“Where’er the trees grow biggest,
Huntsmen find the easiest way,”
says Emerson, and for a similar reason the way is always easy and inviting through Arnold’s pages.
But his theological criticism has less charm; and, for my part, I doubt if it will survive. I once seriously tried to re-read his “Literature and Dogma,” but stuck before I had got half-way through it. I suppose I found too much dogma in it. Arnold makes a dogma out of what he calls the “method and secret of Jesus,” his “method of inwardness” and “secret of self-renunciation;” he iterates and reiterates these phrases till one never wants to hear them again. Arnold’s besetting sin of giving a quasi-scientific value to certain literary terms here has free rein, and one finds only a new kind of inflexibility in place of the one he condemns. Sir Thomas Browne directed a free play of mind upon the old dogmas, and the result was the “Religio Medici,” a work which each generation treasures and re-reads, not because of the dogma, but because of the literature; it is a rare specimen of vital, flexible, imaginative writing. It is full of soul, like Emerson’s “Divinity School Address,” which sought to dissolve certain of the old dogmas. In both these authors we are made free as the spirit makes free; but in Arnold’s criticism we are made free only as a liberal Anglicanism makes free, which is not much.
The books that we do not like to part with after we have read them, that we like to keep near us,—like Amiel’s “Journal,” say,—are probably the books that our children’s children will like to have around. A Western woman once paid an Eastern author this rare compliment. “Most of the new books,” she said, “we see at the public library; but your books we always buy, because we like to have them in the house.” Probably it is the personal element in a book, the quality of the writer, that alone endears it to us. If we could not love the man, is it probable that we can love his book?
Of our New England poets, I find myself taking down Emerson oftener than any other; then Bryant; occasionally Longfellow for a few poems; then Whittier for “The Playmate” or “Snow-Bound”; and least of all, Lowell. I am not so vain as to think that the measure of my appreciation of these poets is the measure of their merit; but as this writing is so largely autobiographical, I must keep to the facts. As the pathos and solemnity of life deepen with time, I think one finds only stray poems, or parts of poems, in the New England anthology that adequately voice them; and these he finds in Emerson more plentifully than anywhere else, though in certain of Longfellow’s sonnets there is adequacy also. The one on “Sumner,” beginning,—
River, that stealest with such silent pace,
easily fixed itself in my mind.
I think we go back to books not so much for the amount of pleasure we have had in them, as the kind of pleasure. There is a pleasure both in books and in life that is inconsistent with health and wholeness, and there is a pleasure that is consistent with these things. The instinct of self-preservation makes us cleave to the latter. I do not think we go back to the exciting books,—they do not usually leave a good taste in the mouth; neither to the dull books, which leave no taste at all in the mouth; but to the quiet, mildly tonic and stimulating books,—books that have the virtues of sanity and good nature, and that keep faith with us.
At any rate, an enduring fame is of slow growth. The man of the moment is rarely the man of the eternities. If your name is upon all men’s tongues to-day, some other name is likely to be there to-morrow.