In a secluded spot in the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin I took upon myself to live two years as a hermit, after a mild Epicurean fashion of my own. Three maiden aunts wagged their heads ominously; my nearest friend inquired cautiously whether there was any taint of insanity in the family; an old gray-haired lady, a veritable saint, who had not been soured by her many deeds of charity, admonished me on the utter selfishness and godlessness of such a proceeding.... As for the hermit ... having found it impossible to educe any meaning from the tangled habits of mankind while he himself was whirled about in the imbroglio, he had determined to try the efficiency of undisturbed meditation at a distance. So deficient had been his education that he was actually better acquainted with the aspirations and emotions of the old dwellers on the Ganges than with those of the modern toilers by the Hudson or the Potomac. He had been deafened by the "Indistinguishable roar" of the streets, and could make no sense of the noisy jargon of the market place.[165]
The period gave him time to read, leisurely, thoughtfully, with no nervous subconsciousness that the product of that reading was to be marketable. When he wrote his first papers he wrote with no press of need upon him. He had evolved his own notion of the function of literature and of the critic. This was what he evolved: and it is worthy of study:
There is a kind of criticism that limits itself to looking at the thing in itself, or at the parts of a thing as they successively strike the mind. This is properly the way of sympathy, and those who choose this way are right in saying that it is absurd or merely ill-tempered to dwell on what is ugly in a work of art, or false, or incomplete. But there is a place also for another kind of criticism, which is not so much directed to the individual thing as to its relation with other things, and to its place as cause or effect in a whole group of tendencies. No criticism, to be sure, can follow one or the other of these methods exclusively, as no product of art can ever be entirely isolated in its genesis or altogether merged in the current of the day. The highest criticism would contrive to balance these methods in such manner that neither the occasional merits of a work nor its general influence would be unduly subordinated, and in so far as these essays fail to strike such a balance—I wish this were their only failure—they err sadly from the best model.[166]
In the eight volumes now issued there are eighty-five essays on topics as varied as George Crabbe, Hawthorne, Swinburne, Walt Whitman, The Bhagavad Gita, Pascal, Plato, Nietzsche. Nearly two-thirds of them all deal with representative English writers; some fifteen have to do with Americans. In the criticizing of them he has held steadfastly to the contention that men of letters are to be viewed not alone as individuals but as voices and as spiritual leaders in their generations. The soul of literature is not art and it is not alone beauty. For decadents like Swinburne he has small sympathy and he can even rebuke Charles Lamb for "his persistent refusal to face, in words at least, the graver issues of life." He takes his stand at a point so elevated that only the great masters who have been the original voices of the race are audible. He dares even to speak of "the jaunty optimism of Emerson," and to suggest that his confidence and serenity were all too often taken by his generation for original wisdom.
The foundation of his work is religious—religious in the fundamental, the oriental, sense of the word. He has been consistent and he has been courageous. That America has a critic with standards of criticism, an official critic in the sense that Sainte-Beuve was official, and that as editor of the leading critical review of America this critic has a dominating clientele and a leader's authority, is one of the most promising signs for that new literary era which already is overdue.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Charles Dudley Warner. (1829–1900.) My Summer in a Garden, 1870; Saunterings, 1872; Backlog Studies, 1872; The Gilded Age [with Mark Twain], 1873; Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing, 1874; My Winter on the Nile Among the Mummies and Moslems, 1876; In the Levant, 1877; Being a Boy, 1877; In the Wilderness, 1878; Washington Irving, 1881; Captain John Smith, 1881; A Roundabout Journey, 1884; Their Pilgrimage, 1887; On Horseback: a Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, with Notes on Travel in Mexico and California, 1888; Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada, 1889; A Little Journey in the World: a Novel, 1889; Our Italy, 1891; As We Were Saying, 1891; As We Go, 1894; The Golden House, 1895; The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote, 1897; The Relation of Literature to Life, 1897; That Fortune: a Novel, 1899; Fashions in Literature and Other Essays, 1902; Complete works, 15 vols. Edited by T. R. Lounsbury, 1904; Charles Dudley Warner, by Mrs. James T. Fields, 1904.
Lafcadio Hearn. (1850–1904.) Stray Leaves from Strange Literatures: Stories from the Anvari-Soheili, Baitál-Packisi, Mahabharata, etc., 1884; Gombo Zhêbes, 1885; Some Chinese Ghosts, 1887; Chita: a Memory of Last Island, 1889; Two Years in the French West Indies, 1890; Youma: the Story of a West Indian Slave, 1890; Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894; Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan, 1895; Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, 1896; Gleanings in Buddha-fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East, 1897; Exotics and Retrospectives, 1899; In Ghostly Japan, 1899; Shadowings, 1900; Japanese Miscellany, 1901; Kotto: Being Japanese Curios with Sundry Cobwebs, 1902; Japanese Fairy Tales, 1903; Kwaidan, 1904; Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation, 1904; The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies, 1905; Letters from the Raven: the Correspondence of Lafcadio Hearn with Henry Watkin, 1905, 1907; Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, 2 vols., by Elizabeth Bisland, 1906; Concerning Lafcadio Hearn, with a Bibliography by Laura Stedman, by G. M. Gould, 1908; Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, edited by Elizabeth Bisland, 1910; Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist: Early Writings; with an Introduction by Ferris Greenslet, 1911; Lafcadio Hearn in Japan, by Y. Noguchi, 1911; Lafcadio Hearn, by N. H. Kennard, 1912; Lafcadio Hearn, by E. Thomas, 1912; Fantastics and Other Fancies, with an Introduction by Dr. Charles W. Hutson, 1914.
Agnes Repplier. (1857——.) Books and Men, 1888; Points of View, 1891; Essays in Miniature, 1892; Essays in Idleness, 1893; In the Dozy Hours and Other Papers, 1894; Varia, 1897; Philadelphia, the Place and the People, 1898; The Fireside Sphinx, 1901; Compromises, 1904; In Our Convent Days, 1905; A Happy Half Century, 1908; Americans and Others, 1912; The Cat, 1912.
Paul Elmer More. (1864——.) Helena, and Occasional Poems, 1890; The Great Refusal: Letters of a Dreamer in Gotham, 1894; A Century of Indian Epigrams; Chiefly from the Sanscrit of Bhartrihari, 1898; Shelburne Essays, First series, 1904; Second and Third series, 1905; Fourth series, 1906; Fifth series, 1908; Sixth series, 1909; Seventh series, 1910; Eighth series, 1913; Nietzsche, 1912.