REFERENCES:
Parke Godwin: George William Curtis, A Commemorative Address, 1892.
J. W. Chadwick: George William Curtis, an Address, 1893.
Edward Cary: George William Curtis, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1894.
I
HIS LIFE
Henry Curtis, who sailed for New England from the port of London on May 6, 1635, was the founder of the Curtis family in America. His grandson, John Curtis of Worcester, was ‘a sturdy and open loyalist’ of Revolutionary times whose personal character was as heartily esteemed as his political principles were detested.
George Curtis, a great-grandson of John, married Mary Elizabeth Burrill, daughter of James Burrill, Jr., Chief-justice of Rhode Island. Of their two sons George William Curtis was the younger. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 24, 1824.
With his brother James Burrill, his closest friend and almost inseparable companion, he was sent to C. W. Greene’s school at Jamaica Plain, near Boston, and remained there five years. He was afterwards at school in Providence for four years. In New York, whither his father had removed (in 1839) to become connected with the Bank of Commerce, Curtis studied under private tutors and had some experience of practical life in the counting-room of a German importing house.
The education given the Curtis boys had also an irregular though very agreeable side. They spent much of the time from 1842 to 1844 as students at Brook Farm. The greater part of the two following years they were at Concord, their object being to combine study and out-of-door life, and above all to be near Emerson. Taking up residence with one or other of several farmers whose local fame almost equalled that of the Concord men of letters, they spent half of each day in farm work and the other half in study or studious idleness. They were to be found regularly at the Club which met on Monday evenings in Emerson’s library and which numbered among its members Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Alcott.
In August, 1846, provided by his father with a sum of money sufficient to give him what he called ‘a generous background,’ Curtis went abroad. He planned to be gone two years, but the background was more than generous and he did not return until 1850. He travelled leisurely through France, Germany, Italy, and the East, made notes of what he saw and used them partly in the form of letters to the New York ‘Courier and Enquirer’ and partly in the famous ‘Howadji’ books. His literary plans were ambitious, including as they did a life of Mehemet Ali, on which he worked for some years only to abandon it at last.
On his return to New York he began writing regularly for the ‘Tribune,’ and was associated with C. F. Briggs and Parke Godwin in the editorship of ‘Putnam’s Magazine.’ When the magazine passed into the hands of Dix, Edwards, and Company, Curtis put money into the firm. By their failure he not only lost everything he had, but he also assumed a debt for which he could not have been legally held and devoted the proceeds of his lectures to paying it. He was eighteen years in ridding himself of the burden.
In 1854 he began printing the famous ‘Easy Chair’ papers in ‘Harper’s Monthly,’ and in 1857 the department of ‘Harper’s Weekly’ called ‘The Lounger.’ The latter was a frank imitation in part of the Tatler and Spectator, even to the letters from lady correspondents such as Nelly Lancer, Sabina Griddle, and Xantippe. During the ten years following his return from abroad Curtis published six books: Nile Notes of a Howadji, 1851; The Howadji in Syria, 1852; Lotus-Eating, 1852; The Potiphar Papers, 1853; Prue and I, 1857; Trumps, 1861. His ambitions had hitherto been chiefly literary. To be sure, in 1856, at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, he had given his address on ‘The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times,’ and had followed it with his oration on ‘Patriotism’ and his lecture on ‘The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question.’[58] He had taken the stump for Frémont in 1856, and been a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1860, where his courage, adroitness, and impassioned eloquence had saved the platform at a moment when it needed salvation. Nevertheless it may be said that the first ten years of Curtis’s life as a writer and speaker were ‘literary’ with a strong emphasis on politics, and that the last thirty years were political with an undiminished interest in letters.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1856, Curtis married Anna Shaw, a daughter of F. G. Shaw, formerly of West Roxbury, and a sister of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He had made her acquaintance at Brook Farm twelve years earlier. There is a pretty reference to her in one of his letters to Dwight written in 1844. Curtis had been in Boston for the day: ‘Anna Shaw and Rose Russell passed me like beautiful spirits; one like a fresh morning, the other like an oriental night.’
In 1863 Curtis became the political editor of ‘Harper’s Weekly’ with the proviso that he was to have a free hand. He represented political ideals than which there can be no higher; his discussions were marked by absolute frankness, joined to perfect courtesy. The parts which fell to him in the drama of political life were always important and often conspicuous. He was a delegate both to National and to State conventions, and a delegate-at-large to the convention for revising the State constitution of New York. Although ‘nominated by acclamation’ for Secretary of the State of New York (1869), he refused to serve. He did allow his name to be presented for governor in the convention of 1870, supposing all to be in good faith; but when he discovered that he was the victim of a trick,—the object being to defeat Greeley,—he withdrew.[59]
Next to Anti-slavery his favorite cause was that of Civil Service reform. In 1865 he became ‘second in command’ to Thomas A. Jenckes of Rhode Island, the pioneer in the movement. He was the head of the Civil Service Commission appointed by President Grant in 1871. As president of the New York Civil Service Reform Association and of the National Civil Service Reform League, he did a work of immediate and lasting value.
In 1877 President Hayes offered Curtis his choice of the foreign missions, supposing that he would elect to go to England. In refusing the honor Curtis expressed the doubt whether ‘a man absolutely without legal training of any kind could be a proper minister.’ Later the German mission was urged on him, but he saw no reason to change his former opinion. As an Independent, Curtis voiced opposition to machine methods in the State campaign of 1879, and in 1884 broke with his party and gave his support to Cleveland.
Albeit he was not college bred, Curtis received a full share of the honorary degrees which American colleges lavish every June upon those who have acquired reputation. For the two years prior to his death he was Chancellor of the University of New York.
The literary work of his middle and later years remains for the most part embedded in the files of ‘Harper’s Monthly.’ Three or four little volumes of ‘Easy Chair’ papers (less than a tenth part of the whole number of his contributions) were printed in 1893–94. Written to serve an ephemeral purpose, these essays have a permanent value. It is singular that there is no demand for more reprints of the work of a writer whose journalism was better than most men’s books. Besides the ‘Easy Chair’ papers there were published posthumously Orations and Addresses edited by C. E. Norton, 1894; Literary and Social Essays, 1895; Ars Recte Vivendi, 1898; Early Letters of George William Curtis to John S. Dwight, edited by G. W. Cooke, 1898.
Curtis died, after a long and painful illness, on August 31, 1892.
II
THE MAN
Of Curtis it may be said that his character is revealed in every line of his writing and in every act of his public and private life. He was gracious, winning, generous, quick to forgive, and slow to take offence. Goodness as exemplified in not a few good men is alike painful to those who possess it and to those on whom its influence is exerted. Virtue as exemplified in him never wore the austere garb or the gloomy countenance.
At the time of Curtis’s defection from the Republican party incredible abuse was showered on him, not only in the press but through anonymous letters. He was much saddened by it, less from the personal point of view than because of the revelation it gave of the meanness and vindictiveness of human nature. Having thought too well of his fellows, he suffered under the disillusionment, all of which goes to show how optimistic at heart this disciple of Thackeray and writer of satires was. And when Senator Conkling made a savage personal attack on him in the New York State convention of 1877, Curtis seems to have had no feeling towards his enemy but that of pity: ‘It was the saddest sight I ever knew, that man glaring at me in a fury of hate and storming out his foolish blackguardism.’
If Curtis’s career illustrates one thing above another, it is his willingness to sacrifice mental ease and personal comfort for an ideal. But the sacrifice was made with such good nature, such grace in the acquiescence, that one forgets its extent, and even makes the mistake of thinking that possibly it cost him little. Undoubtedly it cost him much, this giving up of literature for politics, this putting aside of all public honors because there was a nearer duty which could not be neglected.
III
THE WRITER AND THE ORATOR
The author of Nile Notes of a Howadji loved alliteration. In his early books he amused himself with pleasant arrangements of words such as ‘camels with calm, contemptuous eyes,’ or ‘lustrous leaves languidly moving,’ or ‘slim minarets spiring silverly and strangely from the undefined mass of mud houses.’ Note this description of the date-palm: ‘Plumed as a prince and graceful as a gentleman, stands the date; and whoever travels among palms travels in good society;’ or this of the sakias: ‘Like huge summer insects they doze upon the bank, droning a melancholy, monotonous song. The slow, sad sound pervades the land—one calls to another, and he sighs to his neighbor, and the Nile is shored with sound no less than sand.’
Alliteration is a mark of youth. Employed to excess it has a cloying effect, like that of diminished sevenths in music. Of minor rhetorical arts it is the poorest, the most seductive, the most readily abused. But we should miss it sadly from the ‘Howadji’ books. Removed from the context these phrases quoted have an artificial sound, in their place they blend perfectly.
Curtis’s style grew less florid and sensuous after the early writings. At all times it is singularly easy. One gets the impression that he was a spontaneous writer. Great productivity is not possible when there must be a constant retouching of phrases and paragraphs. The unlabored nature of his writing may explain the light estimate Curtis put on it. He is said to have been quite unwilling to reprint a volume of essays from the ‘Easy Chair.’ That anything which came with so little effort could be worth re-reading seemed not to occur to him.
He was the orator almost as soon as he was the man of letters. A rhetorician by taste and training, he knew the dangers of rhetoric and in his oratory avoided them. Clarity and grace are the most obvious characteristics of every sentence. Curtis could no more have been awkward and heavy than he could have been obscure.
He can hardly be praised enough for the ease and naturalness of his allusions. We auditors grow restless when a speaker begins to cite classical names. We fear our old friends Cicero and Catiline, Cæsar and Brutus. We cannot away with Hannibal and Hamilcar. The ear has been dulled by constant repetition. Curtis knew how to make the oldest of these tiresome references seem new. All his allusions have an air of freshness and spontaneity. One would suppose the declaimers had long since exhausted the virtues of Spartacus. Curtis dared to make the old gladiator accessory to his argument in a passage like this:—
‘Spartacus was a barbarian, a pagan, and a slave. Escaping he summoned other men whose liberty was denied. His call rang clear through Italy like an autumn storm through the forest, and men answered him like clustering leaves.... He had no rights that Romans were bound to respect, but he wrote out in blood upon the plains of Lombardy his equal humanity with Cato and Cæsar. The tale is terrible. History shudders with it still. But you and I, Plato and Shakespeare, the mightiest and the meanest men, were honored in Spartacus, for his wild revenge showed the brave scorn of oppression that beats immortal in the proud heart of man.’
Nature had bestowed on Curtis gifts which, if not indispensable to a speaker, are like free-will offerings as against tribute, and make the pathway smooth. His commanding presence, his winning smile and manner, his glorious voice, the air of high breeding, a self-possession which when accompanied by unaffected good nature is one of the most attractive traits—all combined to place him among the first of American orators. He was properly said (in a phrase which through vain repetition has almost lost its meaning) to ‘grace’ the platform.
IV
NILE NOTES OF A HOWADJI, PRUE AND I, TRUMPS
‘In Shakespeare’s day the nuisance was the Monsieur Travellers who had swum in a gundello,’ wrote Fitzgerald in a half-petulant, half-humorous mood, ‘but now the bores are those who have smoked tchibouques with a Peshaw!’ He was speaking of Eothen. The fever for Eastern books was at its height when Curtis went abroad in 1846.
The Nile Notes of a Howadji describes the four weeks’ flight of the ‘Ibis’ up the river to Aboo Simbel, and the ‘course of temples’ on the return voyage. It is a book of impressions and rhapsodies, a glowing record of travel in which realism struggles with poetry and is usually worsted. It is a dream of the Orient, delightfully parsimonious as to improving facts, and prodigal of whatever helps the home-keeping reader to comprehend the witchery and fascination of the East. A few timid souls were disturbed by ‘Fair Frailty’ and ‘Kushuk Arnem,’ which seem innocent enough now, but the timid souls no doubt found peace in other chapters, such as ‘Under the Palms.’
The Howadji in Syria continues the record. The conditions are changed. Instead of the dahabieh, the camel; for the Ibis was substituted MacWhirter, whose exertions in trotting ‘shook my soul within me;’ for the mud villages and mysterious temples of the Nile, Jerusalem, Acre, Damascus. The temper of the book differs from that of its predecessor. In this volume Curtis is poetical, in the other he was a poet. The mocking American note is heard, as when the Howadji says ‘a storm besieged us in Nablous and a fellow Christian of the Armenian persuasion secured us for his fleas, during the time we remained.’ The Howadji has evidently undergone a measure of disenchantment. The wonders of the East are less wonderful because less vague. In Egypt there was intoxication, in Palestine and Syria there is curiosity, mingled with amusement and contempt. The characteristic quality of the second Howadji book is to be found in the descriptions of the cafés, the bazaars, and in that most excellent account of the Turkish bath (‘Uncle Kühleborn’), quite the best thing of the kind that has been written.
Lotus-Eating is a series of journalistic letters on the Hudson, Trenton Falls, Niagara, Saratoga, Newport, and Nahant, when Nahant was ‘a shower of little brown cottages fallen upon the rocky promontory that terminates Lynn beach.’ Not in this wise do young men now write for newspapers, with ornate periods and quotations from Waller and Herrick. The book abounds in happy characterizations. At Saratoga ‘we discriminate the arctic and antarctic Bostonians, fair, still, stately, with a vein of scorn in their Saratoga enjoyment, and the languid, cordial, and careless Southerners, far from precise in dress or style, but balmy in manner as a bland Southern morning. We mark the crisp courtesy of the New Yorker, elegant in dress, exclusive in association, a pallid ghost of Paris—without its easy elegance, its bonhomie, its gracious savoir faire, without the spirituel sparkle of its conversation, and its natural and elastic grace of style.’ And so it runs on.
The Potiphar Papers is in another key. The placid observer, who, in Lotus-Eating, quoted from De Quincey a delectable passage on the poetry of dancing, is now a bitter satirist contemplating a corps-de-ballet of society buds gyrating in the arms of the jeunesse dorée. These ‘bounding belles’ and their admirers shock the observer with a style of dancing which in its whirl, its ‘rush, its fury is only equalled by that of the masked balls at the French opera.’ The book is a new treatment (new in 1853) of the old subject of Vanity Fair. The humor is severe. The touch is not light and the caustic writing is not happy. Curtis was never a master of the whip of scorpions. Nevertheless The Potiphar Papers had a vogue.
Prue and I is a book of the sort Zola used to hate—literature which ‘consoles with the lies of the imagination.’ It is the idyl of contented obscurity, the poetic side of humble life. Delicately wrought, light in texture, shot with charming fancies and dainty conceits, having the grace that belongs to old-school manners, this little prose poem is justly accounted its author’s masterpiece.
Curtis wrote one novel, Trumps, and was disappointed in the result. The book is readable, but not because it is a story. Many good novelists are made, not born. Trumps is the work of a novelist in the making.
V
THE EASY CHAIR
The twenty-seven essays of the volume entitled From the Easy Chair show very well in brief compass the range of their author’s powers in this form. Here are reminiscences of Browning and his wife, of the Dickens readings in ’67, of Everett’s oratory and Jennie Lind’s singing, of a lecture by Emerson and a recital by Gottschalk or by Thalberg, of a night at the play-house with Jefferson, or a dinner at the old (the very old) Delmonico’s, when that famous eating-house stood at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. The flavor of by-gone days is here. ‘It was a pleasant little New York,’ says the essayist regretfully, being mindful of the charm which a lively small city possesses, and which a big city, be it never so lively, somehow lacks.
Half the attractiveness of the ‘Easy Chair’ papers is due to their seemingly unpremeditated character. Curtis was not writing a book, nor was he proposing at some time, ‘in response to the earnest solicitations of friends upon whose judgment I rely,’ to collect and republish these fugitive leaves. He comes home after a little chat, perhaps, with John Gilbert and sits down to tell us about it. Two or three reflections suggested by the interview are thrown in quite happily, and while we listeners are most absorbed and in no mood to have him break off, Curtis rises, and with some pleasant little remark, nods, and smiles, and is gone. And one of the listeners says, ‘I wish we saw him oftener. He comes only once a month.’
The ‘Easy Chair’ papers are urban as well as urbane. Curtis was a city man. We know that he had a summer home in ‘Arcadia’ and was happy there, but his joy in city life is betrayed in almost every paper he wrote. No passionate lover of nature, intent on fringed gentians and purling brooks, penned that description of a gown—‘a mass of pleats and puffs and marvelous trimmings, which, when profusely extravagant upon the form of an elderly woman, always reminds me of signals of distress hung out upon a craft that is drifting far away from the enchanted isles of youth.’
Satirist though he is, Curtis in the ‘Easy Chair’ is always the gentle satirist. He writes of the mannerless sex, of the people who rent boxes at the opera because they can talk better there than at home, of the taste of the town so greedy for minute details of the doings of the rich and the fashionable, but there is no acerbity in his tone. Here is an illustration of his manner. The Cosmopolitan of the ‘Easy Chair’ talks with Mrs. Grundy, who proposes as a great boon to introduce him to a very rich man. ‘“You say he is very rich?” “Enormously, fabulously,” replied Mrs. Grundy, as if crossing herself.’
‘Trifles light as air’ would be a not inadequate description of hundreds of the ‘Easy Chair’ papers. And they are quite as wholesome as air.
VI
ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES
Curtis’s biographer holds that the volume of reports and addresses on Civil Service reform is ‘in some respects the most valuable of all [his] writings.’[60] The entire collection of Orations and Addresses, comprising over a thousand pages, is no less a manual of literary than of civic virtues. A student of the art of expression can well afford to make this book his vade mecum. Here is a body of practical illustration of how to write and how to speak. The oration on ‘The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times,’ delivered when Curtis was thirty-two years of age, is an extraordinary performance. Few addresses hold one in the reading like this. What it must have been in the delivery we can but faintly imagine. It is another splendid proof that literature and oratory may occupy a common ground, neither usurping the other’s place. With the amplest use of oratorical arts the speaker makes rhetoric subordinate to thought. It shows fully (does this oration) one marked virtue of Curtis’s public discourse, its perfect urbanity. His speeches were free from invective, from personalities of any sort, from every feature born of mere impulse of the moment. If he was ever tempted to give vigor and point to his phrase by means which must afterward be regretted, temptation never got the better of him.
The leading thesis of the Wesleyan College oration—that the scholar is not the recluse, the pale valetudinarian, a woman without woman’s charm, but a man—may not have been new; but the putting was fresh, vivid, inspiring, eloquent. The oration may be compared with Emerson’s utterances on the same theme. Emerson’s treatment is the more philosophical; that of Curtis is the better adapted to public speech.
Along with this oration should be read the address on ‘Patriotism,’ in which Curtis defends the doctrine that where law violates the primary conception of human rights it is our duty to disobey the law, and the address entitled ‘The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question,’ in which Curtis said, ‘Government is, unquestionably, a science of compromises, but only of policies and interests, not of essential rights; and if of them, then the sacrifice must fall on all.’
These three are but the beginning of a series of orations from among which the great eulogies of Sumner and of Wendell Phillips, of Bryant and of Lowell, may be chosen as the very crown of his work.
* * * * *
The critic (and there are such critics) who values almost lightly the sentimental and poetic literary work of Curtis’s young manhood is perhaps not entirely unjust; Curtis would have agreed with him. But the critic would be unjust if he overlooked the value of this literary training in giving an enormous increase of power. We shall never know how much the editorial writer and political orator gained in clarity, precision, beauty of style, effectiveness, by the penning of a series of books in which for pages together he revels in the mere music of words. The author of the address on Sumner was largely indebted to the author of the Nile Notes of a Howadji and Prue and I.