The Psalm-tunes of the Puritan,The songs that dared to goDown searching through the abyss of man,His deeps of conscious woe—
The Psalm-tunes of the Puritan,The songs that dared to goDown searching through the abyss of man,His deeps of conscious woe—
The Psalm-tunes of the Puritan,
The songs that dared to go
Down searching through the abyss of man,
His deeps of conscious woe—
spoke more profoundly to his soul than the easy optimism of liberal Christianity. Hawthorne was no transcendentalist: he went to Brook Farm, not as a Fourierite or a believer in the principles of association, but attracted by the novelty of this experiment at communal living, and by the interestingvarieties of human nature there assembled: literary material which he used in "The Blithedale Romance." He complains slyly of Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer which hooked the other cows (though Colonel Higginson once assured me that this heifer was only a symbol, and that Margaret never really owned a heifer or cow of any kind).
Mr. Lathrop proposed, as a rough formula for Hawthorne, Poe and Irvingplussomething of his own. The resemblances and differences between Poe and Hawthorne are obvious. The latter never deals in physical horror: his morbidest tragedy is of a spiritual kind; while once only—in the story entitled "William Wilson"—Poe enters that field of ethical romance which Hawthorne constantly occupies. What he has in common with Irving is chiefly the attitude of spectatorship, and the careful refinement of the style, so different from the loud, brassy manner of modern writing. Hawthorne never uses slang, dialect, oaths, or colloquial idioms. The talk of his characters is book talk. Why is it that many of us find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorne irritating? Is it the fault of the writer or of the reader? Partly of the former, I think: that anxious finish, those elaborately rounded periods have something of the artificial, which modern naturalismhas taught us to distrust. But also, I believe, the fault is largely our own. We have grown so nervous, in these latter generations, so used to short cuts, that we are impatient of anything slow. Cut out the descriptions, cut out the reflections,coupez vos phrases. Hawthorne's style was the growth of reverie, solitude, leisure—"fine old leisure," whose disappearance from modern life George Eliot has lamented. On the walls of his study at the "Wayside" was written—though not by his own hand—the motto, "There is no joy but calm."
Sentiment and humor do not lie so near the surface in Hawthorne as in Irving. He had a deep sense of the ridiculous, well shown in such sketches as "P's Correspondence" and "The Celestial Railroad"; or in the description of the absurd old chickens in the Pyncheon yard, shrunk by in-breeding to a weazened race, but retaining all their top-knotted pride of lineage. Hawthorne's humor was less genial than Irving's, and had a sharp satiric edge. There is no merriment in it. Do you remember that scene at the Villa Borghese, where Miriam and Donatello break into a dance and all the people who are wandering in the gardens join with them? The author meant this to be a burst of wild mænad gaiety. As such I do not recall a more dismal failure. It is cold at the heartof it. It has no mirth, but is like a dance without music: like a dance of deaf mutes that I witnessed once, pretending to keep time to the inaudible scrapings of a deaf and dumb fiddler.
Henry James says that Hawthorne's stories are the only good American historical fiction; and Woodberry says that his method here is the same as Scott's. The truth of this may be admitted up to a certain point. Our Puritan romancer had certainly steeped his imagination in the annals of colonial New England, as Scott had done in his border legends. He was familiar with the documents—especially with Mather's "Magnalia," that great source book of New England poetry and romance. But it was not the history itself that interested him, the broad picture of an extinct society, thetableau large de la vie, which Scott delighted to paint; rather it was some adventure of the private soul. For example, Lowell had told him the tradition of the young hired man who was chopping wood at the backdoor of the Old Manse on the morning of the Concord fight; and who hurried to the battlefield in the neighboring lane, to find both armies gone and two British soldiers lying on the ground, one dead, the other wounded. As the wounded man raised himself on his knees and stared up at the lad, the latter,obeying a nervous impulse, struck him on the head with his axe and finished him. "The story," says Hawthorne, "comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood-stain.... This one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight." How different is this bit of pathology from the public feeling of Emerson's lines:
Spirit that made those heroes dareTo die and leave their children free,Bid Time and Nature gently spareThe shaft we raise to them and thee.
Spirit that made those heroes dareTo die and leave their children free,Bid Time and Nature gently spareThe shaft we raise to them and thee.
Spirit that made those heroes dare
To die and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
Rura quae Liris quietâMordet aquâ, taciturnus amnis.
Rura quae Liris quietâMordet aquâ, taciturnus amnis.
Rura quae Liris quietâ
Mordet aquâ, taciturnus amnis.
The Concord School of Philosophy opened its first session in the summer of 1879. The dust of late July lay velvet soft and velvet deep on all the highways; or, stirred by the passing wheel, rose in slow clouds, not unemblematic of the transcendental haze which filled the mental atmosphere thereabout.
Of those who had made Concord one of the homes of the soul, Hawthorne and Thoreau had been dead many years—I saw their graves in Sleepy Hollow;—and Margaret Fuller had perished long ago by shipwreck on Fire Island Beach. But Alcott was still alive and garrulous; and Ellery Channing—Thoreau's biographer—was alive. Above all, the sage of Concord, "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit," still walked his ancient haunts; his mind in many ways yet unimpaired, though sadly troubled by aphasia, or the failure of verbal memory. It was an instance of pathetic irony that in his lecture on"Memory," delivered in the Town Hall, he was prompted constantly by his daughter.
It seemed an inappropriate manner of arrival—the Fitchburg Railroad. One should have dropped down upon the sacred spot by parachute; or, at worst, have come on foot, with staff and scrip, along the Lexington pike, reversing the fleeing steps of the British regulars on that April day, when the embattled farmers made their famous stand. But I remembered that Thoreau, whose Walden solitude was disturbed by gangs of Irish laborers laying the tracks of this same Fitchburg Railroad, consoled himself with the reflection that hospitable nature made the intruder a part of herself. The embankment runs along one end of the pond, and the hermit only said:
It fills a few hollowsAnd makes banks for the swallows,And sets the sand a-blowingAnd the black-berries growing.
It fills a few hollowsAnd makes banks for the swallows,And sets the sand a-blowingAnd the black-berries growing.
It fills a few hollows
And makes banks for the swallows,
And sets the sand a-blowing
And the black-berries growing.
Afterwards I witnessed, and participated in, a more radical profanation of these crystal waters, when two hundred of the dirtiest children in Boston, South-enders, were brought down by train on a fresh-air-fund picnic and washed in the lake just in front of the spot where Thoreau's cabin stood, after having been duly swung in the swings,teetered on the see-saws, and fed with a sandwich, a slice of cake, a pint of peanuts, and a lemonade apiece, by a committee of charitable ladies—one of whom was Miss Louisa Alcott, certainly a high authority on "Little Women" and "Little Men."
Miss Alcott I had encountered on the evening of my first day in Concord, when I rang the door bell of the Alcott residence and asked if the seer was within. I fancied that there was a trace of acerbity in the manner of the tall lady who answered my ring, and told me abruptly that Mr. Alcott was not at home, and that I would probably find him at Mr. Sanborn's farther up the street. Perspiring philosophers with dusters and grip-sacks had been arriving all day and applying at the Alcott house for addresses of boarding houses and for instructions of all kinds; and Miss Louisa's patience may well have been tried. She did not take much stock in the School anyway. Her father was supremely happy. One of the dreams of his life was realized, and endless talk and soul-communion were in prospect. But his daughter's view of philosophy was tinged with irony, as was not unnatural in a high-spirited woman who had borne the burden of the family's support, and had even worked out in domestic service, while her unworldly parent was transcendentalizing aboutthe country, holding conversation classes in western towns, from which after prolonged absences he sometimes brought home a dollar, and sometimes only himself. "Philosophy can bake no bread, but it can give us God, freedom, and immortality" read the motto—from Novalis—on the cover of theJournal of Speculative Philosophy, published at Concord in those years, under the editorship of Mr. William T. Harris; but bread must be baked, for even philosophers must eat, and an occasional impatience of the merely ideal may be forgiven in the overworked practician.
On Mr. Frank Sanborn's wide, shady verandah, I found Mr. Alcott, a most quaint and venerable figure, large in frame and countenance, with beautiful, flowing white hair. He moved slowly, and spoke deliberately in a rich voice. His face had a look of mild and innocent solemnity, and he reminded me altogether of a large benignant sheep or other ruminating animal. He was benevolently interested when I introduced myself as the first fruits of the stranger and added that I was from Connecticut. He himself was a native of the little hill town of Wolcott, not many miles from New Haven, and in youth had travelled through the South as a Yankee peddler. "Connecticut gave him birth," says Thoreau; "he peddled first her wares, afterwards, he declares, his brains."
Mr. Sanborn was the secretary of the School, and with him I enrolled myself as a pupil and paid the very modest fee which admitted me to its symposia. Mr. Sanborn is well known through his contributions to Concord history and biography. He was for years one of the literary staff ofThe Springfield Republican, active in many reform movements, and an efficient member of the American Social Science Association. Almost from his house John Brown started on his Harper's Ferry raid, and people in Concord still dwell upon the exciting incident of Mr. Sanborn's arrest in 1860 as an accessory before the fact. The United States deputy marshal with his myrmidons drove out from Boston in a hack. They lured the unsuspecting abolitionist outside his door, on some pretext or other, clapped the handcuffs on him, and tried to get him into the hack. But their victim, planting his long legs one on each side of the carriage door, resisted sturdily, and his neighbors assaulted the officers with hue and cry. The town rose upon them. Judge Hoar hastily issued a habeas corpus returnable before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and the baffled minions of the slave power went back to Boston.
The School assembled in the Orchard House, formerly the residence of Mr. Alcott,on the Lexington road. Next door was the Wayside, Hawthorne's home for a number of years, a cottage overshadowed by the steep hillside that rose behind it, thick with hemlocks and larches. On the ridge of this hill was Hawthorne's "out door study," a foot path worn by his own feet, as he paced back and forth among the trees and thought out the plots of his romances. In 1879 the Wayside was tenanted by George Lathrop, who had married Hawthorne's daughter, Rose. He had already published his "Study of Hawthorne" and a volume of poems, "Rose and Rooftree." His novel, "An Echo of Passion," was yet to come, a book which unites something of modern realism with a delicately symbolic art akin to Hawthorne's own.
A bust of Plato presided over the exercises of the School, and "Plato-Skimpole"—as Mr. Alcott was once nicknamed—made the opening address. I remember how impressively he quoted Milton's lines:
How charming is divine philosophy!Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,But musical as is Apollo's lute.
How charming is divine philosophy!Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,But musical as is Apollo's lute.
How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute.
Ourpièce de résistancewas the course of lectures in which Mr. Harris expounded Hegel. But there were many other lecturers. Mrs. Edna Cheney talked to us about art;though all that I recall of her conversation is the fact that she pronouncedalways olways, and I wondered if that was the regular Boston pronunciation. Dr. Jones, the self-taught Platonist of Jacksonville, Illinois, interpreted Plato. Quite a throng of his disciples, mostly women, had followed him from Illinois and swelled the numbers of the Summer School. Once Professor Benjamin Peirce, the great Harvard mathematician, came over from Cambridge, and read us one of his Lowell Institute lectures, on the Ideality of Mathematics. He had a most distinguished presence and an eye, as was said, of black fire. The Harvard undergraduates of my time used to call him Benny Peirce; and on the fly leaves of their mathematical text books they would write, "Who steals my Peirce steals trash." Colonel T. W. Higginson read a single lecture on American literature, from which I carried away for future use a delightful story about an excellent Boston merchant who, being asked at a Goethe birthday dinner to make a few remarks, said that he "guessed that Go-ethe was the N. P. Willis of Germany."
Colonel Higginson's lecture was to me a green oasis in the arid desert of metaphysics, but it was regarded by earnest truth-seekers in the class as quite irrelevant to the purposes of the course. The lecturer himself confidedto me at the close of the session a suspicion that his audience cared more for philosophy than for literature. Once or twice Mr. Emerson visited the School, taking no part in its proceedings, but sitting patiently through the hour, and wearing what a newspaper reporter described as his "wise smile." After the lecture for the session was ended, the subject was thrown open to discussion and there was an opportunity to ask questions. Most of us were shy to speak out in that presence, feeling ourselves in a state of pupilage. Usually there would be a silence of several minutes, as at a Quaker meeting waiting for the spirit to move; and then Mr. Alcott would announce in his solemn, musical tones "I have a thought"; and after a weighty pause, proceed to some Orphic utterance. Alcott, indeed, was what might be called the leader on the floor; and he was ably seconded by Miss Elizabeth Peabody, the sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife. Miss Peabody was well known as the introducer of the German kindergarten, and for her life-long zeal in behalf of all kinds of philanthropies and reforms. Henry James was accused of having caricatured her in his novel "The Bostonians," in the figure of the dear, visionary, vaguely benevolent old lady who is perpetually engaged in promoting "causes," attending conventions, carryingon correspondence, forming committees, drawing up resolutions, and the like; and who has so many "causes" on hand at once that she gets them all mixed up and cannot remember which of her friends are spiritualists and which of them are concerned in woman's rights movements, temperance agitations, and universal peace associations. Mr. James denied that he meant Miss Peabody, whom he had never met or known. If so, he certainly divined the type. In her later years, Miss Peabody was nicknamed "the grandmother of Boston."
I have to acknowledge, to my shame, that I was often a truant to the discussions of the School, which met three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. The weather was hot and the air in the Orchard House was drowsy. There were many outside attractions, and more and more I was tempted to leave the philosophers to reason high—
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate—Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute—
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate—Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute—
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate—
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute—
while I wandered off through the woods for a bath in Walden, some one and a half miles away, through whose transparent waters the pebbles on the bottom could be plainly seen at a depth of thirty feet. Sometimes I went farther afield to White Pond, described byThoreau, or Baker Farm, sung by Ellery Channing. A pleasant young fellow at Miss Emma Barrett's boarding house, who had no philosophy, but was a great hand at picnics and boating and black-berrying parties, paddled me up the Assabeth, or North Branch, in his canoe, and drove me over to Longfellow's Wayside Inn at Sudbury. And so it happens that, when I look back at my fortnight at Concord, what I think of is not so much the murmurous auditorium of the Orchard House, as the row of colossal sycamores along the village sidewalk that led us thither, whose smooth, mottled trunks in the moonlight resembled a range of Egyptian temple columns. Or I haunt again at twilight the grounds of the Old Manse, where Hawthorne wrote his "Mosses," and the grassy lane beside it leading down to the site of the rude bridge and the first battlefield of the Revolution. Here were the headstones of the two British soldiers, buried where they fell; here the Concord monument erected in 1836:
On this green bank, by this soft streamWe set to-day a votive stone:That memory may their deed redeemWhen, like our sires, our sons are gone.
On this green bank, by this soft streamWe set to-day a votive stone:That memory may their deed redeemWhen, like our sires, our sons are gone.
On this green bank, by this soft stream
We set to-day a votive stone:
That memory may their deed redeem
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
In the field across the river was the spirited statue of the minuteman, designed by youngDaniel Chester French, a Concord boy who has since distinguished himself as a sculptor in wider fields and more imposing works.
The social life of Concord, judging from such glimpses as could be had of it, was peculiar. It was the life of a village community, marked by the friendly simplicity of country neighbors, but marked also by unusual intellectual distinction and an addiction to "the things of the mind." The town was not at all provincial, or what the Germans callkleinstädtisch:—cosmopolitan, rather, as lying on the highway of thought. It gave one a thrill, for example, to meet Mr. Emerson coming from the Post Office with his mail, like any ordinary citizen. The petty constraint, the narrow standards of conduct which are sometimes the bane of village life were almost unknown. Transcendental freedom of speculation, all manner of heterodoxies, and the individual queernesses of those whom the world calls "cranks," had produced a general tolerance. Thus it was said, that the only reason why services were held in the Unitarian Church on Sunday was because Judge Hoar didn't quite like to play whist on that day. Many of the Concord houses have gardens bordering upon the river; and I was interested to notice that the boats moored at the bank had painted on their sterns plant names or bird namestaken from the Concord poems—such as "The Rhodora," "The Veery," "The Linnæa," and "The Wood Thrush." Many a summer hour I spent with Edward Hoar in his skiff, rowing, or sailing, or floating up and down on this soft Concord stream—Musketaquit, or "grass-ground river"—moving through miles of meadow, fringed with willows and button bushes, with a current so languid, said Hawthorne, that the eye cannot detect which way it flows. Sometimes we sailed as far as Fair Haven Bay, whose "dark and sober billows," "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day," Thoreau thought as fine as anything on Lake Huron or the northwest coast. Nor were we, I hope, altogether unperceiving of that other river which Emerson detected flowing underneath the Concord—
Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,Repeats the music of the rain,But sweeter rivers pulsing flitThrough thee as though through Concord plain....I see the inundation sweet,I hear the spending of the stream,Through years, through men, through nature fleet,Through love and thought, through power and dream.
Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,Repeats the music of the rain,But sweeter rivers pulsing flitThrough thee as though through Concord plain....
Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain,
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee as though through Concord plain....
I see the inundation sweet,I hear the spending of the stream,Through years, through men, through nature fleet,Through love and thought, through power and dream.
I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream,
Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream.
Edward Hoar had been Thoreau's companion in one of his visits to the Maine woods. He knew the flora and fauna of Concord as well as his friend the poet-naturalist. He had a large experience of the world, had run a ranch in New Mexico and an orange plantation in Sicily. He was not so well known to the public as his brothers, Rockwood Hoar, Attorney General in Grant's Cabinet, and the late Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of Worcester; but I am persuaded that he was just as good company; and, then, neither of these distinguished gentlemen would have wasted whole afternoons in eating the lotus along the quiet reaches of the Musketaquit with a stripling philosopher.
The appetite for discussion not being fully satisfied by the stated meetings of the School in the Orchard House, the hospitable Concord folks opened their houses for informal symposia in the evenings. I was privileged to make one of a company that gathered in Emerson's library. The subject for the evening was Shakespeare, and Emerson read, by request, that mysterious little poem "The Phœnix and the Turtle," attributed to Shakespeare on rather doubtful evidence, but included for some reason in Emerson's volume of favorite selections, "Parnassus." He began by saying that he would not himself have chosen this particular piece, but asit had been chosen for him he would read it. And this he did, with that clean-cut, refined enunciation and subtle distribution of emphasis which made the charm of his delivery as a lyceum lecturer. When he came to the couplet,
Truth may seem, but cannot be,Beauty brag, but 'tis not she,
Truth may seem, but cannot be,Beauty brag, but 'tis not she,
Truth may seem, but cannot be,
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she,
I thought that I detected an idealistic implication in the lines which accounted for their presence in "Parnassus."
That shy recluse, Ellery Channing, most eccentric of the transcendentalists, was not to be found at the School or the evening symposia. He had married a sister of Margaret Fuller, but for years he had lived alone and done for himself, and his oddities had increased upon him with the years. I had read and liked many of his poems—those poems so savagely cut up by Poe, when first published in 1843—and my expressed interest in these foundlings of the Muse gave me the opportunity to meet the author of "A Poet's Hope" at one hospitable table where he was accustomed to sup on a stated evening every week.
The Concord Summer School of Philosophy went on for ten successive years, but I never managed to attend another session. A friend from New Haven, who was therefor a few days in 1880, brought back the news that a certain young lady who was just beginning the study of Hegel the year before, had now got up to the second intention, and hoped in time to attain the sixth. I never got far enough in Mr. Harris's lectures to discover what Hegelian intentions were; but my friend spoke of them as if they were something like degrees in Masonry. In 1905 I visited Concord for the first and only time in twenty-six years. There is a good deal of philosophy in Wordsworth's Yarrow poems—
For when we're there, although 'tis fair,'Twill be another Yarrow!—
For when we're there, although 'tis fair,'Twill be another Yarrow!—
For when we're there, although 'tis fair,
'Twill be another Yarrow!—
and I have heard it suggested that he might well have added to his trilogy, a fourth member, "Yarrow Unrevisited." There is a loss, though Concord bears the strain better than most places, I think. As we go on in life the world gets full of ghosts, and at the capital of transcendentalism I was peculiarly conscious of the haunting of these spiritual presences. Since I had been there before, Emerson and Alcott and Ellery Channing and my courteous host and companion, Edward Hoar, and my kind old landlady Miss Barrett—who had also been Emerson's landlady and indeed everybody's landlady in Concord, and whom her youngest boardersaddressed affectionately as Emma—all these and many more had joined the sleepers in Sleepy Hollow. The town itself has suffered comparatively few changes. True there is a trolley line through the main street—oddly called "The Milldam," and in Walden wood I met an automobile not far from the cairn, or stone pile, which marks the site of Thoreau's cabin. But the woods themselves were intact and the limpid waters of the pond had not been tapped to furnish power for any electric light company. The Old Manse looked much the same, and so did the Wayside and the Orchard House. Not a tree was missing from the mystic ring of tall pines in front of Emerson's house at the fork of the Cambridge and Lexington roads. On the central square the ancient tavern was gone where I had lodged on the night of my arrival and where my host, a practical philosopher—everyone in Concord had his philosophy,—took a gloomy view of the local potentialities of the hotel business. He said there was nothing doing—some milk and asparagus were raised for the Boston market, but the inhabitants were mostly literary people. "I suppose," he added, "we've got the smartest literary man in the country living right here." "You mean Mr. Emerson," I suggested. "Yes, sir, and a gentleman too."
"And Alcott?" I ventured.
"Oh, Alcott! The best thing he ever did was his daughters."
This inn was gone, but the still more ancient one across the square remains, the tavern where Major Pitcairn dined on the day of the Lexington fight, and from whose windows or door steps he is alleged by the history books to have cried to a group of embattled farmers, "Disperse, ye Yankee rebels."
Concord is well preserved. Still there are subtle indications of the flight of time. For one thing, the literary pilgrimage business has increased, partly no doubt because trolleys, automobiles, and bicycles have made the town more accessible; but also because our literature is a generation older than it was in 1879. The study of American authors has been systematically introduced into the public schools. The men who made Concord famous are dead, but their habitat has become increasingly classic ground as they themselves have receded into a dignified, historic past. At any rate, the trail of the excursionist—the "cheap tripper," as he is called in England,—is over it all. Basket parties had evidently eaten many a luncheon on the first battle-field of the Revolution, and notices were posted about, asking the public not to deface the trees, and instructing themwhere to put their paper wrappers andfragmenta regalia. I could imagine Boston schoolma'ams pointing out to their classes, the minuteman, the monument, and other objects of interest, and calling for names and dates. The shores of Walden were trampled and worn in spots. There were springboards there for diving, and traces of the picnicker were everywhere. Trespassers were warned away from the grounds of the Old Manse and similar historic spots, by signs of "Private Property."
Concord has grown more self-conscious under the pressure of all this publicity and resort. Tablets and inscriptions have been put up at points of interest. As I was reading one of these on the square, I was approached by a man who handed me a business card with photographs of the monument, the Wayside, the four-hundred-year-old oak, with information to the effect that Mr. —— would furnish guides and livery teams about the town and to places as far distant as Walden Pond and Sudbury Inn. Thus poetry becomes an asset, and transcendentalism is exploited after the poet and the philosopher are dead. It took Emerson eleven years to sell five hundred copies of "Nature," and Thoreau's books came back upon his hands as unsalable and were piled up in the attic like cord-wood. I wasimpressed anew with the tameness of the Concord landscape. There is nothing salient about it: it is the average mean of New England nature. Berkshire is incomparably more beautiful. And yet those flat meadows and low hills and slow streams are dear to the imagination, since genius has looked upon them and made them its own. "The eye," said Emerson, "is the first circle: the horizon the second."
And the Concord books—how do they bear the test of revisitation? To me, at least, they have—even some of the second-rate papers in the "Dial" have—now nearly fifty years since I read them first, that freshness which is the mark of immortality.
No ray is dimmed, no atom worn:My oldest force is good as new;And the fresh rose on yonder thornGives back the bending heavens in dew.
No ray is dimmed, no atom worn:My oldest force is good as new;And the fresh rose on yonder thornGives back the bending heavens in dew.
No ray is dimmed, no atom worn:
My oldest force is good as new;
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew.
I think I do not mistake, and confer upon them the youth which was then mine. No, the morning light had touched their foreheads: the youthfulness was inthem.
Lately I saw a newspaper item about one of the thirty thousand literary pilgrims who are said to visit Concord annually. Calling upon Mr. Sanborn, he asked him which of the Concord authors he thought would last longest. The answer, somewhat to hissurprise, was "Thoreau." I do not know whether this report is authentic; but supposing it true, it is not inexplicable. I will confess that, of recent years, I find myself reading Thoreau more and Emerson less. "Walden" seems to me more of a book than Emerson ever wrote. Emerson's was incomparably the larger nature, the more liberal and gracious soul. His, too, was the seminal mind; though Lowell was unfair to the disciple, when he described him as a pistillate blossom fertilized by the Emersonian pollen. For Thoreau had an originality of his own—a flavor as individual as the tang of the bog cranberry, or the wild apples which he loved. One secure advantage he possesses in the concreteness of his subject-matter. The master, with his abstract habit of mind and his view of the merely phenomenal character of the objects of sense, took up a somewhat incurious attitude towards details, not thinking it worth while to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." The disciple, though he professed that the other world was all his art, had a sharp eye for this. Emerson was Nature's lover, but Thoreau was her scholar. Emerson's method was intuition, while Thoreau's was observation. He worked harder than Emerson and knew more,—that is, within certain defined limits. Thus he read the Greek poets in the original.Emerson, in whom there was a spice of indolence—due, say his biographers, to feeble health in early life, and the need of going slow,—read them in translations and excused himself on the ground that he liked to be beholden to the great English language.
Compare Hawthorne's description, in the "Mosses," of a day spent on the Assabeth with Ellery Channing, with any chapter in Thoreau's "Week." Moonlight and high noon! The great romancer gives a dreamy, poetic version of the river landscape, musically phrased, pictorially composed, dissolved in atmosphere—a lovely piece of literary art, with the soft blur of a mezzotint engraving, say, from the designs by Turner in Rogers's "Italy." Thoreau, equally imaginative in his way, writes like a botanist, naturalist, surveyor, and local antiquary; and in a pungent, practical, business-like style—a style, as was said of Dante, in which words are things. Yet which of these was the true transcendentalist?
Matthew Arnold's discourse on Emerson was received with strong dissent in Boston, where it was delivered, and in Concord, where it was read with indignation. The critic seemed to be taking away, one after another, our venerated master's claims as a poet, a man of letters, and a philosopher. What! Gray a great poet, and Emerson not!Addison a great writer, and Emerson not! Surely there are heights and depths in Emerson, an inspiring power, an originality and force of thought which are neither in Gray nor in Addison. And how can these denials be consistent with the sentence near the end of the discourse, pronouncing Emerson's essays the most important work done in English prose during the nineteenth century—more important than Carlyle's? A truly enormous concession this; how to reconcile it with those preceding blasphemies?
Let not the lightning strike me if I say that I think Arnold was right—as he usually was right in a question of taste or critical discernment. For Emerson was essentially a prophet and theosophist, and not a man of letters, or creative artist. He could not have written a song or a story or a play. Arnold complains of his want of concreteness. The essay was his chosen medium, well-nigh the least concrete, the least literary of forms. And it was not even the personal essay, like Elia's, that he practised, but an abstract variety, a lyceum lecture, a moralizing discourse or sermon. For the clerical virus was strong in Emerson, and it was not for nothing that he was descended from eight generations of preachers. His concern was primarily with religion and ethics, not with the tragedy and comedy of personal lives, thismotley face of things,das bunte Menschenleben. Anecdotes and testimonies abound to illustrate this. See him on his travels in Europe, least picturesque of tourists, hastening with almost comic precipitation past galleries, cathedrals, ancient ruins, Swiss alps, Como lakes, Rhine castles, Venetian lagoons, costumed peasants, "the great sinful streets of Naples"—and of Paris,—and all manner and description of local color and historic associations; hastening to meet and talk with "a few minds"—Landor, Wordsworth, Carlyle. Here he was in line, indeed, with his great friend, impatiently waving aside the art patter, with which Sterling filled his letters from Italy. "Among the windy gospels," complains Carlyle, "addressed to our poor Century there are few louder than this of Art.... It is a subject on which earnest men ... had better ... 'perambulate their picture-gallery with little or no speech.'" "Emerson has never in his life," affirms Mr. John Jay Chapman, "felt the normal appeal of any painting, or any sculpture, or any architecture, or any music. These things, of which he does not know the meaning in real life, he yet uses, and uses constantly, as symbols to convey ethical truths. The result is that his books are full of blind places, like the notes which will not strike on a sick piano." The biographerstell us that he had no ear for music and could not distinguish one tune from another; did not care for pictures nor for garden flowers; could see nothing in Dante's poetry nor in Shelley's, nor in Hawthorne's romances, nor in the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen. Edgar Poe was to him "the jingle man." Poe, of course, had no "message."
I read, a number of years ago, some impressions of Concord by Roger Riordan, the poet and art critic. I cannot now put my hand, for purposes of quotation, upon the title of the periodical in which these appeared; but I remember that the writer was greatly amused, as well as somewhat provoked, by his inability to get any of the philosophers with whom he sought interviews to take an æsthetic view of any poem, or painting, or other art product. They would talk of its "message" or its "ethical content"; but as to questions of technique or beauty, they gently put them one side as unworthy to engage the attention of earnest souls.
At the symposium which I have mentioned in Emerson's library, was present a young philosopher who had had the advantage of reading—perhaps in proof sheets—a book about Shakespeare by Mr. Denton J. Snider. He was questioned by some of the guests as to the character of the work, but modestly declined to essay a description of it in thepresence of such eminent persons; venturing only to say that it "gave the ethical view of Shakespeare," information which was received by the company with silent but manifest approval.
Yet, after all, what does it matter whether Emerson was singly any one of those things which Matthew Arnold says he was not—great poet, great writer, great philosophical thinker? These are matters of classification and definition. We know well enough the rare combination of qualities which made him our Emerson. Let us leave it there. Even as a formal verse-writer, when he does emerge from his cloud of encumbrances, it is in some supernal phrase such as only the great poets have the secret of:
Music pours on mortals its beautiful disdain;
Music pours on mortals its beautiful disdain;
Music pours on mortals its beautiful disdain;
or:
Have I a lover who is noble and free?I would he were nobler than to love me.
Have I a lover who is noble and free?I would he were nobler than to love me.
Have I a lover who is noble and free?
I would he were nobler than to love me.
In this year many fames have come of age; among them, Lowell's and Walt Whitman's. As we read their centenary tributes, we are reminded that Lowell never accepted Whitman, who was piqued by the fact and referred to it a number of times in the conversations reported by the Boswellian Traubel. Whitmanites explain this want of appreciation as owing to Lowell's conventional literary standards.
Now convention is one of the things that distinguish man from the inferior animals. Language is a convention, law is a convention; and so are the church and the state, morals, manners, clothing—teste"Sartor Resartus." Shame is a convention: it is human. The animals are without shame, and so is Whitman. His "Children of Adam" are the children of our common father before he had tasted the forbidden fruit and discovered that he was naked.
Poetry, too, has its conventions, among them, metre, rhythm, and rhyme, the choice of certain words, phrases, images, and topics, and the rejection of certain others. Lowell was conservative by nature andthoroughly steeped in the tradition of letters. Perhaps he was too tightly bound by these fetters of convention to relish their sudden loosening. I wonder what he would have thought of his kinswoman Amy's free verses if he had lived to read them.
If a large, good-natured, clean, healthy animal could write poetry, it would write much such poetry as the "Leaves of Grass." It would tell how good it is to lie and bask in the warm sun; to stand in cool, flowing water, to be naked in the fresh air; to troop with friendly companions and embrace one's mate. "Leaves of Grass" is the poetry of pure sensation, and mainly, though not wholly, of physical sensation. In a famous passage the poet says that he wants to go away and live with the animals. Not one of them is respectable or sorry or conscientious or worried about its sins.
But his poetry, though animal to a degree, is not unhuman. We do not know enough about the psychology of the animals to be sure whether, or not, they have any sense of the world as a whole. Does an elephant or an eagle perhaps, viewing some immense landscape, catch any glimpse of the universe, as an object of contemplation, apart from the satisfaction of his own sensual needs? Probably not. But Whitman, as has been said a hundred times, was "cosmic." He had anunequalled sense of the bigness of creation and of "these States." He owned a panoramic eye and a large passive imagination, and did well to loaf and let the tides of sensation flow over his soul, drawing out what music was in him without much care for arrangement or selection.
I once heard an admirer of Walt challenged to name a single masterpiece of his production. Where was his perfect poem, his gem of flawless workmanship? He answered, in effect, that he didn't make masterpieces. His poetry was diffused, like the grass blades that symbolized for him our democratic masses.
Of course, the man in the street thinks that Walt Whitman's stuff is not poetry at all, but just bad prose. He acknowledges that there are splendid lines, phrases, and whole passages. There is that one beginning, "I open my scuttle at night," and that glorious apostrophe to the summer night, "Night of south winds, night of the large, few stars." But, as a whole, his work is tiresome and without art. It is alive, to be sure, but so is protoplasm. Life is the first thing and form is secondary; yet form, too, is important. The musician, too lazy or too impatient to master his instrument, breaks it, and seizes a megaphone. Shall we call that originality or failure?
It is also a commonplace that the democratic masses of America have never accepted Walt Whitman as their spokesman. They do not read him, do not understand or care for him. They like Longfellow, Whittier, and James Whitcomb Riley, poets of sentiment and domestic life, truly poets of the people. No man can be a spokesman for America who lacks a sense of humor, and Whitman was utterly devoid of it, took himself most seriously, posed as a prophet. I do not say that humor is a desirable quality. The thesis may even be maintained that it is a disease of the mind, a false way of looking at things. Many great poets have been without it—Milton for example. Shelley used to speak of "the withering and perverting power of comedy." But Shelley was slightly mad. At all events, our really democratic writers have been such as Mark Twain and James Whitcomb Riley. I do not know what Mark Twain thought of Walt, but I know what Riley thought of him. He thought him a grand humbug. Certainly if he had had any sense of humor he would not have peppered his poems so naïvely with foreign words, calling out "Camerado!" ever and anon, and speaking of a perfectly good American sidewalk as a "trottoir"quasi Lutetia Parisii. And if he had not had a streak of humbug in him, he would hardlyhave written anonymous puffs of his own poetry.
But I am far from thinking Walt Whitman a humbug. He was a man of genius whose work had a very solid core of genuine meaning. It is good to read him in spots—he is so big and friendly and wholesome; he feels so good, like a man who has just had a cold bath and tingles with the joy of existence.
Whitman was no humbug, but there is surely some humbug about the Whitmanculte. The Whitmanites deify him. They speak of him constantly as a seer, a man of exalted intellect. I do not believe that he was a great thinker, but only a great feeler. Was he the great poet of America, or even a great poet at all? A great poet includes a great artist, and "Leaves of Grass," as has been pointed out times without number, is the raw material of poetry rather than the finished product.
A friend of mine once wrote an article about Whitman, favorable on the whole, but with qualifications. He got back a copy of it through the mail, with the word "Jackass!" pencilled on the margin by some outraged Whitmaniac. I know what has been said and written in praise of old Walt by critics of high authority, and I go along with them a part of the way, but only a part. And I do not stand in terror of any critics, howeverauthoritative; remembering how even the great Goethe was taken in by Macpherson's "Ossian." A very interesting paper might be written on what illustrious authors have said of each other: what Carlyle said of Newman, for instance; or what Walter Scott said of Joanna Baillie and the like.