Friends on the Shelf

by Bradford Torrey

And admirable as artistic perfection and absolute unity are, there remains a place, and a high place, for works of another order. All the world, even the stickler for classical perfection, loves a good sentence. Blessed is the writer who now and then makes one. We forgive him for carelessness of construction, and, almost, for every other literary fault, if once in a while—not too infrequently—he packs wit or wisdom into a score or so of memorable words.

In speaking of a quotable style, we are not thinking of works like the Wisdom of Solomon, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Thoughts of Pascal and Joubert, books that are nothing but collections of maxims and aphorisms; nor even of books like Bacon’s Essays or Amiel’s Journal, that come near to falling under the same head. To find a happy and pregnant sentence in such a place is like taking an apple out of a dish and eating it at the table; to run upon one in the reading of a book is like plucking an apple from a wayside tree in the midst of a half-day ramble, and munching it on the road. The fruit may be as fair and well-flavored in the first case as in the second, but what a difference in the relish of it! It is one thing to receive a coin over the banker’s counter, and another to pick a nugget out of the gravel. In reading, as well as anywhere else, a man enjoys the thrill of discovery.

Here, in great part, lies the enduring charm of an author like Montaigne, who wrote without plan, rambling at his own sweet will, never sticking to his text, and never so much as dreaming of unity or anything else that could be called “artistic,” yet making a book to live forever. As Sainte-Beuve says, you may open it at what page you will, and be in what mood you may, and you are sure to find a wise thought expressed in lively and durable phrase, a beautiful meaning set in a single strong line. And the best of it all is that these fine sentences, so detachable and memorable, are written like all the rest of the essay, and are part and parcel of it. No attention is called to them; they call no attention to themselves. They drop on the page, and the pen runs on. Seemingly, it was as easy for the writer to set down a “durable” phrase—done once for all and past all bettering—as to mention the kind of fish he preferred or any other trivial every-day matter. His good things are never tainted with smartness, the besetting vice of sentence-makers in general, nor have they at all the appearance of things designed to nudge the reader, to keep him awake, as if the writer had said to himself, “Go to, let us brighten up the discussion a bit.”

A gift of this sort comes mostly by nature, but no one ever wrote much and well without arriving at some pretty definite notions as to the art of writing; and so it was with Montaigne. If his style was discursive, formless, highly sententious, and yet to an extraordinary degree familiar, he was not only aware of the fact, but gloried in it. He loved a natural and plain way of speaking, he tells us; the same on paper as in the mouth; juicy and sinewy (succulent et nerveux), irregular, incontinuous and bold, every piece a body by itself,—“a soldier-like style.” Fine words he had no place for. “May I never use any other language than what is used in the markets of Paris!” he exclaims. As for mere rhetoric, he held it cheap, as every good writer does. Word painting, no matter how well done, is “easily obscured by the lustre of a simple truth.” But a good sentence, a thing worth saying and well said, he believed to be always in order. “If it is not good for what went before nor for what comes after, it is good in itself.” He praises Tacitus for being “full of sentences.” And therein, perhaps, as in Thoreau’s eulogy of Sir Walter Raleigh, we may see the author defending his own practice. There is no neater way of speaking well of ourselves than by complimenting our own special virtues in the person of another. In truth, however, Montaigne had no need to apologize even with indirectness. His “good sentences” are not only good in themselves, but good for what precedes and follows. They are never stuck on nor thrust in. On the contrary, as has been already observed, they are sure to be part of the very substance of the essay itself. You will never find Montaigne writing or retaining a paragraph for the sake of its snapper, like those authors of whom he said that they would “go a mile out of their way to run after a fine word.”

There is a natural relation, it would seem, between a quotable style and a fondness for quoting. If a man’s own thought falls easily into well-minted, separable phrases, he will almost of course be appreciative of similar aphoristic turns of speech in the works of others. So we find Montaigne’s pages bespattered from top to bottom with extracts from the philosophers and poets of an older time. As years passed, and successive editions of the book were published, the quotations grew more and more numerous, till some of the essays seemed in danger of losing their identity and becoming hardly more than leaves out of a commonplace book.

And as it was with the Frenchman, so was it with our two Concord philosophers, Emerson and Thoreau. They were almost as fond of others’ bright things as of their own. And the same may be said of their contemporary and critic, Lowell, who, like them, was also a master of the phrase, a putter forth of “stamped sentences,” like gold and silver coins, as one of his admirers has called them. He, too, is always offering us a nugget out of another man’s pack. All three of these men, be it added, borrowed not only with freedom, but with great advantage to their own work. They had a right to borrow, being in good measure original in their very quotations, because, as has been remarked of Montaigne, “they employed them only when they found in them an idea of their own, or had been struck by them in a new and singular manner.”

But what a change when we turn to Hawthorne! His work is all of a piece, woven in his own loom. As nobody quotes him, so he quotes nobody. Inverted commas are as scarce on his pages as November violets are in the Concord meadows. You will find them, but you will have to search for them. On Thoreau’s page they are thick as violets in May.

We were not undertaking to determine rank or to appraise values, we said, but so much as this we will venture upon suggesting: that a piece of pure art—“The Scarlet Letter,” if you will—is not on that ground alone to be considered as worthier in itself, or better assured of lasting honor, than some work less perfectly constructed, but, it may be, more nobly inspired. In the final result of things, literary merit and literary fame are not portioned out by any critical yardstick. Lowell complained of Thoreau that “he had no artistic power such as controls a great work to the serene balance of completeness.” True enough. It is the same criticism which Carlyle, and Arnold after him, brought against Emerson; in whose case, also, we need not dispute the point. But Lowell said further of Thoreau, “His work gives me the feeling of a sky full of stars;” and again: “As we read him, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own Montaigne.... Compared with his, all other books of similar aim, even White’s ‘Selborne,’ seem dry as a country clergyman’s meteorological journal in an old almanac.” In other words, Thoreau was not an artist, but he did something new, and something grandly worth doing. Emerson, likewise, was not an artist; but the critic who tells us so tells us in the same breath that Emerson’s essays are the most important work done in English prose during their century.

Whether Emerson will outlive Hawthorne, or Hawthorne outlive Emerson, who can say? It would be rash guessing to attempt a prophecy. As for Thoreau, there are some, perhaps, who would bid higher for his chance of immortality than for that of either of his two famous townsmen.

Let such things turn out as they may, Emerson and Thoreau have each given to American literature, and better still to American life, something that can never be lost, even though their works and their names together should be forgotten; and they have done this partly by reason of their very limitations, their making of sentences and paragraphs—portable wisdom—instead of “artistic bronze statues.” “Wisdom is the principal thing,” said an ancient writer; and an English critic and statesman of our own day has uttered the same truth in more modern fashion. “Aphorism or maxim,” says Mr. John Morley, “let us remember that this wisdom of life is the true salt of literature; that those books, at least in prose, are most nourishing which are most richly stored with it; and that it is one of the main objects, apart from the mere acquisition of knowledge, which men ought to seek in the reading of books.”