THE CONNECTICUT WITS

REPRINTS FROM THE YALE REVIEW

A Book of Yale Review Verse, 1917.

War Poems from The Yale Review, 1918.

(Second Edition, 1919.)

Four Americans: Roosevelt, Hawthorne,

Emerson, Whitman, 1919.

(Second Printing, 1920.)

Milton’s Tercentenary, 1910.

PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF

THE ELIZABETHAN CLUB OF YALE UNIVERSITY

ON THE FOUNDATION ESTABLISHED

IN MEMORY OF

OLIVER BATY CUNNINGHAM

OF THE CLASS OF 1917, YALE COLLEGE

THE

CONNECTICUT WITS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY

HENRY A. BEERS

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE EMERITUS

YALE UNIVERSITY

NEW HAVEN

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON • HUMPHREY MILFORD • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

MDCCCCXX

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CONTENTS

THE OLIVER BATY CUNNINGHAM

MEMORIAL PUBLICATION FUND

❦

THE present volume is the first work published by the

Yale University Press on the Oliver Baty Cunningham

Memorial Publication Fund. This Foundation was established

May 8, 1920, by a gift from Frank S. Cunningham,

Esq., of Chicago, to Yale University, in

memory of his son, Captain Oliver Baty Cunningham,

15th United States Field Artillery, who was born in

Chicago, September 17, 1894, and was graduated from

Yale College in the Class of 1917. As an undergraduate

he was distinguished alike for high scholarship and for

proved capacity in leadership among his fellows, as evidenced

by his selection as Gordon Brown Prize Man

from his class. He received his commission as Second

Lieutenant, United States Field Artillery, at the First

Officers’ Training Camp at Fort Sheridan, and in

December, 1917, was detailed abroad for service, receiving

subsequently the Distinguished Service Medal. He

was killed while on active duty near Thiaucourt, France,

on September 17, 1918, the twenty-fourth

anniversary of his birth.

THE CONNECTICUT WITS

IN the days when Connecticut counted in the national councils; when it had men in the patriot armies, in Washington’s Cabinet, in the Senate of the United States—men like Israel Putnam, Roger Sherman, Oliver Wolcott, Oliver Ellsworth,—in those same days there was a premature but interesting literary movement in our little commonwealth. A band of young graduates of Yale, some of them tutors in the college, or in residence for their Master’s degree, formed themselves into a school for the cultivation of letters. I speak advisedly in calling them a school: they were a group of personal friends, united in sympathy by similar tastes and principles; and they had in common certain definite, coherent, and conscious aims. These were, first, to liberalize and modernize the rigidly scholastic curriculum of the college by the introduction of more elegant studies: the belles lettres, the literae humaniores. Such was the plea of John Trumbull in his Master’s oration, “An Essay on the Use and Advantages of the Fine Arts,” delivered at Commencement, 1770; and in his satire, “The Progress of Dulness,” he had his hit at the dry and dead routine of college learning. Secondly, these young men resolved to supply the new republic with a body of poetry on a scale commensurate with the bigness of American scenery and the vast destinies of the nation: epics resonant as Niagara, and Pindaric odes lofty as our native mountains. And finally, when, at the close of the Revolutionary War, the members of the group found themselves reunited for a few years at Hartford, they set themselves to combat, with the weapon of satire, the influences towards lawlessness and separatism which were delaying the adoption of the Constitution.

My earliest knowledge of this literary coterie was derived from an article in The Atlantic Monthly for February, 1865, “The Pleiades of Connecticut.” The “Pleiades,” to wit, were John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop, and Theodore Dwight. The tone of the article was ironic. “Connecticut is pleasant,” it said, “with wooded hills and a beautiful river; plenteous with tobacco and cheese; fruitful of merchants, missionaries, peddlers, and single women,—but there are no poets known to exist there . . . the brisk little democratic state has turned its brains upon its machinery . . . the enterprising natives can turn out any article on which a profit can be made—except poetry.”

Massachusetts has always been somewhat condescending towards Connecticut’s literary pretensions. Yet all through that very volume of the Atlantic, from which I quote, run Mrs. Stowe’s “Chimney Corner” papers and Donald Mitchell’s novel, “Doctor Johns”; with here and there a story by Rose Terry and a poem by Henry Brownell. Nay, in an article entitled “Our Battle Laureate,” in the May number of the magazine, the “Autocrat” himself, who would always have his fling at Connecticut theology and Connecticut spelling and pronunciation (“Webster’s provincials,” forsooth! though pater ipse, the Rev. Abiel, had been a Connecticut orthodox parson, a Yale graduate, and a son-in-law of President Stiles),—the “Autocrat,” I say, takes off his hat to my old East Hartford neighbor, Henry Howard Brownell.

He begins by citing the paper which I have been citing: “How came the Muses to settle in Connecticut? . . . But the seed of the Muses has run out. No more Pleiades in Hartford . . .”; and answers that, if the author of the article asks Nathanael’s question, putting Hartford for Nazareth, he can refer him to Brownell’s “Lyrics of a Day.” “If Drayton had fought at Agincourt, if Campbell had held a sabre at Hohenlinden, if Scott had been in the saddle with Marmion, if Tennyson had charged with the six hundred at Balaclava, each of these poets might possibly have pictured what he said as faithfully and as fearfully as Mr. Brownell has painted the sea fights in which he took part as a combatant.”

Many years later, when preparing a chapter on the literature of the county for the “Memorial History of Hartford,” I came to close quarters with the sweet influence of the Pleiades. I am one of the few men—perhaps I am the only man—now living who have read the whole of Joel Barlow’s “Columbiad.” “Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?” asks Hawthorne’s crazy correspondent. “Unconscionable man! . . . And does he meditate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas, with machinery contrived on the principle of the steam engine?” I also “perused” (good old verb—the right word for the deed!) Dwight’s “Greenfield Hill”—a meritorious action,—but I cannot pretend to have read his “Conquest of Canaän” (the diaeresis is his, not mine), an epic in eleven books and in heroic couplets. I dipped into it only far enough to note that the poet had contrived to introduce a history of our Revolutionary War, by way of episode, among the wars of Israel.

It must be acknowledged that this patriotic enterprise of creating a national literature by tour de force, was undertaken when Minerva was unwilling. These were able and eminent men: scholars, diplomatists, legislators. Among their number were a judge of the Connecticut Supreme Court, a college president, foreign ministers and ambassadors, a distinguished physician, an officer of the Revolutionary army, intimate friends of Washington and Jefferson. But, as poetry, a few little pieces of the New Jersey poet, Philip Freneau,—“The Indian Student,” “The Indian Burying Ground,” “To a Honey Bee,” “The Wild Honeysuckle,” and “The Battle of Eutaw Springs,”—are worth all the epic and Pindaric strains of the Connecticut bards. Yet “still the shore a brave attempt resounds.” For they had few misgivings and a truly missionary zeal. They formed the first Mutual Admiration Society in our literary annals.

Here gallant Humphreys charm’d the list’ning throng.

Sweetly he sang, amid the clang of arms,

His numbers smooth, replete with winning charms.

In him there shone a great and godlike mind,

The poet’s wreath around the laurel twined.

This was while Colonel Humphreys was in the army—one of Washington’s aides. But when he resigned his commission,—hark! ’tis Barlow sings:—

See Humphreys glorious from the field retire,

Sheathe the glad sword and string the sounding lyre.

O’er fallen friends, with all the strength of woe,

His heartfelt sighs in moving numbers flow.

His country’s wrongs, her duties, dangers, praise,

Fire his full soul, and animate his lays.

Humphreys, in turn, in his poem “On the Future Glory of the United States of America,” calls upon his learned friends to string their lyres and rouse their countrymen against the Barbary corsairs who were holding American seamen in captivity:—

Why sleep’st thou, Barlow, child of genius? Why

See’st thou, blest Dwight, our land in sadness lie?

And where is Trumbull, earliest boast of fame?

’Tis yours, ye bards, to wake the smothered flame.

To you, my dearest friends, the task belongs

To rouse your country with heroic songs.

Yes, to be sure, where is Trumbull, earliest boast of fame? He came from Watertown (now a seat of learning), a cousin of Governor Trumbull—“Brother Jonathan”—and a second cousin of Colonel John Trumbull, the historical painter, whose battle pieces repose in the Yale Art Gallery. Cleverness runs in the Trumbull blood. There was, for example, J. Hammond Trumbull (abbreviated by lisping infancy to “J. Hambull”) in the last generation, a great sagamore—O a very big Indian,—reputed the only man in the country who could read Eliot’s Algonquin Bible. I make no mention of later Trumbulls known in letters and art. But as for our worthy, John Trumbull, the poet, it is well known and has been often told how he passed the college entrance examination at the age of seven, but forebore to matriculate till a more reasonable season, graduating in 1767 and serving two years as a tutor along with his friend Dwight; afterwards studying law at Boston in the office of John Adams, practising at New Haven and Hartford, filling legislative and judicial positions, and dying at Detroit in 1831.

Trumbull was the satirist of the group. As a young man at Yale, he amused his leisure by contributing to the newspapers essays in the manner of “The Spectator” (“The Meddler,” “The Correspondent,” and the like); and verse satires after the fashion of Prior and Pope. There is nothing very new about the Jack Dapperwits, Dick Hairbrains, Tom Brainlesses, Miss Harriet Simpers, and Isabella Sprightlys of these compositions. The very names will recall to the experienced reader the stock figures of the countless Addisonian imitations which sicklied o’er the minor literature of the eighteenth century. But Trumbull’s masterpiece was “M’Fingal,” a Hudibrastic satire on the Tories, printed in part at Philadelphia in 1776, and in complete shape at Hartford in 1782, “by Hudson and Goodwin near the Great Bridge.” “M’Fingal” was the most popular poem of the Revolution. It went through more than thirty editions in America and England. In 1864 it was edited with elaborate historical notes by Benson J. Lossing, author of “Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution.” A reprint is mentioned as late as 1881. An edition, in two volumes, of Trumbull’s poetical works was issued in 1820.

Timothy Dwight pronounced “M’Fingal” superior to “Hudibras.” The Marquis de Chastellux, who had fought with Lafayette for the independence of the colonies; who had been amused when at Windham, says my authority, by Governor Jonathan Trumbull’s “pompous manner in transacting the most trifling public business”; and who translated into French Colonel Humphreys’s poetical “Address to the Armies of the United States of America,”—Chastellux wrote to Trumbull à propos of his burlesque: “I believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry could offer. . . . I prefer it to every work of the kind,—even ‘Hudibras.’ ” And Moses Coit Tyler, whose four large volumes on our colonial and revolutionary literature are, for the most part, a much ado about nothing, waxes dithyrambic on this theme. He speaks, for example, of “the vast and prolonged impression it has made upon the American people.” But surely all this is very uncritical. All that is really alive of “M’Fingal” are a few smart couplets usually attributed to “Hudibras,” such as—

No man e’er felt the halter draw

With good opinion of the law.

“M’Fingal” is one of the most successful of the innumerable imitations of “Hudibras”; still it is an imitation, and, as such, inferior to its original. But apart from that, Trumbull was far from having Butler’s astonishing resources of wit and learning, tedious as they often are from their mere excess. Nor is the Yankee sharpness of “M’Fingal” so potent a spirit as the harsh, bitter contempt of Butler, almost as inventive of insult as the saeva indignatio of Swift. Yet “M’Fingal” still keeps a measure of historical importance, reflecting, in its cracked and distorted mirror of caricature, the features of a stormy time: the turbulent town meetings, the liberty poles and bonfires of the patriots; with the tar-and-feathering of Tories, and their stolen gatherings in cellars or other holes and corners.

After peace was declared, a number of these young writers came together again in Hartford, where they formed a sort of literary club with weekly meetings—“The Hartford Wits,” who for a few years made the little provincial capital the intellectual metropolis of the country. Trumbull had settled at Hartford in the practice of the law in 1781. Joel Barlow, who had hastily qualified for a chaplaincy in a Massachusetts brigade by a six weeks’ course of theology, and had served more or less sporadically through the war, came to Hartford in the year following and started a newspaper. David Humphreys, Yale 1771, illustrious founder of the Brothers in Unity Society, and importer of merino sheep, had enlisted in 1776 in a Connecticut militia regiment then on duty in New York. He had been on the staff of General Putnam, whose life he afterwards wrote; had been Washington’s aide and a frequent inmate at Mount Vernon from 1780 to 1783; then abroad (1784–1786), as secretary to the commission for making commercial treaties with the nations of Europe. (The commissioners were Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson.) On returning to his native Derby in 1786, he had been sent to the legislature at Hartford, and now found himself associated with Trumbull, who had entered upon his Yale tutorship in 1771, the year of Humphreys’s graduation; and with Barlow, who had taken his B.A. degree in 1778. These three Pleiades drew to themselves other stars of lesser magnitude, the most remarkable of whom was Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, a native of Waterbury, but since 1784 a practising physician at Hartford and one of the founders of the Connecticut Medical Society. Hopkins was an eccentric humorist, and is oddly described by Samuel Goodrich—“Peter Parley”—as “long and lank, walking with spreading arms and straddling legs.” “His nose was long, lean, and flexible,” adds Goodrich,—a description which suggests rather the proboscis of the elephant, or at least of the tapir, than a feature of the human countenance.

Other lights in this constellation were Richard Alsop, from Middletown, who was now keeping a bookstore at Hartford, and Theodore Dwight, brother to Timothy and brother-in-law to Alsop, and later the secretary and historian of the famous Hartford Convention of 1814, which came near to carrying New England into secession. We might reckon as an eighth Pleiad, Dr. Elihu H. Smith, then residing at Wethersfield, who published in 1793 our first poetic miscellany, printed—of all places in the world—at Litchfield, “mine own romantic town”: seat of the earliest American law school, and emitter of this earliest American anthology. If you should happen to find in your garret a dusty copy of this collection, “American Poems, Original and Selected,” by Elihu H. Smith, hold on to it. It is worth money, and will be worth more.

The Hartford Wits contributed to local papers, such as the New Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Courant, a series of political lampoons: “The Anarchiad,” “The Echo,” and “The Political Greenhouse,” a sort of Yankee “Dunciad,” “Rolliad,” and “Anti-Jacobin.” They were staunch Federalists, friends of a close union and a strong central government; and used their pens in support of the administrations of Washington and Adams, and to ridicule Jefferson and the Democrats. It was a time of great confusion and unrest: of Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, and the irredeemable paper currency in Rhode Island. In Connecticut, Democratic mobs were protesting against the vote of five years’ pay to the officers of the disbanded army. “The Echo” and “The Political Greenhouse” were published in book form in 1807; “The Anarchiad” not till 1861, by Thomas H. Pease, New Haven, with notes and introduction by Luther G. Riggs. I am not going to quote these satires. They amused their own generation and doubtless did good. “The Echo” had the honor of being quoted in Congress by an angry Virginian, to prove that Connecticut was trying to draw the country into a war with France. It caught up cleverly the humors of the day, now travestying a speech of Jefferson, now turning into burlesque a Boston town meeting. A local flavor is given by allusions to Connecticut traditions: Captain Kidd, the Blue Laws, the Windham Frogs, the Hebron pump, the Wethersfield onion gardens. But the sparkle has gone out of it. There is a perishable element in political satire. I find it difficult to interest young people nowadays even in the “Biglow Papers,” which are so much superior, in every way, to “M’Fingal” or “The Anarchiad.”

Timothy Dwight would probably have rested his title to literary fame on his five volumes of theology and the eleven books of his “Conquest of Canaän.” But the epic is unread and unreadable, while theological systems need constant restatement in an age of changing beliefs. There is one excellent hymn by Dwight in the collections,—“I love thy kingdom, Lord.” His war song, “Columbia, Columbia, in glory arise,” was once admired, but has faded. I have found it possible to take a mild interest in the long poem, “Greenfield Hill,” a partly idyllic and partly moral didactic piece, emanating from the country parish, three miles from the Sound, in the town of Fairfield, where Dwight was pastor from 1783 to 1795. The poem has one peculiar feature: each of its seven parts was to have imitated the manner of some one British poet. Part One is in the blank verse and the style of Thomson’s “Seasons”; Part Two in the heroic couplets and the diction of Goldsmith’s “Traveller” and “Deserted Village.” For lack of time this design was not systematically carried out, but the reader is reminded now of Prior, then of Cowper, and again of Crabbe. The nature descriptions and the pictures of rural life are not untruthful, though somewhat tame and conventional. The praise of modest competence is sung, and the wholesome simplicity of American life, under the equal distribution of wealth, as contrasted with the luxury and corruption of European cities. Social questions are discussed, such as, “The state of negro slavery in Connecticut”; and “What is not, and what is, a social female visit.” Narrative episodes give variety to the descriptive and reflective portions: the burning of Fairfield in 1779 by the British under Governor Tryon; the destruction of the remnants of the Pequod Indians in a swamp three miles west of the town. It is distressing to have the Yankee farmer called “the swain,” and his wife and daughter “the fair,” in regular eighteenth century style; and Long Island, which is always in sight and frequently apostrophized, personified as “Longa.”

Then on the borders of this sapphire plain

Shall growing beauties grace my fair domain

* * * * *

Gay groves exult: Chinesian gardens glow,

And bright reflections paint the wave below.

The poet celebrates Connecticut artists and inventors:—

Such forms, such deeds on Rafael’s tablets shine,

And such, O Trumbull, glow alike on thine.

David Bushnell of Saybrook had invented a submarine torpedo boat, nicknamed “the American Turtle,” with which he undertook to blow up Lord Admiral Howe’s gunship in New York harbor. Humphreys gives an account of the failure of this enterprise in his “Life of Putnam.” It was some of Bushnell’s machines, set afloat on the Delaware, among the British shipping, that occasioned the panic celebrated in Hopkinson’s satirical ballad, “The Battle of the Kegs,” which we used to declaim at school. “See,” exclaims Dwight,—

See Bushnell’s strong creative genius, fraught

With all th’ assembled powers of skillful thought,

His mystic vessel plunge beneath the waves

And glide through dark retreats and coral caves!

Dr. Holmes, who knew more about Yale poets than they know about each other, has rescued one line from “Greenfield Hill.” “The last we see of snow,” he writes, in his paper on “The Seasons,” “is, in the language of a native poet,

The lingering drift behind the shady wall.

This is from a bard more celebrated once than now, Timothy Dwight, the same from whom we borrowed the piece we used to speak, beginning (as we said it),

Columby, Columby, to glory arise!

The line with the drift in it has stuck in my memory like a feather in an old nest, and is all that remains to me of his ‘Greenfield Hill.’ ”

As President of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, Dr. Dwight, by his sermons, addresses, and miscellaneous writings, his personal influence with young men, and his public spirit, was a great force in the community. I have an idea that his “Travels in New England and New York,” posthumously published in 1821–1822, in four volumes, will survive all his other writings. I can recommend Dwight’s “Travels” as a really entertaining book, and full of solid observation.

Of all the wooden poetry of these Connecticut bards, David Humphreys’s seems to me the woodenest,—big patriotic verse essays on the model of the “Essay on Man”; “Address to the Armies of the United States”; “On the Happiness of America”; “On the Future Glory of the United States”; “On the Love of Country”; “On the Death of George Washington,” etc. Yet Humphreys was a most important figure. He was plenipotentiary to Portugal and Spain, and a trusted friend of Washington, from whom, perhaps, he caught that stately deportment which is said to have characterized him. He imported a hundred merino sheep from Spain, landing them from shipboard at his native Derby, then a port of entry on the lordly Housatonic. He wrote a dissertation on merino sheep, and also celebrated the exploit in song. The Massachusetts Agricultural Society gave him a gold medal for his services in improving the native breed. But if these sheep are even remotely responsible for Schedule K, it might be wished that they had remained in Spain, or had been as the flocks of Bo-Peep. Colonel Humphreys died at New Haven in 1818. The college owns his portrait by Stuart, and his monument in Grove Street cemetery is dignified by a Latin inscription reciting his titles and achievements, and telling how, like a second Jason, he brought the auream vellerem from Europe to Connecticut. Colonel Humphreys’s works were handsomely published at New York in 1804, with a list of subscribers headed by their Catholic Majesties, the King and Queen of Spain, and followed by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and numerous dukes and chevaliers. Among the humbler subscribers I am gratified to observe the names of Nathan Beers, merchant, New Haven; and Isaac Beers & Co., booksellers, New Haven (six copies),—no ancestors but conjecturally remote collateral relatives of the undersigned.

I cannot undertake to quote from Humphreys’s poems. The patriotic feeling that prompted them was genuine; the descriptions of campaigns in which he himself had borne a part have a certain value; but the poetry as such, though by no means contemptible, is quite uninspired. Homer’s catalogue of ships is a hackneyed example of the way in which a great poet can make bare names poetical. Humphreys had a harder job, and passages of his battle pieces read like pages from a city directory.

As fly autumnal leaves athwart some dale,

Borne on the pinions of the sounding gale,

Or glides the gossamer o’er rustling reeds,

Bland’s, Sheldon’s, Moylan’s, Baylor’s battle steeds

So skimmed the plain. . . .

Then Huger, Maxwell, Mifflin, Marshall, Read,

Hastened from states remote to seize the meed;

* * * * *

While Smallwood, Parsons, Shepherd, Irvine, Hand,

Guest, Weedon, Muhlenberg, leads each his band.

Does the modern reader recognize a forefather among these heroic patronymics? Just as good men as fought at Marathon or Agincourt. Nor can it be said of any one of them quia caret vate sacro.

But the loudest blast upon the trump of fame was blown by Joel Barlow. It was agreed that in him America had produced a supreme poet. Born at Redding,—where Mark Twain died the other day,—the son of a farmer, Barlow was graduated at Yale in 1778—just a hundred years before President Taft. He married the daughter of a Guilford blacksmith, who had moved to New Haven to educate his sons; one of whom, Abraham Baldwin, afterwards went to Georgia, grew up with the country, and became United States Senator.

After the failure of his Hartford journal, Barlow went to France, in 1788, as agent of the Scioto Land Company, which turned out to be a swindling concern. He now “embraced French principles,” that is, became a Jacobin and freethinker, to the scandal of his old Federalist friends. He wrote a song to the guillotine and sang it at festal gatherings in London. He issued other revolutionary literature, in particular an “Advice to the Privileged Orders,” suppressed by the British government; whereupon Barlow, threatened with arrest, went back to France. The Convention made him a French citizen; he speculated luckily in the securities of the republic, which rose rapidly with the victories of its armies. He lived in much splendor in Paris, where Robert Fulton, inventor of steamboats, made his home with him for seven years. In 1795, he was appointed United States consul to Algiers, resided there two years, and succeeded in negotiating the release of the American captives who had been seized by Algerine pirates. After seventeen years’ absence, he returned to America, and built a handsome country house on Rock Creek, Washington, which he named characteristically “Kalorama.” He had become estranged from orthodox New England, and lived on intimate terms with Jefferson and the Democratic leaders, French sympathizers, and philosophical deists.

In 1811 President Madison sent him as minister plenipotentiary to France, to remonstrate with the emperor on the subject of the Berlin and Milan decrees, which were injuring American commerce. He was summoned to Wilna, Napoleon’s headquarters in his Russian campaign, where he was promised a personal interview. But the retreat from Moscow had begun. Fatigue and exposure brought on an illness from which Barlow died in a small Polish village near Cracow. An elaborate biography, “The Life and Letters of Joel Barlow,” by Charles Burr Todd, was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1886.

Barlow’s most ambitious undertaking was the “Columbiad,” originally printed at Hartford in 1787 as “The Vision of Columbus,” and then reissued in its expanded form at Philadelphia in 1807: a sumptuous quarto with plates by the best English and French engravers from designs by Robert Fulton: altogether the finest specimen of bookmaking that had then appeared in America. The “Columbiad’s” greatness was in inverse proportion to its bigness. Grandiosity was its author’s besetting sin, and the plan of the poem is absurdly grandiose. It tells how Hesper appeared to Columbus in prison and led him to a hill of vision whence he viewed the American continents spread out before him, and the panorama of their whole future history unrolled. Among other things he saw the Connecticut river—

Thy stream, my Hartford, through its misty robe,

Played in the sunbeams, belting far the globe.

No watery glades through richer vallies shine,

Nor drinks the sea a lovelier wave than thine.

It is odd to come upon familiar place-names swollen to epic pomp. There is Danbury, for example, which one associates with the manufacture of hats and a somewhat rowdy annual fair. In speaking of the towns set on fire by the British, the poet thus exalteth Danbury, whose flames were visible from native Redding:—

Norwalk expands the blaze; o’er Redding hills

High flaming Danbury the welkin fills.

Esopus burns, New York’s deliteful fanes

And sea-nursed Norfolk light the neighboring plains.

But Barlow’s best poem was “Hasty Pudding,” a mock-heroic after the fashion of Philips’s “Cider,” and not, I think, inferior to that. One couplet, in particular, has prevailed against the tooth of time:—

E’en in thy native regions how I blush

To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush!

This poem was written in 1792 in Savoy, whither Barlow had gone to stand as deputy to the National Convention. In a little inn at Chambéry, a bowl of polenta, or Indian meal pudding, was set before him, and the familiar dish made him homesick for Connecticut. You remember how Dr. Holmes describes the dinners of the young American medical students in Paris at the Trois Frères; and how one of them would sit tinkling the ice in his wineglass, “saying that he was hearing the cowbells as he used to hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset.”

THE SINGER OF THE OLD SWIMMIN’ HOLE

MANY years ago I said to one of Walt Whitman’s biographers: “Whitman may, as you claim, be the poet of democracy, but he is not the poet of the American people. He is the idol of a literary culte. Shall I tell you who the poet of the American people is just at present? He is James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana.” Riley used to become quite blasphemous when speaking of Whitman. He said that the latter had begun by scribbling newspaper poetry of the usual kind—and very poor of its kind—which had attracted no attention and deserved none. Then he suddenly said to himself: “Go to! I will discard metre and rhyme and write something startlingly eccentric which will make the public sit up and take notice. I will sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, and the world will say—as in fact it did—‘here is a new poetry, lawless, virile, democratic. It is so different from anything hitherto written, that here must be the great American poet at last.’ ”

Now, I am not going to disparage old Walt. He was big himself, and he had an extraordinary feeling of the bigness of America with its swarming multitudes, millions of the plain people, whom God must have loved, said Lincoln, since he made so many of them. But all this in the mass. As to any dramatic power to discriminate among individuals and characterize them singly, as Riley does, Whitman had none. They are all alike, all “leaves of grass.”

Well, my friend, and Walt Whitman’s, promised to read Riley’s poems. And shortly I got a letter from him saying that he had read them with much enjoyment, but adding, “Surely you would not call him a great national poet.” Now since his death, the newspaper critics have been busy with this question. His poetry was true, sweet, original; but was it great? Suppose we leave aside for the moment this question of greatness. Who are the great poets, anyway? Was Robert Burns one of them? He composed no epics, no tragedies, no high Pindaric odes. But he made the songs of the Scottish people, and is become a part of the national consciousness of the race. In a less degree, but after the same fashion, Riley’s poetry has taken possession of the popular heart. I am told that his sales outnumber Longfellow’s. This is not an ultimate test, but so far as it goes it is a valid one.

Riley is the Hoosier poet, but he is more than that: he is a national poet. His state and his city have honored themselves in honoring him and in keeping his birthday as a public holiday. The birthdays of nations and of kings and magistrates have been often so kept. We have our fourth of July, our twenty-second of February, our Lincoln’s birthday; and we had a close escape from having a McKinley day. I do not know that the banks are closed and the children let out of school—Riley’s children, for all children are his—on each succeeding seventh of October; but I think there is no record elsewhere in our literary history of a tribute so loving and so universal to a mere man of letters, as the Hoosier State pays annually to its sweet singer. Massachusetts has its poets and is rightly proud of them, but neither Bryant nor Emerson nor Lowell nor Holmes, nor the more popular Longfellow or Whittier, has had his natal day marked down on the calendar as a yearly state festa. And yet poets, novelists, playwriters, painters, musical composers, artists of all kinds, have added more to the sum of human happiness than all the kings and magistrates that ever lived. Perhaps Indianians are warmer hearted than New Englanders; or perhaps they make so much of their poets because there are fewer of them. But this is not the whole secret of it. In a sense, Riley’s poems are provincial. They are intensely true to local conditions, local scenery and dialect, childish memories and the odd ways and characters of little country towns. But just for this faithfulness to their environment these “poems here at home” come home to others whose homes are far away from the Wabash, but are not so very different after all.

America, as has often been said, is a land of homes: of dwellers in villages, on farms, and in small towns. We are common people, middle-class people, conservative, decent, religious, tenacious of old ways, home-keeping and home-loving. We do not thrill to Walt Whitman’s paeans to democracy in the abstract; but we vibrate to every touch on the chord of family affections, of early friendships, and of the dear old homely things that our childhood knew. Americans are sentimental and humorous; and Riley abounds in sentiment—wholesome sentiment—and natural humor, while Whitman had little of either.

To all Americans who were ever boys; to all, at least who have had the good luck to be country boys and go barefoot; whether they dwell in the prairie states of the Middle West, or elsewhere, the scenes and characters of Riley’s poems are familiar: Little Orphant Annie and the Raggedy Man, and the Old Swimmin’ Hole and Griggsby’s Station “where we ust to be so happy and so pore.” They know when the frost is on the “punkin,” and that the “Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out”; and how the old tramp said to the Raggedy Man:—

You’re a purty man!—You air!—

With a pair o’ eyes like two fried eggs,

An’ a nose like a Bartlutt pear!

They have all, in their time, followed along after the circus parade, listened to the old village band playing tunes like “Lily Dale” and “In the Hazel Dell my Nellie’s Sleeping” and “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower”; have heard the campaign stump speaker when he “cut loose on monopolies and cussed and cussed and cussed”; have belonged to the literary society which debated the questions whether fire or water was the most destructive element; whether town life was preferable to country life; whether the Indian or the negro had suffered more at the hands of the white man; or whether the growth of Roman Catholicism in this country is a menace to our free institutions. And was the execution of Charles the First justifiable? Charles is dead now; but this good old debate question will never die. They knew the joys of “eatin’ out on the porch” and the woes of having your sister lose your jackknife through a crack in the barn floor; or of tearing your thumb nail in trying to get the nickel out of the tin savings bank.

The poets we admire are many; the poets we love are few. One of the traits that endear Riley to his countrymen is his cheerfulness. He is “Sunny Jim.” The south wind and the sun are his playmates. The drop of bitterness mixed in the cup of so many poets seems to have been left out of his life potion. And so, while he does not rouse us with “the thunder of the trumpets of the night,” or move us with the deep organ tones of tragic grief, he never fails to hearten and console. And though tragedy is absent from his verse, a tender pathos, kindred to his humor, is everywhere present. Read over again “The Old Man and Jim,” or “Nothin’ to Say, my Daughter,” or any of his poems on the deaths of children; for a choice that poignant little piece, “The Lost Kiss,” comparable with Coventry Patmore’s best poem, “The Toys,” in which the bereaved father speaks his unavailing remorse because he had once spoken crossly to his little girl when she came to his desk for a good-night kiss and interrupted him at his work.

Riley followed the bent of his genius and gave himself just the kind of training that fitted him to do his work. He never had any regular education, adopted no trade or profession, never married and had children, but kept himself free from set tasks and from those responsibilities which distract the poet’s soul. His muse was a truant, and he was a runaway schoolboy who kept the heart of a boy into manhood and old age, which is one definition of genius. He was better employed when he joined a circus troupe or a travelling medicine van, or set up as a sign painter, or simply lay out on the grass, “knee deep in June,” than if he had shut himself up in a school or an office. He did no routine work, but wrote when he felt like it, when he was in the mood. Fortunately the mood recurred abundantly, and so we have about two dozen volumes from him, filled with lovely poetry. Most of us do hack work, routine work, because we can do nothing better. But for the creative artist, hack work is a waste. Creative work, when one is in the mood, is more a pleasure than a toil; and Riley worked hard at his verse-making. For he was a most conscientious artist; and all those poems of his, seemingly so easy, natural, spontaneous, were the result of labor, though of labor joyously borne. How fine his art was perhaps only those can fully appreciate who have tried their own hands at making verses. Some of the things that he said to me about the use and abuse of dialect in poetry and concerning similar points, showed me how carefully he had thought out the principles of composition.

He thought most dialect poetry was overdone; recalling that delightful anecdote about the member of the Chicago Browning Club who was asked whether he liked dialect verse, and who replied: “Some of it. Eugene Field is all right. But the other day I read some verses by a fellow named Chaucer, and he carries it altogether too far.”

In particular, Riley objected to the habit which many writers have of labelling their characters with descriptive names like Sir Lucius O’Trigger and Birdofredum Sawin. I reminded him that English comedy from “Ralph Roister Doister” down had practised this device. (In Ben Jonson it is the rule.) And that even such an artist as Thackeray employed it frequently with droll effect: Lady Jane Sheepshanks, daughter of the Countess of Southdown, and so forth. But he insisted that it was a departure from vraisemblance which disturbed the impression of reality.

In seeking to classify these Hoosier poems, we are forced back constantly to a comparison with the Doric singers: with William Barnes, the Dorsetshire dialect poet; and above all with Robert Burns. Wordsworth in his “Lyrical Ballads,” and Tennyson in his few rural idyls like “Dora” and “The Brook” dealt also with simple, country life, the life of Cumberland dalesmen and Lincolnshire farmers. But these poets are in another class. They are grave philosophers, cultivated scholars, university men, writing in academic English; writing with sympathy indeed, but from a point of view outside the life which they depict. In our own country there are Will Carleton’s “Farm Ballads,” handling the same homely themes as Riley’s; handling them truthfully, sincerely, but prosaically. Carleton could not

. . . add the gleam,

The light that never was, on sea or land,

The consecration, and the poet’s dream.

But Riley’s world of common things and plain folks is always lit up by the lamp of beauty. Then there is Whittier. He was a farmer lad, and was part of the life that he wrote of. He belonged; and, like Riley, he knew his Burns. I think, indeed, that “Snow-Bound” is a much better poem than “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” Whittier’s fellow Quaker, John Bright, in an address to British workingmen, advised them to read Whittier’s poems, if they wanted to understand the spirit of the American people. Well, the spirit of New England, let us say, if not of all America. For Whittier is in some ways provincial, and rightly so. But though he uses homely New England words like “chore,” he does not, so far as I remember, essay dialect except in “Skipper Ireson’s Ride”; and that is Irish if it is anything. No Yankee women known to me talk like the fishwives of Marblehead in that popular but overrated piece. Then there are the “Biglow Papers,” which remind of Riley’s work on the humorous, as Whittier’s ballads do on the serious side. Lowell made a careful study of the New England dialect and the “Biglow Papers” are brilliantly true to the shrewd Yankee wit; but they are political satires rather than idyls. Where they come nearest to these Hoosier ballads or to “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line” is where they record old local ways and institutions. “This kind o’ sogerin’,” writes Birdofredum Sawin, who is disgustedly campaigning in Mexico, like our National Guards of yesterday:—

This kind o’ sogerin’ aint a mite like our October trainin’,

A chap could clear right out from there ef ’t only looked like rainin’,

An’ th’ Cunnles, tu, could kiver up their shappoes with bandanners,

An’ send the insines skootin’ to the bar-room with their banners

(Fear o’ gittin’ on ’em spotted), . . .

Isn’t that something like Riley? Lowell, of course, is a more imposing literary figure, and he tapped intellectual sources to which the younger poet had no access. But I still think Riley the finer artist. Benjamin F. Johnson, of Boone, the quaint, simple, innocent old Hoosier farmer, is a more convincing person than Hosea Biglow. In many of the “Biglow Papers” sentiment, imagery, vocabulary, phrase, are often too elevated for the speaker and for his dialect. Riley is not guilty of this inconsistency; his touch here is absolutely correct.

Riley’s work was anything but academic; and I am therefore rather proud of the fact that my university was the first to confer upon him an honorary degree. I cannot quite see why geniuses like Mark Twain and Riley, whose books are read and loved by hundreds of thousands of their countrymen, should care very much for a college degree. The fact remains, however, that they are gratified by the compliment, which stamps their performances with a sort of official sanction, like the couronné par l’Académie Française on the title-page of a French author.

When Mr. Riley came on to New Haven to take his Master’s degree, he was a bit nervous about making a public appearance in unwonted conditions; although he had been used to facing popular audiences with great applause when he gave his delightful readings from his own poems, with humorous impersonations in prose as good as Beatrice Herford’s best monologues. He rehearsed the affair in advance, trying on his Master’s gown and reading me his poem, “No Boy Knows when He Goes to Sleep,” which he proposed to use if called on for a speech. He asked me if it would do: it did. For at the alumni dinner which followed the conferring of degrees, when Riley got to his feet and read the piece, the audience broke loose. It was evident that, whatever the learned gentlemen on the platform might think, the undergraduates and the young alumni knew their Riley; and that his enrolment on the Yale catalogue was far and away the most popular act of the day. For in truth there is nothing cloistral or high and dry among our modern American colleges. A pessimist on my own faculty even avers that the average undergraduate nowadays reads nothing beyond the sporting columns in the New York newspapers. There were other distinguished recipients of degrees at that same Commencement. One leading statesman was made a Doctor of Laws: Mr. Riley a Master of Arts. Of course a mere man of letters cannot hope to rank with a politician. If Shakespeare and Ben Butler had been contemporaries and had both come up for a degree at the same Commencement—supposing any college willing to notice Butler at all—why Ben would have got an LL.D. and William an M.A. Yet exactly why should this be so? For as I am accustomed to say of John Hay, anybody can be Secretary of State, but it took a smart man to write “Little Breeches” and “The Mystery of Gilgal.”

EMERSON AND HIS JOURNALS

THE publication of Emerson’s journals,[^[1]] kept for over half a century, is a precious gift to the reading public. It is well known that he made an almost daily record of his thoughts: that, when called upon for a lecture or address, he put together such passages as would dovetail, without too anxious a concern for unity; and that from all these sources, by a double distillation, his perfected essays were finally evolved.

Accordingly, many pages are here omitted which are to be found in his published works, but a great wealth of matter remains—chips from his workshop—which will be new to the reader. And as he always composed carefully, even when writing only for his own eye, and as consecutiveness was never his long suit, these entries may be read with a pleasure and profit hardly less than are given by his finished writings.

The editors, with excellent discretion, have sometimes allowed to stand the first outlines, in prose or verse, of work long familiar in its completed shape. Here, for instance, is the germ of a favorite poem:

“August 28. [1838.]

“It is very grateful to my feelings to go into a Roman cathedral, yet I look as my countrymen do at the Roman priesthood. It is very grateful to me to go into an English church and hear the liturgy read. Yet nothing would induce me to be the English priest. I find an unpleasant dilemma in this nearer home.”

This dilemma is “The Problem.” And here again is the original of “The Two Rivers,” “as it came to mind, sitting by the river, one April day” (April 5, 1856):

“Thy Voice is sweet, Musketaquid; repeats the music of the rain; but sweeter rivers silent flit through thee, as thou through Concord plain.

“Thou art shut in thy banks; but the stream I love, flows in thy water, and flows through rocks and through the air, and through darkness, and through men, and women. I hear and see the inundation and eternal spending of the stream, in winter and in summer, in men and animals, in passion and thought. Happy are they who can hear it.

“I see thy brimming, eddying stream, and thy enchantment. For thou changest every rock in thy bed into a gem; all is real opal and agate, and at will thou pavest with diamonds. Take them away from thy stream, and they are poor shards and flints: So is it with me to-day.”

These journals differ from common diaries in being a chronicle of thoughts, rather than of events, or even of impressions. Emerson is the most impersonal of writers, which accounts in part, and by virtue of the attraction of opposites, for the high regard in which he held that gossip, Montaigne. Still, there are jottings enough of foreign travel, lecture tours, domestic incidents, passing public events, club meetings, college reunions, walks and talks with Concord neighbors, and the like, to afford the material of a new biography,[^[2]] which has been published uniformly with the ten volumes of journals. And the philosopher held himself so aloof from vulgar curiosity that the general reader, who breathes with difficulty in the rarefied air of high speculations, will perhaps turn most readily to such more intimate items as occur. As where his little son—the “deep-eyed boy” of the “Threnody”—being taken to the circus, said à propos of the clown, “Papa, the funny man makes me want to go home.” Emerson adds that he and Waldo were of one mind on the subject; and one thereupon recalls a celebrated incident in the career of Mark Twain. The diarist is not above setting down jests—even profane jests—with occasional anecdotes, bons mots, and miscellaneous witticisms like “an ordinary man or a Christian.” I, for one, would like to know who was the “Miss —— of New Haven, who on reading Ruskin’s book [presumably “Modern Painters”], said ‘Nature was Mrs. Turner.’ ” Were there such witty fair in the New Haven of 1848?

In the privacy of his journals, every man allows himself a license of criticism which he would hardly practise in public. The limitations or eccentricities of Emerson’s literary tastes are familiar to most; such as his dislike of Shelley and contempt for Poe, “the jingle man.” But here is a judgment, calmly penned, which rather takes one’s breath away: “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.” This, to be sure, was in 1842, eight years before the appearance of “The Scarlet Letter.” Yet, to the last, the romancer’s obsession with the problem of evil affected the resolved optimist as unwholesome. Indeed he speaks impatiently of all novels, and prophesies that they will give way by and by to autobiographies and diaries. The only exception to his general distaste for fiction is “The Bride of Lammermoor,” which he mentions repeatedly and with high praise, comparing it with Aeschylus.

The entry concerning Moore’s “Life of Sheridan” is surprisingly savage—less like the gentle Emerson than like his truculent friend Carlyle: “He details the life of a mean, fraudulent, vain, quarrelsome play-actor, whose wit lay in cheating tradesmen, whose genius was used in studying jokes and bons mots at home for a dinner or a club, who laid traps for the admiration of coxcombs, who never did anything good and never said anything wise.”

Emerson’s biographers make a large claim for him. One calls him “the first of American thinkers”: another, “the only great mind in American literature.” This is a generous challenge, but I believe that, with proper definition, it may be granted. When it is remembered that among American thinkers are Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, William James, and Willard Gibbs, one hesitates to subscribe to so absolute a verdict. Let it stand true, however, with the saving clause, “after the intuitional order of thought.” Emerson dwelt with the insights of the Reason and not with the logically derived judgments of the Understanding. (He capitalizes the names of these faculties, which translate the Kantian Vernunft and Verstand.) Dialectics he eschewed, professing himself helpless to conduct an argument. He announced truths, but would not undertake to say by what process of reasoning he reached them. They were not the conclusions of a syllogism: they were borne in upon him—revelations. At New Bedford he visited the meetings of the Quakers, and took great interest in their doctrine of the inner light.

When the heresies of the “Divinity School Address” (1838) were attacked by orthodox Unitarians (if there is such a thing as an orthodox Unitarian) like Andrews Norton in “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” and Henry Ware in his sermon on “The Personality of God,” Emerson made no attempt to defend his position. In a cordial letter to Ware he wrote: “I could not possibly give you one of the ‘arguments’ you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men.”

Let me add a few sentences from the noble and beautiful passage written at sea, September 17, 1833: “Yesterday I was asked what I mean by morals. I reply that I cannot define, and care not to define. . . . That which I cannot yet declare has been my angel from childhood until now. . . . It cannot be defeated by my defeats. It cannot be questioned though all the martyrs apostatize. . . . What is this they say about wanting mathematical certainty for moral truths? I have always affirmed they had it. Yet they ask me whether I know the soul immortal. No. But do I not know the Now to be eternal? . . . Men seem to be constitutionally believers and unbelievers. There is no bridge that can cross from a mind in one state to a mind in the other. All my opinions, affections, whimsies, are tinged with belief,—incline to that side. . . . But I cannot give reasons to a person of a different persuasion that are at all adequate to the force of my conviction. Yet when I fail to find the reason, my faith is not less.”

No doubt most men cherish deep beliefs for which they can assign no reasons: “real assents,” rather than “notional assents,” in Newman’s phrase. But Emerson’s profession of inability to argue need not be accepted too literally. It is a mask of humility covering a subtle policy: a plea in confession and avoidance: a throwing off of responsibility in forma pauperis. He could argue well, when he wanted to. In these journals, for example, he exposes, with admirable shrewdness, the unreasonableness and inconsistency of Alcott, Thoreau, and others, who refused to pay taxes because Massachusetts enforced the fugitive slave law: “As long as the state means you well, do not refuse your pistareen. You have a tottering cause: ninety parts of the pistareen it will spend for what you think also good: ten parts for mischief. You cannot fight heartily for a fraction. . . . The state tax does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin and French and German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at buying.”

Again, is it true that Emerson is the only great mind in American literature? Of his greatness of mind there can be no question; but how far was that mind in literature? No one doubts that Poe, or Hawthorne, or Longfellow, or Irving was in literature: was, above all things else, a man of letters. But the gravamen of Emerson’s writing appears to many to fall outside of the domain of letters: to lie in the provinces of ethics, religion, and speculative thought. They acknowledge that his writings have wonderful force and beauty, have literary quality; but tried by his subject matter, he is more a philosopher, a moralist, a theosophist, than a poet or a man of letters who deals with this human life as he finds it. A theosophist, not of course a theologian. Emerson is the most religious of thinkers, but by 1836, when his first book, “Nature,” was published, he had thought himself free of dogma and creed. Not the least interest of the journals is in the evidence they give of the process, the steps of growth by which he won to his perfected system. As early as 1824 we find a letter to Plato, remarkable in its mature gravity for a youth of twenty-one, questioning the exclusive claim of the Christian Revelation: “Of this Revelation I am the ardent friend. Of the Being who sent it I am the child. . . . But I confess it has not for me the same exclusive and extraordinary claims it has for many. I hold Reason to be a prior Revelation. . . . I need not inform you in all its depraved details of the theology under whose chains Calvin of Geneva bound Europe down; but this opinion, that the Revelation had become necessary to the salvation of men through some conjunction of events in heaven, is one of its vagaries.”

Emerson refused to affirm personality of God, “because it is too little, not too much.” Here, for instance, in the journal for Sunday, May 22, 1836, is the seed of the passage in the “Divinity School Address” which complains that “historical Christianity . . . dwells with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus”: “The talk of the kitchen and the cottage is exclusively occupied with persons. . . . And yet, when cultivated men speak of God, they demand a biography of him as steadily as the kitchen and the bar-room demand personalities of men. . . . Theism must be, and the name of God must be, because it is a necessity of the human mind to apprehend the relative as flowing from the absolute, and we shall always give the absolute a name.”

The theosophist whose soul is in direct contact with the “Oversoul” needs no “evidences of Christianity,” nor any revelation through the scripture or the written word. Revelation is to him something more immediate—a doctrine, said Andrews Norton, which is not merely a heresy, but is not even an intelligible error. Neither does the mystic seek proof of God’s existence from the arguments of natural theology. “The intellectual power is not the gift, but the presence of God. Nor do we reason to the being of God, but God goes with us into Nature, when we go or think at all.”

The popular faith does not warm to Emerson’s impersonal deity. “I cannot love or worship an abstraction,” it says. “I must have a Father to believe in and pray to: a Father who loves and watches over me. As for the immortality you offer, it has no promise for the heart.

My servant Death, with solving rite,

Pours finite into infinite.

I do not know what it means to be absorbed into the absolute. The loss of conscious personal life is the loss of all. To awake into another state of being without a memory of this, is such a loss; and is, besides, inconceivable. I want to be reunited to my friends. I want my heaven to be a continuation of my earth. And hang Brahma!”

In literature, as in religion, this impersonality has disconcerting aspects to the man who dwells in the world of the senses and the understanding. “Some men,” says a note of 1844, “have the perception of difference predominant, and are conversant with surfaces and trifles, with coats and coaches and faces and cities; these are the men of talent. And other men abide by the perception of Identity: these are the Orientals, the philosophers, the men of faith and divinity, the men of genius.”

All this has a familiar look to readers who remember the chapter on Plato in “Representative Men,” or passages like the following from “The Oversoul”: “In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all.” Now, in mundane letters it is the difference that counts, the più and not the uno. The common nature may be taken for granted. In drama and fiction, particularly, difference is life and identity is death; and this “tyrannizing unity” would cut the ground from under them both.

This philosophical attitude did not keep Emerson from having a sharp eye for personal traits. His sketch of Thoreau in “Excursions” is a masterpiece; and so is the half-humorous portrait of Socrates in “Representative Men”; and both these are matched by the keen analysis of Daniel Webster in the journals. All going to show that this transcendentalist had something of “the devouring eye and the portraying hand” with which he credits Carlyle.

As in religion and in literature, so in the common human relations, this impersonality gives a peculiar twist to Emerson’s thought. The coldness of his essays on “Love” and “Friendship” has been often pointed out. His love is the high Platonic love. He is enamored of perfection, and individual men and women are only broken images of the absolute good.

Have I a lover who is noble and free?

I would he were nobler than to love me.

Alas! nous autres, we do not love our friends because they are more or less perfect reflections of divinity. We love them in spite of their faults: almost because of their faults: at least we love their faults because they are theirs. “You are in love with certain attributes,” said the fair blue-stocking in “Hyperion” to her suitor. “ ‘Madam,’ said I, ‘damn your attributes!’ ”

Another puzzle in Emerson, to the general reader, is the centrality of his thought. I remember a remark of Professor Thomas A. Thacher, upon hearing an address of W. T. Harris, the distinguished Hegelian and educationalist. He said that Mr. Harris went a long way back for a jump. So Emerson draws lines of relation from every least thing to the centre.

A subtle chain of countless rings

The next unto the farthest brings.

He never lets go his hold upon his theosophy. All his wagons are hitched to stars: himself from God he cannot free. But the citizen does not like to be always reminded of God, as he goes about his daily affairs. It carries a disturbing suggestion of death and the judgment and eternity and the other world. But, for the present, this comfortable phenomenal world of time and space is good enough for him. “So a’ cried out, ‘God, God, God!’ three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him a’ should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.”

Another block of stumbling, about which much has been written, is Emerson’s optimism, which rests upon the belief that evil is negative, merely the privation or shadow of good, without real existence. It was the heresy of “Uriel” that there was nothing inherently and permanently bad: no line of division between good and evil—“Line in nature is not found”; “Evil will bless and ice will burn.” He turned away resolutely from the contemplation of sin, crime, suffering: was impatient of complaints of sickness, of breakfast-table talk about headaches and a bad night’s sleep. Doubtless had he lived to witness the Christian Science movement, he would have taken an interest in the underlying doctrine, while repelled by the element of quackery in the practice and preaching of the sect. Hence the tragedy of life is ignored or evaded by Emerson. But ici bas, the reality of evil is not abolished, as an experience, by calling it the privation of good; nor will philosophy cure the grief of a wound. We suffer quite as acutely as we enjoy. We find that all those disagreeable appearances—“swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies,”—which he assures us will disappear, when man comes fully into possession of his kingdom, do not disappear but persist.

The dispute between optimism and pessimism rests, in the long run, on individual temperament and personal experience, and admits of no secure solution. Imposing systems of philosophy have been erected on these opposing views. Leibnitz proved that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Schopenhauer demonstrated the futility of the will to live; and showed that he who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. Nor does it avail to appeal from the philosophers to the poets, as more truly expressing the general sense of mankind; and to array Byron, Leopardi, Shelley, and the book of “Lamentations,” and “The City of Dreadful Night” against Goethe, Wordsworth, Browning, and others of the hopeful wise. The question cannot be decided by a majority vote: the question whether life is worth living, is turned aside by a jest about the liver. Meanwhile men give it practically an affirmative answer by continuing to live. Is life so bad? Then why not all commit suicide? Dryden explains, in a famous tirade, that we do not kill ourselves because we are the fools of hope:—

When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat . . .

Shelley, we are reminded, calls birth an “eclipsing curse”; and Byron, in a hackneyed stanza, invites us to count over the joys our life has seen and our days free from anguish, and to recognize that whatever we have been, it were better not to be at all.

The question as between optimist and pessimist is not whether evil is a necessary foil to good, as darkness is to light—a discipline without which we could have no notion of good,—but whether or not evil predominates in the universe. Browning, who seems to have had somewhat of a contempt for Bryon, affirms:—

. . . There’s a simple test

Would serve, when people take on them to weigh

The worth of poets. “Who was better, best,

This, that, the other bard?” . . .

End the strife

By asking “Which one led a happy life?”

This may answer as a criterion of a poet’s “worth,” that is, his power to fortify, to heal, to inspire; but it can hardly be accepted, without qualification, as a test of intellectual power. Goethe, to be sure, thought lightly of Byron as a thinker. But Leopardi was a thinker and a deep and exact scholar. And what of Shakespeare? What of the speeches in his plays which convey a profound conviction of the overbalance of misery in human life?—Hamlet’s soliloquy; Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle”; the Duke’s remonstrance with Claudio in “Measure for Measure,” persuading him that there was nothing in life which he need regret to lose; and the sad reflections of the King in “All’s Well that Ends Well” upon the approach of age,

Let me not live after my flame lacks oil.

It is the habit of present-day criticism to regard all such speeches in Shakespeare as having a merely dramatic character, true only to the feeling of the dramatis persona who speaks them. It may be so; but often there is a weight of thought and emotion in these and the like passages which breaks through the platform of the theatre and gives us the truth as Shakespeare himself sees it.

Browning’s admirers accord him great credit for being happy. And, indeed, he seems to take credit to himself for that same. Now we may envy a man for being happy, but we can hardly praise him for it. It is not a thing that depends on his will, but is only his good fortune. Let it be admitted that those writers do us the greater service who emphasize the hopeful view, who are lucky enough to be able to maintain that view. Still, when we consider what this world is, the placid optimism of Emerson and the robustious optimism of Browning become sometimes irritating; and we feel almost like calling for a new “Candide” and exclaim impatiently, Il faut cultiver notre jardin!

Grow old along with me,

The best is yet to be.

Oh, no: the best has been: youth is the best. So answers general, if not universal, experience. Old age doubtless has its compensations, and Cicero has summed them up ingeniously. But the “De Senectute” is, at best, a whistling to keep up one’s courage.

Strange cozenage! None would live past years again,

Yet all hope pleasure from what still remain,

And from the dregs of life hope to receive

What the first sprightly runnings could not give.

I’m tired of waiting for this chymic gold,

Which fools us young and beggars us when old.

Upon the whole, Matthew Arnold holds the balance more evenly than either optimist or pessimist.

. . . Life still

Yields human effort scope.

But since life teems with ill,

Nurse no extravagant hope.

Because thou must not dream,

Thou needs’t not then despair.

Spite of all impersonality, there is much interesting personal mention in these journals. Emerson’s kindly regard for his Concord friends and neighbors is quite charming. He had need of much patience with some of them, for they were queer as Dick’s proverbial hatband: transcendentalists, reformers, vegetarians, communists—the “cranks” of our contemporary slang. The figure which occurs oftenest in these memoranda is—naturally—Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. Of him Emerson speaks with unfailing reverence, mingled with a kind of tender desperation over his unworldliness and practical helplessness. A child of genius, a deep-thoughted seer, a pure visionary, living, as nearly as such a thing is possible, the life of a disembodied spirit. If earth were heaven, Alcott’s life would have been the right life. “Great Looker! Great Expecter!” says Thoreau. “His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with. . . . He has no venture in the present.”

Emerson is forced to allow that Alcott was no writer: talk was his medium. And even from his talk one derived few definite ideas; but its steady, melodious flow induced a kind of hypnotic condition, in which one’s own mind worked with unusual energy, without much attending to what was being said. “Alcott is like a slate-pencil which has a sponge tied to the other end, and, as the point of the pencil draws lines, the sponge follows as fast, and erases them. He talks high and wide, and expresses himself very happily, and forgets all he has said. If a skilful operator could introduce a lancet and sever the sponge, Alcott would be the prince of writers.” “I used to tell him that he had no senses. . . . We had a good proof of it this morning. He wanted to know ‘why the boys waded in the water after pond lilies?’ Why, because they will sell in town for a cent apiece and every man and child likes to carry one to church for a cologne bottle. ‘What!’ said he, ‘have they a perfume? I did not know it.’ ”

And Ellery Channing, who had in him brave, translunary things, as Hawthorne testifies no less than Emerson; as his own poems do partly testify—those poems which were so savagely cut up by Edgar Poe. Channing, too, was no writer, no artist. His poetry was freakish, wilfully imperfect, not seldom affected, sometimes downright silly—“shamefully indolent and slovenly,” are Emerson’s words concerning it.

Margaret Fuller, too, fervid, high aspiring, dominating soul, and brilliant talker: (“such a determination to eat this huge universe,” Carlyle’s comment upon her; disagreeable, conceited woman, Lowell’s and Hawthorne’s verdict). Margaret, too, was an “illuminator but no writer.” Miss Peabody was proposing to collect anecdotes of Margaret’s youth. But Emerson throws cold water on the project: “Now, unhappily, Margaret’s writing does not justify any such research. All that can be said is that she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation; then that she was herself a fine, generous, inspiring, vinous, eloquent talker, who did not outlive her influence.”

This is sound criticism. None of these people could write. Thoreau and Hawthorne and Emerson, himself, were accomplished writers, and are American classics. But the collected works of Margaret Fuller, in the six-volume “Tribune Memorial Edition” are disappointing. They do not interest, are to-day virtually unreadable. A few of Channing’s most happily inspired and least capriciously expressed verses find lodgment in the anthologies. As for Alcott, he had no technique at all. For its local interest I once read his poem “New Connecticut,” which recounts his early life in the little old hilltop village of Wolcott (Alcott of Wolcott), and as a Yankee pedlar in the South. It is of a winning innocence, a more than Wordsworthian simplicity. I read it with pleasure, as the revelation of a singularly pure and disinterested character. As a literary composition, it is about on the level of Mother Goose. Here is one more extract from the journals, germane to the matter:

“In July [1852] Mr. Alcott went to Connecticut to his native town of Wolcott; found his father’s farm in possession of a stranger; found many of his cousins still poor farmers in the town; the town itself unchanged since his childhood, whilst all the country round has been changed by manufactures and railroads. Wolcott, which is a mountain, remains as it was, or with a still less population (ten thousand dollars, he said, would buy the whole town, and all the men in it) and now tributary entirely to the neighboring town of Waterbury, which is a thriving factory village. Alcott went about and invited all the people, his relatives and friends, to meet him at five o’clock at the schoolhouse, where he had once learned, on Sunday evening. Thither they all came, and he sat at the desk and gave them the story of his life. Some of the audience went away discontented, because they had not heard a sermon, as they hoped.”

Some sixty years after this entry was made, I undertook a literary pilgrimage to Wolcott in company with a friend. We crossed the mountain from Plantsville and, on the outskirts of the village, took dinner at a farmhouse, one wing of which was the little Episcopal chapel in which the Alcott family had worshipped about 1815. It had been moved over, I believe, from the centre. The centre itself was a small green, bordered by some dozen houses, with the meeting-house and horse sheds, on an airy summit overlooking a vast open prospect of farms and woods, falling away to the Naugatuck. We inquired at several of the houses, and of the few human beings met on the road, where was the birthplace of A. Bronson Alcott? In vain: none had ever heard of him, nor of an Alcott family once resident in the town: not even of Louisa Alcott, whose “Little Women” still sells its annual thousands, and a dramatized version of which was even then playing in New York to crowded houses. The prophet and his country! We finally heard rumors of a certain Spindle Hill, which was vaguely connected with traditions of the Alcott name. But it was getting late, and we availed ourselves of a passing motor car which set us some miles on our way towards the Waterbury trolley line. This baffled act of homage has seemed to me, in a way, symbolical, and I have never renewed it.

It was Emerson’s belief that the faintest promptings of the spirit are also, in the end, the practical rules of conduct. A paragraph written in 1837 has a startling application to the present state of affairs in Europe: “I think the principles of the Peace party sublime. . . . If a nation of men is exalted to that height of morals as to refuse to fight and choose rather to suffer loss of goods and loss of life than to use violence, they must be not helpless, but most effective and great men: they would overawe their invader and make him ridiculous: they would communicate the contagion of their virtue and inoculate all mankind.”

Is this transcendental politics? Does it belong to what Mr. Roosevelt calls, with apt alliteration, the “realm of shams and shadows”? It is, at all events, applied Christianity. It is the principle of the Society of Friends; and of Count Tolstoy, who of all recent great writers is the most consistent preacher of Christ’s gospel.

THE ART OF LETTER WRITING

THIS lecture was founded by Mr. George F. Dominick, of the Class of 1894, in memory of Daniel S. Lamont, private secretary to President Cleveland, and afterwards Secretary of War, during Mr. Cleveland’s second term of office. Mr. Dominick had a high regard for Lamont’s skill as a letter writer and in the composition of messages, despatches, and reports. It was his wish, not only to perpetuate the memory of his friend and to associate it with his own Alma Mater, but to give his memorial a shape which should mark his sense of the importance of the art of letter writing.

Mr. Dominick thought that Lamont was particularly happy in turning a phrase and that many of the expressions which passed current in Cleveland’s two presidencies were really of his secretary’s coinage. I don’t suppose that we are to transfer such locutions as “innocuous desuetude” and “pernicious activity” from the President to his secretary. They bear the stamp of their authorship. I fancy that Mr. Lamont’s good phrases took less room to turn in.

But however this may be, the founder of this lecture is certainly right in his regard for the art of letter writing. It is an important asset in any man’s equipment, and I have heard it said that the test of education is the ability to write a good letter. Merchants, manufacturers, and business men generally, in advertising for clerks or assistants, are apt to judge of the fitness of applicants for positions by the kind of letters that they write. If these are illegible, ill-spelled, badly punctuated and paragraphed, ungrammatical, confused, repetitious, ignorantly or illiterately expressed, they are usually fatal to their writers’ hopes of a place. This is not quite fair, for there is many a shrewd man of business who can’t write a good letter. But surely a college graduate may be justly expected to write correct English; and he is likely to be more often called on to use it in letters than in any other form of written composition. “The writing of letters,” says John Locke, “has so much to do in all the occurrences of human life, that no gentleman can avoid showing himself in this kind of writing . . . which always lays him open to a severer examination of his breeding, sense and abilities than oral discourses whose transient faults . . . more easily escape observation and censure.” Litera scripta manet. Who was the prudent lady in one of Rhoda Broughton’s novels who cautioned her friend: “My dear, never write a letter; there’s not a scrap of my handwriting in Europe”? Rightly or wrongly, we are quick to draw conclusions as to a person’s social antecedents from his pronunciation and from his letters.

In the familiar epistle, as in other forms of social intercourse, nothing can quite take the place of old use and wont. Still the proper forms may be learned from the rhetoric books, just as the young man whose education has been neglected may learn from the standard manuals of politeness, such as “Etiquette and Eloquence or The Perfect Gentleman,” what the right hour is for making an evening call, and on what occasions the Tuxedo jacket is the correct thing. The rhetorics give directions how to address a letter, to begin it, to close it, and where to put the postage stamp; directions as to the date, the salutation, the signature, and cautions not to write “yours respectively” instead of “yours respectfully.” These are useful, but beyond these the rhetoric books cannot go, save in the way of general advice. The model letters in “The Complete Letter Writer” are dismal things. “Ideas,” says one of these textbook authorities, “ideas should be collected by the card system.” Now I rather think that ideas should not be collected by the card system, or by any other system. The charm of a personal letter is its spontaneity. Any suspicion that the ideas in it have been “collected” is deadly. To do the rhetoric books justice, the best of them warn against formality in all except the necessarily formal portions of the letter. A letter, like an epic poem, should begin in medias res. Ancient targets for jest are the opening formulae in servant girls’ correspondence. “I take my pen in hand to inform you that I am well and hope you are enjoying the same great blessing;” or the sentence with which our childish communications used to start out: “Dear Champ,—As I have nothing else to do I thought I would write you a letter”—matter of excusation and apology which Bacon instructs us to avoid.

The little boy whom Dr. John Brown tells about was unconsciously obeying Aristotle’s rule. Without permission he had taken his brother’s gun and broken it; and after hiding himself all day, he opened written communications with his stern elder; a blotted and tear-spotted scrawl beginning: “O Jamie, your gun is broke and my heart is broke.”

But no general rules for letter writing give much help; nor for that matter, do general rules for any kind of writing. A little practice in the concrete, under intelligent guidance, is worth any number of rhetorical platitudes. But such as it is, the rule for a business letter is just the reverse of that for a friendly letter. It should be as brief as is consistent with clearness, for your correspondent is a business man, whose time is his money. It should above all things, however, be explicit; and in striving to avoid surplusage should omit nothing that is necessary. Ambiguity is here the unpardonable sin and has occasioned thousands of law suits, involving millions of dollars. It should be severely impersonal. Pleasantries, sentiments, digressions and the like are impertinences in a business letter, like the familiarity of an unintroduced stranger. I knew a lawyer—and a good lawyer—who suffered professionally, because he would get himself into his business letters. He made jokes; he made quotations; sometimes French quotations which his correspondents could not translate; he expressed opinions and vented emotions on subjects only incidentally connected with the matter in hand, which he embroidered with wit and fancy; and he was a long time coming to the point. Now men of business may trifle about all other serious aspects of life or death, but when it concerns the making of money, they are in deadly earnest; so that my friend’s frivolous treatment of those interests seemed to them little less than sacrilege.

Viewed then as one of the commonest means of communication between man and man, it is well to be able to write a good letter; just as it is well to know how to tie a bowknot, cast an account, carve a joint, shave oneself, or meet any other of the ordinary occasions of life. But tons of letters are emptied from the mail bags every day, and burned, which serve no other than a momentary end. The art of composing letters worth keeping and printing is a part of the art literary. The word letters and the word literature are indeed used interchangeably; we speak of a man of letters, polite letters, the belles lettres, literae humaniores. How far are such expressions justified? Manifestly a letter, or a collection of letters, has not the structural unity and the deliberate artistic appeal of the higher forms of literature. It is not like an epic poem, a play, a novel or an ode. It has an art of its own, but an art of a particular kind, the secret of which is artlessness. It is not addressed to the public but to an individual and should betray no consciousness of any third party. It belongs, therefore, in the class with journals and table talk and, above all, autobiography, of which it constitutes the very best material. A book is written for everybody, a diary for oneself, a letter for one’s friend. While a letter, therefore, cannot quite claim a standing among the works of the creative imagination, yet it comes so freshly out of life and is so true in self-expression that, in some moods, we prefer it to more artificial or more objective kinds of literature; just as the advertisements in an old newspaper or magazine often have a greater veracity and freshness as dealing with the homely, actual needs and concerns of the time, than the stories, poems, and editorials whose fashion has faded.

I am speaking now of a genuine letter, “a link between two personalities,” as it has been defined. There are two varieties of letters which are not genuine. The first of these is the open letter, the letter to the editor, letter to a noble lord, etc. This is really addressed to the public through the medium of a more or less imaginary correspondent. The Englishman’s habit of writing to the London Times on all occasions is proverbial. Professor Goldwin Smith is a living example of the practice, transplanted to the field of the American newspaper press. But private letters written with an eye to publication are spoiled in the act. To be natural they should not mean to be overheard. If afterwards, by reason of the eminence of the writer, or of some quality in the letters themselves, they get into print, let it be by accident and not from forethought. Why is it, then, that the best printed letters, such as Gray’s, Walpole’s, Cowper’s, Fitzgerald’s, written with all the ease and intimacy of confidential intercourse—“written from one man and to one man”—are found to be composed in such perfect English, with such high finish, filled with matter usually reserved by professional authors for their essays or descriptive sketches; in fine, to be so literary? The reason I take to be partly in the mutual intellectual sympathy between writer and correspondent; and partly in the conscientious literary habit of the letter writer. Hawthorne’s “Note Books,” intended only for his own eye, are written with almost as much care as the romances and tales into which many pages of them were decanted with little alteration.

Besides the open letter, there is another variety which is not a real letter: I mean the letter of fiction. This has been a favorite method of telling a story. You know that all the novels of our first novelist, Richardson, are in this form: “Pamela,” “Clarissa Harlowe,” “Sir Charles Grandison”; and some of the most successful American short stories of recent years have been written in letters: Mr. James’s “A Bundle of Letters,” Mr. Aldrich’s “Margery Daw,” Mr. Bishop’s “Writing to Rosina” and many others. This is a subjective method of narration and requires a delicate art in differentiating the epistolary style of a number of correspondents; though not more, perhaps, than in the management of dialogue in an ordinary novel or play. The plan has certain advantages and in Richardson’s case was perhaps the most effective that he could have hit upon, i.e., the best adapted to the turn of his genius and the nature of his fiction. (Richardson began by writing letters for young people.) Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyám, and himself one of our best letter writers, preferred Richardson to Fielding, as did also Dr. Johnson. For myself, I will acknowledge that, while I enjoy a characteristic introduced letter here and there in a novel, as Thackeray, e.g., manages the thing; or even a short story in this form; yet a long novel written throughout in letters I find tedious, and Richardson’s interminable fictions, in particular, perfectly unendurable.

The epistolary form is conveniently elastic and not only lends itself easily to the purposes of fiction, but is a ready vehicle of reflection, humor, sentiment, satire, and description. Such recent examples as “The Upton Letters,” “The Love Letters of a Worldly Woman,” and Andrew Lang’s “Letters to Dead Authors” are illustrations, holding in solution many of the elements of the essay, the diary, the character sketch, and the parody.

But from these fictitious uses of the form let us return to the consideration of the real letter, the letter written by one man to another for his private perusal, but which from some superiority to the temporary occasion, has become literature. The theory of letter writing has been well given by Mr. J. C. Bailey in his “Studies in Some Famous Letters.” “What is a letter? It is written talk, with something, but not all, of the easiness of talking; and something, but not all, of the formality of writing. It is at once spontaneous and deliberate, a thing of art and a thing of amusement, the idle occupation of an hour and the sure index of a character.”

It is often said that letter writing is a lost art. It is an art of leisure and these are proverbially the days of hurry. The modern spirit is expressed by the telegraphic despatch, the telephone message, and the picture postal card. It is much if we manage an answer to an R.S.V.P. note of invitation. We have lost the habit of those old-fashioned correspondents whose “friendship covered reams.” How wonderful now seem the voluminous outpourings of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter! How did she get time to do it all? It has been shown by actual calculation that the time occupied by Clarissa Harlowe in writing her letters would have left no room for the happening of the events which her letters record. She could not have been doing and suffering what she did and suffered and yet have had the leisure to write it up. And not only want of time, but an increasing reticence constrains our pens within narrower limits. Members of families now exchange letters merely to give news, ask questions, keep in touch with one another: not to confide feelings or impart experiences. A man is ashamed to sit down and deliberately pour out thoughts, sentiments, and descriptions, even to his intimates. “I suppose,” wrote Fitzgerald, “that people who are engaged in serious ways of life, and are of well filled minds, don’t think much about the interchange of letters with any anxiety; but I am an idle fellow, of a very ladylike turn of sentiment, and my friendships are more like loves, I think.” It is from men of letters that the best letters are to be expected, but they are busy magazining, overwork their pens for the public, and are consequently impatient of the burden of private correspondence. “Private letters,” wrote Willis to Poe, “are the last ounce that breaks the camel’s back of a literary man.” To ask him to write a letter after his day’s work, said Willis, was like asking a penny postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. And in a letter to a friend he excused his brevity on the plea that he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to waste manuscript. “I do not write letters to anybody,” wrote Lowell in 1842 to his friend Dr. G. B. Loring. “The longer I live the more irksome does letter writing become to me. When we are young we need such a vent for our feelings. . . . But as we grow older and find more ease of expression, especially if it be in a way by which we can reach the general ear and heart, these private utterances become less and less needful to us.” In spite of this protest, when Mr. Charles Eliot Norton came to print Lowell’s letters, he found enough of them to fill two volumes of four hundred pages each. For after all, and with some exceptions, it is among the class of professional writers that we find the best letter writers: Gray, Cowper, Byron, Lamb, Fitzgerald, Lowell himself. They do it out of hours, “on the side” and, as in Lowell’s case, under protest; but the habit of literary expression is strong in them; they like to practise their pens; they begin a note to a friend and before they know it they have made a piece of literature, bound some day to get into print with others of the same kind.

And here comes a curious speculation. Where do all the letters come from that go into these collections? Do you keep the letters that you receive? I confess that I burn most of mine as soon as I have read them. Still more, do you keep copies of the letters that you send? I don’t mean typewritten business letters which you put damp into the patent-press-letter-copier to take off an impression to file away for reference, but friendly letters? The typewriting machine, by the way, is perhaps partly responsible for the decay of the letter writing art. It is hard to imagine Charles Lamb, or any other master of this most personal and intimate little art, who would not be disconcerted by this mechanical interposition between his thought and his page. The last generation must certainly have hoarded their letters more carefully than ours. You come across trunks full of them, desks full of them in the garrets of old houses: yellow bundles tied with tape, faded ink, stains of pressed violets, dust and musty odors, old mirth, old sorrows, old loves. Hackneyed themes of pathos, I mention them again, not to drop the tear of sensibility on their already well-moistened paper, but to enquire: Are these, and such as these, the sources of those many printed volumes “Letters of Blank,” “Diary and Correspondence of So and So,” ranging in date over periods of fifty or sixty years, and beginning sometimes in the boyhood of the writer, when the correspondent who preserved the letter could not possibly have foreseen Blank’s future greatness and the value of his autograph?

Women are proverbially good letter writers. The letters of Mme. de Sevigné to her daughter are masterpieces of their kind. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s are among the best of English letters; and Fitzgerald somewhat whimsically mentions the correspondence of a certain Mrs. French as worthy to rank with Horace Walpole’s. “Would you desire at this day,” says De Quincey, “to read our noble language in its native beauty . . . steal the mail bags and break open all the letters in female handwriting. Three out of four will have been written by that class of women who have the most leisure and the most interest in a correspondence by the post,” i.e., “unmarried women above twenty-five.” De Quincey adds that “if required to come forward in some public character” these same ladies “might write ill and affectedly. . . . But in their letters they write under the benefit of their natural advantages . . . sustained by some deep sympathy between themselves and their correspondents.” “Authors can’t write letters,” says Lowell in a letter to Miss Norton. “At best they squeeze out an essay now and then, burying every natural sprout in a dry and dreary sand flood, as unlike as possible to those delightful freshets with which your heart overflows the paper. They are thinking of their punctuation, of crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s, and cannot forget themselves in their correspondent, which I take to be the true recipe for a letter.” And writing to another correspondent, C. E. Norton, he says: “The habits of authorship are fatal to the careless unconsciousness that is the life of a letter. . . . But worse than all is that lack of interest in one’s self that comes of drudgery—for I hold that a letter which is not mainly about the writer of it lacks the prime flavor.” This is slightly paradoxical, for, I repeat, the best published letters are commonly the work of professional literati. Byron’s letters have been preferred by some readers to his poetry, such are their headlong vigor, dash, verve, spontaneity, the completeness of their self-expression. Keats was par excellence the literary artist; yet nothing can exceed the artlessness, simplicity, and sympathetic self-forgetfulness with which he writes to his little sister. But it is easy to see what Lowell means. Charles Lamb’s letters, e.g., though in many respects charming, are a trifle too composed. They have that trick of quaintness which runs through the “Essays of Elia,” but which gives an air of artificiality to a private letter. He is practising a literary habit rather than thinking of his correspondent. In this most intimate, personal, and mutual of arts, the writer should write to his friend what will interest him as well as himself. He should not dwell on hobbies of his own; nor describe his own experiences at too great length. It is all right to amuse his friend, but not to air his own cleverness. Lowell’s letters are delightful, and, by and large, I would place them second to none in the language. But they are sometimes too literary and have the faults of his prose writing in general. Wit was always his temptation, misleading him now and then into a kind of Yankee smartness and a disposition to show off. His temperament was buoyant, impulsive; there was to the last a good deal of the boy about Lowell. Letter writing is a friendly art, and Lowell’s warm expressions of love for his friends are most genuine. His epistolary style, like his essay style, is lavish and seldom chastened or toned down to the exquisite simplicity which distinguishes the best letters of Gray and Cowper. And so Lowell is always getting in his own way, tripping himself up over his superabundance of matter. Still, as a whole, I know no collected letters richer in thought, humor, and sentiment. And one may trace in them, read consecutively, the gradual ripening and refining of a highly gifted mind and a nature which had at once nobility and charm of thought.

Lowell speaks admiringly of Emerson’s “gracious impersonality.” Now impersonality is the last thing we expect of a letter writer. Emerson could write a good letter on occasion, as may be seen by a dip almost anywhere into the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence. But when Mr. Cabot was preparing his life of Emerson and applied to Henry James, Senior, for permission to read his letters to Emerson, Mr. James replied, not without a touch of petulance: “Emerson always kept one at such arm’s length, tasting him and sipping him and trying him, to make sure that he was worthy of his somewhat prim and bloodless friendship, that it was fatiguing to write him letters. I can’t recall any serious letter I ever sent him. I remember well what maidenly letters I used to receive from him.” We know what doctrine Emerson held on the subject of “persons.” But it is just this personality which makes Lowell the prince of letter writers. He may attract, he may irritate, but he never fails to interest us in himself. Even in his books it is the man in the book that interests most.

Women write good letters because they are sympathetic; because they take personal rather than abstract views; because they stay at home a great deal and are interested in little things and fond of exchanging confidences and news. They like to receive letters as well as to write them. The fact that Richardson found his most admiring readers among the ladies was due perhaps not only to the sentimentality of his novels, but to their epistolary form. Hence there is apt to be a touch of the feminine in the most accomplished letter writers. They are gossips, like Horace Walpole, or dilettanti like Edward Fitzgerald, or shy, reserved, sensitive persons like Gray and Cowper, who live apart, retired from the world in a retirement either cloistral or domestic; who have a few friends and a genius for friendship, enjoy the exercise of their pens, feel the need of unbosoming themselves, but are not ready talkers. Above all they are not above being interested in trifles and little things. Cowper was absorbed in his hares, his cucumber frames and gardening, country walks, tea-table chat, winding silk for Mrs. Unwin. Lamb was unceasingly taken up with the oddities and antiquities of London streets, the beggars, the chimney sweeps, the old benchers, the old bookstalls, and the like. Gray fills his correspondence with his solitary pursuits and recreations and tastes: Gothic curiosities, engravings, music sheets, ballads, excursions here and there. The familiar is of the essence of good letter writing: to unbend, to relax, to desipere in loco, to occupy at least momentarily the playful and humorous point of view. Solemn, prophetic souls devoted to sublimity are not for this art. Dante and Milton and “old Daddy” Wordsworth, as Fitzgerald calls him, could never have been good letter writers: they were too great to care about little things, too high and rigid to stoop to trifles.

Letter writing is sometimes described as a colloquial art. Correspondence, it is said, is a conversation kept up between interlocutors at a distance. But there is a difference: good talkers are not necessarily good letter writers, and vice versa. Coleridge, e.g., was great in monologue, but his letters are in no way remarkable. Cowper, on the other hand, did not sparkle in conversation, and Gray was silent in company, “dull,” Dr. Johnson called him. Johnson himself, notoriously a most accomplished talker, does not shine as a letter writer. His letters, frequently excellent in substance, are ponderous in style. They are of the kind best described as “epistolary correspondence.” The Doctor needed the give and take of social intercourse to allay the heaviness of his written discourse. His talk was animated, pointed, idiomatic, but when he sat down and took pen in hand, he began to translate, as Macaulay said, from English into Johnsonese. His celebrated letter of rebuke to Lord Chesterfield labors under the weight of its indignation, is not free from pomposity and pedantry, and is written with an eye to posterity. One can imagine the noble lord, himself an accomplished letter writer, smiling over this oracular sentence: “The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.” Heine’s irony, Voltaire’s light touch would have stung more sharply, though somewhat of Johnson’s dignified pathos would perhaps have been lost. Orators, in general, are not good letter writers. They are accustomed to the ore rotundo utterance, the “big bow-wow,” and they crave the large audience instead of the audience of one.

The art of letter writing, then, is a relaxation, an art of leisure, of the idle moment, the mind at ease, the bow unbent, the loin ungirt. But there are times in every man’s life when he has to write letters of a tenser mood, utterances of the passionate and agonized crises of the soul, love letters, death messages, farewells, confessions, entreaties. It seems profane to use the word art in such connections. Yet even a prayer, when it is articulate at all, follows the laws of human speech, though directed to the ear that heareth in secret. The collects of the church, being generalized prayer, employ a deliberate art.

Probably you have all been called upon to write letters of condolence and have found it a very difficult thing to do. There is no harder test of tact, delicacy, and good taste. The least appearance of insincerity, the least intrusion of egotism, of an air of effort, an assumed solemnity, a moralizing or edifying pose, makes the whole letter ring false. Reserve is better here than the opposite extreme; better to say less than you feel than even to seem to say more.

There is a letter of Lincoln’s, written to a mother whose sons had been killed in the Civil War, which is a brief model in this kind. I will not cite it here, for it has become a classic and is almost universally known. An engrossed copy of it hangs on the wall of Brasenose College, Oxford, as a specimen of the purest English diction—the diction of the Gettysburg address.

THACKERAY’S CENTENARY

AFTER all that has been written about Thackeray, it would be flat for me to present here another estimate of his work, or try to settle the relative value of his books. In this paper I shall endeavor only two things: first, to enquire what changes, in our way of looking at him, have come about in the half century since his death. Secondly, to give my own personal experience as a reader of Thackeray, in the hope that it may represent, in some degree, the experience of others.

What is left of Thackeray in this hundredth year since his birth? and how much of him has been eaten away by destructive criticism—or rather by time, that far more corrosive acid, whose silent operation criticism does but record? As the nineteenth century recedes, four names in the English fiction of that century stand out ever more clearly, as the great names: Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. I know what may be said—what has been said—for others: Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, Charles Reade, Trollope, Meredith, Stevenson, Hardy. I believe that these will endure, but will endure as writers of a secondary importance. Others are already fading: Bulwer is all gone, and Kingsley is going fast.

The order in which I have named the four great novelists is usually, I think, the order in which the reader comes to them. It is also the order of their publication. For although Thackeray was a year older than Dickens, his first novels were later in date, and he was much later in securing his public. But the chronological reason is not the real reason why we read them in that order. It is because of their different appeal. Scott was a romancer, Dickens a humorist, Thackeray a satirist, and George Eliot a moralist. Each was much more than that; but that was what they were, reduced to the lowest term. Romance, humor, satire, and moral philosophy respectively were their starting point, their strongest impelling force, and their besetting sin. Whenever they fell below themselves, Walter Scott lapsed into sheer romantic unreality, Dickens into extravagant caricature, Thackeray into burlesque, George Eliot into psychology and ethical reflection.

I wonder whether your experience here is the same as mine. By the time that I was fourteen, as nearly as I can remember, I had read all the Waverley novels. Then I got hold of Dickens, and for two or three years I lived in Dickens’s world, though perhaps he and Scott somewhat overlapped at the edge—I cannot quite remember. I was sixteen when Thackeray died, and I heard my elders mourning over the loss. “Dear old Thackeray is gone,” they told each other, and proceeded to reread all his books, with infinite laughter. So I picked up “Vanity Fair” and tried to enjoy it. But fresh from Scott’s picturesque page and Dickens’s sympathetic extravagances, how dull, insipid, repellent, disgusting were George Osborne, and fat Joseph Sedley, and Amelia and Becky! What sillies they were and how trivial their doings! “It’s just about a lot of old girls,” I said to my uncle, who laughed in a provokingly superior manner and replied, “My boy, those old girls are life.” I will confess that even to this day, something of that shock of disillusion, that first cold plunge into “Vanity Fair,” hangs about the book. I understand what Mr. Howells means when he calls it “the poorest of Thackeray’s novels—crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.” I ought to have begun, as he did, with “Pendennis,” of which he writes, “I am still not sure but it is the author’s greatest book.” I don’t know about that, but I know that it is the novel of Thackeray’s that I have read most often and like the best, better than “Henry Esmond” or “Vanity Fair”: just as I prefer “The Mill on the Floss” to “Adam Bede,” and “The House of the Seven Gables” to “The Scarlet Letter” (as Hawthorne did himself, by the way); or as I agree with Dickens that “Bleak House” was his best novel, though the public never thought so. We may concede to the critics that, objectively considered, and by all the rules of judgment, this or that work is its author’s masterpiece and we ought to like it best—only we don’t. We have our private preferences which we cannot explain and do not seek to defend. As for “Esmond,” my comparative indifference to it is only, I suppose, a part of my dislike of the genre. I know the grounds on which the historical novel is recommended, and I know how intimately Thackeray’s imagination was at home in the eighteenth century. Historically that is what he stands for: he was a Queen Anne man—like Austin Dobson: he passed over the great romantic generation altogether and joined on to Fielding and Goldsmith and their predecessors. Still no man knows the past as he does the present. I will take Thackeray’s report of the London of his day; but I do not care very much about his reproduction of the London of 1745. Let me whisper to you that since early youth I have not been able to take much pleasure in the Waverley novels, except those parts of them in which the author presents Scotch life and character as he knew them.

I think it was not till I was seventeen or eighteen, and a freshman in college, that I really got hold of Thackeray; but when once I had done so, the result was to drive Dickens out of my mind, as one nail drives out another. I never could go back to him after that. His sentiment seemed tawdry, his humor, buffoonery. Hung side by side, the one picture killed the other. “Dickens knows,” said Thackeray, “that my books are a protest against him: that, if the one set are true, the other must be false.” There is a species of ingratitude, of disloyalty, in thus turning one’s back upon an old favorite who has furnished one so intense a pleasure and has had so large a share in one’s education. But it is the cruel condition of all growth.

The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold,

Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old.

But when I advanced to George Eliot, as I did a year or two later, I did not find that her fiction and Thackeray’s destroyed each other. I have continued to reread them both ever since and with undiminished satisfaction. And yet it was, in some sense, an advance. I would not say that George Eliot was a greater novelist than Thackeray, nor even so great. But her message is more gravely intellectual: the psychology of her characters more deeply studied: the problems of life and mind more thoughtfully confronted. Thought, indeed, thought in itself and apart from the story, which is only a chosen illustration of a thesis, seems her principal concern. Thackeray is always concrete, never speculative or abstract. The mimetic instinct was strong in him, but weak in his great contemporary, to the damage and the final ruin of her art. His method was observation, hers analysis. Mr. Brownell says that Thackeray’s characters are “delineated rather than dissected.” There is little analysis, indeed hardly any literary criticism in his “English Humorists”: only personal impressions. He deals with the men, not with the books. The same is true of his art criticisms. He is concerned with the sentiment of the picture, seldom with its technique, or even with its imaginative or expressional power.

In saying that Dickens was essentially a humorist and Thackeray a satirist, I do not mean, of course, that the terms are mutually exclusive. Thackeray was a great humorist as well as a satirist, but Dickens was hardly a satirist at all. I know that Mr. Chesterton says he was, but I cannot believe it. He cites “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Is “Martin Chuzzlewit” a satire on the Americans? It is a caricature—a very gross caricature—a piece of bouffe. But it lacks the true likeness which is the sting of satire. Dickens and Thackeray had, in common, a quick sense of the ridiculous, but they employed it differently. Dickens was a humorist almost in the Ben Jonsonian sense: his field was the odd, the eccentric, the grotesque—sometimes the monstrous; his books, and especially his later books, are full of queer people, frequently as incredible as Jonson’s dramatis personae. In other words, he was a caricaturist. Mr. Howells says that Thackeray was a caricaturist, but I do not think he was so except incidentally; while Dickens was constantly so. When satire identifies itself with its object, it takes the form of parody. Thackeray was a parodist, a travesty writer, an artist in burlesque. What is the difference between caricature and parody? I take it to be this, that caricature is the ludicrous exaggeration of character for purely comic effect, while parody is its ludicrous imitation for the purpose of mockery. Now there is plenty of invention in Dickens, but little imitation. He began with broad facetiae—“Sketches by Boz” and the “Pickwick Papers”; while Thackeray began with travesty and kept up the habit more or less all his life. At the Charterhouse he spent his time in drawing burlesque representations of Shakespeare, and composing parodies on L. E. L. and other lady poets. At Cambridge he wrote a mock-heroic “Timbuctoo,” the subject for the prize poem of the year—a prize which Tennyson captured. Later he wrote those capital travesties, “Rebecca and Rowena” and “Novels by Eminent Hands.” In “Fitzboodle’s Confessions” he wrote a sentimental ballad, “The Willow Tree,” and straightway a parody of the same. You remember Lady Jane Sheepshanks who composed those lines comparing her youth to

A violet shrinking meanly

Where blow the March winds[^[3]] keenly—

A timid fawn on wildwood lawn

Where oak-boughs rustle greenly.

I cannot describe the gleeful astonishment with which I discovered that Thackeray was even aware of our own excellent Mrs. Sigourney, whose house in Hartford I once inhabited (et nos in Arcadia). The passage is in “Blue-Beard’s Ghost.” “As Mrs. Sigourney sweetly sings:—

“ ‘O the heart is a soft and delicate thing,

O the heart is a lute with a thrilling string,

A spirit that floats on a gossamer’s wing.’

Such was Fatima’s heart.” Do not try to find these lines in Mrs. Sigourney’s complete poems: they are not there. Thackeray’s humor always had this satirical edge to it. Look at any engraving of the bust by Deville (the replica of which is in the National Portrait Gallery), which was taken when its subject was fourteen years old. There is a quizzical look about the mouth, prophetic and unmistakable. That boy is a tease: I would not like to be his little sister. And this boyish sense of fun never deserted the mature Thackeray. I like to turn sometimes from his big novels, to those delightful “Roundabout Papers” and the like where he gives a free rein to his frolic: “Memorials of Gormandizing,” the “Ballads of Policeman X,” “Mrs. Perkins’ Ball,” where the Mulligan of Ballymulligan, disdaining the waltz step of the Saxon, whoops around the room with his terrified partner in one of the dances of his own green land. Or that paper which describes how the author took the children to the zoölogical gardens, and how

First he saw the white bear, then he saw the black,

Then he saw the camel with a hump upon his back.

Chorus of Children:

Then he saw the camel with the HUMP upon his back.

Of course in all comic art there is a touch of caricature, i.e., of exaggeration. The Rev. Charles Honeyman in “The Newcomes,” e.g., has been denounced as a caricature. But compare him with any of Dickens’s clerical characters, such as Stiggins or Chadband, and say which is the fine art and which the coarse. And this brings me to the first of those particulars in which we do not view Thackeray quite as his contemporaries viewed him. In his own time he was regarded as the greatest of English realists. “I have no head above my eyes,” he said. “I describe what I see.” It is thus that Anthony Trollope regarded him, whose life of Thackeray was published in 1879. And of his dialogue, in special, Trollope writes, “The ear is never wounded by a tone that is false.” It is not quite the same to-day. Zola and the roman naturaliste of the French and Russian novelists have accustomed us to forms of realism so much more drastic that Thackeray’s realism seems, by comparison, reticent and partial. Not that he tells falsehoods, but that he does not and will not tell the whole truth. He was quite conscious, himself, of the limits which convention and propriety imposed upon him and he submitted to them willingly. “Since the author of ‘Tom Jones’ was buried,” he wrote, “no writer of fiction has been permitted to depict, to his utmost power, a Man.” Thackeray’s latest biographer, Mr. Whibley, notes in him certain early Victorian prejudices. He wanted to hang a curtain over Etty’s nudities. Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” scandalized him. He found the drama of Victor Hugo and Dumas “profoundly immoral and absurd”; and had no use for Balzac, his own closest parallel in French fiction. Mr. G. B. Shaw, the blasphemer of Shakespeare, speaks of Thackeray’s “enslaved mind,” yet admits that he tells the truth in spite of himself. “He exhausts all his feeble pathos in trying to make you sorry for the death of Col. Newcome, imploring you to regard him as a noble-hearted gentleman, instead of an insufferable old fool . . . but he gives you the facts about him faithfully.” But the denial of Thackeray’s realism goes farther than this and attacks in some instances the truthfulness of his character portrayal. Thus Mr. Whibley, who acknowledges, in general, that Thackeray was “a true naturalist,” finds that the personages in several of his novels are “drawn in varying planes.” Charles Honeyman and Fred Bayham, e.g., are frank caricatures; Helen and Laura Pendennis, and “Stunning” Warrington are somewhat unreal; Colonel Newcome is overdrawn—“the travesty of a man”; and even Beatrix Esmond, whom Mr. Brownell pronounces her creator’s masterpiece, is a “picturesque apparition rather than a real woman.” And finally comes Mr. Howells and affirms that Thackeray is no realist but a caricaturist: Jane Austen and Trollope are the true realists.

Well, let it be granted that Thackeray is imperfectly realistic. I am not concerned to defend him. Nor shall I enter into this wearisome discussion of what realism is or is not, further than to say that I don’t believe the thing exists; that is, I don’t believe that photographic fiction—the “mirror up to nature” fiction—exists or can exist. A mirror reflects, a photograph reproduces its object without selection or rejection. Does any artist do this? Try to write the history of one day: everything—literally everything—that you have done, said, thought: and everything that you have seen done, or heard said during twenty-four hours. That would be realism, but, suppose it possible, what kind of reading would it make? The artist must select, reject, combine, and he does it differently from every other artist: he mixes his personality with his art, colors his art with it. The point of view from which he works is personal to himself: satire is a point of view, humor is a point of view, so is religion, so is morality, so is optimism or pessimism, or any philosophy, temper, or mood. In speaking of the great Russians Mr. Howells praises their “transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist’s personality should be in a portrait.” This seems to me true; though it was said long ago, the style is the man. Yet if this transparency, this impersonality is measurably attainable in the style, it is not so in the substance of the novel. If an impersonal report of life is the ideal of naturalistic or realistic fiction—and I don’t say it is—then it is an impossible ideal. People are saying now that Zola is a romantic writer. Why? Because, however well documented, his facts are selected to make a particular impression. I suppose the reason why Thackeray’s work seemed so much more realistic to his generation than it does to ours was that his particular point of view was that of the satirist, and his satire was largely directed to the exposure of cant, humbug, affectation, and other forms of unreality. Disillusion was his trade. He had no heroes, and he saw all things in their unheroic and unromantic aspect. You all know his famous caricature of Ludovicus Rex inside and outside of his court clothes: a most majestic, bewigged and beruffled grand monarque: and then a spindle-shanked, pot-bellied, bald little man—a good illustration for a chapter in “Sartor Resartus.” The ship in which Thackeray was sent home from India, a boy of six, touched at St. Helena and he saw Napoleon. He always remembered him as a little fat man in a suit of white duck and a palm-leaf hat.