strange emigrant, that eastward takes his way, has come and gone again in my time. The bank- swallows, wellnigh innumerable during my boyhood, no longer frequent the crumbly cliff of the gravel-pit by the river. The barn-swallows, which once swarmed in our barn, flashing through the dusty sunstreaks of the mow, have been gone these many years. My father would lead me out to see them gather on the roof, and take counsel before their yearly migration, as Mr. White used to see them at Selborne. Elien, fugaces! Thank fortune, the swift still glues his nest, and rolls his distant thunders night and day in the wide-throated chimneys, still sprinkles the evening air with his merry twit tering. The populous heronry in Fresh Pond meadows has been wellnigh broken up, but still a pair or two haunt the old home, as the gypsies of Ellangowan their ruined huts, and every evening fly over us riverwards, clearing their throats with a hoarse hawk as they go, and, in cloudy weather, scarce higher than the tops of the chimneys. Sometimes I have known one to alight in one of our trees, though for what pur pose I never could divine. Kingfishers have sometimes puz zled me in the same way, perched at high noon in a pine, springing their watchman's rattle when they flitted away from my curiosity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy heads along as a man does a wheelbarrow. Some birds have left us, I suppose, because the country is growing less wild. I once found a summer duck's nest within quarter of a mile of our house, but such a trouvaille would be impossible now as Kidd's treasure. And yet the mere taming of the neighbourhood does not quite satisfy me as an explanation. Twenty years ago, on my way to bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace of woodcock, on the miry edge of a spring within a few rods of a house, and constantly visited by thirsty cows. There was no growth of any kind to conceal them, and yet these ordinarily shy MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. IJ birds were almost as indifferent to my passing as common poultry would have been. Since bird-nesting has become scientific, and dignified itself as oology, that, no doubt, is partly to blame for some of our losses. But some old friends are constant. Wilson's thrush comes every year to remind me of that most poetic of ornithologists. He flits before me through the pine-walk like the very genius of solitude. A pair of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. Always on the same brick, and never more than a single pair, though two broods of five each are raised there every summer. How do they settle their claim to the homestead ? By what right of pri mogeniture ? Once the children of a man employed about the place oologized the nest, and the pewees left us for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the messmates of the Ancient Mariner did towards him after he had shot the albatross. But the pewees came back at last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so near my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly on the wing with the unerring precision a stately Trasteverina shows in the capture of her smaller deer. The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morning; and during the early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of pewee with a slender whistle, unheard at any other time. He saddens with the season, and, as summer declines, he changes his note to eheu, pewee! as if in lamentation. Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so lamiliar as often to pursue a fly through the open window into my library'. There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but has had, at some time or other, a happy homestead among its boughs, to which I cannot say, Many light hearts and wings, Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers. My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm were I to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson's thrush, nor hear in haying-time the metallic ring of his song, that justifies his rustic name of scythe-whet. I protect my game as jealously as an English squire. If anybody had oologized a certain cuckoo's nest I know of (I have a pair in my garden every year), it would have left me a sore place in my C 1 8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. mind for weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back to the mansuetude they showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive the involuntary pun) they had grown accustomed to man and knew his savage ways. And they repay your kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever to breed contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them, preferring that to the Puritan way with the natives, which converted them to a little Hebraism and a great deal of Medford rum. If they will not come near enough to me (as most of them will), I bring them close with an opera-glass — a much better weapon than a gun. I would not, if I could, convert them from their pretty pagan ways. The only one I sometimes have savage doubts about is the red squirrel. I think he oologizes. I know he eats cherries (we counted five of them at one time in a single tree, the stones pattering down like the sparse hail that preludes a storm), and that he gnaws off the small end of pears- to get at the seeds. He steals the corn from under the noses of my poultry. But what would you have ? He will come down upon the limb of the tree I am lying under till he is within a yard of me. He and his mate will scurry up and down the great black- walnut for my diversion, chattering like monkeys. Can I sign his death- warrant who has tolerated me about his grounds so long ? Not I. Let them steal, and welcome. I am sure I should, had I had the same bringing up and the same temptation. As for the birds, I do not believe there is one of them but does more good than harm ; and of how many featherless bipeds can this be said ? A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. y-instinct in our common humanity, that I believe I could fill a house by advertising a free lecture on Tupper considered as a philosophic poet, or on my personal C2 20 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. recollections of the late James K. Polk. This being so, I have sometimes wondered that the peep-shows which Nature provides with such endless variety for her children, and to which we are admitted on the bare condition of having eyes, should be so generally neglected. To be sure, eyes are not so common as people think, or poets would be plentier, and perhaps also these exhibitions of hers are cheapened in esti mation by the fact that in enjoying them we are not getting the better of anybody else. Your true lovers of nature, how ever, contrive to get even this solace ; and Wordsworth, looking upon mountains as his own peculiar sweethearts, was jealous of anybody else who ventured upon even the most innocent flirtation with them. As if such fellows, indeed, could pretend to that nicer sense of what-d'ye-call-it which was so remarkable in him ! Marry come up ! Mountains, no doubt, may inspire a profounder and more exclusive passion, but on the whole I am not sorry to have been born and bred among more domestic scenes, where I can be hos pitable without a pang. I am going to ask you presently to take potluck with me at a board where Winter shall supply whatever there is of cheer. I think the old fellow has hitherto had scant justice done him in the main. We make him the symbol of old age or death, and think we have settled the matter. As if old age were never kindly as well as frosty ; as if it had no reverend graces of its own as good in their way as the noisy imperti nence of childhood, the elbowing self-conceit of youth, or the pompous mediocrity of middle life. As if there were anything discreditable in death, or nobody had ever longed for it ! Suppose we grant that Winter is the sleep of the year, what then ? I take it upon me to say that his dreams are finer than the best reality of his waking rivals. Sleep, Silence' child, the father of soft Rest, is a very agreeable acquaintance, and most of us are better employed in his company than anywhere else. For my own part, I think Winter a pretty wide-awake old boy, and his bluff sincerity and hearty ways are more congenial to my mood, and more wholesome for me, than any charms of which his rivals are capable. Spring is a fickle mistress, who either does not know her own mind, or is so long in making it up, whether you shall have her or not have her A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 21 that one gets tired at last of her pretty miffs and reconcilia tions. You go to her to be cheered up a bit, and ten to one catch her in the sulks, expecting you to find enough good- humour for both. After she has become Mrs. Summer she grows a little more staid in her demeanour, and her abun dant table, where you are sure to get the earliest fruits and vegetables of the season, is a good foundation for steady friendship ; but she has lost that delicious aroma of maiden hood, and what was delicately rounded grace in the girl gives more than hints of something like redundance in the matron. Autumn is the poet of the family. He gets you up a splendour that you would say was made out of real sunset ; but it is nothing more than a few hectic leaves, when all is done. He is but a sentimentalist, after all ; a kind of Lamar- tine whining along the ancestral avenues he has made bare timber of, and begging a contribution of good spirits from your own savings to keep him in countenance. But WinterA has his delicate sensibilities too, only he does not make\ them as good as indelicate by thrusting them for ever in your face. He is a better poet than Autumn, when he has a mind, but, like a truly great one as he is, he brings you down to your bare manhood, and bids you understand him out of that, with no adventitious helps of association, or he will none of you. He does not touch those melancholy chords on which Autumn is as great a master as Heine. Well, is there no such thing as thrumming on them and maundering over them till they get out of tune, and you wish some manly hand would crash through them and leave them dangling brokenly for ever ? Take Winter as you find him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow, with no nonsense in him, and tolerating none in you, which is a great comfort in the long run. He is not what they call a genial critic, but bring a real man along with you, and you will find there is a crabbed generosity about the old cynic that you would not exchange for all the creamy concessions of Autumn. * Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness/ quotha ? That's just it ; Winter soon blows your head clear of fog and makes you see things as they are. I thank him for it ! The truth is, between ourselves, I have a very good opinion of the whole family, who always welcome me without making me feel as if I were too much of a poor relation. There ought to be some kind of distance, never so little, you know, to 22 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. give the true relish. They are as good company, the worst of them, as any I know, and I am not a little flattered by a condescension from any one of them ; but I happen to hold Winter's retainer this time, and, like an honest advocate, am bound to make as good a showing as I can for him, even if it cost a few slurs upon the rest of the household. Moreover, Winter is coming, and one would like to get on the blind side of him. The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a mirror for the moods of the mind, is a modern thing. The fleeing to her as an escape from man was brought into fashion by Rousseau ; for his prototype Petrarch, though he had a taste for pretty scenery, had a true antique horror for the grander aspects of nature. He got once to the top of Mount Ventoux, but it is very plain that he did not enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a century or so that the search after the picturesque has been a safe employment. It is not so even now in Greece or Southern Italy. Where the Anglo-Saxon carves his cold fowl, and leaves the relics of his picnic, the ancient or mediaeval man might be pretty confident that some ruffian would try the edge of his knife on a chicken of the Platonic sort, and leave more precious bones as an offering to the genius of the place. The ancients were cer tainly more social than we, though that, perhaps, was natural enough, when a good part of the world was still covered with forest. They huddled together in cities as well for safety as to keep their minds warm. The Romans had a fondness for country life, but they had fine roads, and Rome was always within easy reach. The author of the Book of Job is the earliest I know of who showed any profound sense of the moral meaning of the outward world ; and I think none has approached him since, though Wordsworth comes nearest with the first two books of the ' Prelude.' But their feeling is not precisely of the kind I speak of as modern, and which gave rise to what is called descriptive poetry. Chaucer opens his Clerk's Tale with a bit of landscape admirable for its large style, and as well composed as any Claude. There is right at the west end of Itaille, Down at the root of Vesulus the cold, A lusty plain abundant of vitaille, Where many a tower and town thou mayst behold, That founded were in time of fathers old, And many an other delectable sight ; And Saluces this noble country hight. A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 23 What an airy precision of touch there is here, and what a sure eye for the points of character in landscape ! But the picture is altogether subsidiary. No doubt the works of Salvator Rosa and Caspar Poussin show that there must have been some amateur taste for the grand and terrible in scenery; but the British poet Thomson ( ' sweet-souled ' is Wordsworth's apt word) was the first to do with words what they had done partially with colours. He was turgid, no good metrist, and his English is like a translation from one of those poets who wrote in Latin after it was dead ; but he was a man of sincere genius, and not only English, but European literature is largely in his debt. He was the in ventor of cheap amusement for the million, to be had of All- out-doors for the asking. It was his impulse which uncon sciously gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school of Jean Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateau briand, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Rus- kin — the great painters of ideal landscape. So long as men had slender means, whether of keeping out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, Winter was an unwelcome guest, especially in the country. There he was the bearer of a lettre de cachet, which shut its victims in solitary confinement with few resources but to boose round the fire and repeat ghost-stories, which had lost all their freshness and none of their terror. To go to bed was to lie awake of cold, with an added shudder of fright whenever a loose casement or a waving curtain chose to give you the goose-flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his letters, gives us a notion how uncomfortable it was in the country, with green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and windows that thought it was their duty to make the wind whistle, not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not have been much better in the city, to judge by Mdnage's warning against the danger of our dressing-gowns taking fire, while we cuddle too closely over the sparing blaze. The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in bed, with his hand through a hole in the blanket; and we may suspect that it was the warmth quite as much as the company that first drew men together at the coffee-house. Coleridge, in January 1800, writes to Wedgewood : ' I am sitting by a fire in a rug greatcoat. . . . It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, can shield your self from it only by perpetual imprisonment.' This thermo- 24 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. metrical view of winter is, I grant, a depressing one ; for I think there is nothing so demoralising as cold. I know of a boy who, when his father, a bitter economist, was brought home dead, said only, * Now we can burn as much wood as we like.' I would not off-hand prophesy the gallows for that boy. I remember with a shudder a pinch I got from the cold once in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of fresh air, I found myself glad to see the windows hermetically scaled by the freezing vapour of our breath, and plotted the assassina tion of the conductor every time he opened the door. I felt myself sensibly barbarising, and would have shared Colonel Jack's bed in the ash-hole of the glass-furnace with a grate ful heart. Since then I have had more charity for the pre vailing ill-opinion of winter. It was natural enough that Ovid should measure the years of his exile in Pontus by the number of winters. Ut sumus In Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister, Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris : Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I In Pontus was, thrice Euxine's wave made hard. Jubinal has printed an Anglo-Norman piece of doggerel in which Winter and Summer dispute which is the better man. It is not without a kind of rough and inchoate humour, and I like it because old Whitebeard gets tolerably fair play. The jolly old fellow boasts of his rate of living, with that contempt of poverty which is the weak spot in the burly English nature. Jk Dieu ne place que me avyenge Que ne face plus honour Et plus despenz en un soul jour Que vus en tote vostre vie : Now God forbid it hap to me That I make not more great display, And spend more in a single day Than you can do in all your life. The best touch, perhaps, is Winter's claim for credit as a mender of the highways, which was not without point when every road in Europe was a quagmire during a good part of the year unless it was bottomed on some remains of Roman engineering. Je su, fet-il, seignur et mestre Et a bon droit le dey estre, Quant de la bowe face cauce" Par un petit de geele" : A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 25 Master and lord I am, says he, And of good right so ought to be, Since I make causeys, safely croat, Of mud, with just a pinch of frost. But there is no recognition of Winter as the best of out-door company. Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer of it, if ever any, confesses, The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, Sings in my ear, my hands are stones, Curdles the blood to the marble bones, Tugs at the heartstrings, numbs the sense, And hems in life with narrowing fence. Winter was literally 'the inverted year,' as Thomson called him ; for such entertainments as could be had must be got within doors. What cheerfulness there was in brumal verse was that of Horace's dissolve frigus ligna super foco large reponens, so pleasantly associated with the cleverest scene in Roderick Random. This is the tone of that poem of Walton's friend Cotton, which won the praise of Words worth : — Let us home, Our mortal enemy is come ; Winter and all his blustering train Have made a voyage o'er the main. Fly, fly, the foe advances fas Into our fortress let us haste, Where all the roarers of the north Can neither storm nor starve us forth. There underground a magazine Of sovereign juice is cellared in, Liquor that will the siege maintain Should Phoebus ne'er return again. Whilst we together jovial sit Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, Where, though bleak winds confine us home Our fancies round the world shall roam. Thomson's view of Winter is also, on the whole, a hostile one, though he does justice to his grandeur. Thus Winter falls, A heavy gloom oppressive o'er the world, Through Nature shedding influence malign. He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the house, though more refined : — 26 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. While without The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat Between the groaning forest and the shore Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, A rural, sheltered, solitary scene, Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit And hold high converse with the mighty dead. Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with respect, follows Thomson. With him, too, 'Winter desolates the year/ and How pleasing wears the wintry night Spent with the old illustrious dead ! While by the taper's trembling light I seem those awful scenes to tread Where chiefs or legislators lie, &c. Akenside had evidently been reading Thomson. He had the conceptions of a great poet with less faculty than many a little one, and is one of those versifiers of whom it is enough to say that we are always willing to break him off in the middle with an £c., well knowing that what follows is but the coming-round again of what went before, marching in a circle with the cheap numerosity of a stage-army. In truth, it is no wonder that the short days of that cloudy northern climate should have added to winter a gloom borrowed of the mind. We hardly know, till we have ex perienced the contrast, how sensibly our winter is alleviated by the longer daylight and the pellucid atmosphere. I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw him groping among the chimney-pots oppo site my windows as he described his impoverished arc in the sky. The enforced seclusion of the season makes it the time for serious study and occupations that demand fixed incomes of unbroken time. This is why Milton said * that his vein never happily flowed but from the autumnal equinox to the vernal,' though in his twentieth year he had written, on the return of spring, — Fallor ? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest ? Err I ? or do the powers of song return To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring ? Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first to notice the cheerfulness of snow in sunshine. His Harz-reise im Winter gives no hint of it, for that is a diluted reminiscence A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 27 of Greek tragic choruses and the Book of Job in nearly equal parts. In one of the singularly interesting and cha-~ racteristic letters to Frau von Stein, however, written during the journey, he says : ' It is beautiful indeed ; the mist heaps itself together in light snow-clouds, the sun looks through, and the snow over everything gives back a feeling of gaiety.' But I find in Cowper the first recognition of a general amiability in Winter. The gentleness of his temper, and the wide charity of his sympathies, made it natural for him to find good in everything except the human heart. A dreadful creed distilled from the darkest moments of dys peptic solitaries compelled him against his will to see in that the one evil thing made by a God whose goodness is over all His works. Cowper's two walks in the morning and noon of a winter's day are delightful, so long as he contrives to let himself be happy in the graciousness of the landscape. Your muscles grow springy, and your lungs dilate with the crisp air as you walk along with him. You laugh with him at the grotesque shadow of your legs lengthened across the snow by the just-risen sun. I know nothing that gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration than the easy verses of this escaped hypochondriac. But Cowper also preferred his sheltered garden-walk to those robuster joys, and bitterly acknowledged the depressing influence of the darkened year. In December 1780 he writes : 'At this season of the year, and in this gloomy uncomfortable climate, it is no easy matter for the owner of a mind like mine to divert it from sad subjects, and to fix it upon such as may administer to its amusement.' Or was it because he was writing to the dreadful Newton ? Perhaps his poetry bears truer witness to his habitual feeling, for it is only there that poets \ disenthral themselves of their reserve and become fully 1 possessed of their greatest charm, — the power of being / franker than other men. In the Third Book of ' The Task ' ' he boldly affirms his preference of the country to the city even in winter : — But are not wholesome airs, though unperfumed By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt, And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure From clamour, and whose very silence charms, To be preferred to smoke ? . . . . They would be, were not madness in the head And folly in the heart ; were England now What England was, plain, hospitable, kind, And undebauched. 28 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. The conclusion shows, however, that he was thinking mainly of fireside delights, not of the blusterous companion ship of nature. This appears even more clearly in the Fourth Book : — O Winter, ruler of the inverted year ; but I cannot help interrupting him to say how pleasant it always is to track poets through the gardens of their pre decessors and find out their likings by a flower snapped off here and there to garnish their own nosegays. Cowper had been reading Thomson, and 'the inverted year' pleased his fancy with its suggestion of that starry wheel of the zodiac moving round through its spaces infinite. He could not help loving a handy Latinism (especially with elision beauty added), any more than Gray, any more than Wordsworth — on the sly. But the member for Olney has the floor : — 0 Winter, ruler of the inverted year, Thy scattered hair with sleet-like ashes filled, Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks Fringed with a beard made white with other snows Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds, A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne A sliding car, indebted to no wheels, But urged by storms along its slippery way, 1 love thee all ijilovely as thou seem'st, And dreaded as thou art ! Thou hold'st the sun A prisoner in the yet undawning east, Shortening his journey between morn and noon, And hurrying him, impatient of his stay, Down to the rosy west, but kindly still Compensating his loss with added hours Of social converse and instructive ease, And gathering at short notice, in one group, The family dispersed, and fixing thought, Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares. I crown thee king of intimate delights, Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness, And all the comforts that the lowly roof Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours Of long uninterrupted evening know. I call this a good human bit of writing, imaginative, too — not so flushed, not so .... highfaluting (let me dare the odious word !) as the modern style since poets have got hold of a theory that imagination is common-sense turned inside out, and not common-sense sublimed — but wholesome, mas culine, and strong in the simplicity of a mind wholly occu pied with its theme. To me Cowper is still the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear. And what unobtrusive skill he has ! How he heightens, for example, your sense of A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 29 winter-evening seclusion, by the twanging horn of the post man on the bridge ! That horn has rung in my ears ever since I first heard it, during the consulate of the second Adams. Wordsworth strikes a deeper note ; but does it not sometimes come over one (just the least in the world) that one would give anything for a bit of nature pure and simple, without quite so strong a flavour of W. W. ? W. W. is, of course, sublime and all that — but ! For my part, I will make a clean breast of it, and confess that I can't look at a moun tain without fancying the late laureate's gigantic Roman nose thrust between me and it, and thinking of Dean Swift's pro fane version of Romanes rerum dominos into Roman nose! a rareun! dom your nose! But do I judge verses, then, by the impression made on me by the man who wrote them ? Not so fast, my good friend, but, for good or evil, the cha racter and its intellectual product are inextricably interfused. If I remember aright, Wordsworth himself (except in his magnificent skating-scene in the * Prelude') has not much to say for winter out of doors. I cannot recall any picture by him of a snow-storm. The reason may possibly be that in the Lake Country even the winter storms bring rain rather than snow. He was thankful for the Christmas visits of Crabb Robinson, because they ' helped him through the winter.' His only hearty praise of winter is when, as General Fevrier, he defeats the French : — Humanity, delighting to behold A fond reflection of her own decay, Hath painted Winter like a traveller old, Propped on a staff, and, through the sullen day, In hooded mantle, limping o'er the plain As though his weakness were disturbed by pain : Or, if a juster fancy should allow An undisputed symbol of command, The chosen sceptre is a withered bough Infirmly grasped within a withered hand. These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn ; But mighty Winter the device shall scorn. The Scottish poet Grahame, in his ' Sabbath/ says man fully :— Now is the time To visit Nature in her grand attire ; and he has one little picture which no other poet has sur passed : — High-ridged the whirled drift has almost reached The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch : Mute hangs the hooded bell ; the tombs lie buried. 30 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. Even in our own climate, where the sun shows his winter face as long and as brightly as in central Italy, the seduction of the chimney-corner is apt to predominate in the mind over the severer satisfactions of muffled fields and penitential woods. The very title of Whittier's delightful ' Snow-Bound' shows what he was thinking of, though he does not vapour a little about digging out paths. The verses of Emerson, per fect as a Greek fragment (despite the archaism of a dissyl labic fire), which he has chosen for his epigraph, tell us too how the Housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm. They are all in a tale. It is always the tristis Hiems of Virgil. Catch one of them having a kind word for old Barbe Fleurie, unless he whines through some cranny, like a beggar, to heighten their enjoyment while they toast their slippered toes. I grant there is a keen relish of contrast about the bickering flame as it gives an emphasis beyond Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, or kindles the gloomy gold of volumes scarce less friendly, especially when a tempest is blundering round the house. Wordsworth has a fine touch that brings home to us the comfortable contrast of without and within, during a storm at night, and the passage is highly characteristic of a poet whose inspiration always has an undertone of bourgeois: — How touching, when, at midnight, sweep Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark, To hear, — and sink again to sleep ! J. H., one of those choice poets who will not tarnish their bright fancies by publication, always insists on a snow-storm as essential to the true atmosphere of whist. Mrs. Battles, in her famous rule for the game, implies winter, and would doubtless have added tempest, if it could be had for the asking. For a good solid read also, into the small hours, there is nothing like that sense of safety against having your evening laid waste, which Euroclydon brings, as he bellows down the chimney, making your fire gasp, or rustles snow- flakes against the pane with a sound more soothing than silence. Emerson, as he is apt to do, not only hit the nail on the head, but drove it home, in that last phrase of the ' tumultuous privacy.' A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 31 But I would exchange this, and give something to boot, for the privilege of walking out into the vast blur of a north- northeast snow-storm, and getting a strong draught on the furnace within, by drawing the first furrows through its sandy drifts. I love those Noontide twilights which snow makes With tempest of the blinding flakes. If the wind veer too much toward the east, you get the heavy snow that gives a true Alpine slope to the boughs of your evergreens, and traces a skeleton of your elms in white ; but you must have plenty of north in your gale if you want those driving nettles of frost that sting the cheeks to a crimson manlier than that of fire. During the great storm of two winters ago, the most robustious periwig-pated fellow of late years, I waded and floundered a couple of miles through the whispering night, and brought home that feeling of ex pansion we have after being in good company. ' Great things doeth He which we cannot comprehend ; for He saith to the snow, " Be thou on the earth." ' There is admirable snow scenery in Judd's ' Margaret/ but some one has confiscated my copy of that admirable book, and, perhaps, Homer's picture of a snow-storm is the best yet in its large simplicity: — And as in winter-time, when Jove his cold sharp javelins throws Amongst us mortals, and is moved to white the earth with snows, The winds asleep, he freely pours till highest prominents, Hill-tops, low meadows, and the fields that crown with most contents The toils of men, seaports and shores, are hid, and every place, But floods, that fair snow's tender flakes, as their own brood, embrace. Chapman, after all, though he makes very free with him, comes nearer Homer than anybody else. There is nothing in the original of that fair snow's tender flakes, but neither Pope nor Cowper could get out of their heads the Psalmist's tender phrase, ' He giveth his snow like wool,5 for which also Homer affords no hint. Pope talks of ' dissolving fleeces,' and Cowper of a ' fleecy mantle.' But David is nobly simple, while Pope is simply nonsensical, and Cowper pretty. If they must have prettiness, Martial would have supplied them with it in his Densum tacitarum vellus aquarum, which is too pretty, though I fear it would have pleased Dr. Donne. Eustathius of Thessalonica calls snow 32 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. tpioidec, woolly water, which a poor old French poet, Godeau, has amplified into this: — Lorsque la froidure inhumaine De leur verd ornement depouille les forets Sous une neige epaisse il couvre les guerets, Et la neige a pour eux la chaleur de la laine. In this, as in Pope's version of the passage in Homer, there is, at least, a sort of suggestion of snow-storm in the blind ing drift of words. But, on the whole, if one would know what snow is, I should advise him not to hunt up what the poets have said about it; but to look at the sweet miracle itself. The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as those of Spring. In a gray December day, when, as the farmers say, it is too cold to snow, his numbed fingers will let fall doubtfully a few star-shaped flakes, the snowdrops and ane mones that harbinger his more assured reign. Now, and now only, may be seen, heaped on the horizon's eastern edge, those ' blue clouds ' from forth which Shakespeare says that Mars ' doth pluck the masoned turrets.' Some times also, when the sun is low, you will see a single cloud trailing a flurry of snow along the southern hills in a waver ing fringe of purple. And when at last the real snowstorm comes, it leaves the earth with a virginal look on it that no other of the seasons can rival, compared with which, indeed, they seem soiled and vulgar. And what is there in nature so beautiful as the next morn ing after such confusion of the elements ? Night has no silence like this of busy day. All the batteries of noise are spiked. We see the movement of life as a deaf man sees it, a mere wraith of the clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is bare. The earth is clothed in innocence as a garment. Every wound of the landscape is healed ; whatever was stiff has been sweetly rounded as the breasts of Aphrodite ; what was unsightly has been covered gently with a soft splendour, as if, Cowley would have said, Nature had cleverly let fall her handker chief to hide it. If the Virgin (Notre Dame de la neige) were to come back, here is an earth that would not bruise her foot nor stain it. It is The fanned snow That's bolted by the northern blasts twice o'er, — Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi, Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds,—? A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 33 packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will bear your weight. What grace is in all the curves, as if every one of them had been swept by that inspired thumb of Phidias's journeyman. Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in those light ripples that sometimes scurry across smooth water with a sudden blur. But on this gleaming hush the aerial deluge has left plain marks of its course ; and in gullies through which it rushed torrent-like, the eye finds its bed irregularly scooped like that of a brook in hard beach-sand, or, in more sheltered spots, traced with outlines like those left by the sliding edges of the surf upon the shore. The air, after all, is only an infinitely thinner kind of water, such as I suppose we shall have to drink when the State does her whole duty as a moral reformer. Nor is the wind the only thing whose trail you will notice on this sensitive surface. You will find that you have more neighbours and night visitors than you dreamed of. Here is the dainty footprint of a cat ; here a dog has looked in on you like an amateur watchman to see if all is right, slumping clumsily about in the mealy treachery. And look ! before you were up in the morning, though you were a punctual courtier at the sun's levee, here has been a squirrel zigzagging to and fro like a hound gathering the scent, and some tiny bird searching for unimaginable food, perhaps for the tinier creature, whatever it is, that drew this slender continuous trail like those made on the wet beach by light borderers of the sea. The earliest auto graphs were as frail as these. Poseidon traced his lines, or giant birds made their mark, on pre-Adamite sea-margins ; and the thunder-gust left the tear-stains of its sudden passion there ; nay, we have the signatures of delicatest fern- leaves on the soft ooze of aeons that dozed away their dream less leisure before consciousness came upon the earth with man. Some whim of nature locked them fast in stone for us after-thoughts of creation. Which of us shall leave a footprint as imperishable as that of the ornithorhyncus, or much more so than that of these Bedouins of the snow-desert ? Perhaps it was only because the ripple and the rain-drop and the bird were not thinking of themselves, that they had such luck. The chances of immortality depend very much on that. How often have we not seen poor mortals, dupes of a season's notoriety, carving their names on seeming-solid D 34 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. rock of merest beach-sand, whose feeble hold on memory shall be washed away by the next wave of fickle opinion ! Well, well, honest Jacques, there are better things to be found in the snow than sermons. The snow that falls damp comes commonly in larger flakes from windless skies, and is the prettiest of all to watch from under cover. This is the kind Homer had in mind ; and Dante, who had never read him, compares the dilatate falde t the flaring flakes, of his fiery rain, to those of snow among the mountains without wind. This sort of snowfall has no fight in it, and does not challenge you to a wrestle like that which drives well from the northward, with all moisture thoroughly winnowed out of it by the frosty wind. Burns, who was more out of doors than most poets, and whose bare foot Muse got the colour in her cheeks by vigorous exercise in all weathers, was thinking of this drier deluge when he speaks of the ' whirling drift/ and tells how — Chanticleer Shook off the powthery snaw. But the damper and more deliberate falls have a choice knack at draping the trees; and about eaves or stone walls — wherever, indeed, the evaporation is rapid, and it finds a chance to cling — it will build itself out in curves of wonderful beauty. I have seen one of these dumb waves, thus caught in the act of breaking, curl four feet beyond the edge of my roof and hang there for days, as if Nature were too well pleased with her work to let it crumble from its exquisite pause. After such a storm, if you are lucky enough to have even a sluggish ditch for a neighbour, be sure to pay it a visit. You will find its banks corniced with what seems pre cipitated light, and the dark current down below gleams as if with an inward lustre. Dull of motion as it is, you never saw water that seemed alive before. It has a brightness like that of the eyes of some smaller animals, which gives assu rance of life, but of a life foreign and unintelligible. A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in our freakish climate, the wind will whisk sometimes into the north-west so suddenly as to plate all the trees with crystal before it has swept the sky clear of its last cobweb of cloud. Ambrose Philips, in a poetical epistle from Copenhagen to the Earl of Dorset, describes this strange confectionery of Nature, — for such, I am half ashamed to say, it always seems to me, A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 35 recalling the 'glorified sugar-candy' of Lamb's first night at the theatre. It has an artificial air, altogether beneath the grand artist of the atmosphere, and besides does too much mischief to the trees for a philodendrist to take unmixed pleasure in it. Perhaps it deserves a poet like Philips, who really loved Nature, and yet liked her to be mighty fine, as Pepys would say, with a heightening of powder and rouge : — And yet but lately have I seen e'en here The winter in a lovely dress appear. Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow, Or winds begun through hazy skies to blow, At evening a keen eastern breeze arose, And the descending rain unsullied froze. Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew, The ruddy noon disclosed at once to view The face of Nature in a rich disguise, And brightened every object to my eyes ; For every shrub, and every blade of grass, And every pointed thorn, seemed wrought in glass ; In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show. And through the ice the crimson berries glow ; The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yield, Seem polished lances in a hostile field; The stag in limpid currents with surpri:--; Sees crystal branches on his forehead ri.^2 ; The spreading oak, the beech, the towering pine, Glazed over in the freezing ether shine ; The frighted birds the rattling branches shun, Which wave and glitter in the distant sun, When, if a sudden gust of wind arise, The brittle forest into atoms flies, The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends And in a spangled shower the prospect ends. It is not uninstructive to see how tolerable Ambrose is, so long as he sticks manfully to what he really saw. The moment he undertakes to improve on Nature he sinks into the mere court poet, and we surrender him to the jealousy of Pope without a sigh. His 'rattling branches' and 1 crackling forest ' are good, as truth always is, after a fashion ; but what shall we say of that dreadful stag which, there is little doubt, he valued above all the rest, because it was purely his own ? The damper snow tempts the amateur architect and sculptor. His Pentelicus has been brought to his very door, and if there are boys to be had (whose company beats all other recipes for prolonging life) a middle-aged Master of the Works will knock the years off his account and make the family Bible seem a dealer in foolish fables, by a few D 2 36 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. hours given heartily to this business. First comes the Sisy phean toil of rolling the clammy balls till they refuse to JDudge farther. Then, if you would play the statuary, they are piled one upon the other to the proper height; or if your aim be masonry, whether of house or fort, they must be squared and beaten solid with the shovel. The material is capable of very pretty effects, and your young companions meanwhile are unconsciously learning lessons in aesthetics. From the feeling of satisfaction with which one squats on the damp floor of his extemporized dwelling, I have been led to think that the backwoodsman must get a sweeter savour of self-reliance from the house his own hands have built than Bramante or Sansovino could ever give. Perhaps the fort is the best thing, for it calls out more masculine qualities and adds the cheer of battle with that dumb artillery which gives pain enough to test pluck without risk of serious hurt. Already, as I write, it is twenty odd years ago. The balls fly thick and fast. The uncle defends the waist-high ramparts against a storm of nephews, his breast plastered with decorations like another Radetzky's. How well I recall the indomitable good-humour under fire of him who fell in the front at Ball's Bluff, the silent pertinacity of the gentle scholar who got his last hurt at Fair Oaks, the ardour in the charge of the gallant gentleman who, with the death-wound in his side, headed his brigade at Cedar Creek ! How it all comes back, and they never come ! I cannot again be the Vauban of fortresses in the innocent snow, but I shall never see children moulding their clumsy giants in it without longing to help. It was a pretty fancy of the young Vermont sculptor to make his first essay in this evanescent material. Was it a figure of Youth, I wonder ? Would it not be well if all artists could begin in stuff as perishable, to melt away when the sun of prosperity began to shine, and leave nothing behind but the gain of practised hands ? It is pleasant to fancy that Shakespeare served his apprenticeship at this trade, and owed to it that most pathetic of despairing wishes, — O, that I were a mockery -king of snow, Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, To melt myself away in water-drops ! I have spoken of the exquisite curves of snow surfaces. Not less rare are the tints of which they are capable — the A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 37 faint blue of the hollows, for the shadows in snow are always i blue, and the tender rose of higher points, as you stand with j your back to the setting sun and look upward across the soft i rondure of a hillside. I have seen within a mile of home effects of colour as lovely as any iridescence of the Silberhorn after sundown. Charles II., who never said a foolish thing, gave the English climate the highest praise when he said that it allowed you more hours out of doors than any other, and I think our winter may fairly make the same boast as compared with the rest of the year. Its still mornings, with the thermometer near zero, put a premium on walking. There is more sentiment in turf, perhaps, and it is more elastic to the foot ; its silence, too, is wellnigh as congenial with medi tation as that of fallen pine-tassel; but for exhilaration there is nothing like a stiff snow-crust that creaks like a cricket at every step, and communicates its own sparkle to the senses. The air you drink is frappe, all its grosser particles preci pitated, and the dregs of your blood with them. A purer current mounts to the brain, courses sparkling through it, and rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff. There is no thing left to breed an exhalation of ill-humour or despondency. They say that this rarefied atmosphere has lessened the capacity of our lungs. Be it so. Quart-pots are for muddier liquor than nectar. To me, the city in winter is infinitely dreary — the sharp street-corners have such a chill in them, and the snow so soon loses it maidenhood to become a mere drab — ' doing shameful things,' as Steele says of politicians, ; * without being ashamed.' I pine for the Quaker purity of my country landscape. I am speaking, of course, of those winters that are not niggardly of snow, as ours too often are, giving us a gravelly dust instead. Nothing can be unsight- lier than those piebald fields where the coarse brown hide of Earth shows through the holes of her ragged ermine. But even when there is abundance of snow, I find as I grow older that there are not so many good crusts as there used to be. When I first observed this, I rashly set it to the ac count of that general degeneracy in nature (keeping pace with the same melancholy phenomenon in man) which forces itself upon the attention and into the philosophy of middle life. But happening once to be weighed, it occurred to me that an arch which would bear fifty pounds could hardly be blamed for giving way under more than three times the 38 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. weight. I have sometimes thought that if theologians would remember this in their arguments, and consider that the man may slump through, with no fault of his own, where the boy would have skimmed the surface in safety, it would be better for all parties. However, when you do get a crust that will bear, and know any brooklet that runs down a hill-side, be sure to go and take a look at him, especially if your crust is due, as it commonly is, to a cold snap following eagerly on a thaw. You will never find him so cheerful. As he shrank away after the last thaw, he built for himself the most ex quisite caverns of ice to run through, if not 'measureless to man ' like those of Alph, the sacred river, yet perhaps more pleasing for their narrowness than those for their grandeur. What a cunning silversmith is Frost ! The rarest workman ship of Delhi or Genoa copies him but clumsily, -as if the fingers of all other artists were thumbs. Fernwork and lace- work and filagree in endless variety, and under it all the water tinkles like a distant guitar, or drums like a tambour ine, or gurgles like the Tokay of an anchorite's dream. Be yond doubt there is a fairy procession marching along those frail arcades and translucent corridors. Their oaten pipes blow wondrous shrill, The hemlock small blow clear. And hark ! is that the ringing of Titania's bridle, or the bells of the wee, wee hawk that sits on Oberon's wrist ? This wonder of Frost's handiwork may be had every winter, but he can do better than this, though I have seen it but once in my life. There had been a thaw without wind or rain, making the air fat with gray vapour. Towards sundown came that chill, the avant-courier of a northwesterly gale. Then, though there was no perceptible current in the atmo sphere, the fog began to attach itself in frosty roots and fila ments to the southern side of every twig and grass-stem. The very posts had poems traced upon them by this dumb minstrel. Wherever the moist seeds found lodgment grew an inch-deep moss fine as cobweb, a slender coral-reef, argen tine, delicate, as of some silent sea in the moon, such as Agassiz dredges when he dreams. The frost, too, can wield a delicate graver, and in fancy leaves Piranesi far behind. He covers your window-pane with Alpine etchings, as if in memory of that sanctuary where he finds shelter even in midsummer. A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 39 Now look down from your hill-side across the valley. The trees are leafless, but this is the season to study their ana tomy, and did you ever notice before how much colour there is in the twigs of many of them ? And the smoke from those chimneys is so blue it seems like a feeder of the sky into which it flows. Winter refines it, and gives it agreeable associations. In summer it suggests cookery or the drudgery of steam-engines, but now your fancy (if it can forget for a moment the dreary usurpation of stoves) traces it down to the fireside and the brightened faces of children. Thoreau is the only poet who has fitly sung it. The wood-cutter rises before day. and • First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad His early scout, his emissary, smoke, The earliest, latest pilgrim from his roof, To feel the frosty air ; . And, while he crouches still beside the hearth, Nor musters courage to unbar the door, It has gone down the glen -with the light wind And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath, Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill, And warmed the pinions of the early bird ; And now, perchance, high in the crispy air, Has caught_ sight of the day o'er the earth's edge, And grists its master's eye at his low door As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky. Here is very bad verse and very good imagination. He had been reading Wordsworth, or he would not have made tree-tops an iambus. In the Moretum of Virgil (or, if not his, better than most of his) is a pretty picture of a peasant kindling his winter-morning fire. He rises before dawn, Sollicitaque manu tenebras explorat inertes Vestigatque focum laesus quern denique sensit Parvulus exusto remanebat stipite fumus, Et cinis obductse celabat lumina prunae. Admovet his pronam submissa fronte lucernam, Et producit acu stupas humore carentes, Excitat et crebris languentem flatibus ignem ; Tandem concepto tenebrse fulgore recedunt, Opposilaque manu lumen defendit ab aura. With cautious hand he gropes the sluggish dark, Tracking the hearth which, scorched, he feels erelong. In burnt-out logs a slender smoke remained, And raked-up ashes hid the cinders' eyes ; Stooping, to these the lamp outstretched he nears, And, with a needle loosening the dry wick, With frequent breath excites the languid flame. Before the gathering glow the shades recede, And his bent hand the new-caught light defends. 40 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. Ovid heightens the picture by a single touch :— Ipse genu posito flammas exsuscitat aura. Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames. If you walk down now into the woods, you may find a robin or a blue-bird among the red-cedars, or a nuthatch scaling deviously the trunk of some hardwood tree with an eye as keen as that of a French soldier foraging for the fiot- aii-feu of his mess. Perhaps a blue-jay shrills cah cah in his corvine trebles, or a chickadee Shows feats of his gymnastic play, Head downward, clinging to the spray. But both him and the snow-bird I love better to see, tiny fluffs of feathered life, as they scurry about in a driving mist of snow, than in this serene air. Coleridge has put into verse one of the most beautiful phenomena of a winter walk : — The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a halo round its head. But this aureole is not peculiar to winter. I have noticed it often in a summer morning, when the grass was heavy with dew, and even later in the day, when the dewless grass was still fresh enough to have a gleam of its own. For my own part I prefer a winter walk that takes in the nightfall and the intense silence that erelong follows it. The evening lamps look yellower by contrast with the snow, and give the windows that hearty look of which our secretive fires have almost robbed them. The stars seem To hang, like twinkling winter lamps, Among the branches of the leafless trees, or, if you are on a hill-top (whence it is sweet to watch the home-lights gleam out one by one), they look nearer than in summer, and appear to take a conscious part in the cold. Especially in one of those stand-stills of the air that forebode a change of weather, the sky is dusted with motes of fire of which the summer- watcher never dreamed. Winter, too, is, on the whole, the triumphant season of the moon, a moon devoid of sentiment, if you choose, but with the refreshment of a purer intellectual light — the cooler orb of middle life. Who ever saw anything to match that gleam, rather divined than seen, which runs before her over the snow, a breath of ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 4! light, as she rises on the infinite silence of winter night? High in the heavens also she seems to bring out some in- tenser property of cold with her chilly polish. The poets have instinctively noted this. When Goody Blake imprecates a curse of perpetual chill upon Harry Gill, she has The cold, cold moon above her head ; and Coleridge speaks of The silent icicles, Quietly gleaming to the quiet moon. As you walk homeward, — for it is time that we should end our ramble, — you may perchance hear the most impressive sound in nature, unless it be the fall of a tree in the forest during the hush of summer noon. It is the stifled shriek of the lake yonder as the frost throttles it. Wordsworth has de scribed it (too much, I fear, in the style of Dr. Armstrong) : — And, interrupting oft that eager game, From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice, The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, Gave out to meadow-grounds and hills a loud Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves Howling in troops along the Bothnic main. Thoreau (unless the English lakes have a different dialect from ours) calls it admirably well a ' whoop.' But it is a noise like none other, as if Demogorgon were moaning inarticulately from under the earth. Let us get within doors, lest we hear it again, for there is something bodeful and uncanny in it. ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. WALKING one day toward the Village, as we used to call it in the good old days when almost every dweller in the town had been born in it, I was enjoying that delicious sense of disenthralment from the actual which the deepening twilight brings with it, giving, as it does, a sort of obscure novelty to things familiar. The coolness, the hush, broken only by the distant bleat of some belated goat, querulous to be disburdened of her milky load, the few faint stars, more guessed as yet than seen ; the sense that the 42 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. coming dark would so soon fold me in the secure privacy of its disguise — all things combined in a result as near absolute peace as can be hoped for by a man who knows that there is a writ out against him in the hands of the printer's devil. For the moment I was enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking without being called on to stand and deliver what I thought to the small public who are good enough to take any interest therein. I love old ways, and the path I was walking felt kindly to the feet it had known for almost fifty years. How many fleeting impressions it had shared with me ! How many times I had lingered to study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon the turf that edged it by the moon, of the bare boughs etched with a touch beyond Rembrandt by the same unconscious artist on the smooth page of snow ! If I turned round, through dusky tree-gaps came the first twinkle of evening lamps in the dear old homestead. On Corey's hill I could see these tiny pharoses of love and home and sweet domestic thoughts flash out one by one across the blackening salt-meadow between. How much has not kerosene added to the cheerfulness of our evening landscape ! A pair of night-herons flapped heavily over me toward the hidden river. The war was ended. I might walk townward without that aching dread of bulletins that had darkened the July sunshine, and twice made the scarlet leaves of October seemed stained with blood. I remembered with a pang, half proud, half painful, how so many years ago I had walked over the same path and felt round my finger the soft pressure of a little hand that was one day to harden with faithful grip of sabre. On how many paths, leading to how many homes where proud Memory does all she can to fill up the fireside gaps with shining shapes, must not men be walking in just such pensive mood as I ? Ah, young heroes, safe in im mortal youth as those of Homer, you at least carried your ideal hence untarnished ! It is locked for you beyond moth or rust in the treasure-chamber of Death. Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as they in it, that could give such as they a brave joy in dying for it, worth something, then ? And as I felt more and more the soothing magic of evening's cool palm upon my temples, as my fancy came home from its reverie, and my senses, with reawakened curiosity, ran to the front windows again from the viewless closet of abstraction, and felt a strange charm ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 43 in finding the old tree and shabby fence still there under the travesty of falling night, nay, were conscious of an un suspected newness in familiar stars and the fading outlines of hills my earliest horizon, I was conscious of an immortal soul, and could not but rejoice in the unwaning goodliness of the world into which I had been born without any merit of my own. I thought of dear Henry Vaughan's rainbow, 'Still young and fine !' I remembered people who had to go over to the Alps to learn what the divine silence of snow was, who must run to Italy before they were conscious of the miracle wrought every day under their very noses by the sunset ; who must call upon the Berkshire hills to teach them what a painter autumn was, while close at hand the Fresh Pond meadows made all oriels cheap with hues that showed as if a sunset cloud had been wrecked among their maples. One might be worse off than even in America, I thought. There are some things so elastic that even the heavy roller of democracy cannot flatten them altogether down. The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts and dwell a hermit anywhere. A country without traditions, without ennobling associations, a scramble otparvemts, with a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through politics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself ? I confess it did not seem so to me there in that illimitable quiet, that serene self-possession of nature, where Collins might have brooded his ' Ode to Evening/ or where those verses on Solitude in Dodsley's Collection, that Hawthorne liked so much, might have been composed. Traditions ? Granting that we had none, all that is worth having in them is the common property of the soul — an estate in gavelkind for all the sons of Adam — and, moreover, if a man cannot stand on his two feet (the prime quality of whoever has left any tradition behind him), were it not better for him to be honest about it at once, and go down on all-fours ? And for associations, if one have not the wit to make them for himself out of his native earth, no ready-made ones of other men will avail him much. Lexington is none the worse to me for not being in Greece, nor Gettysburg that its name is not Marathon. ' Blessed old fields/ I was just exclaiming to myself, like one of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroes, 'dear acres, innocently secure from history, which these eyes first beheld, may you be also those to which they shall at last slowly 44 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS, darken ! ' when I was interrupted by a voice which asked me in German whether I was the Herr Professor, Doctor, So- and-So ? The 'Doctor 'was by brevet or vaticination, to make the grade easier to my pocket. One feels so intimately assured that he is made up, in part, of shreds and leavings of the past, in part of the interpolations of other people, that an honest man would be slow in saying yes to such a question. But ' my name is So-and-So ' is a safe answer, and I gave it. While I had been romancing with myself, the street lamps had been lighted, and it was under one of these detectives that have robbed the Old Road of its privilege of sanctuary after nightfall that I was ambushed by my foe. The inexorable villain had taken my description, it appears, that I might have the less chance to escape him. Dr. Holmes tells us that we change our substance, not every seven years, as was once believed, but with every breath we draw. Why had I not the wit to avail myself of the subterfuge, and, like Peter, to renounce my identity, especially as, in certain moods of mind, I have often more than doubted of it myself? When a man is, as it were, his own front door, and is thus knocked at, why may he not assume the right of that sacred wood to make every house a castle, by denying himself to all visita tions ? I was truly not at home when the question was put to me, but had to recall myself from all out-of-doors, and to piece my self-consciousness hastily together as well as I could before I answered it. I knew perfectly well what was coming. It is seldom that debtors or good Samaritans waylay people under gas lamps in order to force money upon them, so far as I have seen or heard. I was also aware, from considerable experi ence, that every foreigner is persuaded that, by doing this country the favour of coming to it, he has laid every native thereof under an obligation, pecuniary or other, as the case may be, whose discharge he is entitled to on demand duly made in person or by letter. Too much learning (of this kind) had made me mad in the provincial sense of the word. I had begun life with the theory of giving something to every beggar that came along, though sure of never finding a native-born countryman among them. In a small way, I was resolved to emulate Hatem Tai's tent, with its three hundred and sixty-five entrances, one for every day in the ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 45 year — I know not whether he was astronomer enough to add another for leap-years. The beggars were a kind of German silver aristocracy ; not real plate, to be sure, but better than nothing. Where everybody was overworked, they supplied the comfortable equipoise of absolute leisure, so aesthetically needful. Besides, I was but too conscious of a vagrant fibre in myself, which too often thrilled me in my solitary walks with the temptation to wander on into infinite space, and by a single spasm of resolution to emancipate myself from the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectability and the regular course of things. This prompting has been at times my familiar demon, and I could not but feel a kind of respectful sympathy for men who had dared what I had only sketched out to myself as a splendid possibility. For seven years I helped maintain one heroic man on an imaginary journey to Portland — as fine an example as I have ever known of hopeless loyalty to an ideal. I assisted another so long in a fruitless attempt to reach Mecklenburg-Schwerin, that at last we grinned in each other's faces when we met, like a couple of augurs. He was possessed by this harmless mania as some are by the North Pole, and I shall never forget his look of regretful compassion (as for one who was sacrificing his higher life to the fleshpots of Egypt) when I at last advised him somewhat strenuously to go to the D , whither the road was so much travelled that he could not miss it. General Banks, in his noble zeal for the honour of his country, would confer on the Secretary of State the power of imprisoning, in case of war, all these seekers of the unattainable, thus by a stroke of the pen annihilating the single poetic element in our humdrum life. Alas ! not everybody has the genius to be a Bobbin-Boy, or doubtless all these also would have chosen that more prosperous line of life ! But moralists, sociologists, political economists, and taxes have slowly convinced me that my beggarly sympathies were a sin against society. Especially was the Buckle doctrine of averages (so flattering to our free-will) persuasive with me ; for as there must be in every year a certain number who would bestow an alms on these abridged editions of the Wandering Jew, the withdrawal of my quota could make no possible difference, since some destined proxy must always step forward to fill my gap. Just so many misdirected letters every year, and no more. Would it were as easy to reckon 46 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. up the number of men on whose backs fate has written the wrong address, so that they arrive by mistake in Congress and other places where they do not belong ! May not these wanderers of whom I speak have been sent into the world without any proper address at all? Where is our Dead- Letter Office for such ? And if wiser social arrangements should furnish us with something of the sort, fancy (horrible thought !) how many a workingman's friend (a kind of in dustry in which the labour is light and the wages heavy) would be sent thither because not called for in the office where he at present lies ! But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long under the lamp-post. The same Gano which had betrayed me to him revealed to me a well-set young man of about half my own age, as well dressed, so far as I could see, as I was, and with every natural qualification for getting his own livelihood, as good, if not better, than my own. He had been reduced to the painful necessity of calling upon me by a series of crosses beginning with the Baden Revolution (for which, I own, he seemed rather young — but perhaps he referred to a kind of revolution practised every season at Baden-Baden), continued by repeated failures in business, for amounts which must convince me of his entire respectability, and ending with our Civil War. During the latter he had served with distinction as a soldier, taking a main part in every important battle, with a rapid list of which he favoured me, and no doubt would have admitted that, impartial as Jona than Wild's great ancestor, he had been on both sides, had I baited him with a few hints of conservative opinions on a subject so distressing to a gentleman wishing to profit by one's sympathy and unhappily doubtful as to which way it might lean. For all these reasons, and, as he seemed to imply, for his merit in consenting to be born in Germany, he considered himself my natural creditor to the extent of five dollars, which he would handsomely consent to accept in greenbacks, though he preferred specie. The offer was cer tainly a generous one, and the claim presented with an assurance that carried conviction. But, unhappily, I had been led to remark a curious natural phenomenon. If I was ever weak enough to give anything to a petitioner of what ever nationality, it always rained decayed compatriots of his for a month after. Post hoc ergo propter hoc may not be ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 47 always safe logic, but here I seemed to perceive a natural connection of cause and effect. Now, a few days before I had been so tickled with a paper (professedly written by a benevolent American clergyman) certifying that the bearer, a hard-working German, had long ' sofered with rheumatic paints in his limps/ that, after copying the passage into my note-book, I thought it but fair to pay a trifling honorarium to the author. I had pulled the string of the shower-bath ! It had been running shipwrecked sailors for some time, but forthwith it began to pour Teutons, redolent of lager-bier. I could not help associating the apparition of my new friend with this series of otherwise unaccountable phenomena. I accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, and modestly did so, pleading a native bias towards impecunio- sity to the full as strong as his own. He took a high tone with me at once, such as an honest man would naturally take with a confessed repudiator. He even brought down his proud stomach so far as to join himself to me for the rest of my townward walk, that he might give me his views of the American people, and thus inclusively of myself. I know not whether it is because I am pigeon-livered and lack gall, or whether it is from an overmastering sense of drollery, but I am apt to submit to such bastings with a patience which afterwards surprises me, being not without my share of warmth in the blood. Perhaps it is because I so often meet with young persons who know vastly more than I do, and especially with so many foreigners whose knowledge of this country is superior to my own. However it may be, I listened for some time with tolerable composure as my self-appointed lecturer gave me in detail his opinions of my country and its people. America, he informed me, was without arts, science, literature, culture, or any native hope of supplying them. We were a people wholly given to money-getting, and who, having got it, knew no other use for it than to hold it fast. I am fain to confess that I felt a sensible itching of the biceps, and that my fingers closed with such a grip as he had just informed me was one of the effects of our unhappy climate. But happening just then to be where I could avoid temptation by dodging down a by street, I hastily left him to finish his diatribe to the lamp post, which could stand it better than I. That young man will never know how near he came to being assaulted by a 48 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. respectable gentleman of middle age, at the corner of Church Street. I have never felt quite satisfied that I did all my duty by him in not knocking him down. But perhaps he might have knocked me down, and then ? The capacity of indignation makes an essential part of the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined to doubt whether he is a wise one who allows himself to act upon its first hints. It should be rather, I suspect, a latent heat in the blood, which makes itself felt in character, a steady reserve for the brain, warming the ovum of thought to life, rather than cooking it by a too hasty enthusiasm in reaching the boiling-point. As my pulse gradually fell back to its normal beat, I reflected that I had been uncomfortably near making a fool of myself— a handy salve of euphuism for our vanity, though it does not always make a just allowance to Nature for her share in the business. What possible claim had my Teutonic friend to rob me of my composure ? I am not, I think, specially thin-skinned as to other people's opinions of myself, having, as I conceive, later and fuller intelligence on that point than anybody else can give me. Life is continually weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust. Whoever at fifty does not rate himself quite as low as most of his acquaintance would be likely to put him, must be either a fool or a great man, and I humbly disclaim being either. But if I was not smarting in person from any scat tering shot of my late companion's commination, why should I grow hot at any implication of my country therein ? Surely her shoulders are broad enough, if yours or mine are not, to bear up under a considerable avalanche of this kind. It is the bit of truth in every slander, the hint of likeness in every caricature, that makes us smart. l Art thou there, old True penny?' How did your blade know its way so well to that one loose rivet in our armour ? I wondered whether Ameri cans were over sensitive in this respect, whether they were more touchy than other folks. On the whole, I thought we were not. Plutarch, who at least had studied philosophy, if he had not mastered it, could not stomach something Hero dotus had said of Bceotia, and devoted an essay to showing up the delightful old traveller's malice and ill- breeding. French editors leave out of Montaigne's ' Travels' some remarks of his about France, for reasons best known to ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 49 themselves. Pachydermatous Deutschland, covered with trophies from every field of letters, still winces under that question which Pere Bouhours put two centuries ago, St un Allemand peut etre bel-esprit ? John Bull grew apoplectic with angry amazement at the audacious persiflage of Ptickler- Muskau. To be sure, he was a prince — but that was not all of it, for a chance phrase of gentle Hawthorne sent a spasm through all the journals of England. Then this tenderness is not peculiar to ust Console yourself, dear man and brother ; whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality, or the world would be at a sad pass shortly. The surprising thing is that men have such a taste for this somewhat musty flavour, that an Englishman, for example, should feel himself defrauded, nay, even outraged, when he comes over here and finds a people speaking what he admits to be something like English, and yet so very different from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at home. Nothing, I am sure, equals my thankfulness when I meet an English man who is ?wt like every other, or, I may add, an American of the same odd turn. Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as nice about his country as about his sweetheart, and who ever heard even the friendliest appreciation of that unexpressive she that did not seem to fall infinitely short ? Yet it would hardly be wise to hold every one an enemy who could not see her with our own enchanted eyes. It seems to be the common opinion of foreigners that Americans are too tender upon this point. Perhaps we are ; and if so, there must be a reason for it. Have we had fair play ? Could the eyes of what is called Good Society (though it is so seldom true either to the adjective or noun) look upon a nation of democrats with any chance of receiving an undistorted image ? Were not those, moreover, who found in the old order of things an earthly paradise, paying them quarterly dividends for the wisdom of their ancestors, with the punc tuality of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to misunderstand if not to misrepresent us? Whether at war or at peace, there we were, a standing menace to all earthly paradises of that kind, fatal underminers of the very credit on which the dividends were based, all the more hateful and terrible E 50 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. that our destructive agency was so insidious, working invisible in the elements, as it seemed, active while they slept, and co ning upon them in the darkness like an armed man. Could Laius have the proper feelings of a father towards CEdipus announced as his destined destroyer by infallible oracles, and felt to be such by every conscious fibre of his soul ? For more than a century the Dutch were the laughing-stock of polite Europe. They were butter-firkins, swillers of beer and schnaps, and their vrouius from whom Holbein painted the ail-but loveliest of Madonnas, Rembrandt the graceful girl who sits immortal on his knee in Dresden, and Rubens his abounding goddesses, were the synonymes of clumsy vul garity. Even so late as Irving the ships of the greatest navigators in the world were represented as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the aristocratic Venetians should have Riveted with gigantic piles Thorough the centre their new-catched miles, was heroic. But the far more marvellous achievement of the Dutch in the same kind was ludicrous even to republican Marvell. Meanwhile, during that very century of scorn, they were the best artists, sailors, merchants, bankers, printers, scholars, jurisconsults, and statesmen in Europe, and the genius of Motley has revealed them to us, earning a right to themselves by the most heroic struggle in human annals. But, alas ! they were not merely simple burghers who had fairly made themselves high mightinesses, and could treat on equal terms with anointed kings, but their commonwealth carried in its bosom the germs of democracy. They even unmuzzled, at least after dark, that dreadful mastiff, the Press, whose scent is, or ought to be, so keen for wolves in sheep's clothing and for certain other animals in lions' skins. They made fun of sacred majesty, and, what was worse, managed uncommonly well without it. In an age when periwigs made so large a part of the natural dignity of man, people with such a turn of mind were dangerous. How could they seem other than vulgar and hateful ? In the natural course of things we succeeded to this unen viable position of general butt. The Dutch had thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope that we could at least con trive to worry along. And we certainly did in a very re doubtable fashion. Perhaps we deserved some of the sar- ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 51 casm more than our Dutch predecessors in office. We had nothing to boast of in arts or letters, and were given to brag ging overmuch of our merely material prosperity, due quite as much to the virtue of our continent as to our own. There was some truth in Carlyle's sneer after all. Till we had succeeded in some higher way than this, we had only the success of physical growth. Our greatness, like that of enormous Russia, was greatness on the map — barbarian mass only ; but had we gone down, like that other Atlantis, in some vast cataclysm, we should have covered but a pin's point on the chart of memory, compared with those ideal spaces occupied by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the same time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that material must make ready the foundation for ideal triumphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries. But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a great deal in our shortcoming. The Edinburgh Review never would have thought of asking, ' Who reads a Russian book ? ' and Eng land was satisfied with iron from Sweden without being impertinently inquisitive after her painters and statuaries. Was it that they expected too much from the mere miracle of Freedom ? Is it not the highest art of a Republic to make men of flesh and blood, and not the marble ideals of such ? It may be fairly doubted whether we have produced this higher type of man yet. Perhaps it is the collective, not the individual, humanity that is to have a chance of nobler de velopment among us. We shall see. We have a vast amount of imported ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made knowledge, to digest before even the preli minaries of such a consummation can be arranged. We have got to learn that statesmanship is the most complicated of all arts, and to come back to the apprenticeship-system too hastily abandoned. At present, we trust a man with making constitutions on less proof of competence than we should demand before we gave him our shoe to patch. We have nearly reached the limit of the reaction from the old notion, which paid too much regard to birth and station as qualifications for office, and have touched the extreme point in the opposite direction, putting the highest of human func tions up at auction to be bid for by any creature capable of going upright on two legs. In some places, we have arrived at a point at which civil society is no longer possible, and E 2 52 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNER. already another reaction has begun, not backwards to the old system, but towards fitness either from natural aptitude or special training. But will it always be safe to let ev^s work their own cure by becoming unendurable ? Every one of them leaves its taint in the constitution of the body- politic, each in itself, perhaps, trifling, yet altogether powerful for evil. But whatever we might do or leave undone, we were not genteel, and it was uncomfortable to be continually reminded that, though we should boast that we were the Great West till we were black in the face, it did not bring us an inch nearer to the world's West-End. That sacred enclosure of respectability was tabooed to us. The Holy Alliance did not inscribe us on its visiting-list. The Old World of wigs and orders and liveries would shop with us, but we must ring at the area-bell, and not venture to awaken the more august clamours of the knocker. Our manners, it must be granted, had none of those graces that stamp the caste of Vere de Vere, in whatever museum of British antiquities they may be hidden. In short, we were vulgar. This was one of those horribly vague accusations, the victim of which has no defence. An umbrella is of no avail against a Scotch mist. It envelops you, it penetrates at every pore, it wets you through without seeming to wet you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth deadly sin, added to the list in these latter days, and worse than all the others put together, since it perils your salvation in this world, far the more im portant of the two in the minds of most men. It profits nothing to draw nice distinctions between essential and con ventional, for the convention in this case is the essence, and you may break every command of the decalogue with perfect good-breeding, nay, if you are adroit, without losing caste. We, indeed, had it not to lose, for we had never gained it. ' How am I vulgar ? ' asks the culprit, shudderingly. ' Because thou art not like unto Us,' answers Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and there is no more to be said. The god of this world may be a fallen angel, but he has us there ! We were as clean, so far as my observation goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and physically, than the English, and there fore, of course, than everybody else. But we did not pro nounce the diphthong ou as they did, and we said eethcr and not cyther, following therein the fashion of our ancestors, who ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 53 unhappily could bring over no English better than Shaks- peare's ; and we did not stammer as they had learned to do from the courtiers, who in this way flattered the Hanoverian king, a foreigner among the people he had come to reign over. Worse than all, we might have the noblest ideas and the finest sentiments in the world, but we vented them through that organ by which men are led rather than leaders, though some physiologists would persuade us that Nature furnishes her captains with a fine handle to their faces that Opportu nity may get a good purchase on them for dragging them to the front. This state of things was so painful that excellent people were not wanting who gave their whole genius to reproducing here the original Bull, whether by gaiters, the cut of their whiskers, by a factitious brutality in their tone, or by an accent that was for ever tripping and falling flat over the tangled roots of our common tongue. Martyrs to a false ideal, it never occurred to them that nothing is more hateful to gods and men than a second-rate Englishman, and for the very reason that this planet never produced a more splendid creature than the first-rate one, witness Shakspeare and the Indian Mutiny. Witness that truly sublime self-abnegation of those prisoners lately among the bandits of Greece, where average men gave an example of quiet fortitude for which all the stoicism of antiquity can show no match. If we could con trive to be not too unobtrusively our simple selves, we should be the most delightful of human beings, and the most original ; whereas, when the plating of Anglicism rubs off, as it always will in points that come to much wear, we are liable to very unpleasing conjectures about the quality of the metal underneath. Perhaps one reason why the average Briton spreads himself here with such an easy air of supe riority may be owing to the fact that he meets with so many bad imitations as to conclude himself the only real thing in a wilderness of shams. He fancies himself moving through an endless Bloomsbury, where his mere apparition confers honour as an avatar of the court-end of the universe. Not a Bull of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa upon his back. This is the sort of fellow whose patronage is so divertingly insufferable. Thank heaven, he is not the only specimen of cater-cousinship from the dear old mother island that is shown to ITS J Among genuine things, I know 54 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. nothing more genuine than the better men whose limbs \\ere made in England. So manly-tender, so brave, so true, so warranted to wear, they make us proud to feel that blood is thicker than water. But it is not merely the Englishman ; every European candidly admits in himself some right of primogeniture in respect to us, and pats this shaggy continent on the back with a lively sense of generous unbending. The German who plays the bass-viol has a well-founded contempt, which he is not always nice in concealing, for a country so few of whose children ever take that noble instrument between their knees. His cousin, the Ph. D. from Gottingen, cannot help despising a people who do not grow loud and red over Aryans and Turanians, and are indifferent about their descent from either. The Frenchman feels an easy mastery in speak ing his mother tongue, and attributes it to some native superiority of parts that lifts him high above us barbarians of the West. The Italian prima donna sweeps a courtesy of careless pity to the over-facile pit which unsexes her with the bravo! innocently meant to show a familiarity with foreign usage. But all \vithout exception make no secret of regarding us as the goose bound to deliver them a golden egg in return for their cackle. Such men as Agassiz, Guyot, and Goldwin Smith come with gifts in their hands ; but since it is commonly European failures who bring hither their remarkable gifts and acquirements, this view of the case is sometimes just the least bit in the world provoking. To think what a delicious seclusion of contempt we enjoyed till California and our own ostentatious parvenus, flinging gold away in Europe that might have endowed libraries at home, gave us the ill repute of riches ! What a shabby downfall from the Arcadia which the French officers of our Revolu tionary War fancied they saw here through Rousseau-tinted spectacles ! Something of Arcadia there really was, something of the Old Age ; and that divine provincialism were cheaply repurchased could we have it back again in exchange for the tawdry upholstery that has taken its place. For some reason or other, the European has rarely been able to see America except in caricature. Would the first Review of the world have printed the niaiseries of Mr. Maurice Sand as a picture of society in any civilised coun try ? Mr. Sand, to be sure, has inherited nothing of his ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 55 famous mother's literary outfit, except the pseudonyme. But since the conductors of the Revue could not have published his story because it was clever, they must have thought it valuable for its truth. As true as the last century English man's picture of Jean Crapaud! We do not ask to be sprinkled with rosewater, but may perhaps fairly protest against being drenched with the rinsings of an unclean ima gination. The next time the Revue allows such ill-bred persons to throw their slops out of its first-floor windows, let it honestly preface the discharge with a gare de I'eauf that we may run from under in season. And Mr. Duvergier d'Hauranne, who knows how to be entertaining ! I know le Fran$ais est plutot indiscret que confiant, and the pen slides too easily when indiscretions will fetch so much a page ; but should we not have been tant-soit-peu more cautious had we been writing about people on the other side of the Channel ? But then it is a fact in the natural history of the American long familiar to Europeans, that he abhors privacy, knows not the meaning of reserve, lives in hotels because of their greater publicity, and is never so pleased as when his do mestic affairs (if he may be said to have any) are paraded in the newspapers. Barnum, it is well known, represents per fectly the average national sentiment in this respect. How ever it be, we are not treated like other people, or perhaps I should say like people who are ever likely to be met with in society. Is it in the climate? Either I have a false notion of European manners, or else the atmosphere affects them strangely when exported hither. Perhaps they suffer from the sea- voyage like some of the more delicate wines. During our Civil War an English gentleman of the highest descrip tion was kind enough to call upon me, mainly, as it seemed, to inform me how entirely he sympathised with the Con federates, and how sure he felt that we could never subdue them, — * they were the gentlemen of the country, you know. Another, the first greetings hardly over, asked me how I accounted for the universal meagreness of my countrymen. To a thinner man than I, or from a stouter man than he, the question might have been offensive. The Marquis of Hart- ington* wore a secession badge at a public ball in New York. * One of Mr. Lincoln's neatest strokes of humour was his treatment of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to be presented to the President 56 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. In a civilised country he might have been roughly handled; but here, where the bienstances are not so well understood, of course nobody minded it. A French traveller told me he had been a good deal in the British colonies, and had been astonished to see how soon the people became Americanised. He added, with delightful bonhomie, and as if he were sure it would charm me, that ' they even began to talk through their noses, just like you ! ' I was naturally ravished with this tes timony to the assimilating power of democracy, and could only reply that I hoped they would never adopt our demo cratic patent-method of seeming to settle one's honest debts, for they would find it paying through the nose in the long run. I am a man of the New World, and do not know pre cisely the present fashion of May Fair, but I have a kind of feeling that if an American (mutato nomine, de te is always frightfully possible) were to do this kind of thing under a European roof, it would induce some disagreeable reflections as to the ethical results of democracy. I read the other day in print the remark of a British tourist who had eaten large quantities of our salt, such as it is (I grant it has not the European savour), that the Americans were hospitable, no doubt, but that it was partly because they longed for foreign visitors to relieve the tedium of their dead-level existence, and partly from ostentation. What shall we do ? Shall we close our doors? Not I, for one, if I should so have for feited the friendship of L. S., most lovable of men. He somehow seems to find us human at least, and so did Clough, whose poetry will one of these days, perhaps, be found to have been the best utterance in verse of this generation. And T. H., the mere grasp of whose manly hand carries with it the pledge of frankness and friendship, of an abiding sim plicity of nature as affecting as it is rare ! The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not hard to bear. There was something even refreshing in it, as in a north-easter to a hardy temperament. When a British parson, travelling in Newfoundland while the slash of our separation* was still raw, after prophesying a glorious future for an island that continued to dry its fish under the aegis of Saint George, of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of good-breeding could go no further. Giving the young man his real name (already notorious in the newspapers) would have made his visit an insult. Had Henri IV. done this, it would have beer* famouSt ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 57 glances disdainfully over his spectacles in parting at the U. S. A., and forebodes for them a f speedy relapse into bar barism/ now that they have madly cut themselves off from the humanising influences of Britain, I smile with barbarian self-conceit. But this kind of thing became by degrees an unpleasant anachronism. For meanwhile the young giant was growing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in his clothes, was obliged to let in a gore here and there in Texas, in Cali fornia, in New Mexico, in Alaska, and had the scissors and needle and thread ready for Canada when the time came. His shadow loomed like a broken-spectre over against Europe, — the shadow of what they were coming to, that was the unpleasant part of it. Even in such misty image as they had of him, it was painfully evident that his clothes were not of any cut hitherto fashionable, nor conceivable by a Bond Street tailor ; and this in an age, too, when everything de pends upon clothes ; when, if we do not keep up appearances, the seeming solid-frame of this universe, nay, your very God, would slump into himself, like a mockery king of snow, being nothing, after all, but a prevailing mode. From this moment the young giant assumed the respectable aspect of a phe nomenon, to be got rid of if possible, but at any rate as legi timate a subject of human study as the glacial period or the silurian what-d'ye-call-ems. If the man of the primeval drift- heaps is so absorbingly interesting, why not the man of the drift that is just beginning, of the drift into whose irresistible current we are just being sucked whether we will or no ? If I were in their place, I confess I should not be frightened. Man has survived so much, and contrived to be comfortable on this planet after surviving so much ! I am something of a Protestant in matters of government also, and am willing to get rid of vestments and ceremonies and to come down to bare benches, if only faith in God take the place of a general agreement to profess confidence in ritual and sham. Every mortal man of us holds stock in the only public debt that is absolutely sure of payment, and that is the debt of the Maker of this Universe to the Universe he has made. I have no notion of selling out my stock in a panic. It was something to have advanced even to the dignity of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that the relation of the individual American to the individual European was bettered by it; and that, after all, must adjust itself comfort- 58 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. ably before there can be a right understanding between the two. We had been a desert, we became a museum. People came hither for scientific and not social ends. The very cockney could not complete his education without taking a vacant stare at us in passing. But the sociologists (I think they call themselves so) were the hardest to bear. There was no escape. I have even known a professorof this fearful science to come disguised in petticoats. We were cross- examined as a chemist cross-examines a new substance. Human ! yes, all the elements are present, though abnor mally combined. Civilised ? Hm ! that needs a stricter assay. No entomologist could take a more friendly interest in a strange bug. After a few such experiences, I, for one, have felt as if I were merely one of those horrid things pre served in spirits (and very bad spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the fellow-being of these explorers ; I was a curi osity; I was a specimen. Hath not an American organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions even as a European hath? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh ? I will not keep on with Shylock to his next question but one. Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter the head of any foreigner, especially of any Englishman, that an American had what could be called a country, except as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then it seemed to strike them suddenly. ' By Jove, you know, fellahs don't fight like that for a shop-till ! ' No, I rather think not. To Ameri cans America is something more than a promise and an expectation. It has a past and traditions of its own. A descent from men who sacrificed everything and came hither, not to better their fortunes, but to plant their idea in virgin soil, should be a good pedigree. There was never colony save this that went forth, not to seek gold, but God. Is it not as well to have sprung from such as these as from some burly beggar who came over with Wilhelmus Conquestor, unless, indeed, a line grow better as it runs farther away from stalwart ancestors ? And for history, it is dry enough, no doubt, in the books, but, for all that, is of a kind that tells in the blood. I have admitted that Carlyle's sneer had a show of truth in it. But what does he himself, like a true Scot, admire in the Hohenzollerns ? First of all, that they were canny, a thrifty, forehanded race. Next, that they ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 59 made a. good fight from generation to generation with the chaos around them. That is precisely the battle which the English race on this continent has been carrying doughtily on for two centuries and a half. Doughtily and silently, for you cannot hear in Europe * that crash, the death-song of the perfect tree/ that has been going on here from sturdy father to sturdy son, and making this continent habitable for the weaker Old World breed that has swarmed to it during the last half-century. If ever men did a good stroke of work on this planet, it was the forefathers of those whom you are wondering whether it would not be prudent to acknowledge as far-off cousins. Alas ! man of genius, to whom we owe so much, could you see nothing more than the burning of a foul chimney in that clash of Michael and Satan which flamed up under your very ey^es ? Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob of adventurers and shopkeepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it well enough when he said that he could never think of America without seeing a gigantic counter stretched all along the seaboard. Feudalism had by degrees made commerce, the great civiliser, contemptible. But a tradesman \vith sword on thigh and very prompt of stroke was not only re doubtable, he had become respectable also. Few people, I suspect, alluded twice to a needle in Sir John Hawkwood's presence, after that doughty fighter had exchanged it for a more dangerous tool of the same metal. Democracy had been hitherto only a ludicrous effort to reverse the laws of nature by thrusting Cleon into the place of Pericles. But a ^democracy that could fight for an abstraction, whose mem bers held life and goods cheap compared with that larger •life which we call country, was not merely unheard-of, but portentous. It was the nightmare of the Old World taking upon itself flesh and blood, turning out to be substance and not dream. Since the Norman crusader clanged down upon the throne of the porphyro-geniti, carefully-draped appear ances had never received such a shock, had never been so rudely called on to produce their titles to the empire of the world. Authority has had its periods not unlike those of geology, and at last comes Man claiming kingship in right of his mere manhood. The world of the Saurians might be in some respects more picturesque, but the march of events is inexorable, and it is bygone. 60 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. The young giant had certainly got out of long-clothes. He had become the enfant terrible of the human household. It was not and will not be easy for the world (especially for our British cousins) to look upon us as grown up. The youngest of nations, its people must also be youns* and to be treated accordingly, was the syllogism — as if libraries did not make all nations equally old in all those respects, at least, where age is an advantage and not a defect. Youth, no doubt, has its good qualities, as people feel who are losing it ; but boy ishness is another thing. We had been somewhat boyish as a nation, a little loud, a little pushing, a little braggart. But might it not partly have been because we felt that we had certain claims to respect that were not admitted ? The war which established our position as a vigorous nationality has also sobered us. A nation, like a man, cannot look death in the eye for four years, without some strange reflections, with out arriving at some clearer consciousness of the stuff it is made of, without some great moral change. Such a change, or the beginning of it, no observant person can fail to see here. Our thought and our politics, our bearing as a people, are assuming a manlier tone. We have been compelled to see what was weak in democracy as well as what was strong. We have begun obscurely to recognise that things do not go of themselves, and that popular government is not in itself a panacea, is no better than any other form except as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and that when men undertake to do their own kingship, they enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as well as the privileges of the function. Above all, it looks as if we were on the way to be persuaded that no government can be carried on by de clamation. It is noticeable also that facility of communica tion has made the best English and French thought far more directly operative here than ever before. Without being Europeanised, our discussion of important questions in states manship, political economy, in aesthetics, is taking a broader scope and a higher tone. It had certainly been provincial, one might almost say local, to a very unpleasant extent. Perhaps our experience in soldiership has taught us to value training more than we have been popularly wont. We may possibly come to the conclusion, one of these days, that self- made men may not be always equally skilful in the manu facture of wisdom, may not be divinely commissioned to ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 6 1 fabricate the higher qualities of opinion on all possible topics of human interest. So long as we continue to be the most common-schooled and the least cultivated people in the world, I suppose we must consent to endure this condescending manner of foreigners toward us. The more friendly they mean to be the more ludicrously prominent it becomes. They can never appreciate the immense amount of silent work that has been done here, making this continent slowly fit for the abode of man, and which will demonstrate itself, let us hope, in the character of the people. Outsiders can only be expected to judge a nation by the amount it has contributed to the civil isation of the world ; the amount, that is, that can be seen and handled. A great place in history can only be achieved by competitive examinations, nay, by a long course of them. How much new thought have we contributed to the common stock ? Till that question can be triumphantly answered, or needs no answer, we must continue to be simply interesting as an experiment, to be studied as a problem, and not re spected as an attained result or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as I have hinted, their patronising manner toward us is the fair result of their failing to see here anything more than a poor imitation, a plaster-cast of Europe. And are they not partly right? If the tone of the uncultivated American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic ? In the America they meet with is there the simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the sincere human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from what our orators call * the effete civilisation of the Old World ? ' Is there a politician among us daring enough (except a Dana here and there) to risk his future on the chance of our keeping our word with the exact ness of superstitious communities like England ? Is it certain that we shall be ashamed of a bankruptcy of honour, if we can only keep the letter of our bond ? I hope we shall be able to answer all these questions with a frank yes. At any rate, we would advise our visitors that we are not merely curious creatures, but belong to the family of man, and that, as individuals, we are not to be always subjected to the com petitive examination above-mentioned, even if we acknow ledged their competence as an examining board. Above all, 62 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. we beg them to remember that America is not to us, as to them, a mere object of external interest to be discussed and analysed, but in us, part of our very marrow. Let them not suppose that we conceive of ourselves as exiles from the graces and amenities of an older date than we, though very much at home in a state of things not yet all it might be or should be but which we mean to make so, and which we find both wholesome and pleasant for men (though perhaps not for dilettanti} to live in. ' The full tide of human existence ' may be felt here as keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing Cross, and in a larger sense. I know one person who is singular enough to think Cambridge the very best spot on the habitable globe. ' Doubtless God could have made a better, but doubtless he never did.' It will take England a great while to get over her airs of patronage toward us, or even passably to conceal them. She cannot help confounding the people with the country, and regarding us as lust) juveniles. She has a conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly English, when the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism. She is especially con descending just now, and lavishes sugar-plums on us as if we had not outgrown them. I am no believer in sudden con versions, especially in sudden conversions to a favorable opinion of people who have just proved you to be mistaken in judgment, and therefore unwise in policy. I never blamed her for not wishing well to democracy, — how should she ? — but Alabamas are not wishes. Let her not be too hasty in believing Mr. Reverdy Johnson's pleasant words. Though there is no thoughtful man in America who would not con sider a war with England the greatest of calamities, yet the feeling towards her here is very far from cordial, whatever our minister may say in the effusion that comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams, with his famous ' My lord, this means war,' perfectly represented his country. Justly or not, we have a feeling that we have been wronged, not merely in sulted. The only sure way of bringing about a healthy rela tion between the two countries is for Englishmen to clear their minds of the notion, that we are always to be treated as a kind of inferior and deported Englishman whose nature they perfectly understand, and whose back they accordingly stroke the wrong -way of the fur with amazing perseverance. ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS, 63 Let them learn to treat us naturally on our merits as human beings, as they would a German or a Frenchman, and not as if we were a kind of counterfeit Briton whose crime appeared in every shade of difference, and before long there would come that right feeling which we naturally call a good un derstanding. The common blood, and still more the com mon language, are fatal instruments of misapprehension. Let them give up trying to understand us, still more thinking that they do, and acting in various absurd ways as the ne cessary consequence, for they will never arrive at that de voutly-to-be-wished consummation, till they learn to look at us as we are and not as they suppose us to be. Dear old long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many years since we parted. Since 1660, when you married again, you have been a step-mother to us. Put on your spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and changed likewise. You would not let us darken your doors, if you could help it. We know that perfectly well. But pray, when we look to be treated as men, don't shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us any longer. Do, child, go to it grandam, child ; Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig I A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER* IT is the misfortune of American biography that it must needs be more or less provincial, and that, contrary to what might have been predicted, this quality in it predomi nates in proportion as the country grows larger. Wanting any great and acknowledged centre of national life and thought, our expansion has hitherto been rather aggregation than growth; reputations must be hammered out thin to cover so wide a surface, and the substance of most hardly holds out to the boundaries of a single state. Our very history wants unity, and down to the Revolution the attention is wearied and confused by having to divide itself among thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred on a single clue. A sense of remoteness and seclusion comes over us as we read, and we cannot help asking ourselves, * Were * The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son. 64 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. not these things done in a corner?' Notoriety may be achieved in a narrow sphere, but fame demands for its evi dence a more distant and prolonged reverberation. To the world at large we were but a short column of figures in the corner of a blue-book, New England exporting so much salt fish, timber, and Medford rum, Virginia so many hogsheads of tobacco, and buying with the proceeds a certain amount of English manufactures. The story of our early colonisation had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was altogether inferior in picturesque fascination to that of Mexico or Peru. The lives of our worthies, like that of our nation, are bare of those foregone and far-reaching associations with names, the divining-rods of fancy, which the soldiers and civilians of the Old -World get for nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their historians and biographers have succeeded to the good will, as well as to the long-established stand, of the shop of glory. Time is, after all, the greatest of poets, and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace in saying, Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante Trita solo ; but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece and Rome behind him, and can begin his poem with invoking a goddess from whom legend derived the planter of his race. His eyes looked out on a landscape saturated with glorious recollections; he had seen Caesar, and heard Cicero. But who shall conjure with Saugus or Cato Four Corners, — with Israel Putnam or Return Jonathan Meigs? We have been transplanted, and for us the long hierarchical succession of history is broken. The Past has not laid its venei able hands upon us in consecration, conveying to us that mysterious in fluence whose force is in its continuity. We are to Europe as the Church of England to her of Rome. The latter old lady may be the Scarlet Woman, or the Beast with ten horns, if you will; but hers are all the heirlooms, hers that vast spi ritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet everywhere, whose revenues are none the less fruitful for being levied on the imagination. We may claim that England's history is also ours, but it is a de jure, and not a de facto property that we have in it, — something that may be proved indeed, yet is a merely intellectual satisfaction, and does not savour of the realty. Have we not seen the mockery crown and sceptre A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 65 of the exiled Stuarts in St. Peter's ? the medal struck so lately as 1784 with its legend, HEN IX MAG BRIT ET HIE REX, whose contractions but faintly typify the scantness of the fact ? As the novelist complains that our society wants that sharp contrast of character and costume which conies of caste, so in the narrative of our historians we miss what may be called background and perspective, as if the events and the actors in them failed of that cumulative interest which only a long historical entail can give. Relatively, the crusade of Sir William Pepperell was of more consequence than that of St. Louis, and yet forgive us, injured shade of the second Ame rican baronet, if we find the narrative of Join ville more inter esting than your despatches to Governor Shirley. Relatively, the insurrection of that Daniel whose Irish patronymic Shea was euphonized into Shays, as a set-off for the debasing of French chaise into shay, was more dangerous than that of Charles Edward ; but for some reason or other (as vice some times has the advantage of virtue) the latter is more enticing to the imagination, and the least authentic relic of it in song or story has a relish denied to the painful industry of Minot. Our events seem to fall short of that colossal proportion which befits the monumental style. Look grave as we will, there is something ludicrous in Counsellor Keane's pig being the pivot of a revolution. We are of yesterday, and it is to no purpose that our political augurs divine from the flight of our eagles that to-morrow shall be ours, and flatter us with an all-hail hereafter. Things do really gain in greatness by being acted on a great and cosmopolitan stage, because there is inspiration in the thronged audience, and the nearer match that puts men on their mettle. Webster was more largely endowed by nature than Fox, and Fisher Ames not much below Burke as a talker; but what a difference in the intel lectual training, in the literary culture and associations, in the whole social outfit, of the men who were their antagonists and companions ! It should seem that, if it be collision with other minds and with events that strikes or draws the fire from a man, then the quality of those might have something to do with the quality of the fire — whether it shall be culinary or electric. We have never known the varied stimulus, the inexorable criticism, the many-sided opportunity of a great metropolis, the inspiring reinforcement of an undivided na tional consciousness. In everything but trade we have missed F 66 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. the invigoration of foreign rivalry. We may prove that we are this and that and the other— our Fourth of July orators have proved it time and again— the census has proved it; but the Muses are women, and have no great iancy for sta tistics, though easily silenced by them. We are great, we are rich, we are all kinds of good things; but did it never occur to you that somehow we are not interesting, except as a phe nomenon ? It may safely be affirmed that for one cultivated man in this country who studies American, there are fifty who study European history, ancient or modern. Till within a year or two we have been as distant and obscure to the eyes of Europe as Ecuador to our own. Every day brings us nearer, enables us to see the Old World more clearly, and by inevitable comparison to judge ourselves with some closer approach to our real value. This has its advantage so long as our culture is, as for a long time it must be, European; for we shall be little better than apes and parrots till we are forced to measure our muscle with the trained and practised champions of that elder civilisation. We have at length established our claim to the noblesse of the sword, the first step still of every nation that would make its entry into the best society of history. To maintain our selves there, we must achieve an equality in the more exclu sive circle of culture, and to that end must submit ourselves to the European standard of intellectual weights and measures. That we have made the hitherto biggest gun might excite apprehension (were there a dearth of iron), but can never exact respect. That our pianos and patent reapers have won medals does but confirm us in our mechanic and ma terial measure of merit. We must contribute something more than mere contrivances for the saving of labour, which we have been only too ready to misapply in the domain of thought and the higher kinds of invention. In those Olympic games where nations contend for truly immortal wreaths, it may well be questioned whether a mowing-machine would stand much chance in the chariot-races — whether a piano, though made by a chevalier, could compete successfully for the prize of music. We shall have to be content for a good while yet with our provincialism, and must strive to make the best of it. In it lies the germ of nationality, and that is, after all, the prime condition of all thoroughbred greatness of character. To, A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 67 this choicest fruit of a healthy life, well rooted in native soil, and drawing prosperous juices thence, nationality gives the keenest flavour. Mr. Lincoln was an original man, and in so far a great man ; yet it was the Americanism of his every thought, word, and act which not only made his influence equally at home in East and West, but drew the eyes of the outside world, and was the pedestal that lifted him where he could be seen by them. Lincoln showed that native force may transcend local boundaries, but the growth of such nationality is hindered and hampered by our division into so many half-independent communities, each with its objects of county ambition, and its public men great to the borders of their district. In this way our standard of greatness is insen sibly debased. To receive any national appointment, a man must have gone through precisely the worst training for it ; he must have so far narrowed and belittled himself with State politics as to be acceptable at home. In this way a man may become chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs because he knows how to pack a caucus in Catawampus County, or be sent ambassador to Barataria because he has drunk bad whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City. Should we e\-er attain to a conscious nationality, it will have the advantage of lessening the number of our great men, and widening our appreciation to the larger scale of the two or three that are left — if there should be so many. Meanwhile we offer a premium to the production of great men in a small way, by inviting each State to set up the statues of two of its immortals in the Capitol. What a niggardly percentage ! Already we are embarrassed, not to find the two, but to choose among the crowd of candidates. Well, seventy- odd heroes in about as many years is pretty well for a young nation. We do not envy most of them their eternal martyr dom in marble, their pillory of indiscrimination. We fancy even native tourists pausing before the greater part of the effigies, and, after reading the names, asking desperately, 'Whowas/z^?' Nay, if they should say, 'Who the devil was he?' it were a pardonable invocation, for none so fit as the Prince of Darkness to act as cicerone among such pal pable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of the Uffizj at Florence. That also is not free of parish celebrities; but Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Macchiavelli — shall the in ventor of the sewing-machine, even with the button-holing F2 68 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. improvement, let us say, match with these, or with far lesser than these ? Perhaps he was more practically useful than any one of these, or all of them together, but the soul is sen sible of a sad difference somewhere. These also were citi zens of a provincial capital; so were the greater part of Plutarch's heroes. Did they have a better chance than we moderns — than we Americans ? At any rate they have the start of us, and we must confess that By bed and table they lord it o'er us, Our elder brothers, but one in blood. Yes, one in blood ; that is the hardest part of it. Is our pro vincialism then in some great measure due to our absorption in the practical, as we politely call it, meaning the material — to our habit of estimating greatness by the square mile and the hundredweight? Even during our war, in the midst of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were not our speakers and newspapers so enslaved to the vulgar habit as to boast ten times of the thousands of square miles it covered with armed men, for once that they alluded to the motive that gave it all its meaning and its splendour ? Perhaps it was as well that they did not exploit that passion of patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum or Perham. ' I scale one hundred and eighty pounds, but when I'm mad I weigh two ton,' said the Kentuckian, with a true notion of moral avoirdupois. That ideal kind of weight is wonderfully increased by a national feeling, whereby one man is con scious that thirty millions of men go into the balance with him. The Roman in ancient, and the Englishman in modern times, have been most conscious of this representative soli dity, and wherever one of them went there stood Rome or England in his shoes. We have made some advance in thej right direction. Our civil war, by the breadth of its propor tions and the implacability of its demands, forced us to admit a truer valuation, and gave us, in our own despite, great; soldiers and sailors, allowed for such by all the world. The harder problems it has left behind may in time compel us to, have great statesmen, with views capable of reaching beyond the next election. The criticism of Europe alone can rescue us from the provincialism of an over or false estimate of our selves. Let us be thankful, and not angry, that we must accept it as our touchstone. Our stamp has so often been impressed upon base metal, that we cannot expect it to bej A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 69 taken on trust, but we may be sure that true gold will be equally persuasive the world over. Real manhood and honest achievement are nowhere provincial, but enter the select society of all time on an even footing. Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look into. Those Catharine -wheel republics, always in revolution while the powder lasts, and sure to burn the fingers of whoever attempts intervention, have also their great men, as placidly ignored by us as our own by jealous Europe. The following passage from the life of Don Simon Bolivar might allay many motus animorum, if rightly pondered. Bolivar, then a youth, was travelling in Italy, and his biographer tells us that, * near Castiglione he was present at the grand review made by Napoleon of the columns defiling into the plain large enough to contain sixty thousand men. The throne was situ ated on an eminence that overlooked the plain, and Napoleon on several occasions looked through a glass at Bolivar and his companions, who were at the base of the hill. The hero Caesar could not imagine that he beheld the liberator of the world of Columbus ! ' And small blame to him, one would say. We are not, then, it seems, the only foundling of Columbus, as we are so apt to take for granted. The great Genoese did not, as we supposed, draw that first star-guided furrow across the vague of waters with a single eye to the future greatness of the United States. And have we not sometimes, like the enthusiastic biographer, fancied the Old World staring through all its telescopes at us, and wondered that it did not recognise in us what we were fully persuaded we were going to be and do ? Our American life is dreadfully barren of those elements of the social picturesque which give piquancy to anecdote. And without anecdote, what is biography, or even history, which is only biography on a larger scale ? Clio, though she take airs on herself, and pretend to be ' philosophy teaching by example,' is, after all, but a gossip who has borrowed Fame's speaking-trumpet, and should be figured with a tea cup instead of a scroll in her hand. How much has she not owed of late to the tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia ? In what gutters has not Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits with which he has put together his admirable mosaic picture of England under the last two Stuarts? Even Mommsen himself, who dislikes Plutarch's method as much as Montaigne 70 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. loved it, cannot get or give a lively notion of ancient Rome, without running to the comic poets and the anecdote- mongers. He gives us the very beef-tea of history, nour ishing and even palatable enough, excellently portable for a memory that must carry her own packs, and can afford little luggage ; but for our own part, we prefer a full, old- fashioned meal, with its side-dishes of spicy gossip, and its last relish, the Stilton of scandal, so it be not too high. One volume of contemporary memoirs, stuffed though it be with lies (for lies to be good for anything must have a potential probability, must even be true so far as their moral and social setting is concerned) will throw more light into the dark backward of time than the gravest Camden or Thuanus. If St. Simon is not accurate, is he any the less essentially trite ? No history gives us so clear an understanding of the moral condition of average men after the restoration of the Stuarts as the unconscious blabbings of the Puritan tailor's son, with his two consciences, as it were — an inward, still sensitive in spots, though mostly toughened to India-rubber, and good rather for rubbing out old scores than retaining them, and an outward, alert, and termagantly effective in Mrs. Pepys. But we can have no St. Simons or Pepyses till we have a Paris or London to delocalize our gossip and give it historic breadth. All our capitals are fractional, merely greater or smaller gatherings of men, centres of business rather than of action or influence, Each contains so many souls, but is not, as the word ' capital ' implies, the true head of a community and seat of its common soul. Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic than it once was ? As the clearing away of the woods scants the streams, may not our civilisation have dried up some feeders that helped to swell the current of individual and personal force? We have sometimes thought that the stricter definition and consequent seclusion from each other of the different callings in modern times, as it narrowed the chance of developing and giving variety to character, lessened also the interest of biography. Formerly arts and arms were not divided by so impassable a barrier as now. There was hardly such a thing as a pekin. Caesar gets up from writing his Latin Grammar to conquer Gaul, change the course of history, and make so many things possible — among the rest our English language and Shakespeare. Horace had been a A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 71 colonel; and from ^Eschylus, who fought at Marathon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low Countries, the list of martial civilians is a long one. A man's education seems more complete who has smelt hostile powder from a less aesthetic distance than Goethe. It raises our confidence in Sir Kenelm Digby as a physicist, that he is able to illustrate some theory of acoustics in his Treatise of Bodies by instancing the effect of his guns in a sea-fight off Scanderoon. One would expect the proportions of character to be enlarged by such variety and contrast of experience. Perhaps it will by-and- by appear that our own Civil War has done something for us in this way. Colonel Higginson comes down from his pulpit to draw on his jackboots, and thenceforth rides in our imagination alongside of John Bunyan and Bishop Compton. To have stored moral capital enough to meet the drafts of Death at sight must be an unmatched tonic. We saw our light-hearted youth some back with the modest gravity of age, as if they had learned to throw out pickets against a surprise of any weak point in their temperament. Perhaps that American shiftiness, so often complained of, may not be so bad a thing, if, by bringing men acquainted with every humour of fortune and human nature, it puts them in fuller possession of themselves. But with whatever drawbacks in special circumstances, the main interest of biography must always lie in the amount of character or essential manhood which the subject of it reveals to us, and events are of import only as means to that end. It is true that lofty and far-seen exigencies may give greater opportunity to some men, whose energy is more sharply spurred by the shout of a multitude than by the grudging Well done ! of conscience. Some theorists have too hastily assumed that, as the power of public opinion increases, the force of private character, or what we call originality, is absorbed into and diluted by it. But we think Horace was right in putting tyrant and mob on a level as the trainers and tests of a man's solid quality. The amount of resistance of which one is capable to whatever lies outside the conscience is of more consequence than all other faculties together ; and democracy, perhaps, tries this by pressure in more directions, and with a more continuous strain, than any other form of society. In Josiah Quincy we have an example of character trained and shaped, under the nearest 72 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. approach to a pure democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, and self-centred poise that recall the finer types of antiquity, in whom the public and private man was so wholly of a piece that they were truly everywhere at home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the hearth carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum. The phrase ' a great public character,' once common, seems to be going out of fashion, perhaps because there are fewer examples of the thing. It fits Josiah Quincy exactly. Active in civic and academic duties till beyond the ordinary period of man, at fourscore and ten his pen, voice, and venerable presence were still efficient in public affairs. A score of years after the energies of even vigorous men are declining or spent, his mind and character made themselves felt as in their prime. A true pillar of house and state, he stood un flinchingly upright under whatever burden might be laid upon him. The French Revolutionists aped what was itself but a parody of the elder republic, with their hair d la Brutus, and their pedantic moralities d la Cato Minor, but this man unconsciously was the antique Roman they laboriously went about to be. Others have filled places more conspicuous, few have made the place they filled so conspicuous by an exact and disinterested performance of duty. In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son there is some thing of the provincialism of which we have spoken as inherent in most American works of the kind. His was a Boston life in the strictest sense. But provincialism is rela tive, and where it has a flavour of its own, as in Scotland, it is often agreeable in proportion to its very intensity. The Massachusetts in which Mr. Quincy's habits of thought were acquired was a very different Massachusetts from that in which we of later generations have been bred. Till after he had passed middle life, Boston was more truly a capital than any other city in America, before or since, except possibly Charleston. The acknowledged head of New England, with a population of well-nigh purely English descent, mostly derived from the earlier emigration, with ancestral traditions and inspiring memories of its own, it had made its name familiar in both worlds, and was both historically and politically more important than at any later period. The Revolution had not interrupted, but rather given a freer A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 73 current to the tendencies of its past. Both by its history and position, the town had what the French call a solidarity, an almost personal consciousness, rare anywhere, rare espe cially in America, and more than ever since our enormous importation of fellow-citizens, to whom America means merely shop, or meat three times a day. Boston has been called the 'American Athens.' -^Esthetically, the comparison is ludicrous, but politically it was more reasonable. Its population was homogeneous, and there were leading fami lies ; while the form of government by town-meeting, and the facility of social and civic intercourse, gave great influence to popular personal qualities and opportunity to new men. A wide commerce, while it had insensibly softened the aspe rities of Puritanism and imported enough foreign refinement to humanise, not enough foreign luxury to corrupt, had not essentially qualified the native tone of the town. Retired sea-captains (true brothers of Chaucer's Shipman), whose exploits had kindled the imagination of Burke, added a not unpleasant savour of salt to society. They belonged to the old school of Gilbert, Hawkins, Frobisher, and Drake, parcel-soldiers all of them, who had commanded armed ships, and had tales to tell of gallant fights with privateers or pirates, truest representatives of those Vikings who, if trade in lumber or peltry was dull, would make themselves Dukes of Dublin or Earls of Orkney. If trade pinches the mind, commerce liberalises it ; and Boston was also advantaged with the neighbourhood of the country's oldest College, which maintained the wholesome traditions of culture — where Homer and Horace are familiar there is a certain amount of cosmopolitanism — and would not allow bigotry to become despotism. Manners were more self-respectful, and therefore more respectful of others, and personal sensitive ness was fenced with more of that ceremonial with which society armed itself when it surrendered the ruder protection of the sword. We had not then seen a Governor in his chamber at the State House with his hat on, a cigar in his mouth, and his feet upon the stove. Domestic service, in spite of the proverb, was not seldom an inheritance, nor was household peace dependent on the whim of a foreign armed neutrality in the kitchen. Servant and master were of one stock; there was decent authority and becoming respect; the tradition of the Old World lingered after its superstition 74 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. had passed away. There was an aristocracy such as is healthful in a well-ordered community, founded on public service, and hereditary so long as the virtue which was its patent was not escheated. The clergy, no longer hedged by the reverence exacted by sacerdotal caste, were more than repaid by the consideration willingly paid to superior culture. What changes, many of them for the better, some of them surely for the worse, and all of them inevitable, did not Josiah Quincy see in that well-nigh secular life which linked the war of independence to the war of nationality ! We seemed to see a type of them the other day in a coloured man standing with an air of comfortable self-possession while his boots were brushed by a youth of catholic neutral tint, but whom nature had planned for white. The same eyes that had looked on Gage's redcoats, saw Colonel Shaw's negro regiment march out of Boston in the national blue. Seldom has a life, itself actively associated with public affairs, spanned so wide a chasm for the imagination. Oglethorpe's offers a parallel — the aide-de-camp of Prince Eugene calling on John Adams, American Ambassador to England. Most long lives resemble those threads of gos samer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly pro longed, scarce visible pathway of some worm from his cradle to his grave ; but Quincy's was strung with seventy active years, each one a rounded bead of usefulness and service. Mr. Quincy was a Bostonian of the purest type. Since the settlement of the town, there had been a colonel of the Boston regiment in every generation of his family. He lived to see a grandson brevetted with the same title for gallantry in the field. Only child of one among the most eminent advocates of the Revolution, and who but for his untimely death would have been a leading actor in it, his earliest recollections belonged to the heroic period in the history of his native town. With that history his life was thenceforth intimately united by offices of public trust, as Representative in Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and President of the University, to a period beyond the ordinary span of mortals. Even after he had passed ninety, he would not claim to be emeritus, but came forward to brace his townsmen with a courage and warm them with a fire younger than their own. The legend of Colonel Goffe at Deerfield A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 75 became a reality to the eyes of this generation. The New England breed is running out, we are told ! This was in all ways a beautiful and fortunate life — fortunate in the goods of this world — fortunate, above all, in the force of character which makes fortune secondary and subservient. We are fond in this country of what are called self-made men (as if real success could ever be other) ; and this is all very well, provided they make something worth having of themselves. Otherwise it is not so well, and the examples of such are at best but stuff for the Alnaschar dreams of a false democracy. The gist of the matter is, not where a man starts from, but where he comes out. We are glad to have the biography of one who, beginning as a gentleman, kept himself such to the end — who, with no necessity of labour, left behind him an amount of thoroughly done work such as few have accomplished with the mighty help of hunger. Some kind of pace may be got out of the veriest jade by the near prospect of oats ; but the thoroughbred has the spur in his blood. Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father's life with the skill and good taste that might have been expected from the author of ' Wensley.' Considering natural partial ities, he has shown a discretion of which we are oftener reminded by missing than by meeting it. He has given extracts enough from speeches to show their bearing and quality — from letters, to recall bygone modes of thought and indicate many-sided friendly relations with good and emi nent men ; above all, he has lost no opportunity to illustrate that life of the past, near in date, yet alien in manners, whose current glides so imperceptibly from one generation into another that we fail to mark the shiftings of its bed or the change in its nature wrought by the affluents that dis charge into it on all sides — here a stream bred in the hills to sweeten, there the sewerage of some great city to corrupt. We cannot but lament that Mr. Quincy did not earlier begin to keep a diary. ' Miss not the discourses of the elders,' though put now in the Apocrypha, is a wise precept, but in complete unless we add, ' Nor cease from recording what soever thing thou hast gathered therefrom ' — so ready is Oblivion with her fatal shears. The somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and-bone-picker, like Athenasus, is turned to gold by time. Even the Virgilium mdi tantum of Dryden 76 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. about Milton, and of Pope again about Dryden, is worth having, and gives a pleasant fillip to the fancy. There is much of this quality in Mr. Edmund Quincy's book, enough to make us wish there were more. We get a glimpse of President Washington, in 1795, who reminded Mr. Quincy 'of the gentlemen who used to come to Boston in those days to attend the General Court from Hampden or Frank lin County, in the western part of the State. A little stiff in his person, not a little formal in his manners, not particu larly at ease in the presence of strangers. He had the air of a country gentleman not accustomed to mix much in so ciety, perfectly polite, but not easy in his address and con versation, and not graceful in his gait and movements.' Our figures of Washington have been so long equestrian, that it is pleasant to meet him dismounted for once. In the same way we get a card of invitation to a dinner of sixty covers at John Hancock's, and see the rather light-weighted great man wheeled round the room (for he had adopted Lord Chatham's convenient trick of the gout) to converse with his guests. In another place we are presented, with Mr. Merry, the English Minister, to Jefferson, whom we find in an unofficial costume of studied slovenliness, intended as a snub to haugh'ty Albion. Slippers down at the heel and a dirty shirt become weapons of diplomacy and threaten more serious war. Thus many a door into the past, long irrevocably shut upon us, is set ajar, and we of the younger generation on the landing catch peeps of distinguished men, and bits of their table-talk. We drive in from Mr. Lyman's beautiful seat at Waltham (unique at that day in its stately swans and half shy, half familiar deer) with John Adams, who tells us that Dr. Priestley looked on the French monarchy as the tenth horn of the Beast in Revelation — a horn that has set more sober wits dancing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those were days, we are inclined to think, of more solid and elegant hospita lity than our own — the elegance of manners, at once more courtly and more frugal, of men who had better uses for wealth than merely to display it. Dinners have more courses now, and, like the Gascon in the old story, who could not see the town for the houses, we miss the real dinner in the multiplicity of its details. We might seek long before we found so good cheer, so good company, or so good talk as our fathers had at Lieutenant- Governor Win- throp's or Senator Cabot's. A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 77 We shall not do Mr. Edmund Quincy the wrong of picking out in advance all the plums in his volume, leaving to the reader only the less savoury mixture that held them together — a kind of filling unavoidable in books of this kind, and too apt to be what boys at boarding-school call stick-jaw^ but of which there is no more than could not be helped here, and that light and palatable. But here and there is a pas sage where we cannot refrain, for there is a smack of Jack Horner in all of us, and a reviewer were nothing without it. Josiah Ouincy was born in 1772. His father, returning from a mission to England, died in sight of the dear New England shore three years later. His young widow was worthy of him, and of the son whose character she was to have so large a share in forming. There is something very touching and beautiful in this little picture of her which Mr. Quincy drew in his extreme old age. * My mother imbibed, as was usual with the women of the period, the spirit of the times. Patriotism was not then a profession, but an energetic principle beating in the heart and active in the life. The death of my father, under circumstances now the subject of history, had over whelmed her with grief. She viewed him as a victim in the cause of freedom, and cultivated his memory with veneration, regarding him as a martyr, falling, as did his friend Warren, in the defence of the liberties of his country. These circum stances gave a pathos and vehemence to her grief, which, after the first violence of passion had subsided, sought con solation in earnest and solicitous fulfilment of duty to the representative of his memory and of their mutual affections. Love and reverence for the memory of his father were early impressed on the mind of her son, and worn into his heart by her sadness and tears. She cultivated the memory of my father in my heart and affections, even in my earliest childhood, by reading to me passages from the poets, and obliging me to learn by heart and repeat such as were best adapted to her own circumstances and feelings. Among others, the whole leave-taking of Hector and Andromache, in the sixth book of Pope's Homer, was one of her favourite lessons, which she made me learn and frequently repeat. Her imagination probably found consolation in the repetition of lines which brought to mind and seemed to typify her own great bereavement. 78 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be,-— A widow I, a helpless orphan he ? These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's address and circumstances, she identified with her own sufferings, which seemed relieved by the tears my repetition of them drew from her.' Pope's Homer is not Homer, perhaps; but how many noble natures have felt its elation, how many bruised spirits the solace of its bracing, if monotonous melody ! To us there is something inexpressibly tender in this instinct of the widowed mother to find consolation in the idealization of her grief by mingling it with those sorrows which genius has turned into the perennial delight of mankind. This was a kind of sentiment that was healthy for her boy, refining without unnerving, and associating his father's memory with a noble company unassailable by time. It was through this lady, whose image looks down on us out of the past, so full of sweetness and refinement, that Mr. Quincy became of kin with Mr. Wendell Phillips, so justly eminent as a speaker. There is something nearer than cater-cousinship in a certain impetuous audacity of temper common to them both. When six years old, Mr. Quincy was sent to Phillips' Academy at Andover, where he remained till he entered col lege. His form-fellow here was a man of thirty, who had been a surgeon in the Continental army, and whose character and adventures might almost seem borrowed from a romance of Smollett. Under Principal Pearson, the lad, though a near-relative of the founder of the school, seems to have en dured all that severity of the old a posteriori method of teaching which still smarted in Tusser's memory when he sang, From Paul's I went, to Eton sent, To learn straightways the Latin phrase, Where fifty-three stripes given to me At once I had. The young victim of the wisdom of Solomon was boarded with the parish minister, in whose kindness he found a leni tive for the scholastic discipline he underwent. This gentle man had been a soldier in the Colonial service, and Mr. Quincy afterwards gave as a reason for his mildness, that, ' while a sergeant at Castle William, he had seen something of mankind.' This, no doubt, would be a better preparative for successful dealing with the young than is generally A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 79 thought. However, the birch was then the only classic tree, and every round in the ladder of learning was made of its inspiring wood. Dr. Pearson, perhaps, thought he was only doing justice to his pupil's claims of kindred by giving him a larger share of the educational advantages which the neighbouring forest afforded. The vividness with which this system is always remembered by those who have been subjected to it would seem to show that it really enlivened the attention, and thereby invigorated the memory, nay, might even raise some question as to what part of the person is chosen by the mother of the Muses for her residence. With an appetite for the classics quickened by ' Cheever's Acci dence/ and such other preliminary whets as were then in vogue, young Quincy entered college, where he spent the usual four years, and was graduated with the highest honours of his class. The amount of Latin and Greek imparted to the students of that day was not very great. They were carried through Horace, Sallust, and the De Oratoribus of Cicero, and read portions of Livy, Xenophon, and Homer. Yet the chief end of classical studies was perhaps as often reached then as now, in giving young men a love for some thing apart from and above the more vulgar associations of life. Mr. Quincy, at least, retained to the last a fondness for certain Latin authors. While he was President of the College, he told a gentleman, from whom we received the story, that, ' if he were imprisoned, and allowed to choose one book for his amusement, that should be Horace/ In 1797 Mr. Quincy was married to Miss Eliza Susan Morton, of New York, a union which lasted in unbroken happiness for more than fifty years. His case might be cited among the leading ones in support of the old poet's axiom, that He never loved, that loved not at first sight ; for he saw, wooed, and won in a week. In later life he tried in a most amusing way to account for this rashness, and to find reasons of settled gravity for the happy inspiration of his heart. He cites the evidence of Judge Sedgwick, of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Wolcott, of the Rev. Dr. Smith, and others, to the wisdom of his choice. But it does not appear that he consulted them beforehand. If love were not too cunning for that, what would become of the charming idyl, renewed in all its wonder and freshness for every generation ? Let us 8O A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. be thankful that in every man's life there is a holiday of romance, an illumination of the senses by the soul, that makes him a poet while it lasts. Mr. Quincy caught the enchantment through his ears, a song of Burns heard from the next room conveying the infection — a fact still inexpli cable to him after lifelong meditation thereon, as he ' was not very impressible by music!' To us there is something very characteristic in this rapid energy of Mr. Quincy, something very delightful in his naive account of the affair. It needs the magic of no Dr. Heidegger to make these dried roses, that drop from between the leaves of a volume shut for seventy years, bloom again in all their sweetness. Mr. Edmund Quincy tells us that his mother was ' not handsome ; ' but those who remember the gracious dignity of her old age will hardly agree with him. She must always have had that highest kind of beauty which grows more beautiful with years, and keeps the eyes young, as if with the partial con nivance of Time. We do not propose to follow Mr. Quincy closely through his whole public life, which, beginning with his thirty- second, ended with his seventy-third year. He entered Congress as the representative of a party privately the most respectable, publicly the least sagacious, among all those which under different names have divided the country. The Federalists were the only proper Tories our politics have ever produced, whose conservatism truly represented an idea, and not a mere selfish interest — men who honestly distrusted demo cracy, and stood up for experience, or the tradition which they believed for such, against empiricism. During his Congressional career, the Government was little more than an attacht* of the French legation, and the Opposition to which he belonged a helpless revenant from the dead and buried Colonial past. There are some questions whose in terest dies the moment they are settled ; others into which a moral element enters that hinders them from being settled, though they may be decided. It is hard to revive any enthusi asm about &&Embargot though it once could inspire the boyish muse of Bryant, or in the impressment quarrel, though the Trent difficulty for a time rekindled its old animosities. The stars in their courses fought against Mr. Quincy's party, which was not in sympathy with the instincts of the people, groping about for some principle of nationality, and finding a substi- A GUEAt PUBLIC CttAkAtTESj. 8l fute for it in hatred of England. But there are several things which still make his career in Congress interesting to us, because they illustrate the personal character of the man. He prepared himself honestly for his duties, by a thorough study of whatever could make him efficient in them. It was not enough that he could make a good speech; he wished also to have something to say. In Congress, as everywhere else, quod voluit valde voluit ; and he threw a fervour into the most temporary topic, as if his eternal salvation depended upon it. He had not merely, as the French say, the courage of his opinions, but his opinions became principles, and gave him that gallantry of fanaticism which made him always ready to head a forlorn hope — the more ready, perhaps, that it was a forlorn hope. This is not the humour of a states man — no, unless he holds a position like that of Pitt, and can charge a whole people with his own enthusiasm, and then we call it genius. Mr. Quincy had the moral firmness which enabled him to decline a duel without any loss of per sonal prestige. His opposition to the Louisiana purchase illustrates that Roman quality in him to which we have alluded. He would not conclude the purchase till each of the old thirteen States had signified its assent. He was reluctant to endow a Sabine city with the privilege of Roman citizenship. It is worth noting that, while in Con gress, and afterwards in the State Senate, many of his phrases became the catchwords of party politics. He always dared to say what others deemed it more prudent only to think, and whatever he said he intensified with the whole ardour of his temperament. It is this which makes Mr. Quincy's speeches good reading still, even when the topics they dis cussed were ephemeral. In one respect he is distinguished from the politicians, and must rank with the far-seeing statesmen of his time. He early foresaw and denounced the political danger with which the Slave Power threatened the Union. His fears, it is true, were aroused for the balance of power between the old States, rather than by any moral sen sitiveness, which would, indeed, have been an anachronism at that time. But the Civil War justified his prescience. It was as mayor of his native city that his remarkable qualities as an administrator were first called into requisition and adequately displayed. He organized the city govern ment, and put it in working order. To him we owe many G 82 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. reforms in police, in the management of the poor, and other kindred matters, much in the way of cure, still more in that of prevention. The place demanded a man of courage and firmness, and found those qualities almost superabun dantly in him. His virtues lost him his office, as such virtues are only too apt to do in peaceful times, where they are felt more as a restraint than a protection. His address on laying down the mayoralty is very characteristic. We quote the concluding sentences: — ' And now, gentlemen, standing as I do in this relation for the last time in your presence and that of my fellow-citizens, about to surrender for ever a station full of difficulty, of labour and temptation, in which I have been called to very arduous duties, affecting the rights, property, and at times the liberty of others ; concerning which the perfect line of rectitude — though desired — was not always to be clearly discerned ; in which great interests have been placed within my control, under circumstances in which it would have been easy to advance private ends and sinister projects ; under these cir cumstances, I inquire, as I have a right to inquire — for in the recent contest insinuations have been cast against my in tegrity — in this long management of your affairs, whatever errors have been committed— and doubtless there have been many — have you found in me anything selfish, anything per sonal, anything mercenary ? In the simple language of an ancient seer, I say, " Behold, here I am; witness against me. Whom have I defrauded ? Whom have I oppressed ? At whose hands have I received any bribe ?" ' Six years ago, when I had the honour first to address the City Council, in anticipation of the event which has now occurred, the following expressions were used: "In admin istering the police, in executing the laws, in protecting the rights and promoting the prosperity of the city, its first officer will be necessarily beset and assailed by individual interests, by rival projects, by personal influences, by party passions. The more firm and inflexible he is in maintaining the rights and in pursuing the interests of the city, the greater is the probability of his becoming obnoxious to the censure of all whom he causes to be prosecuted or punished, of all whose passions he thwarts, of all whose interests he opposes." ' The day and the event have come. I retire— as in that A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 83 first address I told my fellow-citizens, " If, in conformity with the experience of other republics, faithful exertions should be followed by loss of favour and confidence," I should retire — " rejoicing, not, indeed, with a public and patriotic, but with a private and individual joy ; " for I shall retire with a con sciousness weighed against which all human suffrages are but as the light dust of the balance. ' Of his mayoralty we have another anecdote quite Roman in colour. He was in the habit of riding early in the morn ing through the various streets that he might look into every thing with his own eyes. He was once arrested on a malicious charge of violating the city ordinance against fast driving. He might have resisted, but he appeared in court and paid the fine, because it would serve as a good example ' that no citizen was above the law.' Hardly had Mr. Quincy given up the government of the city, when he was called to that of the College. It is here that his stately figure is associated most intimately and warmly with the recollections of the greater number who hold his memory dear. Almost everybody looks back regretfully to the days of some Consul Plancus. Never were eyes so bright, never had wine so much wit and good-fellowship in it, never were we ourselves so capable of the various great things we have never done. Nor is it merely the sunset of life that casts such a ravishing light on the past, and makes the western windows of those homes of fancy we have left for ever tremble with a sentiment of such sweet regret. We set great store by what we had, and cannot have again, how ever indifferent in itself, and what is past is infinitely past. This is especially true of college life, when we first assume the titles without the responsibilities of manhood, and the President of our year is apt to become our Plancus very early. Popular or not while in office, an ex-president is always sure of enthusiastic cheers at every college festival. Mr. Quincy had many qualities calculated to win favour with the young — that one above all which is sure to do it, indomi table pluck. With him the dignity was in the man, not in the office. He had some of those little oddities, too, which afford amusement without contempt, and which rather tend to heighten than diminish personal attachment to superiors in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular inability to G 2 84 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER* make even the shortest off-hand speech to the students — all the more singular in a practised orator — his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he had just dried with it, — the old-fashioned courtesy of his, i Sir, your servant,' as he bowed you out of his study, — all tended to make him popular. He had also a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry humour, not without influence in his relations with the students. In taking leave of the graduating class, he was in the habit of paying them whatever honest compliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall be nameless, will ever forget the gravity with which he assured them that they were ' the best-dressed class that had passed through college during his administration ? ' How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful levity, will always be gratefully re membered by whoever had occasion to experience it. A visitor not long before his death found him burning some memoranda of college peccadilloes, lest they should ever rise up in judgment against the men eminent in Church and State who had been guilty of them. One great element of his popularity with the students was his esprit de corps. However strict in discipline, he was always on our side as respected the outside world. Of his efficiency, no higher testimony could be asked than that of his successor, Dr. Walker. Here also many reforms date from his time. He had that happiest combination for a wise vigour in the conduct of affairs, — he was a conservative with an open mind. One would be apt to think that, in the various offices which Mr. Quincy successively filled, he would have found enough to do. But his indefatigable activity overflowed. Even as a man of letters, he occupies no inconsiderable place. His ' History of Harvard College ' is a valuable and entertaining treatment of a subject not wanting in natural dryness. His * Municipal History of Boston,' his ' History of the Boston Athenaeum/ and his ' Life of Colonel Shaw ' have permanent interest and value. All these were works demanding no little labour and research, and the thoroughness of their workmanship makes them remarkable as the by-productions of a busy man. Having consented, when more than eighty, to write a memoir of John Quincy Adams, to be published in the * Proceedings ' of the Massachusetts Historical Society, he was obliged to excuse himself. On account of his age ? A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 85 Not at all, but because the work had grown to be a volume under his weariless hand. Ohne Hast oJine Rast, was as true of him as of Goethe. We find the explanation of his accom plishing so much in a rule of life which he gave, when pre sident, to a young man employed as his secretary, and who was a little behindhand with his work : ' When you have a number of duties to perform, always do the most disagreeable one first.' No advice could have been more in character, and it is perhaps better than the great German's, ' Do the duty that lies nearest thee.' Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Quincy's life was his old age. What in most men is decay, was in him but beneficent prolongation and adjournment. His interest in affairs unabated, his judgment undimmed, his fire unchilled, his last years were indeed 'lovely as a Lapland night.' Till within a year or two of its fall, there were no signs of dila pidation in that stately edifice. Singularly felicitous was Mr. Winthrop's application to him of Wordsworth's verses : — The monumental pomp of age Was in that goodly personage. Everything that Macbeth foreboded the want of, he had in deserved abundance — the love, the honour, the obedience, the troops of friends. His equanimity was beautiful. He loved life, as men of large vitality always do, but he did not fear to lose life by changing the scene of it. Visiting him in his ninetieth year with a friend, he said to us, among other things : ' I have no desire to die, but also no reluctance. In deed, I have a considerable curiosity about the other world. I have never been to Europe, you know.' Even in his ex treme senescence there was an April mood somewhere in his nature ' that put a spirit of youth in everything.' He seemed to feel that he could draw against an unlimited credit of years. When eighty-two, he said smilingly to a young man just returned from a foreign tour, ' Well, well, I mean to go myself when I am old enough to profit by it.' We have seen many old men whose lives were mere waste and desolation, who made longevity disreputable by their untimely persist ence in it; but in Mr. Quincy's length of years there was nothing that was not venerable. To him it was fulfilment, not deprivation ; the days were marked to the last for what they brought, not for what they took away. The memory of what Mr. Quincy did will be lost in ihs , 86 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. crowd of newer activities ; it is the memory of what he was that is precious to us. Bonum virum facile crederes, magnum libenter. If John Winthrop be the highest type of the men who shaped New England, we can find no better one of those whom New England has shaped than Josiah Quincy. It is a figure that we can contemplate with more than satisfac tion — a figure of admirable example in a democracy as that of a model citizen. His courage and high-mindedness were personal to him; let us believe that his integrity, his indus try, his love of letters, his devotion to duty, go in some sort to the credit of the society which gave him birth and formed his character. In one respect he is especially interesting to us, as belonging to a class of men of whom he was the last representative, and whose like we shall never see again. Born and bred in an age of greater social distinction than ours, he was an aristocrat in a sense that is good even in a republic. He had the sense of a certain personal dignity inherent in him, and which could not be alienated by any whim of the popular will. There is no stouter buckler than this for inde pendence of spirit, no surer guaranty of that courtesy which, in its consideration of others, is but paying a debt of self- respect. During his presidency, Mr. Quincy was once riding to Cambridge in a crowded omnibus. A coloured woman got in, and could nowhere find a seat. The President instantly gave her his own, and stood the rest of the way, a silent rebuke of the general rudeness. He was a man of quality in the true sense — of quality not hereditary, but personal. Posi tion might be taken from him, but he remained where he was. In what he valued most, his sense of personal worth, the world's opinion could neither help nor hinder. We do not mean that this was conscious in him; if it had been, it would have been a weakness. It was an instinct, and acted with the force and promptitude proper to such. Let us hope that the scramble of democracy will give us something as good ; anything of so classic dignity we shall not look to see again. Josiah Quincy was no seeker of office ; from first to last he and it were drawn together by the mutual attraction of need and fitness, and it clung to him as most men cling to it. The people often make blunders in their choice; they are apt to mistake presence of speech for presence of mind; they love so to help a man rise from the ranks, that they will spoil a good demagogue to make a bad general ; a great many faults A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 87 may be laid at their door, but they are not fairly to be charged with fickleness. They are constant to whoever is constant to his real self, to the best manhood that is in him, and not to the mere selfishness, the antica lupa so cunning to hide herself in the sheep's fleece even from ourselves. It is true, the contemporary world is apt to be the gull of bril liant parts, and the maker of a lucky poem or picture or statue, the winner of a lucky battle, gets perhaps more than is due to the solid result of his triumph. It is time that fit honour should be paid also to him who shows a genius for public usefulness, for the achievement of character, who shapes his life to a certain classic proportion, and comes off conqueror on those inward fields where something more than mere talent is demanded for victory. The memory of such men should be cherished as the most precious inheritance which one generation can bequeath to the next. However it might be with public favour, public respect followed Mr. Quincy unwaveringly for seventy years, and it was because he had never forfeited his own. In this, it appears to us, lies the lesson of his life, and his claim upon our grateful recollection. It is this which makes him an example, while the careers of so many of our prominent men are only useful for warning. As regards history, his greatness was narrowly provincial; but if the measure of deeds be the spirit in which they are done, that fidelity to instant duty, which, according to Herbert, makes an action fine, then his length of years should be very precious to us for its lesson. Talleyrand, whose life may be compared with his for the strange vicissi tudes which it witnessed, carried with him out of the world the respect of no man, least of all his own; and how many of our own public men have we seen whose old age but accu mulated a disregard which they would gladly have exchanged for oblivion ! In Quincy the public fidelity was loyal to the private, and the withdrawal of his old age was into a sanc tuary — a diminution of publicity with addition of influence. Conclude we, then, felicity consists Not in exterior fortunes. . . . Sacred felicity doth ne'er extend Beyond itself. . . . The swelling of an outward fortune can Create a prosperous, not a happy man. 88 CARLYLE. CARLYLE* A FEELING of comical sadness is likely to come over the mind of any middle-aged man who sets himself to recollecting the names of different authors that have been famous, and the number of contemporary immortalities whose end he has seen since coming to manhood. Many a light, hailed by too careless observers as a fixed star, has proved to be only a short-lived lantern at the tail of a newspaper kite. That literary heaven which our youth saw dotted thick with rival glories, we find now to have been a stage-sky merely, artificially enkindled from behind; and the cynical daylight which is sure to follow all theatrical enthusiasms shows us ragged holes where once were luminaries, sheer vacancy instead of lustre. Our earthly reputations, says a great poet, are the colour of grass, and the same sun that makes the green bleaches it out again. But next morning is not the time to criticise the scene-painter's firmament, nor is it quite fair to examine coldly a part of some general illusion in the absence of that sympathetic enthusiasm, that self- surrender of the fancy, which made it what it was. It would not be safe for all neglected authors to comfort themselves in Wordsworth's fashion, inferring genius in an inverse propor tion to public favour, and a high and solitary merit from the world's indifference. On the contrary, it would be more just to argue from popularity a certain amount of real value, though it may not be of that permanent quality which in sures enduring fame. The contemporary world and Words worth were both half right. He undoubtedly owned and worked the richest vein of his period; but he offered to his contemporaries a heap of gold-bearing quartz where the baser mineral made the greater show, and the person must do his own crushing and smelting, with no guaranty but the bare word of the miner. It was not enough that certain bolder adventurers should now and then show a nugget in proof of the success of their venture. The gold of the poet must be refined, moulded, stamped with the image and superscription of his time, but with a beauty of design and finish that are of no time. The work must surpass the material. Wordsworth * Apropos of his ' Frederick the Great.' CARLYLE. g was wholly void of that shaping imagination which is the highest criterion of a poet. Immediate popularity and lasting fame, then, would seem to be the result of different qualities, and not of mere differ ence in degree. It is safe to prophesy a certain durability of recognition for any author who gives evidence of intellectual force, in whatever kind, above the average amount. There are names in literary history which are only names; and the works associated with them, like Acts of Congress already agreed on in debate, are read by their titles and passed. What is it that insures what may be called living fame, so that a book shall be at once famous and read-? What is it that relegates divine Cowley to that remote, uncivil Pontus of the ' British Poets/ and keeps garrulous Pepys within the cheery circle of the evening lamp and fire ? Originality, eloquence, sense, imagination, not one of them is enough by itself, but only in some happy mixture and proportion. Ima gination seems to possess in itself more of the antiseptic property than any other single quality; but, without less showy and more substantial allies, it can at best give only deathlessness, without the perpetual youth that makes it other than dreary. It were easy to find examples of this Tithonus immortality, setting its victims apart from both gods and men ; helpless duration, undying, to be sure, but sapless and voiceless also, and long ago deserted by the fickle Hemera. And yet chance could confer that gift on Glaucus, which love and the consent of Zeus failed to secure for the darling of the Dawn. Is it mere luck, then ? Luck may, and often does, have some share in ephemeral suc cesses, as in a gambler's winnings spent as soon as got, but not in any lasting triumph over time. Solid success must be based on solid qualities and the hnnpst mlhire nf form. ilie first element of contemporary popularity is undoubt edly the power of entertaining. If a man have anything to tell, the world cannot be expected to listen to him unless he have perfected himself in the best way of telling it. People are not to be argued into a pleasurable sensation, nor is taste to be compelled by any syllogism, however stringent. An author may make himself very popular^ however, and even justly so, by appealing to the passion of the moment, without having anything in him that shall outlast the public whim which he satisfies. Churchill is a remarkable example of 90 CARLYLE. this. He had a surprising extemporary vigour of mind ; his phrase carries great weight of blow ; he undoubtedly sur passed all contemporaries, as Cowper says of him, in a certain rude and earth-born vigour ; but his verse is dust and ashes now, solemnly inurned, of course, in the Chalmers columbarium, and without danger of violation. His brawn and muscle are fading traditions, while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is still a good life on the books of the v ^"Critical Insurance Office. * Is it not, then, loftiness of mind v that puts one by the side of Virgil ?' cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wits' end. Certainly not altogether that. There must ,- be also the great Mantuan's art; his power, not only of being ' strong in parts, but of making those parts coherent in an harmonious whole, and tributary to it. Gray, if we may believe the commentators, has not an idea, scarcely an epithet, that he can call his own, and yet he is, in the best sense, one of the classics of English literature. He had exquisite felicity of choice ; his dictionary had no vulgar word in it, no harsh one, but all culled from the luckiest moods of poets, and with a faint but delicious aroma of association ; he had a perfect sense of sound, and one idea without which all the poetic outfit (si absit prudentid) is of little avail, — that of combination and arrangement, in short, of art. The poets from whom he helped himself have no more claim to any of his poems as wholes, than the various beauties of Greece (if the old story were true) to the Venus of the artist. ,> Imagination, as we have said, has more virtue to keep a book alive than any other single faculty. Burke is rescued from the usual doom of orators because his learning, his ex perience, his sagacity are rimmed with a halo by this bewitching light behind the intellectual eye from the highest heaven of the brain. Shakespeare has impregnated his common sense with the steady glow of it, and answers the mood of youth and age, of high and low, immortal as that dateless substance of the soul he wrought in. To have any chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, but a constant longing and hunger of human nature ; and it needs only a superficial study of literature to be convinced that real fame depends rather on the sum of an author's powers than on any brilliancy of special parts. There must be wisdom as well as wit, sense CARLYLE. 91 no less than imagination, judgment in equal measure with fancy, and the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the poor wooden stick that gives it guidance if it would mount and draw all eyes. There are some who think that the brooding patience which a great work calls for belonged exclusively to an earlier period than ours. Others lay the blame on our fashion of periodical publication, which necessitates a sensa tion and a crisis in every number, and forces the writer to strive for startling effects, instead of that general lowness of tone which is the last achievement of the artist. The sim plicity of antique passion, the homeliness of antique pathos, seem not merely to be gone out of fashion, but out of being as well. Modern poets appear rather to tease their words into a fury, than to infuse them with the deliberate heats of their matured conception, and strive to replace the rapture of the mind with a fervid intensity of phrase. Our reaction from the decorous platitudes of the last century has no doubt led us to excuse this, and to be thankful for something like real fire, though of stubble ; but our prevailing style of criticism, which regards parts rather than wholes, which dwells on the beauty of passages, and, above all, must have its languid nerves pricked with the expected sensation at whatever cost, has done all it could to confirm us in our evil way. Passages are good when they lead to something, when they are necessary parts of the building, but they are not good to dwell in. This taste for the startling reminds us of something which happened once at the burning of a country meeting-house. The building stood on a hill, and, apart from any other considerations, the fire was as picturesque as could be desired. When all was a black heap, licking itself here and there with tongues of fire, there rushed up a farmer gasping anxiously, ' Hez the bell fell yit ? ' An ordinary fire was no more to him than that on his hearth-stone ; even the burning of a meeting-house, in itself a vulcanic rarity (so long as he was of another parish), could not tickle his out worn palate ; but he had hoped for a certain tang in the downcome of the bell that might recall the boyish flavour of conflagration. There was something dramatic, no doubt, in this surprise of the brazen sentinel at his post, but the breathless rustic has always seemed to us a type of the pre vailing delusion in aesthetics. Alas ! if the bell must fall in every stanza or every monthly number, how shall an author 92 CARLYLE. contrive to stir us at last, unless with whole Moscows, crowned with the tintinnabulary crash of the Kremlin ? For ourselves, we are glad to feel that we are still able to find contentment in the more conversational and domestic tone of our old-fashioned wood-fire. No doubt a great part of our pleasure in reading is unexpectedness, whether in turn of thought or of phrase ; but an emphasis out of place, an intensity of expression not founded on sincerity of moral or intellectual conviction, reminds one of the underscorings in young ladies' letters, a wonder even to themselves under the colder north-light of matronage. It is the part of the critic, however, to keep cool under whatever circumstances, and to reckon that the excesses of an author will be at first more attractive to the many than that average power which shall win him attention with a new generation of men. It is seldom found out by the majority, till after a considerable interval, that he was the original man who contrived to be simply natural — the hardest lesson in the school of art, and the latest learned, if, indeed, it be a thing capable of acquisi tion at all. The most winsome and wayward of brooks draws now and then some lover's foot to its intimate reserve, while the spirt of a bursting water-pipe gathers a gaping crowd forthwith. Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been so long before the world that we may feel toward him something of the unprejudice of posterity. It has long been evident that he had no more ideas to bestow upon us, and that no new turn of his kaleidoscope would give us anything but some varia tion of arrangement in the brilliant colours of his style. It is perhaps possible, then, to arrive at some not wholly inade quate estimate of his place as a writer, and especially of the value of the ideas whose advocate he makes himself, with a bitterness and violence that increase, as it seems to us, in proportion as his inward conviction of their truth diminishes. The leading characteristics of an author who is in any sense original, that is to say, who does not merely reproduce, but modifies the influence of tradition, culture, and contem porary thought upon himself by some admixture of his own, may commonly be traced more or less clearly in his earliest works. This is more strictly true, no doubt, of poets, because the imagination is a fixed quantity, not to be increased by any amount of study and reflection. Skill, wisdom, and even CARLYLE. wit are cumulative ; but that diviner faculty, which spiritual eye, though it may be trained and sharpened, not be added to by taking thought. This has always something innate, unaccountable, to be laid to a happy con junction of the stars. Goethe, the last of the great poets, accordingly takes pains to tell us under what planets he was born ; and in him it is curious how uniform the imaginative quality is from the beginning to the end of his long literary activity. His early poems show maturity, his mature ones a youthful freshness. The apple already lies potentially in the blossom, as that may be traced also in the ripened fruit. With a mere change of emphasis, Goethe might be called an old boy at both ends of his career. In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we find some not obscure hints of the future man. Nearly fifty years ago he contributed a few literary and critical articles to the Edin burgh Encyclopaedia. The outward fashion of them is that of the period ; but they are distinguished by a certain secu rity of judgment remarkable at any time, remarkable espe cially in one so young. British criticism has been always more or less parochial ; has never, indeed, quite freed itself from sectarian cant, and planted itself honestly on the aesthe tic point of view. It cannot quite persuade itself that truth is of immortal essence, totally independent of all assistance from quarterly journals or the British army and navy. Car lyle, in these first essays, already shows the influence of his master, Goethe, the most widely receptive of critics. In a compact notice of Montaigne, there is not a word as to his religious scepticism. The character is looked at purely from its human and literary sides. As illustrating the bent of the author's mind, the following passage is most to our purpose : ' A modern reader will not easily cavil at the patient and good-natured, though exuberant egotism which brings back to our view " the form and pressure " of a time long past. The habits and humours, the mode of acting and thinking, •which characterized a Gascon gentleman in the sixteenth cen tury, cannot fail to amuse an inquirer of the nineteenth ; while the faithful delineation of human feelings, in all their strength and weakness, will serve as a mirror to every mind capable of self-examination.1 We find here no uncertain in dication of that eye for the moral picturesque, and that sym pathetic appreciation of character, which within the next 4 CARLYLE. few years were to make Carlyle the first in insight of English critics and the most vivid of English historians. In all his earlier writing he never loses sight of his master's great rule, Den Gegenstand fest zu halten. He accordingly gave to Englishmen the first humanly possible likeness of Voltaire, Diderot, Mirabeau, and others, who had hitherto been mea sured by the usual British standard of their respect for the geognosy of Moses and the historic credibility of the Books of Chronicles. What was the real meaning of this phenome non ? what the amount of this man's honest performance in the world ? and in what does he show that family likeness, common to all the sons of Adam, which gives us a fair hope of being able to comprehend him ? These were the questions which Carlyle seems to have set himself honestly to answer in the critical writings which fill the first period of his life as a man of letters. In this mood he rescued poor Boswell from the unmerited obloquy of an ungrateful generation, and taught us to see something half-comically beautiful in the poor, weak creature, with his pathetic instinct of reverence for what was nobler, wiser, and stronger than himself. Every thing that Mr. Carlyle wrote during this first period thrills with the purest appreciation of whatever is brave and beauti ful in human nature, with the most vehement scorn of cowardly compromise with things base ; and yet, immitigable as his demand for the highest in us seems to be, there is always something reassuring in the humorous sympathy with mortal frailty which softens condemnation and consoles for shortcoming. The remarkable feature of Mr. Carlyle's criticism (see, for example, his analysis and exposition of Goethe's ' Helena') is the sleuth-hound instinct with which he presses on to the matter of his theme — never turned aside by a false scent, regardless of the outward beauty of form, some times almost contemptuous of it, in his hunger after the in tellectual nourishment which it may hide. The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush re morselessly to come at the marrow of meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to the ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint conception of their possible unity. By degrees the humorous element in his nature gains ground, till it overmasters all the rest. Becoming always more bois- CARLYLE. 95 terous and obtrusive, it ends at last, as such humour must, in cynicism. In ' Sartor Resartus' it is still kindly, still infused with sentiment ; and the book, with its mixture of indignation and farce, strikes one as might the prophecies of Jeremiah, if the marginal comments of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his wildest mood had by some accident been incorporated with the text. In ' Sartor' the marked influence of Jean Paul is undeniable, both in matter and manner. It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national litera tures on each other, to see the humour of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind. Unhappily the bit of •mother from Swift's vinegar-barrel has had strength enough to sour all the rest. The whimsicality of ' Tristram Shandy/ which, even in the original, has too often the effect of forethought, becomes a deliberate artifice in Richter, and at last a mere mannerism in Carlyle. Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the advantage of a well-defined theme, and of limits both in the subject and in the space allowed for its treatment, which kept his natural extravagance within bounds, and compelled some sort of dis cretion and compactness. The great merit of these essays lay in a criticism based on wide and various study, which, careless of tradition, applied its standard to the real and not the contemporary worth of the literary or other performance to be judged, and in an unerring eye for that fleeting expres sion of the moral features of character, a perception of which alone makes the drawing of a coherent likeness possible. Their defect was a tendency, gaining strength with years, to confound the moral with the aesthetic standard, and to make the value of an author's work dependent on the general force of his nature rather than on his special fitness for a given task. In proportion as his humour gradually overbalanced the other qualities of his mind, his taste for the eccentric, amorphous, and violent in men became excessive, disturbing more and more his perception of the more commonplace at tributes which give consistency to portraiture. His * French Revolution' is a series of lurid pictures, unmatched for vehe ment power, in which the figures of such sons of earth as Mirabeau and Danton loom gigantic and terrible as in the glare of an eruption, their shadows swaying far and wide, 96 CARLYLfi. grotesquely awful. But all is painted by eruption-flashes in violent light and shade. There are no half-tints, no grada tions, and we find it impossible to account for the continuance in power of less Titanic actors in the tragedy like Robes pierre, on any theory, whether of human nature or of individual character, supplied by Mr. Carlyle. Of his success, however, in accomplishing what he aimed at, which was to haunt the mind with memories of a horrible political nightmare, there can be no doubt. Goethe says, apparently thinking of Richter, * the worthy Germans have persuaded themselves that the essence of true humour is formlessness.' Heine had not yet shown that a German might combine the most airy humour with a sense of form as delicate as Goethe's own, and that there was no need to borrow the bow of Philoctetes for all kinds of game. Mr. Carlyle's own tendency was toward the lawless, and the attraction of Jean Paul made it an overmastering one. Goethe, we think, might have gone farther, and affirmed that nothing but the highest artistic sense can prevent humour from degenerating into the grotesque, and thence downwards to utter anarchy. Rabelais is a striking example of it. The moral purpose of his book cannot give it that unity which the instinct and forethought of art only can bring forth. Perhaps we owe the masterpiece of humorous literature to the fact that Cervantes had been trained to authorship in a school where form predominated over substance, and the most convincing proof of the supremacy of art at the highest period of Greek literature is to be found in Aristophanes. Mr. Carlyle has / no artistic sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of proportion. , Accordingly he looks on verse with contempt as something barbarous — a savage ornament which a higher refinement will abolish, as it has tattooing and nose-rings. With a con- ceptive imagination vigorous beyond any in his generation, with a mastery of language equalled only by the greatest poets, he wants altogether the plastic imagination, the shap ing faculty, which would have made him a poet in the highest sense. He is a preacher and a prophet — anything you will — (but an artist he is not, and never can be. It is always the knots andgnarls of the oak that he admires, never the perfect and balanced tree. It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful for what we owe an author, than to blame him for what he cannot give us. CARLYLE. 97 Dut it is sometimes the business of a critic to trace faults of style and of thought to their root in character and tempera ment — to show their necessary relation to, and dependence on, each other — and to find some more trustworthy explana tion than mere wantonness of will for the moral obliquities of a man so largely moulded and gifted as Mr. Carlyle. So long as he was merely an exhorter or dehorter, we were thankful for such eloquence, such humour, such vivid or grotesque images, and such splendour of illustration as only he could give ; but when he assumes to be a teacher of moral and political philosophy, when he himself takes to compounding the social panaceas he has made us laugh at so often, and advertises none as genuine but his own, we begin to inquire into his qualifications and his defects, and to ask ourselves whether his patent pill differs from others except in the larger amount of aloes, or has any better recommendation than the superior advertising powers of a mountebank of genius. Com parative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects - are more nearly related than is commonly supposed. Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he would have had an ideal in his work which would have lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of things. His innate love of the picturesque (which is only another form of the sentimentalism he so scoffs at, perhaps as feeling it a weakness in himself) once turned in the direction of cha racter, and finding its chief satisfaction there, led him to look for that ideal of human nature in individual men which is but fragmentarily represented in the entire race, and is rather divined from the aspiration, for ever disenchanted to be for ever renewed, of the immortal part in us, than found in any example of actual achievement. A wiser temper would have found something more consoling than disheartening in the continual failure of men eminently endowed to reach the standard of this spiritual requirement, would perhaps have found in it an inspiring hint that it is mankind, and not spe cial men, that are to be shaped at last into the image of God, and that the endless life of the generations may hope to come nearer that goal of which the short-breathed threescore years and ten fall too unhappily short. But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, and all who H 98 CARLYLE. recommend any other method, or see any hope of healing elsewhere, are either quacks and charlatans or their victims. His lively imagination conjures up the image of an impossible he, as contradictorily endowed as the chief personage in a modern sentimental novel, and who, at all hazards, must not lead mankind like a shepherd, but bark, bite, and otherwise worry them toward the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. If Mr. Carlyle would only now and then recollect that men are men, and not sheep — nay, that the farther they are from being such, the more well grounded our hope of one day making something better of them ! It is indeed strange that one who values Will so highly in the greatest, should be blind to its infinite worth in the least of men ; nay, that he should so often seem to confound it with its irritable and purposeless counterfeit, Wilfulness. The natural impatience of an ima ginative temperament, which conceives so vividly the beauty and desirableness of a nobler manhood and a diviner political order, makes him fret at the slow moral processes by which the All- Wise brings about his ends and turns the very fool ishness of men to his praise and glory. Mr. Carlyle is for calling down fire from Heaven whenever he cannot readily lay his hand on the match-box. No doubt it is somewhat provoking that it should be so easy to build castles in the air, and so hard to find tenants for them. It is a singular in tellectual phenomenon to see a man, who earlier in life so thoroughly appreciated the innate weakness and futile ten dency of the * storm and thrust' period of German literature, constantly assimilating, as he grows older, more and more nearly to its principles and practice. It is no longer the sagacious and moderate Goethe who is his type of what is highest in human nature, but far rather some Gotz of the Iron Hand, some assertor of the divine legitimacy of Faust- recht. It is odd to conceive the fate of Mr. Carlyle under the sway of any of his heroes — how Cromwell would have scorned him as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne, but less clear and practical — how Friedrich would have scoffed at his tirades as dummes Zeug not to be compared with the romances of Crdbillon fils, or possibly have clapped him in a marching regiment as a fit subject for the cane of the sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr. Carlyle's irritability is to be laid to the account of his early schoolmastership at Ecclefechan. This great booby World is such a dull boy, \ CA^-LYLE. 99 and will not learn the lesson we have taken such pains in expounding for the fiftieth time. Well, then, if eloquence, if example, if the awful warning of other little boys who neg lected their accidence and catne to the gallows, if none of these avail, the birch at leasnis left, and we will try that. The dominie spirit has become every year more obtrusive and intolerant in Mr. Carlyle's Writing, and the rod, instead of being kept in its place as a resource for desperate cases, has become the alpha an$ omega of all successful training, the one divinely- appointed means of human enlightenment and progress — in short, the final hope of that absurd animal who fancies himself a little lower than the angels. Have we feebly taken it for granted that the distinction of man was reason ? Never was there a more fatal misconception. It is in the gift of unreason that we are unenviably distinguished from the brutes, whose, nobler privilege of instinct saves them from our blunders and our crimes. But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed with the hal lucination that he is head-master of this huge boys' school which we call the world, his pedagogic birch has grown to the taller proportions and more ominous aspect of a gallows. His article on Dr. Francia was a panegyric of the halter, in which the gratitude of mankind is invoked for the self-ap pointed dictator who had discovered in Paraguay a tree more beneficent than that which produced the Jesuits' bark. Mr. Carlyle seems to be in the condition of a man who uses sti mulants, and must increase his dose from day to day as the senses become dulled under the. spur. He began by admiring strength of character and purpose, and the manly self-denial which makes a humble fortune great by steadfast loyalty to duty. He has gone on till mere strength has become such washy weakness that there is no longer any titillation in it; and nothing short of downright violence will rouse his nerves now to the needed excitement. At first he made out very well with remarkable men ; then, lessening the water and in creasing the spirit, he took to Heroes; and now he must have downright ///humanity, or the draught has no savour; so he gets on at last to Kings, types of remorseless Force, who maintain the political views of Berserkers by the legal principles of Lynch. Constitutional monarchy is a failure, representative government is a gabble, democracy a birth of the bottomless pit; there is no hope for mankind except in H 2 100 CARLYLE* getting themselves under a good driver who shall not spare the lash. And yet, unhappily for us, these drivers are provi dential births not to be contrived by any cunning of ours, and Friedrich II. is hitherto the last of them. Meanwhile the world's wheels have got fairly stalled in mire and other matter of every vilest consistency and most disgustful smell. What are we to do ? Mr. Carlyle will not let us make a lever with a rail from the next fence, or call in the neighbours. That would be too commonplace and cowardly, too anar chical. No; he would have us sit down beside him in the slough, and shout lustily for Hercules. If that indispensable demigod will not or cannot come, we can find a useful and instructive solace, during the intervals of shouting, in a hearty abuse of human nature, which, at the long last, is always to blame. Since ' Sartor Resartus ' Mr. Carlyle has done little but repeat himself with increasing emphasis and heightened shrillness. Warning has steadily heated toward denunciation, and remonstrance soured toward scolding. The image of the Tartar prayer-mill, which he borrowed from Richter and turned to such humorous purpose, might be applied to him self. The same phrase comes round and round, only the machine, being a little crankier, rattles more, and the per former is called on for a more visible exertion. If there be not something very like cant in Mr. Carlyle's later writings, then cant is not the repetition of a creed after it has become a phrase by the cooling of that white-hot conviction which once made it both the light and warmth of the soul. We do not mean intentional and deliberate cant, but neither is that which Mr. Carlyle denounces so energetically in his fellow- men of that conscious kind. We do not mean to blame him for it, but mention it rather as an interesting phenomenon of human nature. The stock of ideas which mankind has to work with is very limited, like the alphabet, and can at best have an air of freshness given it by new arrangements and combinations, or by application to new times and cir cumstances. Montaigne is but Ecclesiastes writing in the sixteenth century, Voltaire but Lucian in the eighteenth. Yet both are original, and so certainly is Mr. Carlyle, whose borrowing is mainly from his own former works. But he does this so often and so openly that we may at least be sure that he ceased growing a number of years ago, and is a remarkable example of arrested development. CARLYLE. 101 The cynicism, however, which h?!s now become • the pre vailing temper of his mind, has gone on expanding with unhappy vigour. In Mr. Carlyle it is not, certainly, as in Swift, the result of personal disappointment, and of the fatal eyejof an accomplice for the mean qualities by which power could be attained that it might be used for purposes as mean. It seems rather the natural corruption of his exuberant humour. Humour in its first analysis is a perception of the incongruous, and, in its highest development, of the incon gruity between the actual and the ideal in men and life. With so keen a sense of the ludicrous contrast between what men might be, nay, wish to be, and what they are, and with a vehement nature that demands the instant realisation of his vision of a world altogether heroic, it is no wonder that Mr. Carlyle, always hoping for a thing and always disap pointed, should become bitter. Perhaps if he expected less he would find more. Saul seeking his father's asses found himself turned suddenly into a king; but Mr. Carlyle, on the lookout for a king, always seems to find the other sort of animal. He sees nothing on any side of him but a proces sion of the Lord of Misrule — in gloomier moments, a Dance of Death, where everything is either a parody of whatever is noble, or an aimless jig that stumbles at last into the an nihilation of the grave, and so passes from one nothing to another. Is a world, then, which buys and reads Mr. Carlyle's works distinguished only for its 'fair, large ears'? If he who has read and remembered so much would only now and then call to mind the old proverb, Nee deus, nee lupus, sedhomo! If he would only recollect that, from the days of the first grandfather, everybody has remembered a golden age behind him ! The very qualities, it seems to us, which came so near making a great poet of Mr. Carlyle, disqualify him for the office of historian. The poet's concern is with the appear ances of things, with their harmony in that whole which the imagination demands for its satisfaction, and their truth to that ideal nature which is the proper object of poetry. History, unfortunately, is very far from being ideal, still farther from an exclusive interest in those heroic or typical figures which answer all the wants of the epic and the drama and fill their utmost artistic limits, Mr. Carlyle has an un equalled power and vividness in painting detached scenes, in 102 bringing out in their full relief *he oddities or peculiarities of character ; but he has a tar feebler sense of those gradual changes of opinion, that strange communication of sympathy from mind to mind, that subtile influence of very subordinate actors in giving a direction to policy or action, which we are wont somewhat vaguely to call the progress of events. His scheme of history is purely an epical one, where only leading figures appear by name and are in any strict sense operative. He has no conception of the people as anything else than an element of mere brute force in political problems, and would sniff scornfully at that unpicturesque common- sense of the many, which comes slowly to its conclusions, no doubt, but compels obedience even from rulers the most despotic when once its mind is made up. His history of Frederick is, of course, a Fritziad ; but next to his hero, the cane of the drill-sergeant and iron ramrods appear to be the conditions which to his mind satisfactorily account for the result of the Seven Years War. It is our opinion, which subsequent events seem to justify, that, had there not been in the Prussian people a strong instinct of nationality, Pro testant nationality too, aiid an intimate conviction of Us advantages, the war might have ended quite otherwise. Frederick II. left the machine of war which he received from his father even more perfect than he found it, yet within a few years of his death it went to pieces before the shock of French armies animated by an idea. Again a few years, and the Prussian soldiery, inspired once more by the old national fervour, were victorious. Were it not for the purely pictu resque bias of Mr. Carlyle's genius, for the necessity which his epical treatment lays upon him of always having a protagonist, we should be astonished that an idealist like him should have so little faith in ideas and so much in matter. Mr. Carlyle's manner is not so well suited to the historian as to the essayist. He is always great in single figures and striking episodes, but there is neither gradation nc^^conti- nuity. He has extraordinary patience and conscientiousness in the gathering and sifting of his material, but is scornful of commonplace facts and characters, impatient of whatever will not serve for one of his clever sketches, or group well in a more elaborate figure-piece. He sees history, as it were, by flashes of lightning. A single scene, whether a landscape CARLYLE. 103 or an interior, a single figure or a wild mob of men, whatever may be snatched by the eye in that instant of intense' illu mination, is minutely photographed upon the memory. Every tree and stone, almost every blade of grass ; every article of furniture in a room ; the attitude or expression, nay, the very buttons and shoe-ties of a principal figure ; the gestures of momentary passion in a wild throng,— - everything leaps into vision under that sudden glare with a painful distinctness that leaves the retina quivering. The intervals are absolute darkness. Mr. Carlyle makes us acquainted with the isolated spot where we happen to be when the flash comes, as if by actual eyesight, but there is no possibility of a comprehensive view. No other writer compares with him for vividness. He is himself a witness, and makes us witnesses of whatever he describes. This is genius beyond a question, and of a very rare quality, but it is not history. He has not the cold-blooded impar tiality of the historian ; and while he entertains us, moves us to tears or laughter, makes us the unconscious captives of his ever-changeful mood, we find that he has taught us com paratively little. His imagination is so powerful that it makes him the contemporary of his characters, and thus his history seems to be the memoirs of a cynical humorist, with hearty likes and dislikes, with something of acridity in his par tialities whether for or against, more keenly sensitive to the grotesque than the simply natural, and who enters in his diary, even of what comes within the range of his own observation, only so much as amuses his fancy, is congenial with his humour, or feeds his prejudice. Mr. Carlyle's method is accordingly altogether pictorial, his hasty temper making narrative wearisome to him. In his Friedrich, for example, we get very little notion of the civil administration of Prussia ; and when he comes, in the last volume, to his hero's dealings with civil reforms, he confesses candidly that it would tire him too much to tell us about it, even if he knew anything at all satisfactory himself. Mr. Carlyle's historical compositions are wonderful prose poems, full of picture, incident, humour, and character, where we grow familiar with his conception of certain leading per sonages, and even of subordinate ones, if they are necessary to the scene, so that they come out living upon the stage from the dreary limbo of names ; but this is no more history than IO4 CARLYLE. the historical plays of Shakespeare. There is nothing in imaginative literature superior in its own way to the episode of Voltaire in the Fritziad. It is delicious in humour, mas terly in minute characterisation. We feel as if the principal victim (for we cannot help feeling all the while that he is so) of this mischievous genius had been put upon the theatre before us by some perfect mimic like Foote, who had studied his habitual gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought, costume, trick of feature, and rendered them with the slight dash of caricature needful to make the whole composition tell. It is in such things that Mr. Carlyle is beyond all rivalry, and that we must go back to Shakespeare for a comparison. But the mastery of Shakespeare is shown perhaps more strikingly in his treatment of the ordinary than of the exceptional. His is the gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr. Carlyle's gift is rather in the representation than in the evolution of cha racter ; and it is a necessity of his art, therefore, to exag gerate slightly his heroic, and to caricature in like manner his comic parts. His appreciation is less psychological than physical and external. Grimm relates that Garrick, riding once with PreVille, proposed to him that they should counter feit drunkenness. They rode through Passy accordingly, deceiving all who saw them. When beyond the town Pre- ville asked how he had succeeded. ' Excellently/ said Gar- rick, ' as to your body; but your legs were not tipsy.' Mr. Carlyle would be as exact in his observation of nature as the great actor, and would make us see a drunken man as well ; but we doubt whether he could have conceived that unmatch- able scene in Antony and Cleopatra, where the tipsiness of Lepidus pervades the whole metaphysical no less than the physical part of the triumvir. If his sympathies bore any proportion to his instinct for catching those traits which are the expression of character, but not character itself, we might have had a great historian in him instead of a history-painter. But that which is a main element in Mr. Carlyle's talent, and does perhaps more than anything else to make it effect ive, is a defect of his nature. The cynicism which renders him so entertaining precludes him from any just conception of men and their motives, and from any sane estimate of the relative importance of the events which concern them. We remember a picture of Hamon's, where before a Punch's theatre are gathered the wisest of mankind in rapt attention. CARLYLE. 105 Socrates sits en a front bench, absorbed in the spectacle, and in the corner stands Dante making entries in his note book. Mr. Carlyle as an historian leaves us in somewhat such a mood. The world is a puppet-show, and when we have watched the play out, we depart with a half-comic con sciousness of the futility of all human enterprise, and the ludicrousness of all man's action and passion on the stage of the world. Simple, kindly, blundering Oliver Goldsmith was after all wiser, and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and not less immortal, is a demonstration of the perennial beauty and heroism of the homeliest human nature. The cynical view is congenial to certain moods, and is so little inconsistent with original nobleness of mind, that it is not seldom the acetous fermentation of it; but it is the view of the satirist, not of the historian, and takes in but a narrow arc in the circumference of truth. Cynicism in itself is essentially dis agreeable. It is the intellectual analogue of the truffle; and though it may be very well in giving a relish to thought for certain palates, it cannot supply the substance of it. Mr. Carlyle's cynicism is not that polished weariness of the out- sides of life which we find in Ecclesiastes. It goes much deeper than that, to the satisfactions, not of the body or the intellect, but of the very soul itself. It vaunts itself; it is noisy and aggressive. What the wise master puts into the mouth of desperate ambition, thwarted of the fruit of its crime, as the fitting expression of passionate sophistry, seems to have become an article of his creed. With him Life is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing He goes about with his Diogenes dark-lantern, professing to seek a man, but inwardly resolved to find a monkey. He loves to flash it suddenly on poor human nature in some ridiculous or degrading posture. He admires still, or keeps affirming that he admires, the doughty, silent, hard-working men who, like Cromwell, go honestly about their business ; but when we come to his later examples, we find that it is not loyalty to duty or to an inward ideal of high-mindedness that he finds admirable in them, but a blind unquestioning vassalage to whomsoever it has pleased him to set up for a hero. He would fain replace the old feudalism with a spiri tual counterpart, in which there shall be an obligation to 106 CARLYLE. soul-service. He who once popularised the word flunkey by ringing the vehement changes of his scorn upon it, is at last forced to conceive an ideal flunkeyism to squire the hectoring Don Belianises of his fancy about the world. Fail ing this, his latest theory of Divine government seems to be the cudgel. Poets have sung all manner of vegetable loves; Petrarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer the daisy, and Wordsworth the gallows-tree; it remained for the ex-peda gogue of Ecclefechan to become the volunteer laureate of the rod, and to imagine a world created and directed by a divine Dr. Busby. We cannot help thinking that Mr. Car- lyle might have learned something to his advantage by living a few years in the democracy which he scoffs at as heartily a priori as if it were the demagogism which Aristophanes derided from experience. The Hero, as Mr. Carlyle under stands him, was a makeshift of the past; and the ideal of manhood is to be found hereafter in free communities, where the state shall at length sum up and exemplify in itself all those qualities which poets were forced to imagine and typify because they could not find them in the actual world. In the earlier part of his literary career, Mr. Carlyle was the denouncer of shams, the preacher up of sincerity, manli ness, and of a living faith, instead of a droning ritual. He had intense convictions, and he made disciples. With a compass of diction unequalled by any other public performer of the time, ranging as it did from the unbooked freshness of the Scottish peasant to the most far-sought phrase of literary curiosity, with humour, pathos, and eloquence at will, it was no wonder that he found eager listeners in a world longing for a sensation, and forced to put up with the West-End gospel of ' Pelham.' If not a profound thinker, he had what was next best — he felt profoundly, and his cry came out of the depths. The stern Calvinism of his early training was rekindled by his imagination to the old fervour of Wishart and Brown, and became a new phenomenon as he reproduced it subtilized by German transcendentalism and German culture. Imagination, if it lays hold of a Scotchman, possesses him in the old demoniac sense of the word, and that hard logical nature, if the Hebrew fire once gets fair headway in it, burns unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But to utilize these sacred heats, to employ them, as a literary man is always tempted, to keep the domestic pot a-boiling — is such CARLYLE. 107 a thing possible? Only too possible, we fear; and Mr. Carlyle is an example of it. If the languid public long for a sensation, the excitement of making one becomes also a necessity of the successful author, as the intellectual nerves grow duller and the old inspiration that came unbidden to the bare garret grows shier and shier of the comfortable parlour. As he himself said thirty years ago of Edward Irving, ' Unconsciously, for the most part in deep uncon sciousness, there was now the impossibility to live neglected — to walk on the quiet paths where alone it is well with us. Singularity must henceforth succeed singularity. O foulest Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Applause ! madness is in thee and death ; thy end is Bedlam and the grave/ Mr. Carlyle won his first successes as a kind of preacher in print. His fervour, his oddity of manner, his pugnacious paradox, drew the crowd ; the truth, or, at any rate, the faith that underlay them all, brought also the fitter audience, though fewer. But the curse was upon him ; he must attract, he must astonish. Thenceforth he has done nothing but revamp his telling things ; but the oddity has become always odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. No very large share of truth falls to the apprehension of any one man ; let him keep it sacred, and beware of repeating it till it turn to false hood on his lips by becoming ritual. Truth always has a bewitching savour of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue ; but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other ! We seem to miss of late in Mr. Carlyle the old sincerity. He has become the purely literary man, less concerned about what he says than about how he shall say it to best advan tage. The muse should be the companion, not the guide, says he whom Mr. Carlyle has pronounced * the wisest of this generation.' What would be a virtue in the poet is a vice of the most fatal kind in the teacher, and, alas that we should say it ! the very Draco of shams, whose code contained no penalty milder than capital for the most harmless of them, has become at last something very likely a sham himself. Mr. Carlyle continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness, but no longer a voice with any earnest conviction behind it. Hearing him rebuke us for being humbugs and impostors, we are inclined to answer, with the ambassador of Philip II., when his master reproached him with forgetting substance in I08 CARLYLE. ceremony, ' Your Majesty forgets that you are only a cere mony yourself/ And Mr. Carlyle's teaching, moreover — if teaching we may call it — belongs to what the great German, whose disciple he is, condemned as the 'literature of despair.' An apostle to the Gentiles might hope for some fruit of his preaching; but of what avail an apostle who shouts his message down the mouth of the pit to poor lost souls, whom he can positively assure only that it is impossible to get out ? Mr. Carlyle lights up the lanterns of his Pharos after the ship is already rolling between the tongue of the sea and the grinders of the reef. It is very brilliant, and its revolving flashes touch the crests of the breakers with an awful pic- turesqueness ; but in so desperate a state of things, even Dr. Syntax might be pardoned for being forgetful of the pictu resque. The Toryism of Scott sprang from love of the past; that of Carlyle is far more dangerously infectious, for it is logically deduced from a deep disdain of human nature. Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an old king sitting at the gate of his palace to judge his people in the calm sunshine of that past which never existed outside a poet's brain. It is the sweetest of waking dreams, this of absolute power and perfect wisdom in one supreme ruler ; but it is as pure a creation of human want and weakness, as clear a witness of mortal limitation and incompleteness, as the shoes of swiftness, the cloak of darkness, the purse of Fortunatus, and the elixir vit