By the usual tests of style we might easily deal harshly with Emerson; but nothing could be idler than any attempt to buckram ourselves in the rules of the schoolroom in studying the qualities that make for style. Emerson’s diction was happily adapted to the needs of his matter. His essays are like the headings for homely lectures or jottings from notebooks, and are almost as good reading when taken backward as forward, so little was he concerned with sequence or climax.
The roaring, steaming style of his grim old friend Carlyle never wakened any desire for emulation in the sage of Concord. Carlyle drives or drags you under the hot sun of mid-day, and if you falter or stumble he lays on the lash with a hard, bony Scotch hand. He was what Sydney Smith called Daniel Webster—a steam engine in trousers; but Emerson addresses you with a fine air of casualty when he meets you in the highway; and if the day be fine, and if you are in the mood for loitering, he will repeat to you the Socratic memoranda from his notebook. He is benignant, sanguine, wise, albeit a trifle cold with the chill of winter’s last fling at the New England landscape. His usual essay reminds me of a string of icicles on the eaves of a white, staring New England house, aglitter but not yet adrip in the March sun. He is as careless of your attention as Walt Whitman when the good gray poet copies the names of “these states” from a geographical index. In spite of his fondness for references to the ancients he suggests Plato and Socrates far less than Poor Richard or Abe Martin. He contrived no new philosophy but he was a master-hand at labeling guideposts on the dusty highway of life. He could not build a bridge to carry us across the stream, but he could paint a sign—“no thoroughfare” or “A fine of ten dollars for driving faster than a walk”: and happy is the youth who heeds these amiable warnings. Proverbs fell as naturally to his pen as codfish balls to his Sunday morning breakfast. He is as wholesome as whole wheat bread; but he has a frugal method with the bread-knife and the slices at his table are thin.
The more genial Lowell produces a cobwebbed bottle from his cellar and takes care to push it to your plate; he plies you with cakes spiced from far lands, and rises anon to kick the logs upon the hearth into leaping flame that the room may be fittingly dressed for cheering talk. Emerson patronizes you and advises a sparing draught from the austere-lipped pitcher of icy spring water. At seventeen (I give you my personal experience for what it may be worth), there is something tonic in the very austerity of his style,—his far-flung pickets that guard the frosty hills. Later on, when the fires of youth have cooled somewhat, and we march beside the veterans in the grand army;—when proverbs have lost their potency and the haversacks hang empty on our lean and weary backs, we prefer, for the campfires, authors of more red blood, and pass our battered cups for literary applejack that is none the worse for us if it tear our throats a little as it gurgles down. Once he might throw up his windows and call to us: Virtue is the soul’s best aim; adjust your lives to truth; and so on. But now that we have tasted battle and known shipwreck, we present arms only to the hardier adjutants of the army of life who gallop by on worn chargers and cry: “Courage, Comrade, the devil’s dead.”
Eloquence of the truest and finest sort we find in Ruskin at his happiest. He could be as wayward and as provoking as Carlyle; but he founded a great apostolic line of teachers of beauty, and when he was most abusive he was at least interesting, and when he was possessed, as so often happened, by the spirit of lovely things, and color and form and light wove their spell for him and he wrought in an abandon of ecstasy, we are aware of eloquence in its truest sense and see style rising to its noblest possibilities. His tremendous earnestness, his zeal, his pictorial phraseology, the glow of language struck off at heat,—these are things that move us greatly in Ruskin. In his armory he assembled a variety of weapons suitable for various uses; he could administer mild rebuke; he could expostulate a little stridently; he could deliver us up to prison and slam the door of a mediæval dungeon upon us; whereas the sour old Scot used one bloody bludgeon for all heads. Carlyle was, to be sure, capable of tenderness—there were, indeed, few feats possible in the literary gymnasium that he could not accomplish; but when Jeannie got on his nerves there was something doing in the Recording Angel’s office. Keble, he declared, was an ape, and Newman was without the brains of a rabbit. He praised as violently as he denounced;—everything was pitched in thundering hyperbole. The great men of the ages slunk through Carlyle’s study like frightened steers through a slaughter house. Where he hid his own iniquities during his life time the genial Froude exposed them in a new chamber of horrors at his death.
Macaulay always reminds me of a gentleman whip driving a coach and four. He manages his horses with a sure hand. His speed is never too high; he knows the smooth roads and rumbles along at a comfortable gallop, swinging up to tavern doors with grand climaxes. He writes as a man writes who dines well and feels good; he piles up a few pages of manuscript after the supper gong has sounded just to show that his head is still full after his stomach is empty. He can turn his horses in the chancel of a cathedral without knocking out a single choir stall; he can drive under low arches without ruffling his hat; his knowledge of the road is complete; his confidence reassuring. As you roll over the road with the whip lash curling and cracking and the horn blowing blithely you submit yourself to his guidance with supreme faith that he will never spill you into the ditch or send you crashing into a fence corner. English history unfolds before him like a charming panorama. We smile but are not convinced by that reference of Dr. Holmes to the Macaulay flowers of literature. You are proud of yourself to be reading anything so wholly agreeable and apparently so wise. The later scientific method of historical writing can not harden our hearts toward Macaulay. A man whose pen never scratched or squeaked is not to be set aside for a spectacled professor in a moldy library. His facts may be misleading but—he’s perfectly bully reading!
It is difficult to speak of Stevenson, for he has been so much cited, and his admirers praise him with so much exuberance that many are on guard against what is called his charm. He has undoubtedly been praised by some who liked his velvet coat better than his writings; and yet when we have dismissed these triflers and have locked away the velvet jacket we must admit that the applause of the tavern idlers is not without reason. We have to do now only with his style,—the style that is indubitably there. It not only exists, but there is an eerie, luring, Ariel-like quality about it that can not readily be shaken off. He has told us with a frankness rarely equaled by men of letters of the methods he employed in learning to write: his confessions have been quoted ad nauseam,—I refer to those paragraphs in which he tells us how he played the sedulous ape to many accepted masters of style in the hope of catching their tricks.
The gods of his youth were certainly respectable,—Hazlitt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe, Hawthorne, Montaigne and Obermann. He not only confesses that he aped these models; he defends the method: “Nor yet,” he says, “if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality.”
Stevenson liked a good phrase just as he liked a good inn, or winter stars or a long white road. A zest for life,—for the day’s adventure, for the possibilities of the next turn of the highway, for a pungent saying that might fall from the lips of a passing beggar,—such things as these interested him, and he accommodated his style to the business of setting them forth in melodious language. He realized in a fine way that which we heavily call the light touch,—a touch firm in its lightness and instinct with nimbleness and grace. We should know from his writings, if he had not been described with so much particularity, that he was a person of keen humor and delightful vivacity. Everything that may be done with the light touch he did and did well. He renewed our interest in the essay; he wrote poems marked by a shy but bubbling joy in simple things; he mounted the fallen lord of romance upon a fresh charger and sent pirate caravels forth again to plunder the seas. And as he sails the wide waters of romance under flags not down in the signal books, we may be quite sure that every bit of brass is polished to the utmost, that every rope is in place and neatly coiled and every sail furled tightly in the nattiest manner or bent to catch the gale. Those cheerless souls who never heard a whip handle rattle a tavern shutter at midnight, who never prowled about old wharves and talked with tattooed sailormen; who are grim seekers after realities and have no eye for the light that never was on sea or land have no business with Stevenson and had better stick to tea, muffins and The Ladies’ Home Journal. And finally—for we must hurry on lest we fall under that spell of his, let me say that the sense of form and the instinctive blending of word colors,—things of no light importance in consideration of style, have not in our time been better exemplified than in the writings of Stevenson.
You will observe that I have been calling the roll of names near to our own generation, for these we may bring to a more intimate scrutiny; and I am not among those who are confident that the last word was said in English style before the Victorian era. The nervous energy of our later English comes naturally with the quicker currents of life. Milton, himself, if he might reappear from the shadows, would be sure to delatinize his speech, and accommodate his manner, in all likelihood, to the requirements of less monstrous subjects than those offered by the decadent years in English history which saw the blackguard roundheads sticking their bloody spears through cathedral windows.
The style of Mr. Henry James is much discussed, frequently execrated and often deplored; and even in a hasty glance like ours over the bookshelves we must linger a moment beside his long line of volumes. Whether we admire or dislike him he is not a negligible figure in contemporaneous literature. He is one of the most interesting writers of his time; he has uttered himself with remarkable fullness; he has attempted and succeeded in many things. His influence upon younger writers has been very great. Mr. Owen Wister has lately acknowledged his own indebtedness; Mrs. Wharton’s obligations are written large on all her pages. Mr. James is, to use a word of his own, immensely provocative. The range of his interest is wide and his cultivation in certain directions great. He is not a scholar in the sense that Lowell was; he has observed life in shorter perspectives; his literary criticisms, which we may take to be a key to his personal interests, have dealt with nearer figures,—with Tourguenief, Balzac and Stevenson. His paper on Stevenson remains and will long remain the most admirable and the most searching thing written on the lad in the velvet jacket. Herein we find an instructive and illuminative denotement of Mr. James’ own attitude toward this trade of writing; every writer, he declares, who respects himself and his art cares greatly for his phrase; but Stevenson, he finds, cares more for life. Mr. James is no scorner of phrase for the phrase’s sake or of form for form’s sake. The essays collected in “Partial Portraits” and “English Hours” are written in a far directer and simpler manner than his later tales. There are few lean streaks in Mr. James’ writings. He sees through and all around the things he writes about, whether it be a city, a bit of landscape, a character of fiction, or an author. When a subject takes hold of him the aroused thoughts tumble about in tumultuous fashion; he is not a little cistern easily emptied but a great flowing well. Most of us complain that in later years he has been inarticulate, or obscure, and often utterly incomprehensible. There is some justice in the charge, and it can not be pretended that “The Golden Bowl” or the essays he has recently printed on American cities are easy reading. The style of these later writings is radically different from that of “Washington Square,” “Roderick Hudson” and “The Portrait of a Lady.” But the difficulties of this later manner may be accounted for, I believe, on the theory that his own amazing abundance throws his powers of expression into confusion. We must admit that Mr. James often stammers, sputters and sticks. His creative vision is so wide that his expression is often unequal to representing it in the familiar symbols of speech. It is at moments of this sort that he leaves us to stumble in a dark stair-case; then suddenly we are aware of his leading hand again, urging us on, and down the hall a brilliant light flashes forth, and we are able to see things again with his eyes as his expression once more catches step with his ideas. His power of phrase is very great indeed. Certainly no other American writer equals him in the knack of flinging into a few words some positively illuminating idea. A phrase with him has often the brilliancy of the spot light in the theater, that falls unexpectedly upon the face of a concealed player and holds for a moment the attention of the spectators. I take up without previous examination a paper on the City of Washington in “The American Scene” and read this passage: “Hereabouts,” he writes, “beyond doubt, history had from of old seemed to me insistently seated, and I remember a short springtime of years ago when Lafayette Square itself, contiguous to the Executive Mansion, could create a rich sense of the past by the use of scarce other witchcraft than its command of that pleasant perspective, and its possession of the most prodigious of all Presidential effigies, Andrew Jackson, as archaic as a Ninevite king, prancing and rocking through the ages.”