Literary values, and other papers

by John Burroughs

I think the service most of us get from Carlyle is a moral rather than an intellectual one. He was to his generation more like a much-needed drastic tonic remedy than like a simple hygienic regimen; we get the virtue of him now in a thousand ways without re-reading him. Hence there are more chances of our outgrowing him than of our outgrowing some lesser but more normal men. In a measure, I think, this is true of Emerson, but not entirely so. Emerson has charm; he has illusion; he has the witchery of the ideal. He is like the wise doctor whose presence, whose reassuring smile, and whose cheerful prognosis do more for the patient than anything else. We want him to come again and again. To re-read his first essays, his “Representative Men,” his “English Traits,” and many of his poems, is again to hear music, to breathe perfume, or to walk in a spring twilight when the evening star throbs above the hill.

One winter night I tried to re-read Carlyle’s “Past and Present” and certain of his “Latter-Day Pamphlets;” but I found I could not, and thanked my stars that I did not have to. It was like riding a spirited but bony horse bareback. There was tremendous “go” in the beast; but oh, the bruises from those knotty and knuckle-like sentences! But the “Life of Sterling” I have found I can re-read with delight; it has a noble music. Certain of the essays, also, such as the ones on Scott, Burns, and Johnson, have a perennial quality. Parts of “Frederick” I mean to read again, and the “Reminiscences.” I have re-read “Sartor Resartus,” but it was a task, hardly a pleasure. Nearly four fifths of the book, I should say, is chaff; but the other fifth is real wheat, if you are not choked in getting it. Yet I have just read the story of an educated tramp who carried the book in his blanket thousands of miles and knew it nearly by heart. Carlyle wrote as he talked; his “Latter-Day Pamphlets” are harangues that it would have been a delight to hear, but in the printed page we miss the guiding tone and emphasis, and above all do we miss the laugh that mollified the bitter words. One can stand, or even welcome, in life what may be intolerable in print; put the same thing in a book, and it is the pudding without the sauce, and cold at that. The colloquial style is good, or the best, if perfectly easy and simple. In reading aloud we teach our children to read as they speak, and thus make the words their own. The same thing holds in writing: the less formal, the less written, the sentences are, or the more they are like familiar speech, the more genuine and real the writing seems, the more it becomes one’s own; but when the form and manner of spoken sentences are very pronounced, they become tiresome when transferred to print. Carlyle will doubtless hold his place in English literature, but he is terribly handicapped in some of his books by his crabbed, raw-boned style.

What reading man does not re-read Boswell’s “Johnson” two or three times in the course of his life? The charm of this is that it is so much like the spoken word, and so filled with the presence of the living man. Another volume of a similar kind, which I have read three times and dipped into any number of times, is Eckermann’s “Conversations with Goethe.” It is a pregnant book; in fact, I know no such armory of critical wisdom anywhere else as this book contains. Its human interest may not be equal to Boswell, though I find this very great; but as an intellectual excitant it is vastly superior.

It is a profitable experience for one who read Dickens forty years ago to try to read him now. Last winter I forced myself through the “Tale of Two Cities.” It was a sheer dead pull from start to finish. It all seemed so insincere, such a transparent make-believe, a mere piece of acting. My sympathies were hardly once touched. I was not insensible to the marvelous genius displayed in the story, but it left me cold and unmoved. A feeling of unreality haunted me on every page. The fault may have been my own. I give myself reluctantly to a novel, yet I love to be entirely mastered by one. But my poor success with this one, of course, makes me think that Dickens’s hold upon the future is not at all secure. A man of wonderful talents, but of no deep seriousness; a matchless mimic through and through, and nothing else. But I am proud to add that my boy, a youth of eighteen, reads his books with great enthusiasm.

Natural, irrepressible humor is always welcome; but the humor of the grotesque, the exaggerated, the distorted, is like a fashion in dress: it has its day. How surely we tire of the loud, the too pronounced, the merely peculiar, whether it be in carpets and wall-papers, or in books and art! The common, the average, the universal, quickened with a new spirit, imbued with a vernal freshness—that is the stuff of enduring works.

One often wonders what is the secret of the vitality of such a book as Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast.” Each succeeding generation reads it with the same pleasure. I can myself re-read it every ten or a dozen years. Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” has much of the same perennial charm as has Franklin’s autobiography.

How far perfect seriousness and good faith carry in literature! Why should they not count for just as much here as in life? They count in anything. The least bit of acting and pretense, and the words ring false. The effort of the writer of books like “Two Years before the Mast” is always entirely serious and truthful; his eye is single; he has no vanities to display before the reader. Compare this book with such a record as Stevenson’s “Inland Voyage” or his “Travels with a Donkey.” Here the effort is mainly literary, and we get the stimulus of words rather than of things; we are one remove more from reality.

General Grant’s “Memoirs,” I think, are likely to last, because of their deep seriousness and good faith. The effort here is not a literary one, but a real one. The writer is not occupied with his manner, but with his matter. Had Grant had any literary vanity or ambition, is it at all probable that his narrative would cleave to us as it does? The near presence of death would probably cure any man of his vanity, if he had any; but Grant never had any.

I have always felt that Tennyson’s famous poem “Crossing the Bar” did not ring quite true, because it was not conceived in a spirit serious enough for the occasion. The poetic effort is too obvious; the pride of the verse is too noticeable; it bedecks itself with pretty fancies. The last solemn strain of Whitman, wherein he welcomes death as the right hand of God, strikes a far deeper chord, I think. As in the Biblical writers, the literary effort is entirely lost in the religious faith and fervor. We do not want a thing too much written; in fact, we do not want it written at all, but spoken directly from the heart. It is in this respect that I think Wordsworth’s poetry, at its best, is better than Tennyson’s. It is more inevitable; it wrote itself; the poetic intention is not so obvious; the art of the singer is more completely effaced by his inspiration.

There are probably few readers of the critical literature of the times who do not recur again and again to Matthew Arnold’s criticism, not only for the charm of the style, but for the currents of vital thought which it holds. One may not always agree with Arnold, but for that very reason one will go back to see how it is possible to differ from a man who sees so clearly and feels so justly. Of course, Arnold’s view is not final, any more than is that of any other man; but it is always fit, and challenges your common sense. After the muddle and puddle of most literary criticism, the reader of Arnold feels like a traveler who has got out of the confusion of brush and bog into clean and clear open spaces, where the ground is firm, and where he can see his course.