INDOOR 
 STUDIES 
 
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INDOOR STUDIES 
 
 JOHN BURROUGHS 
 
 AUTHOR OF " WAKE ROBIN,' 
 " FRESH FIELDS," 
 
 "WINTER SUNSHINE," " BIRDS AND POETS, 
 SIGNS AND SEASONS," ETC., ETC. 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
Copyright, 1889, 
 Br JOHN BURROUGHS. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 /j. ■■■?// 3 y 
 
 
 \*\ 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., V. S. A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Houghton & Company. 
 

 CONTENTS. 
 
 .3' 
 
 — « — 
 
 Page 
 Henry D. Thoreau 1 
 
 Science and Literature ..... 43 
 
 Science and the Poets 67 
 
 Matthew Arnold's Criticism .... 79 
 
 Arnold's View of Emerson and Carlyle . . 128*- — — 
 
 Gilbert White's Book 162 
 
 A Malformed Giant 177 
 
 Brief Essays : 
 
 The Biologist's Tree of Life .... 190 
 
 Dr. Johnson and Carlyle ..... 195 
 
 Little Spoons vs. Big Spoons .... 203=^-" 
 
 The Ethics of War 208 <— ~ 
 
 Solitude 214 » 
 
 An Open Door 222 
 
 The True Realism 231s— -^ 
 
 Literary Fame 236 *- 
 
 An Egotistical Chapter 240 l — "— 
 
INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 HENRY D. THOREAU. 
 
 In " Walden " Thoreau enumerates,, in a serio-hu- 
 morous vein, his various unpaid occupations, such as 
 inspector of storms, surveyor of forest-paths and all 
 across-lot routes, shepherd and herder to the wild 
 stock of the town, etc., etc. Among the rest he says : 
 " For a long time I was reporter to a journal of no 
 very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen 
 fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too 
 common with writers, I got only my labor for my 
 pains. However, in this case my pains were their 
 own reward." The journal to which Thoreau so play- 
 fully alludes, consisting of many manuscript volumes, 
 is now the property of Mr. H. G. O. Blake, an old 
 friend and correspond snt of his, and his rejected con- 
 tributions to it, after a delay of nearly twenty years, 
 are being put into print. " Early Spring in Massachu- 
 setts," " Summer," and " Winter," lately published, 
 are made up of excerpts from this journal. A few of 
 the passages in the former have been in print before ; 
 I notice one in the " Week," one or more in his dis- 
 
Z INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 course on " Walking, or the Wild," and one in the 
 essay called " Life without Principle." 
 
 Thoreau published but two volumes in his life-time, 
 
 — "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers " 
 
 — which, by the way, is mainly a record of other 
 and much longer voyages upon other and less tangible 
 rivers than those named in the title — and " Walden, 
 or Life in the Woods." The other six volumes of his 
 works, including Mr. Blake's, have been collected and 
 published since his death. 
 
 Of Thoreau's journal as published by Mr. Blake I 
 think it may be said that a good deal of it is evi- 
 dently experimental with the author. There is often 
 an attempt to make something out of nothing by the 
 mere force of words. He squeezes his subject as in 
 a vice ; we feel the effort he makes, but the result is 
 often not worth the labor ; the precious drop he is 
 after is not forthcoming. In fact, his journal is 
 largely the record of a search for something he never 
 fully finds ; any fact of natural history, or botany, or 
 geology which he does find is only incidental ; he 
 turns it over curiously, remarks upon it, and passes 
 on in his chase of the unattainable. Yet there is 
 most excellent and characteristic matter in his jour- 
 nal, and many valuable and interesting natural his- 
 tory notes. When he wrote a book, or a lecture, or 
 an essay, we are told, he went to his journal for the 
 greater share of his material. He revised, and cor- 
 rected, and supplemented his record from day to day 
 and from year to year, till it often reflects truly his 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 3 
 
 life and mind. He was a man so thoroughly devoted 
 to principle and to his own aims in life that he seems 
 never to have allowed himself one indifferent or care- 
 less moment. He was always making the highest 
 demands upon himself and upon others. 
 
 In his private letters his bow is strung just as taut 
 as in his printed works, and he uses arrows from the 
 same quiver, and sends them just as high and far as 
 he can. In his journal it appears to be the same. 
 
 Thoreau's fame has steadily increased since his 
 death, in 1862, as it was bound to do. It was little 
 more than in the bud at that time, and its full leaf 
 and flowering are not yet, perhaps not in many years 
 yet. He improves with age ; in fact, requires age to 
 take off a little of his asperity and fully ripen him. 
 The generation he lectured so sharply will not give 
 the same heed to his words as will the next and the 
 next. The first effect of the reading of his books, 
 upon many minds, is irritation and disapproval ; the 
 perception of their beauty and wisdom comes later. 
 He makes short work of our prejudices ; he likes the 
 wind in his teeth, and to put it in the teeth of his 
 reader. He was a man devoid of compassion, devoid 
 of sympathy, devoid of generosity, devoid of patriot- 
 ism, as these words are usually understood, yet his 
 life showed a devotion to principle such as one life in 
 millions does not show ; and matching this there runs 
 through his works a vein of the purest and rarest 
 poetry and the finest wisdom. For both these reasons 
 time will enhance rather than lessen the value of his 
 
INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 contributions. The world likes a good hater and re- 
 fuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and ac- 
 ceptor, only it likes him farther off. 
 
 In writing of Thoreau, I am not conscious of having 
 any criticism to make of him. I would fain accept 
 him just as he was, and make the most of him, defin- 
 ing and discriminating him as I would a flower or a 
 bird or any other product of nature — perhaps exag- 
 gerating some features the better to bring them out. 
 There were greater men among his contemporaries, 
 but I doubt if there were any more genuine and sin- 
 cere, or more devoted to ideal ends. If he was not 
 this, that, or the other great man, he was Thoreau, 
 and he fills his own niche well, and has left a positive 
 and distinct impression upon the literature of his 
 country. He did his work thoroughly ; he touched 
 bottom ; he made the most of his life. He said : " I 
 would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a 
 nail into mere lath and plastering ; " he would beat 
 about with his hammer till he found the studding, 
 and no one can study his life and books and not feel 
 that he really drove his nail home into good solid 
 timber. He was, perhaps, a little too near his friend 
 and master, Emerson, and brought too directly under 
 his influence. If he had lived farther from him, he 
 would have felt his attraction less. But he was just 
 as positive a fact as Emerson. The contour of his 
 moral nature was just as firm and resisting. He was 
 no more a soft-shelled egg, to be dented by every 
 straw in the nest, than was his distinguished neighbor. 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 5 
 
 An English reviewer has summed up his estimate 
 of Thoreau by calling him a " skulker," which is the 
 pith of Dr. Johnson's smart epigram about Cowley, 
 a man in whom Thoreau is distinctly foreshadowed, 
 " If his activity was virtue, his retreat was cowardice." 
 Thoreau was a skulker if it appears that he ran away 
 from a noble part to perform an ignoble, or one less 
 noble. The world has a right to the best there is in 
 a man, both in word and deed : from the scholar, 
 knowledge ; from the soldier, courage ; from the 
 statesman, wisdom ; from the farmer, good husbandry, 
 etc. ; and from all, virtue ; but has it a right to say 
 arbitrarily who shall be soldiers and who poets ? Is 
 there no virtue but virtue ? no religion but in the 
 creeds ? no salt but what is crystallized ? Who shall 
 presume to say the world did not get the best there 
 was in Thoreau — high and much needed service 
 from him ? — albeit there appear in the account more 
 kicks than compliments. Would you have had him 
 stick to his lead-pencils, or to school-teaching, and let 
 Walden Pond and the rest go ? We should have 
 lost some of the raciest and most antiseptic books in 
 English literature, and an example of devotion to 
 principle that provokes and stimulates like a winter 
 morning. I am not aware that Thoreau shirked any 
 responsibility or dodged any duty proper to him, and 
 he could look the world as square in the face as any 
 man that ever lived. 
 
 The people of his native town remember at least 
 one notable occasion on which Thoreau did not skulk, 
 
b INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 nor sulk either. I refer to the 30th of October, 1859, 
 when he made his plea for Captain John Brown, 
 while the hero was on trial in Virginia. It was pro- 
 posed to stop Thoreau's mouth, persuade him to keep 
 still and lie low, but he was not to be stopped. He 
 thought there were enough lying low — the ranks 
 were all full there, the ground was covered ; and in 
 an address delivered in Concord he glorified the old 
 hero in words that at this day and in the light of sub- 
 sequent events it thrills the blood to read. This in- 
 stant and unequivocal indorsement of Brown by Tho- 
 reau, in the face of the most overwhelming public 
 opinion even among antislavery men, throws a flood 
 of light upon him. It is the most significant act of 
 his life. It clinches him ; it makes the colors fast. 
 We know he means what he says after that. It is 
 of the same metal and has the same ring as Brown's 
 act itself. It shows what thoughts he had fed his 
 soul on, what school he had schooled himself in, what 
 his devotion to the ideal meant. His hatred of slav- 
 ery and injustice, and of the government that toler- 
 ated them, was pure, and it went clean through ; it 
 stopped at nothing. Iniquitous laws must be defied, 
 and there is no previous question. " The fact that 
 the politician fears," he says, referring to the repeal 
 of the Fugitive Slave Law, " is merely that there is 
 less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not 
 the fact that they are thieves." For the most part, 
 Thoreau's political tracts and addresses seem a little 
 petulant and willful, and fall just short of enlisting 
 
HENKY D. THOREAU. / 
 
 one's sympathies, and his carrying his opposition to 
 the State to the point of allowing himself to be put in 
 jail rather than pay a paltry tax, savors a little bit of 
 the grotesque and the melodramatic. But his plea 
 for John Brown when the whole country was disown- 
 ing him, abolitionists and all, fully satisfies one's 
 sense of the fitness of things. It does not overshoot 
 the mark. The mark was high, and the attitude of 
 the speaker was high and scornful, and uncompro- 
 mising in the extreme. It was just the occasion re- 
 quired to show Thoreau's metal. " If this man's acts 
 and words do not create a revival, it will be the 
 severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. 
 It is the best news that America has ever heard." 
 " Think of him — of his rare qualities ! — such a man 
 as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand ; no 
 mock hero, nor the representative of any party. A 
 man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this 
 benighted land. To whose making went the costliest 
 material, the finest adamant ; sent to be the redeemer 
 of those in captivity ; and the only use to which you 
 can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope ! " 
 " Do yourselves the honor to recognize him ; he 
 needs none of your respect." It was just such radical 
 qualities as John Brown exhibited, or their analogue 
 and counterpart in other fields, that Thoreau coveted 
 and pursued through life ; in man, devotion to the 
 severest ideal, friendship founded upon antagonism, 
 or hate, as he preferred to call it ; in nature the un- 
 tamed and untamable, even verging on the savage and 
 
8 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 pitiless ; in literature the heroic — " books, not which 
 afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each 
 thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man 
 cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained 
 by." Indeed Thoreau was Brown's spiritual brother, 
 the last and finer flowering of the same plant — the 
 seed flowering ; he was just as much of a zealot, was 
 just as gritty and unflinching in his way ; a man 
 whose brow was set, whose mind was made up, and 
 leading just as forlorn a hope, and as little quailed 
 by the odds. 
 
 In the great army of Mammon, the great army of 
 the fashionable, the complacent and church-going, 
 Thoreau was a skulker, even a deserter, if you please 
 — yea, a traitor fighting on the other side. 
 
 Emerson regrets the loss to the world of his rare 
 powers of action, and thinks that, instead of being 
 the captain of a huckleberry-party, he might have en- 
 gineered for all America. But Thoreau, doubtless, 
 knew himself better when he said, with his usual 
 strength of metaphor, that he was as unfit for the 
 coarse uses of this world as gossamer for ship-timber. 
 A man who believes that " life should be lived as ten- 
 derly and daintily as one would pluck a flower," and 
 actually and seriously aims to live his life so, is not a 
 man to engineer for all America. If you want a 
 columbiad you must have tons and tons of gross metal, 
 and if you want an engineer for all America, leader 
 and wielder of vast masses of men, you must have a 
 certain breadth and coarseness of fibre in your hero ; 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 9 
 
 but if you want a trenchant blade like Thoreau, you 
 must leave the pot-metal out and look for something 
 bluer and finer. 
 
 Thoreau makes a frank confession upon this very 
 point in his journal, written when he was but twenty- 
 five. " I must confess I have felt mean enough when 
 asked how I was to act on society, what errand I had 
 to mankind. Undoubtedly I did not feel mean with- 
 out a reason, and yet my loitering is not without a 
 defense. I would fain communicate the wealth of 
 my life to men, would really give them what is most 
 precious in my gift. I would secrete pearls with the 
 shell-fish, and lay up honey with the bees for them. 
 I will sift the sunbeams for the public good. I know 
 no riches I would keep back." And his subsequent 
 life made good these words. He gave the world the 
 strongest and bravest there was in him, the pearls of 
 his life, — not a fat oyster, not a reputation unctuous 
 with benevolence and easy good-will, but a character 
 crisp and pearl-like, full of hard, severe words, and 
 stimulating taunts and demands. Thoreau was an 
 extreme product, an extreme type of mind and char- 
 acter, and was naturally more or less isolated from 
 his surroundings. He planted himself far beyond 
 the coast-line that bounds most lives, and seems in- 
 sular and solitary, but he believed he had the granite 
 floor of principle beneath him, and without the cus- 
 tomary intervening clay or quicksands. 
 
 Of a profile we say the outlines are strong, or they 
 are weak and broken. The outlines of Thoreau's 
 
10 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 moral nature are strong and noble, but the direct 
 face-to-face expression of his character is not always 
 pleasing, not always human. He appears best in pro- 
 file, when looking away from you and not toward you 
 — when looking at Nature and not at man. He com- 
 bined a remarkable strength of will with a nature 
 singularly sensitive and delicate — the most fair 
 and fragile of wood-flowers on an iron stem. With 
 more freedom and flexibility of character, greater 
 capacity for self-surrender and self-abandonment, 
 he would have been a great poet. But his prin- 
 cipal aim in life was moral and intellectual, rather 
 than artistic. He was an ascetic before he was a 
 poet, and he cuts the deepest in the direction of char- 
 acter and conduct. He had no caution or prudence 
 in the ordinary sense, no worldly temporizing quali- 
 ties of any kind, was impatient of the dross and alloy 
 of life — would have it pure flame, pure purpose and 
 aspiration ; and, so far as he could make it, his life 
 was so. He was, by nature, of the Opposition ; he 
 had a constitutional No in him that could not be tor- 
 tured into Yes. He was of the stuff that saints and 
 martyrs and devotees, or, if you please, fanatics are 
 made of, and, no doubt, in an earlier age, would have 
 faced the rack or the stake with perfect composure. 
 Such a man was bound to make an impression by con- 
 trast, if not by comparison, with the men of his coun- 
 try and time. He is, for the most part, a figure going 
 the other way from that of the eager, money-getting, 
 ambitious crowd, and he questions and admonishes 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 11 
 
 and ridicules the passers-by sharply. We all see him 
 and remember him, and feel his shafts. Especially 
 was his attitude upon all social and political questions 
 scornful and exasperating. His devotion to principle, 
 to the ideal, was absolute ; it was like that of the 
 Hindu to his idol. If it devoured him or crushed 
 him — what business was that of his ? There was no 
 conceivable failure in adherence to principle. 
 
 Thoreau was, probably, the wildest civilized man 
 this country has produced, adding- to the shyness of 
 the hermit and woodsman the wildness of the poet, 
 and to the wildness of the poet the greater ferity 
 and elusiveness of the mystic. An extreme product 
 of civilization and of modern culture, he was yet as 
 untouched by the worldly and commercial spirit 
 of his age and country as any red man that ever 
 haunted the shores of his native stream. He put 
 the whole of Nature between himself and his fel- 
 lows. A man of the strongest local attachments — 
 not the least nomadic, seldom wandering beyond his 
 native township, yet his spirit was as restless and as 
 impatient of restraint as any nomad or Tartar that 
 ever lived. He cultivated an extreme wildness, not 
 only in his pursuits and tastes, but in his hopes and 
 imaginings. He says to his friend, " Hold fast your 
 most indefinite waking dream." Emerson says his 
 life was an attempt to pluck the Swiss edelweiss from 
 the all but inaccessible cliffs. The higher and the 
 wilder, the more the fascination for him. Indeed, 
 the loon, the moose, the beaver were but faint types 
 
12 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 and symbols of the wilclness he coveted and would 
 have reappear in his life and books ; — not the cos- 
 mical, the universal — he was not great enough for 
 that — but simply the wild as distinguished from the 
 domestic and the familiar, the remote and the surpris- 
 ing as contrasted with the hackneyed and the com- 
 monplace, arrow-heads as distinguished from whet- 
 stones or jack-knives. 
 
 Thoreau was French on one side and Puritan on 
 the other. It was probably the wild, untamable 
 French core in him — a dash of the gray wolf that 
 stalks through his ancestral folk-lore, as in Audubon 
 and the Canadian voyageurs — that made him turn 
 with such zest and such genius to aboriginal nature ; 
 and it was the Puritan element in him — strong, grim, 
 uncompromising, almost heartless — that held him to 
 such high, austere, moral, and ideal ends. His genius 
 was Saxon in its homeliness and sincerity, in its di- 
 rectness and scorn of rhetoric, but that wild revolu- 
 tionary cry of his, and that sort of restrained ferocity 
 and hirsuteness, are more French. He said in one of 
 his letters, when he was but twenty-four : " I grow 
 savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw 
 meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untam- 
 ableness." But his savageness took a mild form. He 
 could not even eat meat ; it was unclean and offended 
 his imagination, and when he went to Maine he felt 
 for weeks that his nature had been made the coarser 
 because he had witnessed the killing of a moose. His 
 boasted savageness, the gray wolf in him, only gave 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 13 
 
 a more decided grit or grain to his mental and moral 
 nature, — made him shut his teeth the more firmly, 
 sometimes even with an audible snap and growl, upon 
 the poor lambs and ewes and superannuated wethers 
 of the social, religious, political folds. 
 
 In his moral and intellectual growth and experi- 
 ence, Thoreau seems to have reacted strongly from a 
 marked tendency to invalidism in his own body. He 
 would be well in spirit at all hazards. What was 
 this never-ending search of his for the wild but a 
 search for health, for something tonic and antiseptic 
 in nature ? Health, health, give me health, is his 
 cry. He went forth into nature as the boys go to 
 the fields and woods in spring after wintergreens, 
 black-birch, crinkle-root, and sweet-flag; he had an 
 unappeasable hunger for the pungent, the aromatic, 
 the bitter-sweet, for the very rind and salt of the 
 globe. He fairly gnaws the ground and the trees in 
 his walk, so craving is his appetite for the wild. He 
 went to Walden to study, but it was as a deer goes to 
 a deer-lick ; the brine he was after did abound there. 
 Any trait of wildness and freedom suddenly breaking 
 out in any of the domestic animals, as when your cow 
 leaped your fence like a deer and ate up your corn, 
 or your horse forgot that he was not a mustang on 
 the plains, and took the bit in his moutb, and left 
 your buggy and family behind high and dry, etc., 
 was eagerly snapped up by him. Ah, you have not 
 tamed them, you have not broken them yet ! He 
 makes a most charming entry in his journal about a 
 
14 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 little boy he one day saw in the street, with a home- 
 made cap on his head made of a woodchuck's skin. 
 He seized upon it as a horse with the crib-bite seizes 
 upon a post. It tasted good to him. 
 
 " The great gray-tipped hairs were all preserved 
 and stood out above the brown ones, only a little more 
 loosely than in life. It was as if he had put his head 
 into the belly of a woodchuck, having cut off his tail 
 and legs, and substituted a visor for the head. The 
 little fellow wore it innocently enough, not knowing 
 what he had on forsooth, going about his small busi- 
 ness pit-a-pat, and his black eyes sparkled beneath it 
 when I remarked on its warmth, even as the wood- 
 chuck's might have done. Such should be the his- 
 tory of every piece of clothing that we wear." 
 
 He says how rarely are we encouraged by the sight 
 of simple actions in the street, but when one day he 
 saw an Irishman wheeling home from far a large, 
 damp, and rotten pine log for fuel, he felt encour- 
 aged. That looked like fuel ; it warmed him to 
 think of it. The piles of solid oak-wood which he 
 saw in other yards did not interest him at all in com- 
 parison. It savored of the wild, and though water- 
 soaked, his fancy kindled at the sight. 
 
 He loved wild men, not tame ones. Any half-wild 
 Irishman, or fisherman, or hunter in his neighborhood 
 he was sure to get a taste of sooner or later. He 
 seems to have had a hankering for the Indian all his 
 life ; could eat him raw, one would think. In fact. 
 he did try him when he went to Maine, and sue- 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 15 
 
 ceeded in extracting more nutriment out of him than 
 any other man has done. He found him rather 
 tough diet, and was, probably, a little disappointed in 
 him, but he got something out of him akin to that 
 which the red squirrel gets out of a pine-cone. In 
 his books he casts many a longing and envious glance 
 upon the Indian. Some old Concord sachem seems 
 to have looked into his fount of life and left his image 
 there. His annual spring search for arrow-heads was 
 the visible outcropping of this aboriginal trace. How 
 he prized these relics ! One is surprised to see how 
 much he gets out of them. They become arrow-root 
 instead of arrow-stones. " They are sown, like a 
 grain that is slow to germinate, broadcast over the 
 earth. As the dragon's teeth bore a crop of soldiers, 
 so these bear a crop of philosophers and poets, and 
 the same seed is just as good to plant again. It is a 
 stone-fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come 
 nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones." 
 " When I see these signs I know that the subtle spir- 
 its that made them are not far off, into whatever form 
 transmuted." (Journal, pages 257, 258.) Our poetry, 
 he said, was white man's poetry, and he longed to 
 hear what the Indian muse had to say. I think he 
 liked the Indian's paint and feathers. Certainly he 
 did his skins, and the claws and hooked beaks with 
 which he adorned himself. He puts a threatening 
 claw or beak into his paragraphs whenever he can, 
 and feathers his shafts with the nicest art. 
 
 So wild a man and such a lover o£ the wild, and 
 
16 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 yet it does not appear that he ever sowed any wild 
 oats. Though he somewhere exclaims impatiently : 
 " What demon possesses me that I behave so well ? " 
 he took it all out in transcendentalism and arrow- 
 heads. His only escapades were eloping with a 
 mountain or coquetting with Walden Pond ! He 
 sees a water-bug, and at once exclaims, " Ah ! if I 
 had no more sins to answer for than a water-bug ! " 
 Had he any more ? His weakness was that he had 
 no weakness — it was only unkindness. He had a 
 deeper centre-board than most men, and he carried 
 less sail. The passions and emotions and ambitions 
 of his fellows, which are sails that so often need to be 
 close-reefed and double-reefed, he was quite free 
 from. Thoreau's isolation, his avoidance of the world, 
 was in self-defense, no doubt. His genius would not 
 bear the contact of rough hands any more than would 
 butterflies' wings. He says, in " Walden : " " The 
 finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, 
 can be preserved only by the most delicate handling." 
 This bloom, this natural innocence, Thoreau was very 
 jealous of and sought to keep unimpaired, and, per- 
 haps, succeeded as few men ever have. He says you 
 cannot even know evil without being a particeps 
 criminis. He did not so much regret the condition 
 of things in this country (in 1861) as that he had 
 ever heard of it. 
 
 Yet Thoreau creates as much consternation among 
 the saints as among the sinners. His delicacy and 
 fineness were saved by a kind of cross-grain there was 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 17 
 
 in him — a natural twist and stubbornness of fibre. 
 He was not easily reduced to kindling-wood. His 
 self-indulgences were other men's crosses. His atti- 
 tude was always one of resistance and urge. He 
 hated sloth and indolence and compliance as he hated 
 rust. He thought nothing was so much to be feared 
 as fear, and that atheism might, comparatively, be 
 popular with God himself. Beware even the luxury 
 of affection, he says — " There must be some nerve 
 and heroism in our love, as in a winter morning." 
 He tells his correspondent to make his failure tragical 
 by the earnestness and steadfastness of his endeavor, 
 and then it will not differ from success. His saint- 
 liness is a rock-crystal. He says in " Walden : " 
 " Probably I should not consciously and deliberately 
 forsake my particular calling to do the good which 
 society demands of me, to save the universe from 
 annihilation ; and I believe that a like but infinitely 
 greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now pre- 
 serves it." Is this crystal a diamond ? What will it 
 not cut? 
 
 There is no grain of concession or compromise in 
 this man. He asks no odds and he pays no boot. 
 He will have his way, but his way is not down the 
 stream with the current. He loves to warp up it 
 against wind and tide, holding fast by his anchor at 
 night. When he is chagrined or disgusted, it con- 
 vinces him his health is better — that there is some 
 vitality left. It is not compliments his friends get 
 from him — rather taunts. The caress of the hand 
 
18 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 may be good, but the sting of its palm is good also. 
 No is more bracing and tonic than Yes. He said : 
 " I love to go through a patch of scrub-oaks in a 
 bee-line — where you tear your clothes and put your 
 eyes out." The spirit of antagonism never sleeps 
 with Thoreau, and the love of paradox is one of his 
 guiding stars. " The longer I have forgotten you, 
 the more I remember you," he says to his correspond- 
 ent. " My friend is cold and reserved, because his 
 love for me is waxing and not waning," he says in 
 his journal. The difficult and the disagreeable are 
 in the line of his self-indulgence. Even lightning 
 will choose the easiest way out of the house — an 
 open window or door. Thoreau would rather go 
 through the solid wall, or mine out through the cellar. 
 When he is sad, his only regret is that he is not 
 sadder. He says if his sadness was only sadder it 
 would make him happier. In writing to his friend, 
 he says it is not sad to him to hear she has sad 
 hours : " I rather rejoice in the richness of your ex- 
 perience." In one of his letters, he charges his cor- 
 respondent to " improve every opportunity to be mel- 
 ancholy," and accuses himself of being too easily 
 contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. 
 " My happiness is a good deal like that of the wood- 
 chucks." He says that " of acute sorrow I suppose 
 that I know comparatively little. My saddest and 
 most genuine sorrows are apt to be but transient re- 
 grets." Yet he had not long before lost by death his 
 brother John, with whom he made his voyage on 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 19 
 
 the Concord and Merrimack. Referring to John's 
 death, he said : " I find these things more strange 
 than sad to me. What right have I to grieve who 
 have not ceased to wonder ? " and says in effect, af- 
 terward, that any pure grief is its own reward. John, 
 he said, he did not wish ever to see again — not the 
 John that was dead (O Henry! Henry!), John as 
 he was in the flesh, but the ideal, the nobler John, 
 of whom the real was the imperfect representative. 
 When the son of his friend died, he wasted no human 
 regrets. It seemed very natural and proper that he 
 should die. " Do not the flowers die every autumn ? " 
 " His fine organization demanded it [death], and na- 
 ture gently yielded its request. It would have been 
 strange if he had lived." 
 
 Thoreau was either destitute of pity and love (in 
 the human sense), and of many other traits that are 
 thought to be both human and divine, or else he stu- 
 diously suppressed them and thought them unworthy 
 of him. He writes and talks a great deal about love 
 and friendship, and often with singular beauty and 
 appreciation, yet he always says to his friend : 
 " Stand off — keep away ! Let there be an unfath- 
 omable gulf between us — let there be a wholesome 
 hate." Indeed, love and hatred seem inseparable in 
 his mind, and curiously identical. He writes in his 
 journal that "words should pass between Mends as 
 the lightning passes from cloud to cloud." One of 
 his poems begins : — 
 
20 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 ' ' Let such pure hate still underprop 
 Our love, that we may he 
 Each other's conscience, 
 And have our sympathy 
 Mainly from thence. 
 
 ' ' Surely, surely, thou wilt trust me 
 When I say thou dost disgust me. 
 Oh, I hate thee with a hate 
 That would fain annihilate ; 
 Yet, sometimes, against my will, 
 My dear friend, I love thee still. 
 It were treason to our love, 
 And a sin to God ahove, 
 One iota to ahate 
 Of a pure, impartial hate." 
 
 This is the salt with which he seasons and pre- 
 serves his love — hatred. In this pickle it will keep. 
 Without it, it would become stale and vulgar. This 
 is characteristic of Thoreau ; he must put in something 
 sharp and bitter. You shall not have the nut with- 
 out its bitter acrid rind or prickly sheath. 
 
 As a man, Thoreau appears to have been what is 
 called a crusty person — a loaf Avith a hard bake, a 
 good deal of crust, forbidding to tender gums, but 
 sweet to those who had good teeth and unction enough 
 to soften him. He says he did not wish to take a 
 cabin passage in life, " but rather to go before the 
 mast and on the deck of the world." 
 
 He was no fair-weather walker. He delighted in 
 storms, and in frost and cold. They were congenial 
 to him. They came home. " Yesterday's rain," he 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 21 
 
 begins an entry in his journal, " in which I was glad 
 to be drenched," etc. Again he says : " I sometimes 
 feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a 
 three weeks' storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to 
 my system." Another time : " A long, soaking rain, 
 the drops trickling down the stubble, while I lay 
 drenched on a last year's bed of wild oats, by the 
 side of some bare hill, ruminating." And this in 
 March, too ! He says " to get the value of a storm we 
 must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that 
 it may fairly penetrate our skin," etc. He rejoices 
 greatly when, on an expedition to Monadnock, he gets 
 soaked with rain and is made thoroughly uncomforta- 
 ble. It tastes good. It made him appreciate a roof 
 and a fire. The mountain gods were especially kind 
 and thoughtful to get up the storm. When they saw 
 himself and friend coming, they said : " There come 
 two of our folks. Let us get ready for them — get 
 up a serious storm that will send a -packing these 
 holiday guests. Let us receive them with true moun- 
 tain hospitality — kill the fatted cloud." In his jour- 
 nal he says : "If the weather is thick and stormy 
 enough, if there is a good chance to be cold, and wet, 
 and uncomfortable — in other words, to feel weather- 
 beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage, 
 thus browsing along the edge of some near wood, 
 which would scarcely detain you at all in fair 
 weather." " There is no better fence to put between 
 you and the village than a storm into which the vil- 
 lagers do not venture forth." This passion for storms 
 
22 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 and these many drenchings no doubt helped shorten 
 Thoreau's days. 
 
 This crustiness, this playful and "willful perversity 
 of Thoreau, is one source of his charm as a writer. 
 It stands him in stead of other qualities — of real 
 unction and heartiness — is, perhaps, these qualities 
 in a more seedy and desiccated state. Hearty, in the 
 fullest sense, he was not, and unctuous he was not, 
 yet it is only by comparison that we miss these quali- 
 ties from his writings. Perhaps he would say that 
 we should not expect the milk on the outside of the 
 cocoanut, but I suspect there is an actual absence of 
 milk here, though there is sweet meat, and a good, 
 hard shell to protect it. Good-nature and conciliation 
 were not among his accomplishments, and yet he puts 
 his reader in a genial and happy frame of mind. He 
 is the occasion of unction and heartiness in others, if 
 he has not them in himself. He says of himself, with 
 great penetration : " My only integral experience is 
 in my vision. I see, perchance, with more integrity 
 than I feel." His sympathies lead you into narrow 
 quarters, but his vision takes you to the hill-tojDS. As 
 regards humanity and all that goes with it, he was 
 like an inverted cone, and grew broader and broader 
 the farther he got from it. He approached things, 
 or even men, but very little through his humanity or 
 his manliness. How delightful his account of the 
 Canadian wood-chopper in " Walden," and yet he 
 sees him afar off, across an impassable gulf ! — he is 
 a kind of Homeric or Paphlagonian man to him. 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 23 
 
 Very likely he would not have seen him at all had it 
 not been for the classic models and ideals with which 
 his mind was filled, and which saw for him. 
 
 Yet Thoreau doubtless liked the flavor of strong, 
 racy men. He said he was naturally no hermit, but 
 ready enough to fasten himself, like a blood-sucker 
 for the time, to any full-blooded man that came in 
 his way ; and he gave proof of this when he saw and 
 recognized the new poet, Walt Whitman. Here is 
 the greatest democrat the world has seen, he said, 
 and he found him exhilarating and encouraging, while 
 yet he felt somewhat imposed upon by his heartiness 
 and broad generalities. As a writer, Thoreau shows 
 all he is, and more. Nothing is kept back ; greater 
 men have had • far less power of statement. His 
 thoughts do not merely crop out, but lie upon the 
 surface of his pages. They are fragments ; there is 
 no more than you see. It is not the edge or crown 
 of the native rock, but a drift bowlder. He sees 
 clearly, thinks swiftly, and the sharp emphasis and 
 decision of his mind strew his pages with definite and 
 striking images and ideas. His expression is never 
 sod-bound, and you get its full force at once. 
 
 One of his chief weapons is a kind of restrained 
 extravagance of statement, a compressed exaggeration 
 of metaphor. The hyperbole is big, but it is gritty, 
 and is firmly held. Sometimes it takes the form of 
 paradox, as when he tells his friend that he needs his 
 hate as much as his love : — 
 
24 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 " Indeed, indeed, I cannot tell, 
 Though I ponder on it well, 
 Which were easier to state, 
 All my love or all my hate." 
 
 Or when he says, in " "Walclen : " '-Our manners have 
 been corrupted by communication with the saints," 
 and the like. Sometimes it becomes downright brag, 
 as when he says, emphasizing his own preoccupation 
 and indifference to events : " I would not run around 
 the corner to see the world blow up ; " or again : 
 " Methinks I would hear with indifference if a trust- 
 worthy messenger were to inform me that the sun 
 drowned himself last night." Again it takes an imp- 
 ish ironical form, as when he says : " In heaven I 
 hope to bake my own bread and clean my own linen." 
 Another time it assumes a half-quizzical, half-humor- 
 ous turn, as when he tells one of his correspondents 
 that he was so warmed up in getting his winter's 
 wood that he considered, after he got it housed, 
 whether he should not dispose of it to the ash-man, as 
 if he had extracted all its heat. Often it gives only an 
 added emphasis to his expression, as when he says : 
 " A little thought is sexton to all the world ; " or, 
 " Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as 
 when you find a trout in the milk ; " but its best and 
 most constant office is to act as a kind of fermenting, 
 expanding gas that lightens, if it sometimes inflates, 
 his page. His exaggeration is saved by its wit, its 
 unexpectedness. It gives a wholesome jostle and 
 shock to the mind. 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 25 
 
 Thoreau was not a racy writer, but a trenchant ; 
 not nourishing so much as stimulating ; not convincing, 
 but wholesomely exasperating and arousing, which, in 
 some respects, is better. There is no heat in him, 
 and yet in reading him one understands what he 
 means when he says that, sitting by his stove at night, 
 he sometimes had thoughts that kept the fire warm. 
 I think the mind of his reader always reacts health- 
 fully and vigorously from his most rash and extreme 
 statements. The blood comes to the surface and to 
 the extremities with a bound. He is the best of 
 counter-irritants when he is nothing else. There is 
 nothing to reduce the tone of your moral and intel- 
 lectual systems in Thoreau. Such heat as there is in 
 refrigeration, as he himself might say, — you are 
 always sure of that in his books. 
 
 His literary art, like that of Emerson's, is in the 
 unexpected turn of his sentences. Shakespeare 
 says : — 
 
 "It is the witness still of excellency 
 To put a strange face on his own perfection." 
 
 This " strange face " Thoreau would have at all haz- 
 ards, even if it was a false face. If he could not state 
 a truth he would state a paradox, which, however, is 
 not always a false face. He must make the common- 
 est facts and occurrences wear a strange and unfa- 
 miliar look. The commonplace he would give a new 
 dress, even if he set it masquerading. But the 
 reader is always the gainer by this tendency in him. 
 
26 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 It gives a fresh and novel coloring to what in other 
 writers would prove flat and wearisome. He made 
 the whole world interested in his private experiment 
 at Walden Pond by the strange and, on the whole, 
 beaming face he put upon it. Of course, this is al- 
 ways more or less the art of genius, but it was pre- 
 eminently the art of Thoreau. We are not buoyed 
 up by great power, we do not swim lightly as in deep 
 water, but we are amused and stimulated, and now 
 and then positively electrified. 
 
 To make an extreme statement, and so be sure that 
 he made an emphatic one, that was his aim. Exag- 
 geration is less to be feared than dullness and tame- 
 ness. The far-fetched is good if you fetch it swift 
 enough; you must make its heels crack — jerk it out 
 of its boots, in fact. Cushions are good provided 
 they are well stuck with pins ; you will be sure not to 
 go to sleep in that case. Warm your benumbed 
 hands in the snow ; that is a more wholesome warmth 
 than that of the kitchen stove. This is the way he 
 underscored his teachings. Sometimes he racked his 
 bones to say the unsayable. His mind had a strong 
 gripe, and he often brings a great pressure to bear 
 upon the most vague and subtle problems, or shadows 
 of problems, but he never quite succeeds to my satis- 
 faction in condensing bluing from the air or from the 
 Indian summer haze, any moi'e than he succeeded in 
 extracting health and longevity from water-gruel and 
 rye-meal. 
 
 He knew what an exaggeration he was, and he 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 27 
 
 went about it deliberately. He says to one of his 
 
 correspondents, a Mr. B , whom he seems to have 
 
 delighted to pummel with these huge boxing-gloves : 
 " I trust that you realize what an exaggerator I am, 
 — that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I 
 have an opportunity, — pile Pelion upon Ossa to 
 reach heaven so. Expect no trivial truth from me, 
 unless I am on the witness-stand. I will come as 
 near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four." 
 
 "We have every reason to be thankful that he was 
 not always or commonly on the witness-stand. The 
 record would have been much duller. Eliminate 
 from him all his exaggerations, all his magnifying of 
 the little, all his inflation of bubbles, etc., and you 
 make sad havoc in his pages — as you would, in fact, 
 in any man's. Of course it is one thing to bring the 
 distant near, and thus magnify as does the telescope, 
 and it is quite another thing to inflate a pigmy to the 
 stature of a giant with a gas-pipe. But Thoreau 
 brings the stars as near as any writer I know of, and 
 if he sometimes magnifies a will-o'-the-wisp, too, what 
 matters it ? He had a hard common sense, as well as 
 an uncommon sense, and he knows well when he is 
 conducting you to the brink of one of his astonishing 
 hyperboles, and inviting you to take the leap with 
 him, and what is more, he knows that you know it. 
 Nobody is deceived and the game is well played. 
 Writing to a correspondent who had been doing some 
 big mountain-climbing, he says : — 
 
 "It is after we get home that we really go over 
 
28 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 the mountain if ever. What did the mountain say ? 
 "What did the mountain do ? I keep a mountain 
 anchored off eastward a little way. which I ascend in 
 my dreams, hoth awake and asleep. Its broad base 
 spreads over a village or two, which do not know it ; 
 neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. 
 I can see its general outline as plainly now in my 
 mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the 
 least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go 
 up it when I am light-footed and earnest. I am not 
 aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of 
 it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse." 
 What a saving clause is that last one, and what hu- 
 mor ! 
 
 The bird Thoreau most admired was Chanticleer, 
 crowing from his perch in the morning. He saj's the 
 merit of that strain is its freedom from all plaintive- 
 ness. Unless our philosophy hears the cock-crow in 
 the morning it is belated. " It is an expression of 
 the health and soundness of Nature — a brag for all 
 the world." " Who has not betrayed his Master 
 many times since he last heard that note ? " " The 
 singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but 
 where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy ? 
 When in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness 
 of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or perchance a 
 watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel 
 crow, far or near, I think to myself, ' There is one of 
 us well at any rate,' — and with a sudden gush return 
 to my senses." 
 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 29 
 
 Thoreau pitched his " Walden " in this key ; he 
 claps his wings and gives forth a clear, saucy, cheery, 
 triumphant note — if only to wake his neighbors up. 
 And the book is certainly the most delicious piece of 
 brag in literature. There is nothing else like it ; noth- 
 ing so good, certainly. It is a challenge and a tri- 
 umph, and has a morning freshness and elan. Read 
 the chapter on his " bean-field." One wants to go 
 forthwith and plant a field with beans, and hoe them 
 barefoot. It is a kind of celestial agriculture. " When 
 my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed 
 to the woods and the sky, and was an accompani- 
 ment to my labor which yielded an instant and im- 
 measurable crop. It was no longer beans that I 
 hoed, nor I that hoed beans ; and I remembered with 
 as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my 
 acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the 
 oratorios." " On gala days the town fires its great 
 guns, which echo like pop-guns to these woods, and 
 some waif of martial music occasionally penetrated 
 thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field and 
 the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if 
 a puff-ball had burst ; and when there was a military 
 turn-out of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes 
 had a vague sense all day, — of some sort of itching 
 and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would 
 break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, 
 — until at length some more favorable puff of wind, 
 making haste over the fields and up the Wayland 
 road, brought me information of the ' trainers ! ' " 
 
30 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 What visitors he had, too, in his little hut — what 
 royal company ! — " especially in the morning, when 
 nobody called." " One inconvenience I sometimes 
 experience in so small a house — the difficulty of 
 getting to a sufficient distance from my guest, when 
 we began to utter the big thoughts in big words." 
 " The bullet of your thought must have overcome its 
 lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last 
 and steady course before it reaches the ear of the 
 hearer, else it may plow out again through the side 
 of his head." He bragged that Concord could show 
 him nearly everything worth seeing in the world or 
 in nature, and that he did not need to read Dr. 
 Kane's " Arctic Voyages " for phenomena that he 
 could observe at home. He declined all invitations 
 to go abroad, because he should then lose so much 
 of Concord. As much of Paris, or London, or Berlin 
 as he got, so much of Concord should he lose. He 
 says in his journal : " It would be a wretched bargain 
 to accept the proudest Paris in exchange for my 
 native village." " At best, Paris could only be a 
 school in which to learn to live here — a stepping- 
 stone to Concord, a school in which to fit for this 
 university." " The sight of a marsh-hawk in Con- 
 cord meadows is worth more to me than the entry 
 of the Allies into Paris." This is very Parisian and 
 Victor Hugoish, except for its self-consciousness and 
 the playful twinkle in the author's eye. 
 
 Thoreau had humor, but it had worked a little — 
 it was not quite sweet ; a vinous fermentation had 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 31 
 
 taken place more or less in it. There was too much 
 acid for the sugar. It shows itself especially when 
 he speaks of men. How he disliked the average so- 
 cial and business man, and said his only resource was 
 to get away from them. He was surprised to find 
 what vulgar fellows they were. " They do a little 
 business commonly each day, in order to pay their 
 board, and then they congregate in sitting-rooms, and 
 feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush ; and 
 when I think that they have sufficiently relaxed, and 
 am prepared to see them steal away to their shrines, 
 they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new 
 layer of sloth." Methinks there is a drop of aqua- 
 fortis in this liquor. Generally, however, there is 
 only a pleasant acid or sub-acid flavor to his humor, 
 as when he refers to a certain minister who spoke of 
 God as if he enjoyed a monopoly of the subject ; or 
 when he says of the good church-people that "they 
 show the whites of their eyes on the Sabbath, and the 
 blacks all the rest of the week." He says the greatest 
 bores who visited him in his hut by Walden Pond 
 were the self-styled reformers, who thought that he 
 was forever singing, — 
 
 " This is the house that I built ; 
 That is the man that lives in the house that I built.' ' 
 
 But they did not know that the third line was, — 
 
 " These are the folks that worry the man 
 That lives in the house that I built. 1 ' 
 
 " I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no 
 chickens, but I feared the men-harriers rather." 
 
32 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 What sweet and serious humor in that passage in 
 " Walden " wherein he protests that he was not 
 lonely in his hermitage : — 
 
 " I have occasional visits in the long winter even- 
 ings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in 
 the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, 
 who is reported to have dug Walden Pond and 
 stoned it, and fringed it with pine-woods ; who tells 
 me stories of old time and of new eternity ; and be- 
 tween us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with 
 social mirth and pleasant views of things, even with- 
 out apples or cider — a most wise and humorous 
 friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more 
 secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley ; and though 
 he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is 
 buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neigh- 
 borhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous 
 herb-garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering sim- 
 ples and listening to her fables ; for she has a genius 
 of unequaled fertility, and her memory runs back 
 farther than mythology, and she can tell me the orig- 
 inal of every fable, and on what fact every one is 
 founded, for the incidents occurred when she was 
 young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights 
 in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all 
 her children yet." 
 
 Emerson says Thoreau's determination on natural 
 history was organic, but it was his determination on 
 supernatural history that was organic. Natural his- 
 tory was but one of the doors through which he sought 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 33 
 
 to gain admittance to this inner and finer heaven of 
 things. He hesitated to call himself a naturalist ; 
 probably even poet-naturalist would not have suited 
 him. He says in his journal : " The truth is, I am a 
 mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher 
 to boot," and the least of these is the natural philos- 
 opher. He says : " Man cannot afford to be a nat- 
 uralist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the 
 side of his eye. He must look through and beyond 
 her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head 
 of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone." 
 It is not looking at Nature that turns the man of sci- 
 ence to stone, but looking at his dried and labeled 
 specimens, and his dried and labeled theories of her. 
 Thoreau always sought to look through and beyond 
 her, and he missed seeing much there was in her ; 
 the jealous goddess had her revenge. I do not make 
 this remark as a criticism, but to account for his fail- 
 ure to make any new or valuable contribution to nat- 
 ural history. He did not love Nature for her own 
 sake, or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, 
 or with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert 
 White did, for instance, but for what he could make 
 out of them. He says (Journal, page 83) : " The 
 ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a 
 fine effluence, which only the most ingenuous wor- 
 shiper perceives at a reverent distance from its sur- 
 face even." This "fine effluence " he was always 
 reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling. This 
 is the mythical hound and horse and turtle-dove 
 
34 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 which he says in " Walden " he long ago lost, and 
 has been on their trail ever since. He never aban- 
 dons the search, and in every woodchuck-hole or 
 muskrat-den, in retreat of bird, or squirrel, or mouse, 
 or fox thatthe pries into, in every walk and expedition 
 to the fields or swamps, or to distant woods, in e\ery 
 spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he 
 hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, to the ef- 
 fluence that so provokingly eludes him. 
 
 Hence, when we regard Thoreau simply as an ob- 
 server or as a natural historian, there have been bet- 
 ter, though few so industrious and persistent. He 
 was up and out at all hours of the day and night, and 
 in all seasons and weathers, year in and year out, and 
 yet he saw and recorded nothing new. It is quite 
 remarkable. He says in his journal that he walked 
 half of each day ; and kept it up perhaps for twenty 
 years or more. Ten years of persistent spying and 
 inspecting of nature, and no new thing found out ; and 
 so little reported that is in itself interesting, that is, 
 apart from his description of it. I cannot say that 
 there was any felicitous and happy seeing ; there was 
 no inspiration of the eye, certainly not in the direc- 
 tion of natural history. He has added no new line or 
 touch to the portrait of bird or beast that I can re- 
 call — no important or significant fact to their lives. 
 What he saw in this field everybody may see who 
 looks ; it is patent. He had not the detective eye of 
 the great naturalist ; he did not catch the clews and 
 hints dropped here and there, the quick, flashing 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 35 
 
 movements, the shy but significant gestures by which 
 new facts are disclosed, mainly because he was not 
 looking for them. His eye was not penetrating and 
 interpretive. It was full of speculation ; it was so- 
 phisticated with literature, sophisticated with Con- 
 cord, sophisticated with himself. His mood was 
 subjective rather than objective. He was more in- 
 tent on the natural history of his own thought than 
 on that of the bird. To the last his ornithology was 
 not quite sure, not quite trustworthy. In his pub- 
 lished journal he sometimes names the wrong bird, 
 and what short work a naturalist would have made 
 of his night-warbler, which Emerson reports Thoreau 
 had been twelve years trying to identify. It was 
 perhaps his long-lost turtle-dove, in some one of its 
 disguises. From his journal it would seem that he 
 was a long time puzzled to distinguish the fox-colored 
 sparrow from the tree or Canadian sparrow — a very 
 easy task to one who has an eye for the birds. But 
 he was looking too intently for a bird behind the 
 bird — for a mythology to shine through his orni- 
 thology. " The song-sparrow and the transient fox- 
 colored sparrow — have they brought me no message 
 this year ? Is not the coming of the fox-colored 
 sparrow something more earnest and significant than 
 I have dreamed of ? Have I heard what this tiny 
 passenger has to say while it flits thus from tree to 
 tree ? " "I love the birds and beasts because they 
 are mythologically in earnest." (Journal, page 284.) 
 If he had had the same eye for natural history he 
 
36 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 possessed for arrow-heads, what new facts he would 
 have disclosed ! But he was looking for arrow-heads. 
 He had them in his mind ; he thought arrow-heads ; 
 he was an arrow-head himself, and these relics fairly 
 kicked themselves free of the mould to catch his eye. 
 
 " It is surprising how thickly-strewn our soil is 
 with arrow-heads. I never see the surface broken in 
 sandy places hut I think of them. I find them on 
 all sides, not only in corn, grain, potato, and bean 
 fields, but in pastures and woods, by woodchucks' 
 holes and pigeon beds, and, as to-night, in a pasture 
 where a restless cow had pawed the ground." 
 
 Thoreau was a man eminently " preoccupied of his 
 own soul." He had no self-abandonment, no self- 
 forget fulness ; he could not give himself to the birds 
 or animals : they must surrender to him. He says 
 to one of his correspondents : " Whether he sleeps or 
 wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a 
 microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man 
 never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, 
 or leaves anything behind, but himself." This is half 
 true of some ; it is wholly true of others. It is 
 wholly true of Thoreau. Nature was the glass in 
 which he saw himself. He says the partridge loves 
 peas, but not those that go into the pot with her ! 
 All the peas Thoreau loved had been in the pot with 
 him and were seasoned by him. 
 
 I trust I do not in the least undervalue Thoreau's 
 natural history notes ; I only wish there were more 
 of them. What makes them so valuable and charm- 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 37 
 
 ing is his rare descriptive powers. He could give 
 the simple fact with the freshest and finest poetic 
 bloom upon it. If there is little or no felicitous see- 
 ing in Thoreau, there is felicitous description : he 
 does not see what another would not, but he describes 
 what he sees as few others can ; his happy literary- 
 talent makes up for the poverty of his observation. 
 That is, we are never surprised at what he sees, but 
 are surprised and tickled at the way he tells what he 
 sees. He notes, for instance, the arrival of the high- 
 hole in spring ; we all note it, every school-boy notes 
 it, but who has described it as Thoreau does : " The 
 loud peop of a pigeon woodpecker is heard, and anon, 
 the prolonged loud and shrill cackle calling the thin- 
 wooded hillsides and pastures to life. It is like the 
 note of an alarm clock set last fall so as to wake Na- 
 ture up at exactly this date, up, up, up, up, up, tip, 
 up, up, up, up I " He says : " The note of the first 
 bluebird in the air answers to the purling rill of melted 
 snow beneath. It is evidently soft and soothing, and, 
 as surely as the thermometer, indicates a higher tem- 
 perature. It is the accent of the south wind, its ver- 
 nacular." 
 
 Often a single word or epithet of his tells the whole 
 story. Thus he says, speaking of the music of the 
 blackbird, that it has a " split-whistle " ; the note of 
 the red-shouldered starling is " gurgle-ee." Looking 
 out of his window one March day, he says he cannot 
 see the heel of a single snowbank anywhere. He 
 does not seem to have known that the shrike sang in 
 
38 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 the fall and winter as well as in the spring ; and is 
 he entirely sure he saw a muskrat building its house 
 in March (the fall is the time they build) ; or that 
 he heard the whippoorwill singing in September ; or 
 that the woodchuck dines principally upon crickets ? 
 With what patience and industry he watched things 
 for a sign ! From his journal it would appear that 
 Thoreau kept nature about Concord under a sort of 
 police surveillance the year round. He shadowed 
 every flower and bird and musquash that appeared. 
 His vigilance was unceasing ; not a mouse or a squir- 
 rel must leave its den without his knowledge. If the 
 birds or frogs were not on hand promptly at his 
 spring roll-call, he would know the reason ; he would 
 look them up ; he would question his neighbors. He 
 was up in the morning and off to some favorite haunt 
 earlier than the day-laborers, and he chronicled his 
 observations on the spot as if the case was to be tried 
 in court the next day and he was the principal wit- 
 ness. He watched the approach of spring as a doctor 
 watches the development of a critical case. He felt 
 the pulse of the wind and the temperature of the day 
 at all hours. He examined the plants growing under 
 water, and noted the radical leaves of various weeds 
 that keep green all winter under the snow. He felt 
 for them with benumbed fingers amid the wet and 
 the snow. The first sight of bare ground and of the 
 red earth excites him. The fresh meadow spring 
 odor was to him like the fragrance of tea to an old 
 tea-drinker. In early March he goes to the Corner 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 39 
 
 Spring to see the tufts of green grass, or he inspects 
 the minute lichens that spring from the hark of trees. 
 " It is short commons," he says, " and innutritious." 
 He brings home the first frog-spittle he finds in a 
 ditch and studies it in a tumbler of water. The first 
 water-beetle that appears he makes a note of, and the 
 first skunk-cabbage that thrusts its spathe up through 
 the mould is of more interest to him than the latest 
 news from Paris or London. " I go to look for mud- 
 turtles in Heywood's meadow," he says, March 23, 
 1853. The first water-fowl that came in the spring 
 he stalked like a pot-hunter, crawling through the 
 swamps and woods, or over a hill on his stomach, to 
 have a good shot at them with his — journal. He is 
 determined nature shall not get one day the start of 
 him ; and yet he is obliged to confess that " no mor- 
 tal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of 
 spring ; " still he will not give up toying. " Can you 
 be sure," he says, " that you have heard the first frog 
 in the township croak ? " A lady offered him the 
 life of Dr. Chalmers to read, but he would not prom- 
 ise. The next day she was heard through a partition 
 shouting to some one who was deaf : " Think of it — 
 he stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, 
 and he would n't read the life of Chalmers ! " He 
 would go any number of miles to interview a musk- 
 rat or a woodchuck, or to keep an " appointment 
 with an oak-tree," but he records in his journal that 
 he rode a dozen miles one day with his employer, 
 keeping a profound silence almost all the way. " I 
 
40 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 treated him simply as if he had bronchitis and could 
 not speak — just as I would a sick man, a crazy man, 
 or an idiot." 
 
 Thoreau seems to have been aware of his defect 
 on the human side. He says : " If I am too cold 
 for human friendship, I trust I shall not soon be too 
 cold for natural influences ; " and then he goes on 
 with this doubtful statement : " It appears to be a 
 law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with 
 both man and nature. Those qualities which bring 
 you near to the one estrange you from the other." 
 One day he met a skunk in the field, and he de- 
 scribes its peculiar gait exactly when he says : "It 
 runs, even when undisturbed, with a singular teter 
 or undulation, like the walking of a Chinese lady." 
 He ran after the animal to observe it, keeping out of 
 the reach of its formidable weapon, and when it took 
 refuge in the wall he interviewed it at his leisure. If 
 it had been a man or a woman he had met, he would 
 have run the other way. Thus he went through the 
 season, Nature's reporter, taking down the words 
 as they fell from her lips, and distressed if a sentence 
 is missed. 
 
 The Yankee thrift and enterprise that he had so 
 little patience with in his neighbors, he applied to his 
 peculiar ends. He took the day and the season by 
 the foretop. " How many mornings," he says in 
 " Walden," " summer and winter, before yet any 
 neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been 
 about mine ! " He had an eye to the main chance, 
 
HENRY D. THOREAU. 41 
 
 to a good investment. He probed the swamps like a 
 butter-buyer, he sampled the plants and the trees and 
 lichens like a tea-taster. He made a burning-glass 
 of a piece of ice ; he made sugar from a pumpkin 
 and from the red-maple, and wine from the sap of 
 the black-birch, and boiled rock-tripe for an hour and 
 tried it as food. If he missed any virtue or excel- 
 lence in these things or in anything in his line, or 
 any suggestion to his genius, he felt like a man who 
 had missed a good bargain. Yet he sometimes paused 
 in this peeping and prying into nature, and cast a re- 
 gretful look backward. " Ah, those youthful days," 
 he says in his journal, under date of March 30, 1853, 
 " are they never to return ? when the walker does 
 not too enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, 
 scents, tastes, and feels only himself, the phenomena 
 that showed themselves in him, his expanding body, 
 his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quad- 
 ruped or bird confined his view, but the unbounded 
 universe was his. A bird has now become a mote 
 in his eye." Then he proceeds to dig out a wood- 
 chuck. 
 
 In " Walden," Thoreau pretends to quote the fol- 
 lowing passage from the Gulistan, or Rose Garden of 
 Sadi of Shiraz, with an eye to its application to his 
 own case, but as he evidently found it not in, but 
 under, Sadi's lines, it has an especial significance, and 
 may fitly close this paper : — 
 
 " They asked a wise man, saying : ' Of the many 
 celebrated trees which the Most High God has ere- 
 
42 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 ated, lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or 
 free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit ; 
 what mystery is there in this ? ' He replied : ' Each 
 has its appropriate produce and appointed season, 
 during the continuance of which it is fresh and bloom- 
 ing, and during their absence dry and withered ; to 
 neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being 
 always flourishing ; and of this nature are the azads, 
 or religious independents. Fix not thy heart on that 
 which is transitory ; for the Dijlah or Tigris will con- 
 tinue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs 
 is extinct : if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the 
 date-tree ; but if it affords nothing to give away, be 
 an azad, or free man, like the cypress.' " 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 
 
 Interested as I am in all branches of natural 
 science, and great as is my debt to these things, yet 
 I suppose my interest in nature is not strictly a sci- 
 entific one. I seldom, for instance, go into a Natural 
 History Museum without feeling as if I was attend- 
 ing a funeral. There lie the birds and animals stark 
 and stiff, or else, what is worse, stand up in ghastly 
 mockery of life, and the people pass along and gaze 
 at them through the glass with the same cold and un- 
 profitable curiosity that they gaze upon the face of 
 their dead neighbor in his coffin. The fish in the 
 water, the bird in the tree, the animal in the fields or 
 woods, what a different impression they make upon 
 us ! 
 
 To the great body of mankind, the view of nature 
 presented through the natural sciences has a good 
 deal of this lifeless funereal character of the speci- 
 mens in the museum. It is dead dissected nature, a 
 cabinet of curiosities carefully labeled and classified. 
 " Every creature sundered from its natural surround- 
 ings," says Goethe, " and brought into strange com- 
 pany makes an unpleasant impression on us, which 
 disappears only by habit." Why is it that the hunter, 
 the trapper, the traveler, the farmer, or even the 
 
44 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 school-boy, can often tell us more of what we want 
 to know about the bird, the flower, the animal, than 
 the professor in all the pride of his nomenclature ? 
 Why, but that these give us a glimpse of the live 
 creature as it stands related to other things, to the 
 whole life of nature, and to the human heart, while 
 the latter shows it to us as it stands related to some 
 artificial system of human knowledge. 
 
 " The world is too much with us," said Words- 
 worth, and he intimated that our science and our 
 civilization had put us " out of tune " with nature. 
 
 " Great God! I 'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 To the scientific mind such language is simply non- 
 sense, as are those other lines of the bard of Gras- 
 mere, in which he makes his poet — 
 " Contented if he might enjoy 
 The things which others understand." 
 
 Enjoyment is less an end in science than it is in 
 literature. A poem or other work of the imagination 
 that failed to give us the joy of the spirit would be 
 of little value, but from a work of science we expect 
 only the satisfaction which comes with increased 
 stores of exact knowledge. 
 
 Yet it may be questioned if the distrust with which 
 science and literature seem to be more and more re- 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 45 
 
 garding each other in our day is well founded. That 
 such distrust exists is very evident. Professor Hux- 
 ley taunts the poets with " sensual caterwauling," and 
 the poets taunt the professor and his ilk with gross 
 materialism. 
 
 Science is said to be democratic, its aims and 
 methods in keeping with the great modern move- 
 ment ; while literature is alleged to be aristocratic 
 in its spirit and tendencies. Literature is for the 
 few ; science is for the many. Hence their opposi- 
 tion in this respect. 
 
 Science is founding schools and colleges from which 
 the study of literature, as such, is to be excluded ; 
 and it is becoming clamorous for the positions oc- 
 cupied by the classics in the curriculum of the older 
 institutions. As a reaction against the extreme par- 
 tiality for classical studies, the study of names in- 
 stead of things, which has so long been shown in our 
 educational system, this new cry is wholesome and 
 good ; but so far as it implies that science is capable 
 of taking the place of the great literatures as an in- 
 strument of high culture, it is mischievous and mis- 
 leading. 
 
 About the intrinsic value of science, its value as a 
 factor in our civilization, there can be but one opin- 
 ion ; but about its value to the scholar, the thinker, 
 the man of letters, there is room for very divergent 
 views. It is certainly true that the great ages of the 
 world have not been ages of exact science, nor have 
 the great literatures, in which so much of the power 
 
46 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 and vitality of the race have been stored, sprung 
 from minds which held correct views of the physical 
 universe. Indeed, if the growth and maturity of 
 man's moral and intellectual stature was a question 
 of material appliances or conveniences, or of accumu- 
 lated stores of exact knowledge, the world of to-day 
 ought to be able to show more eminent achievements 
 in all fields of human activity than ever before. But 
 this it cannot do. Shakespeare wrote his plays for 
 people who believed in witches, arid probably believed 
 in them himself ; Dante's immortal poem could never 
 have been produced in a scientific age. Is it likely 
 that the Hebrew scriptures would have been any 
 more precious to the race, or their influence any 
 deeper, had they been inspired by correct views of 
 physical science ? 
 
 It is not my purpose to write a diatribe against the 
 physical sciences. I would as soon think of abusing 
 the dictionary. But as the dictionary can hardly be 
 said to be an end in itself, so I would indicate that 
 the final value of physical science is its capability to 
 foster in us noble ideals, and to lead us to new and 
 larger views of moral and spiritual truths. The ex- 
 tent to which it is able to do this measures its value 
 to the spirit — measures its value to the educator. 
 
 That the great sciences can do this, that they are 
 capable of becoming instruments of pure culture, in- 
 struments to refine and spiritualize the whole moral 
 and intellectual nature, is no doubt true ; but that 
 they can ever usurp the place of the humanities or 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 47 
 
 general literature in this respect is one of those mis- 
 taken notions which seem to be gaining ground so 
 fast in our time. 
 
 Can there be any doubt that contact with a great 
 character, a great soul, through literature, immensely 
 surpasses in educational value, in moral and spiritual 
 stimulus, contact with any of the forms or laws of 
 physical nature, through science ? Is there not some- 
 thing in the study of the great literatures of the world 
 that opens the mind, inspires it with noble sentiments 
 and ideals, cultivates and develops the intuitions, and 
 reaches and stamps the character, to an extent that is 
 hopelessly beyond the reach of science ? They add 
 something to the mind that is like leaf mould to the 
 soil, like the contribution from animal and vegetable 
 life and from the rains and the dews. Until science 
 is mixed with emotion, and appeals to the heart and 
 imagination, it is like dead inorganic matter ; and 
 when it becomes so mixed and so transformed it is 
 literature. 
 
 The college of the future will doubtless lay much 
 less stress upon the study of the ancient languages ; 
 but the time thus gained will not be devoted to the 
 study of the minutiae of physical science, as contem- 
 plated by Mr. Herbert Spencer, but to the study of 
 man himself, his deeds and his thoughts, as illustrated 
 in history and embodied in the great literatures. 
 
 " Microscopes and telescopes, properly considered," 
 says Goethe, " put our human eyes out of their natu- 
 ral, healthy, and profitable point of view." By which 
 
48 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 remai-k he probably meant that artificial knowledge 
 obtained by the aid of instruments, and therefore by a 
 kind of violence and inquisition, a kind of dissecting 
 and dislocating process, is less innocent, is less sweet 
 and wholesome, than natural knowledge the fruits of 
 our natural faculties and perceptions. And the reason 
 is that physical science pursued in and for itself results 
 more and more in barren analysis, becomes more and 
 more separated from human and living currents and 
 forces — in fact, becomes more and more mechanical, 
 and rests in a mechanical conception of the universe. 
 And the universe, considered as a machine, however 
 scientific it may be, has neither value to the spirit nor 
 charm to the imagination. 
 
 The man of to-day is fortunate if he can attain as 
 fresh and lively a conception of things as did Plu- 
 tarch and Virgil. How alive the ancient observers 
 made the world ! They conceived of everything as 
 living, being — the primordial atoms, space, form, 
 the earth, the sky. The stars and planets they 
 thought of as requiring nutriment, and as breathing or 
 exhaling. To them fire did not consume things, but 
 fed or preyed upon them, like an animal. It was not 
 so much false science, as a livelier kind of science, 
 which made them regard the peculiar quality of any- 
 thing as a spirit. Thus there was a spirit in snow ; 
 when the snow melted the spirit escaped. This spirit, 
 says Plutarch, " is nothing but the sharp point and 
 finest scale of the congealed substance, endued with 
 a virtue of cutting and dividing not only the flesh, 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 49 
 
 but also silver and brazen vessels." " Therefore this 
 piercing spirit, like a flame " (how much, in fact, 
 frost is like flame !) " seizing upon those that travel in 
 the snow, seems to burn their outsides, and like fire 
 to enter and penetrate the flesh." There is a spirit 
 of salt too, and of heat, and of trees. The sharp, 
 acrimonious quality of the fig-tree bespeaks of a fierce 
 and strong spirit which it darts out into objects. 
 
 To the ancient philosophers the eye was not a mere 
 passive instrument, but sent forth a spirit, or fiery 
 visual rays, that went to cooperate with the rays from 
 outward objects. Hence the power of the eye, and 
 its potency in love matters. " The mutual looks of 
 nature's beauties, or that which comes from the eye, 
 whether light or a stream of spirits, melt and dissolve 
 the lovers with a pleasing pain, which they call the 
 bitter-sweet of love." " There is such a communica- 
 tion, such a flame raised by one glance, that those 
 must be altogether unacquainted with love that won- 
 der at the Median naphtha that takes fire at a dis- 
 tance from the flame." "Water from the heavens," 
 says Plutarch, " is light and aerial, and, being mixed 
 with spirit, is the quicker passed and elevated into 
 the plants by reason of its tenuity." Rain-water, he 
 further says, " is bred in the air and wind, and falls 
 pure and sincere." Science could hardly give an ex- 
 planation as pleasing to the fancy as that. And it is 
 true enough, too. Mixed with spirit, or the gases of 
 the air, and falling pure and sincere, is undoubtedly 
 the main secret of the matter. He said the ancients 
 
50 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 hesitated to put out a fire because of the relation it 
 had to the sacred and eternal flame. "Nothing," he 
 says, " bears such a resemblance to an animal as fire. 
 It is moved and nourished by itself, and, by its 
 brightness, like the soul, discovers and makes every- 
 thing apparent ; but in its quenching it principally 
 shows some power that seems to proceed from our 
 vital principle, for it makes a noise and resists like 
 an animal dying or violently slaughtered." 
 
 The feeling too, with which the old philosophers 
 looked upon the starry heavens is less antagonistic to 
 science than it is welcome and suggestive to the hu- 
 man heart. Says Plutarch in his " Sentiments of Na- 
 ture Philosophers delighted in." " To men the heav- 
 enly bodies that are so visible did give the knowledge 
 of the Deity ; when they contemplated that they are 
 the causes of so great an harmony, that they regulate 
 day and night, winter and summer, by their rising 
 and setting, and likewise considered these things 
 which by their influence in the earth do receive a 
 being and do likewise fructify. It was manifest to 
 men that the Heaven was the father of those things, 
 and the Earth the mother ; that the Heaven was the 
 father is clear, since from the heavens there is the 
 pouring down of waters, which have their spermatic 
 faculty ; the Earth the mother because she receives 
 them and brings forth. Likewise men, considering 
 that the stars are running in a perpetual motion, and 
 that the sun and moon give us the power to view and 
 contemplate, they call them all Gods." 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 51 
 
 The ancients had that kind of knowledge which the 
 heart gathers ; we have in superahundance that kind 
 of knowledge which the head gathers. If much of 
 theirs was made up of mere childish delusions, how 
 much of ours is made up of hard, barren, and unprof- 
 itable details — a mere desert of sand where no green 
 thing grows, or can grow. How much there is in 
 books that one does not want to know, that it would 
 be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know ; 
 how much of modern physical science is a mere rat- 
 tling of dead bones, a mere threshing of empty straw. 
 Probably we shall come round to as lively a concep- 
 tion of things by and by. Darwin has brought us a 
 long way toward it. At any rate, the ignorance of 
 the old writers is often more captivating than our 
 exact, but more barren, knowledge. 
 
 The old books are full of this dew-scented knowl- 
 edge — knowledge gathered at first hand in the 
 morning of the world. In our more exact scientific 
 knowledge this pristine quality is generally missing ; 
 and hence it is that the results of science are far less 
 available for literature than the results of experience. 
 
 Science is probably unfavorable to the growth of lit- 
 erature because it does not throw man back upon him- 
 self and concentrate him as the old belief did ; it takes 
 him away from himself, away from human relations 
 and emotions, and leads him on and on. We wonder 
 and marvel more, but we fear, dread, love, sympa- 
 thize less. Unless, indeed, we finally come to see, as 
 we probably shall, that after science has done its best 
 
52 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 the mystery is as great as ever, and the imagination 
 and the emotions have just as free a field as before. 
 
 Science and literature in their aims and methods 
 have but little in common. Demonstrable fact is the 
 province of the one ; sentiment is the province of the 
 other. " The more a book brings sentiment into 
 light," says M. Taine, " the more it is a work of lit- 
 erature ; " and, we may add, the more it brings the 
 facts and laws of natural things to light, the more it 
 is a work of science. Or, as Emerson says in one of 
 his early essays, " literature affords a platform whence 
 we may command a view of our present life, a pur- 
 chase by which we may move it." In like manner 
 science affords a platform whence we may view our 
 physical existence, a purchase by which we may move 
 the material world. The value of the one is in its 
 ideality, that of the other in its exact demonstrations. 
 The knowledge which literature most loves and treas- 
 ures is knowledge of life ; while science is intent 
 upon a knowledge of things, not as they are in their 
 relation to the mind and heart of man, but as they are 
 in and of themselves, in their relations to each other 
 and to the human body. Science is a capital or fund 
 perpetually reinvested ; it accumulates, rolls up, is 
 carried forward by every new man. Every man of 
 science has all the science before him to go upon, to 
 set himself up in business with. What an enormous 
 sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested ! Not 
 so in literature ; to every poet, to every artist, it is 
 still the first day of citation, so far as the essentials 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 53 
 
 of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much 
 a fund to be reinvested, as it is a crop to be ever new- 
 grown. Wherein science furthers the eye, sharpens 
 the ear, lengthens the arm, quickens the foot, or ex- 
 tends man farther into nature in the natural bent 
 and direction of his faculties and powers, a service is 
 undoubtedly rendered to literature. But so far as it 
 engenders a habit of peeping and prying into na- 
 ture, and blinds us to the festive splendor and mean- 
 ing of the whole, our verdict must be against it. 
 
 It cannot be said that literature has kept pace with 
 civilization, though science has ; in fact, it may be 
 said without exaggeration that science is civilization 
 — the application of the powers of nature to the arts 
 of life. The reason why literature has not kept pace 
 is because so much more than mere knowledge, well- 
 demonstrated facts, goes to the making of it ; while 
 little else goes to the making of pure science. In- 
 deed, the kingdom of heaven in literature, as in 
 religion, " cometh not with observation." This feli- 
 city is within you as much in the one case as in the 
 other. It is the fruit of the spirit, and not of the 
 diligence of the hands. 
 
 Because this is so, because modern achievements in 
 letters are not on a par with our material and scien- 
 tific triumphs, there are those who predict for litera- 
 ture a permanent decay, and think the field it now 
 occupies is to be entirely usurped by science. But 
 this can never be. Literature will have its period of 
 decadence and of partial eclipse ; but the chief inter- 
 
54 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 est of mankind in nature or in the universe can never 
 be for any length of time a merely scientific interest 
 — an interest measured by our exact knowledge of 
 these things ; though it must undoubtedly be an in- 
 terest consistent with the scientific view. Think of 
 having one's interest in a flower, a bird, the land- 
 scape, the starry skies, dependent upon tbe stimulus 
 afforded by the text-books, or dependent upon our 
 knowledge of the structure, habits, functions, rela- 
 tions of tbese objects ! 
 
 This other and larger interest in natural objects, 
 to which I refer, is an interest as old as the race it- 
 self, and which all men, learned and unlearned alike, 
 feel in some degree ; an interest born of our relations 
 to these things, of our associations with them. It is 
 the human sentiments they awaken and foster in us, 
 tbe emotion of love, or admiration, or awe, or fear, 
 tbey call up ; and is, in fact, the interest of literature 
 as distinguished from that of science. The admiration 
 one feels for a flower, for a person, for a fine view, 
 for a noble deed, the pleasure one takes in a spring 
 morning, in a stroll upon the beach, is the admira- 
 tion and the pleasure literature feels, and art feels ; 
 only in them the feeling is freely opened and ex- 
 panded, wbich in most minds is usually vague and 
 germinal. Science has its own pleasure in these 
 things ; but it is not, as a rule, a pleasure in which 
 the mass of mankind can share, because it is not 
 directly related to tbe human affections and emotions. 
 In fact, the scientific treatment of nature can no 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 55 
 
 more do away with or supersede the literary treat- 
 ment of it — the view of it as seen through our sym- 
 pathies and emotions, and touched by the ideal, such 
 as the poet gives us — than the compound of the 
 laboratory can take the place of the organic com- 
 pounds found in our food, drink, and air. 
 
 If Audubon had not felt other than a scientific 
 interest in the birds, namely, a human interest, an 
 interest born of sentiment, would he have ever writ- 
 ten their biographies as he did ? 
 
 It is too true that the ornithologists of our day for 
 the most part look upon the birds only as so much le- 
 gitimate game for expert dissection and classification, 
 and hence have added no new lineaments to Audu- 
 bon's and Wilson's portraits. Such a man as Darwin 
 was full of what we may call the sentiment of science. 
 Darwin was always pursuing an idea, always tracking 
 a living, active principle. He is full of the ideal inter- 
 pretation of fact, science fired with faith and enthusi- 
 asm, the fascination of the power and mystery of na- 
 ture. All his works have a human and almost poetic 
 side. They are undoubtedly the best feeders of liter- 
 ature we have yet had from the field of science. His 
 book on the earth-worm, or on the formation of vege- 
 table mould, reads like a fable in which some high and 
 beautiful philosophy is clothed. How alive he makes 
 the plants and the trees, shows all their movements, 
 their sleeping and waking, and almost their very 
 dreams — does, indeed, disclose and establish a kind 
 of rudimentary soul or intelligence in the tip of the 
 
56 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 radicle of plants. No poet has ever made the trees 
 so human. Mark, for instance, his discovery of the 
 value of cross-fertilization in the vegetable kingdom, 
 and the means nature takes to bring it about. Cross- 
 fertilization is just as important in the intellectual 
 kingdom as in the vegetable. The thoughts of the 
 recluse finally become pale and feeble. Without 
 pollen from other minds how can one have a race of 
 vigorous seedlings of his own ? Thus all Darwinian 
 books have to me a literary or poetic substratum. 
 The old fable of metamorphosis and transformation 
 he illustrates afresh in his '• Origin of Species," in 
 the " Descent of Man." Darwin's interest in nature 
 is strongly scientific, but our interest in him is largely 
 literary ; he is tracking a principle, the principle of 
 organic life following it through all its windings and 
 turnings and doublings and redoublings upon itself, in 
 the air, in the earth, in the water, in the vegetable, and 
 in all the branches of the animal world ; the footsteps 
 of creative energy ; not why, but how ; and we follow 
 him as we would follow a great explorer, or general, 
 or voyager like Columbus, charmed by his candor, 
 dilated by his mastery. He is said to have lost his 
 taste for poetry, and to have cared little for what is 
 called religion ; his sympathies were so large and 
 comprehensive, the mere science in him is so perpet- 
 ually overarched by that which is not science, but 
 faith, insight, imagination, prophecy, inspiration — 
 " substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things 
 not seen ; " his love of truth so deep and abiding, 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 57 
 
 and his determination to see things, facts, in their 
 relations, and as they issue in principle, so unsleep- 
 ing, that both his poetic and religious emotions, as 
 well as his scientific proclivities, found full scope, and 
 his demonstration becomes almost a song. It is easy 
 to see how such a mind as Goethe's would have fol- 
 lowed him and supplemented him, not from its wealth 
 of scientific lore, but from its poetic insight into the 
 methods of nature. 
 
 Again, it is the fine humanism of such a man as 
 Humboldt that gives his name and his teachings cur- 
 rency. Men who have not this humanism, who do 
 not in any way relate their science to life or to the 
 needs of the spirit, but pile up mere technical, dessi- 
 cated knowledge, are for the most part a waste or a 
 weariness. Humboldt's humanism makes him a stim- 
 ulus and a support to all students of nature. The 
 noble character, the poetic soul, shines out in all his 
 works and gives them a value above and beyond 
 their scientific worth, great as that undoubtedly is. 
 To his desire for universal knowledge he added the 
 love of beautiful forms, and his " Cosmos " is an 
 attempt at an artistic creation, a harmonious repre- 
 sentation of the universe that should satisfy the aes- 
 thetic sense as well as the understanding. It is a 
 graphic description of nature, not a mechanical one. 
 Men of pure science look askant at it, or at Hum- 
 boldt, on this account. A sage of Berlin says he 
 failed to reach the utmost height of science because of 
 his want of " physico-mathematical knowledge ; " he 
 
58 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 was not sufficiently content with the mere dead corpse 
 of nature to weigh and measure it. Lucky for him 
 and for the world that there was something that had 
 a stronger attraction for him than the algebraic for- 
 mulas. Humboldt was not content till he had escaped 
 from the trammels of mechanical science into the 
 larger and more vital air of literature, or the literary 
 treatment of nature. What keeps his "Views of 
 Nature " and his " Scientific Travels " alive, is not 
 so much the pure science which they hold, as the 
 good literature which they embody. The observa- 
 tions he records upon that wonderful tropical nature, 
 that are the fruit of his own unaided perceptions, be- 
 traying only the wiser hunter, trapper, walker, farmer, 
 etc., how welcome it all is ; but the moment he goes 
 behind the beautiful or natural reason and discourses 
 as a geologist, mineralogist, physical geographer, etc., 
 how one's interest flags ! It is all of interest and 
 value to specialists in those fields, but it has no hu- 
 man, and therefore no literary interest or value. 
 When he tells us that " monkeys are more melan- 
 choly in proportion as they have more resemblance 
 to man ; " that " their sprightliness diminishes as 
 their intellectual faculties appear to increase," we 
 read with more attention than when he discourses 
 as a learned naturalist upon the different species of 
 monkeys. It is a real addition to our knowledge of 
 nature to learn that the extreme heat and dryness 
 of the summer, within the equatorial zone in South 
 America, produces effects analogous to those pro- 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 59 
 
 duced by the cold of our northern winters. The 
 trees lose their leaves, the snakes and crocodiles and 
 other reptiles bury themselves in the mud, and many 
 phases of life, both animal and vegetable, are wrapped 
 in a long sleep. This is not strictly scientific knowl- 
 edge, it is knowledge that lies upon the surface, and 
 that any eye and mind may gather. One feels in- 
 clined to skip the elaborate account of the physical 
 features of the lake of Valentia and its surroundings, 
 but the old Mestizo Indian who gave the travelers 
 goat's milk, and who, with his beautiful daughter, 
 lived on a little island in its midst, awakens lively 
 curiosity. He guarded his daughter like a miser his 
 treasure. When some hunters by chance passed a 
 night on his island he suspected some designs upon 
 his girl, and he obliged her to climb up a very lofty 
 acacia tree, which grew in the plain at some distance 
 from the hut, while he stretched himself at the foot 
 of the tree, and would not permit her to descend till 
 the young men had departed. Thus, throughout the 
 work, when the scientific interest is paramount, the 
 literary and human interest fail, and vice versa. 
 
 No man of letters was ever more hospitable to sci- 
 ence than Goethe ; indeed some of the leading ideas 
 of modern science were distinctly foreshadowed by 
 him ; yet they took the form and texture of litera- 
 ture, or of sentiment, rather than of exact science. 
 They were the Teachings forth of his spirit ; his 
 grasping for the ideal clews to nature, rather than 
 logical steps of his understanding; and his whole 
 
60 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 interest in physics was a search for a truth above 
 physics — to get nearer, if possible, to this mystery 
 called nature. " The understanding will not reach 
 her," he said to Eckermann ; " man must be capable 
 of elevating himself to the highest reason to come in 
 contact with this divinity, which manifests itself in 
 the primitive phenomena, which dwells behind them, 
 and from which they proceed." Of like purport is bis 
 remark that the common observations which science 
 makes upon nature and its procedure, " in whatever 
 terms expressed, are really after all only symptoms 
 which, if any real wisdom is to result from our stud- 
 ies, must be traced back to the physiological and patho- 
 logical principles of which they are the exponents." 
 
 Literature, I say, does not keep pace with civiliza- 
 tion. That the world is better housed, better clothed, 
 better fed, better transported, better equipped for 
 war, better armed for peace, more skilled in agricul- 
 ture, in navigation, in engineering, in surgery, has 
 steam, electricity, gunpowder, dynamite — all of this, 
 it seems, is of little moment to literature. Are men 
 better ? Are men greater ? Is life sweeter ? These 
 are the test questions. Time has been saved, almost 
 annihilated, by steam and electricity, yet where is 
 the leisure ? The more time we save the less we 
 have. The hurry of the machine passes into the 
 man. We can outrun the wind and the storm, but 
 we cannot outrun the demon of Hurry. The farther 
 we go the harder he spurs us. What we save in 
 time we make up in space ; we must cover more sur- 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 61 
 
 face. What we gain in power and facility is more 
 than added in the length of the task. The needle- 
 woman has her sewing-machine, but she must take 
 ten thousand stitches now where she took only ten 
 before, and it is probably true that the second con- 
 dition is worse than the first. In the shoe factory, 
 knife factory, shirt factory, and all other factories, 
 men and women work harder, look grimmer, suffer 
 more in mind and body, than under the old condi- 
 tions of industry. The iron of the machine enters 
 the soul ; man becomes a mere tool, a cog or spoke 
 or belt or spindle. More work is done, but in what 
 does it all issue ? Certainly not in beauty, in power, 
 in character, in good manners, in finer men and 
 women ; but mostly in giving wealth and leisure to 
 people who use them to publish their own unfitness 
 for leisure and wealth. 
 
 It may be said that science has added to the health 
 and longevity of the race ; that the progress in sur- 
 gery, in physiology, in pathology, in therapeutics, has 
 greatly mitigated human suffering and prolonged life. 
 This is unquestionably true ; but in this service sci- 
 ence is but paying back with one hand what it robbed 
 us of with the other. With its appliances, its ma- 
 chinery, its luxuries, its immunities, and its interfer- 
 ence with the law of natural selection, it has made 
 the race more delicate and tender, and if it did not 
 arm them better against disease also, we should all 
 soon perish. An old physician said that if he bled 
 and physicked now, as in his early practice, his pa- 
 
62 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 tients would all die. Are we stronger, more hardy, 
 more virile than our ancestors ? We are more com- 
 fortable and better schooled than our fathers, but 
 who shall say we are wiser or happier ? " Knowl- 
 edge comes, but wisdom lingers," just as it always 
 has, and always will. The essential conditions of 
 human life are always the same ; the non-essential 
 change with every man and hour. 
 
 Literature is more interested in some branches of 
 science than in others ; more interested in meteor- 
 ology than in mineralogy ; more interested in the 
 superior sciences, like astronomy and geology, than 
 in the inferior experimental sciences ; has a warmer 
 interest in Humboldt the traveler, than in Humboldt 
 the mineralogist ; in Audubon and Wilson, than in 
 the experts and feather - splitters who have finished 
 their tasks ; in Watts, Morse, Franklin, than in the 
 masters of theories and formulas ; and has a greater 
 stake in virtue, heroism, character, beauty, than in 
 all the knowledge in the world. There is no litera- 
 ture without a certain subtle and vital blending of 
 the real and the ideal. 
 
 Unless knowledge in some way issues in life, in 
 character, in impulse, in motive, in love, in virtue, in 
 some live human quality or attribute, it does not be- 
 long to literature. Man, and man alone, is of peren- 
 nial interest to man. In nature we glean only the 
 human traits — only those things that in some way 
 appeal to, or are interpretative of, the meaning or 
 ideal within us. Unless the account of your excur- 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 63 
 
 sion to field and forest, or to the bowels of the earth, 
 or to the bottom of the sea, has some human interest, 
 and in some measure falls in with the festival of life, 
 literature will none of it. 
 
 All persons are interested in the live bird and in 
 the live animal, because they dimly read themselves 
 there, or see their own lives rendered in new charac- 
 ters on another plane. Flowers, trees, rivers, lakes, 
 mountains, rocks, clouds, the rain, the sea, are far 
 more interesting to literature, because they are more 
 or less directly related to our natural lives, and serve 
 as vehicles for the expression of our natural emotions. 
 That which is more directly related to what may be 
 called our artificial life — our need for shelter, cloth- 
 ing, food, transportation — such as the factory, the 
 mill, the forge, the railway, and the whole catalogue 
 of useful arts, is of less Interest, and literature is 
 shyer of it. And it may be observed that the more 
 completely the thing is taken out of nature and arti- 
 ficialized, the less interest we take in it. Thus the 
 sailing vessel is more pleasing to contemplate than 
 the steamer ; the old grist - mill, with its dripping 
 water-wheel, than the steam-mill ; the open fire than 
 the stove or register. Tools and implements are not 
 so interesting as weapons ; nor the trades as the pur- 
 suit of hunting, fishing, surveying, exploring. A 
 jack-knife is not so interesting as an arrow-head, a 
 rifle as a war-club, a watch as an hour-glass, a thresh- 
 ing-machine as the flying flail. Commerce is less 
 interesting to literature than war, because it is more 
 
64 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 artificial ; nature does not have such full swing in it. 
 The blacksmith interests us more than the gunsmith, 
 we see more of nature at his forge ; the farmer is 
 clearer to literature than the merchant ; the gardener 
 than the agricultural chemist ; the drover, the herder, 
 the fisherman, the lumberman, the miner, are more 
 interesting to her than the man of more elegant and 
 artificial pursuits. 
 
 The reason of all this is clear to see. We are em- 
 bosomed in nature, we are an apple on the bough, a 
 babe at the breast. In nature, in God, we live and 
 move and have our being. Our life depends upon 
 the purity, the closeness, the vitality of the connec- 
 tion. We want and must have nature at first hand ; 
 water from the spring, milk from the udder, bread 
 from the wheat, air from the open. Vitiate our sup- 
 plies, weaken our connection, and we fail. All our 
 instincts, appetites, functions must be kept whole and 
 normal ; in fact, our reliance is wholly upon nature, 
 and this bears fruit in the mind. In art, in litera- 
 ture, in life, we are drawn by that which seems near- 
 est to, and most in accord with, her. Natural or 
 untaught knowledge, how much closer it touches us 
 than professional knowledge. Keep me close to na- 
 ture, is the constant demand of literature ; open the 
 windows and let in the air, the sun, let in health and 
 strength ; my blood must have oxygen, my lungs must 
 be momentarily filled with the fresh unhoused element. 
 I cannot breathe the cosmic ether of the abstruse 
 inquirer, nor thrive on the gases of the scientist in 
 his laboratory ; the air of hill and field alone suffices. 
 
SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 65 
 
 The life of the hut is of more interest to literature 
 than the life of the palace, except so far as the same 
 nature has her way in both. Get rid. of the artificial, 
 the complex, and let in the primitive and the simple. 
 Art and poetry never tire of the plow, the scythe, 
 the axe, the hoe, the flail, the oar ; but the pride and 
 glory of the agricultural warehouse — can that be 
 sung ? The machine that talks and walks and suf- 
 fers and loves is still the best. Artifice, the more ar- 
 tifice there is thrust between us and nature, the more 
 appliances, conductors, fenders, the less freely her 
 virtue passes. The direct rays of the open fire are 
 better even for roasting a potato than conducted heat. 
 
 What we owe to science as tending to foster a dis- 
 interested love of truth, as tending to clarify the men- 
 tal vision, or sharpen curiosity, or cultivating the 
 spirit of fearless inquiry, or stimulating the desire to 
 see and know things as they really are, would not be 
 easy to determine. A great deal no doubt. But the 
 value of the modern spirit, the modern emancipation, 
 as a factor in the production of a great literature 
 remains to be seen. 
 
 Science will no doubt draw off, and has already 
 drawn off, a vast deal of force and thought that has 
 heretofore found an outlet in other pursuits, perhaps 
 in law, criticism, or historical inquiries ; but is it 
 probable that it will nip in the bud any great poets, 
 painters, romancers, musicians, orators ? Certain 
 branches of scientific inquiry drew Goethe strongly, 
 but his aptitude in them was clearly less than in his 
 own chosen field. Alexander Wilson left poetry for 
 
66 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 ornithology, and he made a wise choice. He became 
 eminent in the one, and he was only mediocre in the 
 other. Sir Charles Lyell also certainly chose wisely 
 in abandoning verse-making for geology. In the lat- 
 ter field he ranks first, and in interpreting " nature's 
 infinite book of secrecy," as it lies folded in the geo- 
 logical strata, he found ample room for the exercise 
 of all the imagination and power of interpretation he 
 possessed. His conclusions have sky-room and per- 
 spective, and give us a sort of poetic satisfaction. 
 
 The true poet and the true scientist are not es- 
 tranged. They go forth into nature like two friends. 
 Behold them strolling through the summer fields and 
 woods. The younger of the two is much the more 
 active and inquiring ; he is ever and anon stepping 
 aside to examine some object more minutely, pluck- 
 ing a flower, treasuring a shell, pursuing a bird, watch- 
 ing a butterfly ; now he turns over a stone, peers into 
 the marshes, chips off a fragment of a rock, and 
 everywhere seems intent on some special and partic- 
 ular knowledge of the things about him. The elder 
 man has more an air of leisurely contemplation and 
 enjoyment — is less curious about special objects and 
 features, and more desirous of putting himself in hai'- 
 mony with the spirit of the whole. But when his 
 younger companion has any fresh and characteristic 
 bit of information to impart to him, how attentively 
 he listens, how sure and discriminating is his appre- 
 ciation. The interests of the two in the universe are 
 widely different, yet in no true sense are they hostile 
 or mutually destructive 
 
SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 
 
 It is interesting to note to what extent the leading 
 literary men of our time have been influenced by 
 science, or have availed themselves of its results. 
 A great many of them not at all, it would seem. 
 Among our own writers, Bryant, Irving, Hawthorne, 
 Longfellow, Whittier show little or no trace of the 
 influence of science. The later English poets, Arnold, 
 Swinburne, Rossetti, do not appear to have profited 
 by science. There is no science in Rossetti, unless it 
 be a kind of dark, forbidden science, or science in 
 league with sorcery. Rossetti's muse seems to have 
 been drugged with an opiate that worked inversely 
 and made it morbidly wakeful instead of somnolent. 
 The air of his " House of Life " is close, and smells 
 not merely of midnight oil, but of things much more 
 noxious and suspicious. 
 
 Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landor seem to have owed 
 little or nothing directly to science ; Coleridge and 
 "Wordsworth probably more, though with them the 
 debt was inconsiderable. Wordsworth's great ode 
 shows no trace of scientific knowledge. Yet Words- 
 worth was certainly an interested observer of the sci- 
 entific progress of his age, and was the first to indi- 
 cate the conditions under which the poet could avail 
 
68 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 himself of the results of physical science. " The 
 Poet," he says, " writes under one restriction only, 
 namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate 
 pleasure to a human Being possessed of that informa- 
 tion which may be expected from him, not as a law- 
 yer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a nat- 
 ural philosopher, but as a Man." " The knowledge 
 both of the Poet and the Man of Science," he again 
 says, " is pleasure ; but the knowledge of the one 
 cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our 
 natural and unalienable inheritance ; the other as a 
 personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to 
 us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connect- 
 ing us with our fellow beings." In reaching his con- 
 clusion, he finally says: "The remotest discoveries 
 of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist will be 
 as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which 
 it can be employed, if the time should ever come 
 when these things shall be familiar to us, and the re- 
 lations under which they are contemplated by the fol- 
 lowers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly 
 and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering 
 beings. If the time should ever come when what is 
 now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be 
 ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, 
 the Poet will lend this divine spirit to aid the trans- 
 figuration, and will welcome the Being thus produced 
 as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of 
 man." To clothe science with flesh and blood, to 
 breathe into it the breath of life, is a creative work 
 
SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 69 
 
 which only the Poet can do. Several of the younger 
 poets, both in this country and in England, have made 
 essays in this direction, but with indifferent success. 
 It is still science when they have done with it, and 
 not poetry. The transfiguration of which Words- 
 worth speaks is not perfect. The inorganic has not 
 clearly become the organic. Charles DeKay has 
 some good touches, but still the rock is too near the 
 surface. The poetic covering of vegetable mould is 
 too scanty. More successful, but still rather too lit- 
 eral, are several passages in Mr. Nichols' " Monte 
 Rosa." A passage beginning on page 9, 
 
 " Of what was doing on earth 
 Ere man had come to see," 
 
 is good science and pretty good poetry. 
 
 " And that unlettered time slipped on, 
 Saw tropic climes invade the polar rings, 
 The polar cold lay waste the tropic marge ; 
 Saw monster beasts emerge in ooze and air, 
 And run their race and stow their bones in clay ; 
 Saw the bright gold bedew the elder rocks, 
 And all the gems grow crystal in their caves ; 
 Saw plant wax quick, and stir to moving worm, 
 And worm move upward, reaching toward the brute ; 
 Saw brute by habit fit himself with brain, 
 And startle earth with wondrous progeny ; 
 Saw all of these, and still saw no true man, 
 For man was not, or still so rarely was, 
 That as a little child his thoughts were weak, 
 Weak and forgetful and of nothing worth, 
 And Nature stormed along her changeful ways 
 Unheeded, undescribed, the while man slept 
 
70 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Infolded in his germ, or with fierce brutes, 
 Himself but brutal, waged a pigmy war, 
 Unclad as they, and with them housed in caves, 
 Nor knew that sea retired or mountain rose. ' ' 
 
 Whether the science in this and similar passages, 
 with which Mr. Nichols' epic abounds, has met with 
 a change of heai*t and become pure poetry, may be 
 questioned. There is a more complete absorption 
 of science and the emotional reproduction of it in 
 Whitman, as there is also in Tennyson. " In Me- 
 moriam " is full of science winged with passion. 
 
 Tennyson owes a larger debt to physical science 
 than any other current English poet, Browning the 
 largest debt to legerdemain or the science of jugglery. 
 Occasionally Tennyson puts wings to a fact of science 
 very successfully, as in his " The Dragon Fly : " — 
 
 " To-day I saw the dragon fly 
 Come from the wells where he did lie. 
 An inner impulse rent the veil 
 Of his old husk ; from head to tail 
 Came out clear plates of sapphire mail. 
 
 " He dried his wings ; like gauze they grew: 
 Through crofts and pastures wet with dew 
 A living flash of light he flew." 
 
 Keats' touches are often accurate enough for sci- 
 ence, and free and pictorial enough for poetry. 
 
 ' ' Here are sweet peas, on tiptoe for a flight ; 
 With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white, 
 And taper fingers catching at all things, 
 To bind them all about with tiny rings." 
 
SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 71 
 
 Or this by a " streamlet's rushy banks : " — 
 
 ' ' Where swarms of minnows show their little heads, 
 Staying their wavy bodies 'gainst the streams, 
 To taste the luxury of sunny beams 
 Temper' d with coolness, how they ever wrestle 
 With their own sweet delight, and ever nestle 
 Their silver bellies on the pebbly sand ! ' ' 
 
 Only a naturalist can fully appreciate Keats' owl — 
 " the downy owl," as the quills and feathers of this 
 bird are literally tipped with down, making it soft to 
 the hand and silent in its flight. 
 
 On the other hand, it takes a poet to fully appre- 
 ciate Linnaeus' marriage of the planets and his nam- 
 ing of the calyx the thalamus, or bridal chamber ; 
 and the corolla, the tapestry of it. 
 
 The two eminent poets of our own language whose 
 attitude toward science is the most welcome and re- 
 ceptive are undoubtedly Emerson and Whitman. Of 
 the latter in this connection I have spoken elsewhere. 
 Of Emerson I think it may be said that no other im- 
 aginative writer has been so stimulated and aroused 
 by the astounding discoveries of physics. There was 
 something in the boldness of science, in its surprises, 
 its paradoxes, its affinities, its attractions and repul- 
 sions, its circles, its compensations, its positive and 
 negative, its each in all, its all in each, its subtle 
 ethics, its perpetuity and conservation of forces, its 
 spores and invisible germs in the air, its electricity, 
 its mysteries, its metamorphoses, its perceptions of 
 the unity, the oneness of nature, etc., — there was 
 
72 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 something in all these things that was peculiarly im- 
 pressive to Emerson. They were in the direction of 
 his own thinking ; they were like his own startling 
 affirmations. He was constantly seeking and search- 
 ing out the same things in the realm of ideas and of 
 morals. In his laboratory you shall witness wonder- 
 ful combinations, surprising affinities, unexpected re- 
 lations of opposites, threads and ties unthought of. 
 
 Emerson went through the cabinet of the scientist 
 as one goes through a book-stall to find axi odd vol- 
 ume to complete a set ; or through a collection of pic- 
 tures, looking for a companion piece. He took what 
 suited him, what he had use for at home. He was a 
 provident bee exploring all fields for honey, and he 
 could distill the nectar from the most unlikely sources. 
 Science, for its own sake, he perhaps cared little for, 
 and on one occasion refers rather disdainfully to " this 
 jyost-mortem science." Astrology, he says, interests 
 us more, " for it tied man to the system. Instead of 
 an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he 
 felt the star." " The human heart concerns us more 
 than the peering into microscopes, and is larger than 
 can be measured by the pompous figures of the as- 
 tronomer." But where he could turn science over 
 and read a moral on the other side, then he valued it 
 — then the bud became a leaf on a flower instead of 
 a thorn. 
 
 While in London in 1848 he heard Faraday lecture 
 in the Royal Institute on dla, or cross magnetism, 
 and Emerson instantly caught at the idea as applica- 
 
SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 73 
 
 ble in metaphysics. " Dia-magnetism," he says, " is 
 a law of mind to the full extent of Faraday's idea ; 
 namely, that every mind has a new compass, a new 
 north, a new direction of its own, differing in genius 
 and aim from every other mind." In chemistry, in 
 botany, in physiology, in geology, in mechanics, he 
 found keys to unlock his enigmas. No matter from 
 what source the hint came, he was quick to take it. 
 The stress and urge of expression with him was very 
 great, and he would fuse and recast the most stubborn 
 material. There is hardly a fundamental principle of 
 science that he has not turned to ideal uses. " The 
 law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each 
 electrical state superinduces the opposite." " The 
 systole and diastole of the heart are not without their 
 analogy in the ebb and flow of love," and so on. In 
 " Spiritual Laws " he gives a happy turn to the law of 
 gravitation : — 
 
 " Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always 
 works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe it falls. 
 When the fruit is dispatched, the leaf falls. The cir- 
 cuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of 
 man and all animals is a falling forward. All our 
 manual labor and works of strength, as prying, split- 
 ting, digging, rowing, and so forth, are done by dint 
 of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, 
 comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever." 
 
 He is an evolutionist, not upon actual proof like 
 Darwin, but upon poetic insight. " Man," he says, 
 " carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy 
 
74 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the 
 history of nature is charactered in his brain, there- 
 fore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. 
 Every known fact in natural science was divined by 
 the presentiment of somebody before it was actually 
 verified." Thus that stupendous result of modern 
 experimental science, that heat is only a mode of 
 motion, was long before (in 1844) a fact in Emer- 
 son's idealism. "A little heat, that is a little motion, 
 is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and 
 deadly poles of the earth from the prolific tropical 
 climates. All changes pass without violence, by rea- 
 son of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space 
 and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into 
 the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our 
 dame-school measure and exchange our Mosaic and 
 Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew 
 nothing rightly for want of perspective. Now we 
 learn what patient periods must round themselves 
 before the rock is formed, then before the rock is 
 broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated 
 the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the 
 door for the remote flora, fauna, ceres, and pomonas 
 to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite ; how 
 far the quadruped ! how inconceivably remote is 
 man ! All duly arrive, and then race after race of 
 men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster ; 
 farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immor- 
 tality of the soul. Yet all must come as surely as 
 the atom has two sides." 
 
SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 75 
 
 Indeed most of Emerson's writings, including his 
 poems, seem curiously to imply science, as if he had 
 all these bold deductions and discoveries under his 
 feet, and was determined to match them in the ideal. 
 He has taken courage from her revelations. He 
 would show another side to nature equally wonderful. 
 Such men as Tyndall confess their obligation to him. 
 His optics, his electricity, his spectrum analysis, his 
 chemical affinity, his perpetual forces, his dynamics, 
 his litmus tests, his germs in the air, etc., are more 
 wonderful than theirs. How much he makes of cir- 
 cles, of polarity, of attraction and repulsion, of nat- 
 ural selection, of 
 
 " the famous might that lurks 
 In reaction and recoil, 
 Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil." 
 
 He is the astronomer and philosopher of the moral 
 sentiment. He is full of the surprises and paradoxes, 
 the subtle relations and affinities, the great in the lit- 
 tle, the far in the near, the sublime in the mean, that 
 science has disclosed in the world about us. He 
 would find a more powerful fulminant than has yet 
 been discovered. He likes to see two harmless ele- 
 ments come together with a concussion that will shake 
 the roof. It is not so much for material that Emer- 
 son is indebted to science, as for courage, example, 
 inspiration. 
 
 When he used scientific material he fertilized it 
 with his own spirit. This the true poet will always 
 
76 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 do when he goes to this field. Hard pan will not 
 grow corn ; meteoric dust will not nourish melons. The 
 poet adds something to the hard facts of science that 
 is like vegetable mould to the soil, like the contribu- 
 tions of animal and vegetable life, and of the rains, 
 the dews, the snows. 
 
 Carlyle's debt to science is much less obvious than 
 that of Emerson. He was not the intellectual miser, 
 the gleaner and hoarder of ideas for their own sake, 
 that Emerson was, but the prophet and spokesman of 
 personal qualities, the creator and celebrator of heroes. 
 So far as science ignored or belittled man, or the ethi- 
 cal quality in man, and rests with a mere mechanical 
 conception of the universe, he was its enemy. Indi- 
 viduality alone interested him. Not the descent of 
 the species, but the ascent of personal attributes, was 
 the problem that attracted him. He was unfriendly 
 to the doctrine of physical evolution, yet his concep- 
 tion of natural selection and the survival of the fittest 
 as applied to history is as radical as Darwin's. He 
 had studied astronomy to some purpose. The frag- 
 ment left among his papers called " Spiritual Optics," 
 and published by Froude in his life of him, shows 
 what a profound interpretation and application he 
 had given to the cardinal astronomical facts. His 
 sense of the reign of law, his commanding perception 
 of the justice and rectitude inherent in things, of the 
 reality of the ideal, of the subordination of the lesser 
 to the greater, the tyranny of mass, power, etc., have 
 evidently all been deepened and intensified by his 
 
SCIENCE AND THE POETS. 77 
 
 absorption of the main principles of this department 
 of physical science. What disturbed him especially 
 was any appearance of chaos, anarchy, insubordina- 
 tion ; he wanted to see men governed and duly 
 obedient to the stronger force, as if the orbs of 
 heaven were his standard. He seemed always to see 
 man and human life in their sidereal relations, against 
 a background of immensity, depth beyond depth, 
 terror beyond terror, splendor above splendor, sur- 
 rounding them. Indeed, without the light thrown 
 upon the universe by the revelations of astronomy, 
 Carlyle would jirobably never have broken from the 
 Calvinistic creed of his fathers. By a kind of sure 
 instinct he spurned all that phase of science which 
 results in such an interpretation of the universe as is 
 embodied in the works of Spencer — works which, 
 whatever their value, are so utterly barren to the lit- 
 erary and artistic mind. 
 
 The inquisitions of science, the vivisections, the 
 violent, tortuous, disrupting processes are not always 
 profitable. Wherein nature answers the easiest, 
 cheerfulest, directest, we find our deepest interest ; 
 where science just anticipates the natural sense, as it 
 were, or shows itself a little quicker witted than our 
 slow faculties, as in the discovery of the circulation 
 of the blood for instance. The real wonder is that 
 mankind should not always have known and believed 
 in the circulation of the blood, because circulation is 
 the law of nature. Everything circulates, or finally 
 comes back to its starting point. Stagnation is death. 
 
<8 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 The sphericity of the earth, too — how could we 
 ever believe anything else ? Does not the whole sys- 
 tem of things centre into balls ; every form in nature 
 strive to be spherical ? The sphere is the infinity of 
 form, that in which all specific form is merged and 
 lost, or into which it escapes or gets transformed. 
 The doctrine of the correlation and conservation of 
 forces is pointed to by the laws of the mind. The 
 poets have always said it, and all men have felt it ; 
 why await scientific proof ? The spectroscope has 
 revealed the universality of chemistry, that the far- 
 thermost star, as compared with our earth, is bone 
 of her bone and flesh of her flesh. This is a poetic 
 truth as well as a scientific, and is. valuable to all 
 men, because the germ of it always lay in their 
 minds. It is a comfort to know for a certainty that 
 these elements are cosmic ; that matter is the same, 
 and spirit, or law, the same everywhere, and that if 
 we were to visit the remotest worlds, we would not 
 find the men rooted to the ground and the trees walk- 
 ing about, but life on the same terms as here. The 
 main facts of natural history also lie in the main di- 
 rection of our natural faculties, and are proper and 
 welcome to all men. So much of botany, so much of 
 biology, so much of geology, of chemistry, of natural 
 philosophy, as lies within the sphere of legitimate 
 observation, or within the plane of man's natural 
 knowledge, is capable of being absorbed by literature, 
 and heightened to new significance. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 
 
 When Matthew Arnold, during his visit to this 
 country in 1883-84 delivered himself upon Emerson 
 and Carlyle, he criticised two men who belong to 
 quite a different order of mind from his own — men 
 who are the prophets of the intuitions and the moral 
 sense, as he himself is the apostle of culture and clear 
 intelligence. Emerson and Carlyle were essentially 
 religious, and were filled with the sentiment of the 
 infinite, which M. Renan regards as the chief gift of 
 medievalism to the modern world, while Arnold is 
 essentially critical, and is filled with the sentiment or 
 idea of culture, which is the chief gift to the world 
 of Greek civilization. What he had to say of these 
 two men I shall consider in another chapter. At 
 present I wish to take a general view of Arnold's 
 criticism as a whole. 
 
 Probably the need for the urbanity and clear rea- 
 son which Arnold brings is just as urgent as the need 
 for the moral fervor and conviction which Carlyle 
 brings ; if not to us in this country, where the con- 
 science of man needs stimulating more than his in- 
 tellect needs clearing, then certainly in England, 
 where the popular mind is less quick and flexible 
 than in America. And, it is against England, 
 
80 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 against British civilization, that the force of Arnold's 
 criticism has been directed. 
 
 The application to America of the main drift of 
 his criticism of British civilization is lessened not only 
 for the reason above hinted at — namely : that the 
 race refines and comes into shape in this country 
 faster than in Britain, faster, perhaps, than the due 
 proportion between character and faculty will warrant ; 
 but because class distinctions are practically abolished 
 here, and because, in general, there is not the same 
 cramped, inflexible, artificial, and congested state of 
 things in the United States as cause all the woe of 
 England. The defects in our civilization which Ar- 
 nold pointed out in a paper printed just before he 
 died, namely, that our country, or our doings in it 
 are not interesting, that our people are wanting in 
 the discipline of awe and reverence, that we are 
 given to self-glorification, that our newspapers are 
 flippant and sensational, etc., are self-evident to all 
 candid observers. "In what concerns the solving 
 of the political and social problem they [the people 
 of the United States] see clear and think straight ; 
 in what concerns the higher civilization they live in 
 a fool's paradise." s It seems to me that the last part 
 of this sentence is just as true as the first part. From 
 the point of view of a good dinner — a point of view 
 not to be despised by any means, our country and our 
 achievements in it are very interesting, but from a 
 high and disinterested point of view, the point of 
 view of art and literature, of the best that is known 
 and thought in the world, it is not interesting. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 81 
 
 It could hardly be otherwise. America is the pro- 
 duct of the commercial and industrial age, the age of 
 prose. Nearly all its features are the outcome of a 
 spirit that makes little account of taste, or the beauti- 
 ful — the spirit of gain. The spirit that still rules it, 
 and rules more or less all modern European nations, 
 is the spirit of gain, the greed of wealth, and nothing 
 but the ugly, the prosaic can be born of this spirit. 
 The old world is the product of quite a different 
 spirit, the religious spirit and the spirit of chivalry 
 and feudalism. Life seems much riper and fuller 
 there — has much more flavor, and one can well see 
 how a cultivated European would find America al- 
 most intolerable. 
 
 Yet the two principles of which Arnold makes so 
 much, Hellenism and Hebraism, the power of ideas 
 and the power of conduct, are doubtless more evenly 
 blended in our people than among those of Great 
 Britain. Indeed, it often appears that if we need 
 more of either, it is of the latter rather than of the 
 former, a little more of the old Hebrew's reverence 
 and depth and solemnity of character, rather than of 
 the Hellene's flexibility and desire to hear or to tell 
 some new thing. 
 
 The equality also, for which Arnold pleads, we al- 
 ready practically have, and the Irish question, the 
 Church and the State question, and the burning ques- 
 tion, May a man marry his deceased wife's sister ? we 
 have not. But the question of culture, of taste, of 
 literature, of institutions, of science, of obedience, 
 
tiZ INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 and of a just mean and measure in life, we have, and 
 shall always have, and may the time be far removed 
 when a man who cherishes such lofty ideal upon all 
 these subjects as did Matthew Arnold shall not find 
 eager and improving listeners among us. Arnold 
 meant authority as distinctly as Carlyle did, but the 
 authority of the gentler reason, and not of the hero. 
 
 In connecting his name with that of Carlyle, let us 
 note here that he stood as much alone in his arraign- 
 ment of his countrymen as the great Scotchman did, 
 and was as little identified with any party, sect, or 
 movement. He was just as fearless and wholesale 
 in his criticisms, but far more cool and dispassionate. 
 Carlyle can hardly be said to have been a reasonable 
 being ; the secret of his influence was not his reason, 
 but his genius and religious fervor ; but there is no 
 getting away from Arnold's reasonableness (not al- 
 ways or commonly a " sweet reasonableness ; " there is 
 often a bitter or acrid flavor to it) ; the clearness and 
 fullness of his demonstration. Hence he was prob- 
 ably more of a thorn in the side of John Bull than 
 was Carlyle ; his criticism is harder to answer, and 
 he applied it with an air of teasing deference and 
 simplicity, or of restrained scorn and contempt, which 
 makes it far more irritating than the Scotchman's 
 explosions of wrath and picturesque indignation. 
 Carlyle is much the greater force, much the more im- 
 pressive and stimulating, but he is also much the more 
 bewildering and misleading. Arnold has reduced 
 the Scotchman's strange mixture of wrath and ten- 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 83 
 
 clerness, poetry and eloquence, prophecy and philoso- 
 phy, to a system, and has drawn out of it the pure 
 metal available for a sharp and telling criticism. 
 Culture and Anarchy, Friendship's Garland, the 
 Mixed Essays, the Irish Essays, are hut the Latter- 
 day Pamphlets and Past and Present running pure 
 and clear. What was like a mountain of mixed ores 
 in the latter, becomes weapons of polished steel in 
 the former. Take this passage from Past and Pres- 
 ent : — 
 
 " Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter, — 
 oftentimes the force of dullness can no farther go. 
 You stand silent, incredulous, as over a platitude that 
 borders on the Infinite. The man's Churchisms, Dis- 
 senterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College Philos- 
 ophies, Fashionable Literatures, are unexampled in 
 this world. Fate's prophecy is fulfilled ; you call 
 the man an ox or an ass. But get him once to work, 
 — respectable man ! His spoken sense is next to 
 nothing, nine tenths of it palpable nonsense ; but his 
 unspoken sense, his inner silent feeling of what is 
 true, what does agree with fact, what is doable and 
 what is not doable, — this seeks its fellow in the world. 
 A terrible worker ; irresistible against marshes, moun- 
 tains, impediments, disorder, incivilization ; every- 
 where vanquishing disorder, leaving it behind him 
 as method and order. He ' retires to his bed three 
 days,' and considers ! " 
 
 In this passage of strong Carlylese, and in many 
 more like it, lies the germ of Arnold's indictment of 
 
84 INDOOK STUDIES. 
 
 his countrymen, that they lack intelligence, or Geist, 
 ability to deal with ideas, and that they are great 
 only in deeds, in works, or are Hebraic, rather than 
 Hellenic. 
 
 Carlyle himself was terribly given to Hebraizing, 
 to praising work, energy, force, and to spurning ideas, 
 except when embodied in a man or hero. With him 
 the man of theory, or of ideas, cuts a sorry figure 
 beside the man of practice or of deeds. 
 
 "How one loves to see the burly figure of him, 
 this thick-skinned, seemingly opaque, perhaps sulky, 
 almost stupid Man of Practice, pitted against some 
 light, adroit Man of Theory, all equipped with clear 
 logic, and able everywhere to give you Why for 
 Wherefore. The adroit Man of Theory, so light of 
 movement, clear of utterance, with his bow full-bent, 
 and his quiver full of arrow arguments — surely he 
 will strike down the game, transfix everywhere the 
 heart of the matter, triumph everywhere, as he 
 proves that he shall and must do ? To your aston- 
 ishment it turns out oftenest No. The cloudy-browed, 
 thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no logic utter- 
 ance, in silence mainly, with here and there a low 
 grunt or growl, has in him what transcends all logic 
 utterance ; a Congruity with the Unuttered, the 
 Speakable, which lies atop, as a superficial film, or 
 outer skin, is his or is not his ; but the Doable, which 
 reaches down to the world's centre, you find him 
 there." 
 
 Here is the voice of Hebraism, strong and trium- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 85 
 
 phant, as in Arnold we have the voice of Hellenism, 
 clear and triumphant. Yet Carlyle was not so much 
 on the side of the man of deeds as opposed to the 
 man of ideas, as he was on the side of reality as op- 
 posed to shams. His mistake probably was too great 
 haste in pronouncing all theories shams, and all force 
 beneficent. 
 
 The key-note of Arnold's criticism of his country- 
 men might also be found in Emerson's " English 
 Traits." Emerson charges the English with the same 
 want of ideas, and credits them with the same noble 
 Hebraizing tendency. The English do not look 
 abroad into universality, he said, quoting Bacon. 
 Bacon, he said, marked the influx of idealism into 
 England. " He had imagination, the leisure of the 
 spirit, and basked in an element of contemplation." 
 " German science comprehends the English." The 
 latter is " void of imagination and free play of 
 thought" using the very phrase which Arnold has 
 made so telling and significant. Arnold shows his 
 genius in the way he seizes upon and expands these 
 ideas. What was a casual thought or remark with 
 others, in his hands becomes the axis of a great critical 
 system. What was wit, or poetry, or a happy char- 
 acterization with Carlyle and Emerson, furnishes him 
 the start for a most searching and original analysis. 
 
 Arnold was preeminently a critical force, a force of 
 clear reason and of steady discernment. He is not 
 an author whom we read for the man's sake or for 
 the flavor of his personality, for this is not always 
 
86 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 agreeable, but for bis unfailing intelligence and crit- 
 ical acumen ; and because, to borrow a sentence of 
 Goethe, he helps us to " attain certainty and security 
 in the appreciation of things exactly as they are." 
 Everywhere in his books we are brought under the 
 influence of a mind which indeed does not fill and 
 dilate us, but which clears our vision, which sets go- 
 ing a process of crystallization in our thoughts, and 
 brings our knowledge, on a certain range of subjects, 
 to a higher state of clearness and purity. 
 
 Let us admit that he is not a man to build upon ; 
 he is in no sense a founder ; he lacks the broad, pa- 
 ternal, sympathetic human element that the first order 
 of men possess. He lays the emphasis upon the more 
 select, high-bred qualities. All his sympathies are 
 with the influences which make for correctness, for 
 discipline, for taste, for perfection, rather than those 
 that favor power, freedom, originality, individuality, 
 and the more heroic and primary qualities. 
 
 It is to be owned that there is a quality, a stimulus, 
 and helpfulness, which we must not expect of Arnold, 
 a power of poetry which his poems, perfect as they 
 are, do not afford us, but which we get in much 
 greater measure from poets far his inferior in intel- 
 ligence and thoroughness of culture, as in a few 
 poems of Keats ; a power of prose which his lucid 
 sentences do not hold, and a power of criticism which 
 his coolness and disinterestedness do not attain to. 
 But this latter we must probably go outside of Eng- 
 lish literature to find. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 87 
 
 Arnold was a civilizing and centralizing force. Out 
 of the spirit which he begets, and which begat him, 
 does not come the great leaders and reformers, the 
 one-sided, headstrong, fanatical men, men that serve 
 as the plowshare of the destinies to break up the 
 stubborn glebe of the world ; but the wise, the cor- 
 rect, the urbane, the flexible men, the men who reap 
 and enjoy and beautify the world. He says, in effect, 
 there are enough insisting upon force, upon genius, 
 upon independence, upon rights ; he will lay the stress 
 upon culture, and upon duties, and upon those things 
 that make for perfection. 
 
 The more vital and active forces of English litera- 
 ture of our century have been mainly forces of ex- 
 pansion and revolution, or Protestant forces ; our 
 most puissant voices have been voices of dissent, and 
 have been a stimulus to individuality, separatism, and 
 to independence. But here is a voice of another 
 order ; a voice closely allied to the best spirit of 
 Catholicism ; one from which we will not learn hero- 
 worship, or Puritanism, or non-conformity, or catch 
 the spark of enthusiasm, or revolution, but from 
 which we learn the beauty of urbanity, and the value 
 of clear and fresh ideas. 
 
 One never doubts Arnold's ability to estimate a 
 purely literary and artistic force, but one sees that it 
 is by no means certain that he will fully appreciate 
 a force of character, a force of patriotism, of con- 
 science, of religion, or any of the more violent rev- 
 olutionary forces — that is, apart from a literary rep- 
 
88 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 reservation of them — because his point of view does 
 not command these things so completely as it does 
 the other. Emerson was a literary force, but above 
 and beyond that he was a religious force, a force of 
 genius and of good breeding. The dissenters, the 
 English Puritans, the French Huguenots, embody a 
 force of conscience. Carlyle was a force of Puritan- 
 ism, blended with a force antagonistic to it, the force 
 of German culture, two forces that did not work well 
 together and which gave him no rest. 
 
 Arnold was a literary force of a very high order, 
 but was he anything else ? Will he leave any per- 
 manent mark upon the conscience, upon the politics, 
 upon the thought of his countrymen ? His works, as 
 models of urbanity and lucidity, will endure; still 
 they do not contain the leaven which leavens and 
 modifies races and times. 
 
 The impression that a fragmentary and desultory 
 reading of Arnold is apt to give one, namely, that he 
 is one of the scorners, a man of " a high look, and a 
 proud heart," gradually wears away as one grows 
 familiar with the main currents of his teachings. He 
 does not indeed turn out to be a large, hearty, mag- 
 netic man, but he proves to be a thoroughly serious 
 and noble one, whose calmness and elevation are of 
 great value. His writings, as now published, in a 
 uniform edition, embi^ace ten volumes, to wit: two 
 volumes of poems ; two volumes of literary essays, 
 " Essays in Criticism " and a volume made up of 
 " Celtic Literature " and " On Translating: Homer ; " 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 89 
 
 a volume of mixed essays, mainly on Irish themes'; a 
 volume called " Culture and Anarchy " and " Friend- 
 ship's Garland," mainly essays in political and social 
 criticism ; three volumes of religious criticism, namely, 
 " Literature and Dogma," " God and the Bible," and 
 " St. Paul and Protestantism " with " Last Essays," 
 and one volume of " Discourses in America." Of this 
 body of work the eight volumes of prose are pure 
 criticism, and by criticism, when applied to Arnold, 
 we must mean the scientific passion for pure truth, 
 the passion for seeing the thing exactly as it is carried 
 into all fields. " I wish to decide nothing as of my 
 own authority," he says in one of his earlier essays ; 
 " the great art of criticism is to get one's self out of 
 the way and to let humanity decide." He would play 
 the role of a disinterested observer. Apropos of his 
 political and social criticisms, he says : — 
 
 " I do not profess to be a politician, but simply one 
 of a disinterested class of observers, who, with no 
 organized and embodied set of supporters to please, 
 set themselves to observe honestly and to report faith- 
 fully the state and prospects of our civilization." 
 
 He urges that criticism in England has been too 
 " directly polemical and controversial ; " that it has 
 been made to subserve interests not its own ; the 
 interest of party, of a sect, of a theory, or of some 
 practical and secondary consideration. His own ef- 
 fort has been to restore it to its " pure intellectual 
 sphere " and to keep its high aim constantly before 
 him, " which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction 
 
90 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 which is retarding and vulgarizing ; to lead him to- 
 wards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon 
 what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty 
 and fitness of things." 
 
 The spirit in which he approaches Butler's " Anal- 
 ogy " is a fair sample of the spirit in which he ap- 
 proaches most of his themes : — 
 
 " Elsewhere I have remarked what advantage But- 
 ler had against the Deists of his own time, in the 
 line of argument which he chose. But how does his 
 argument in itself stand the scrutiny of one who has 
 no counter-thesis, such as that of the Deists, to make 
 good against Butler? How does it affect one who 
 has no wish at all to doubt or cavil, like the loose 
 wits of fashionable society who angered Butler, still 
 less any wish to mock, but who comes to the ' Anal- 
 ogy ' with an honest desire to receive from it any- 
 thing which he finds he can use ? " 
 
 Matthew Arnold was probably the most deeply im- 
 bued with the spirit of Greek culture of any English 
 man of letters of our time. It is not that he brings a 
 modern mind to classic themes, as has been so often 
 done by our poets and essayists, but that he brings a 
 classic mind to modern themes, herein differing so 
 widely from such a writer, for instance, as Mr. Ad- 
 dington Symonds, who has written so much and so 
 well upon classic subjects, but in the modern roman- 
 tic spirit, rather than with the pure simplicity of the 
 antique, — in the spirit whose ruling sense is a sense 
 of the measureless, rather than of measure. " Hel- 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 91 
 
 lenic virtue," says Dr. Curtius, the German historian 
 of Greece, " consisted in measure ; " " a wise observ- 
 ance of right measure in all things." 
 
 Arnold divides the forces that move the world into 
 two grand divisions — Hellenism and Hebraism, the 
 Greek idea and the Jewish idea, the power of intel- 
 lect and the power of conscience. " The uppermost 
 idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really 
 are ; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct 
 and obedience. Nothing can do away with this in- 
 effaceable difference. The Greek quarrel with the 
 body and its desires is that they hinder right think- 
 ing ; the Hebrew quarrel with them is that they hin- 
 der right acting." " An unclouded clearness of 
 mind, an unimpeded play of thought," is the aim of 
 the one ; " strictness of conscience," fidelity to prin- 
 ciple, is the mainspring of the other. As, in this 
 classification, Carlyle would stand for unmitigated 
 Hebraism, so Arnold himself stands for pure Hellen- 
 ism ; as the former's Hebraism upon principle was 
 backed up by the Hebraic type of mind, its grandeur, 
 its stress of conscience, its opulent imagination, its 
 cry for judgment and justice, etc., so Arnold's con- 
 viction of the superiority of Hellenism as a remedy 
 for modern ills is backed up by the Hellenic type of 
 mind, its calmness, its lucidity, its sense of form and 
 measure. Indeed, Arnold is probably the purest 
 classic writer that English literature, as yet, has to 
 show ; classic not merely in the repose and purity of 
 his style, but in the unity and simplicity of his mind. 
 
92 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 What primarily distinguishes the antique mind from 
 the modern mind is its more fundamental singleness 
 and wholeness. It is not marked by the same spe- 
 cialization and development on particular lines. Our 
 highly artificial and complex modern life leads to sep- 
 aratism ; to not only a division of labor, but almost 
 to a division of man himself. With the ancients, re- 
 ligion and politics, literature and science, poetry and 
 prophecy, were one. These things had not yet been 
 set apart from each other and differentiated. When 
 to this we add vital unity and simplicity, the love of 
 beauty, and the sense of measure and proportion, we 
 have the classic mind of Greece, and the secret of 
 the power and charm of those productions which have 
 so long ruled supreme in the world of literature and 
 art. Arnold's mind has this classic unity and whole- 
 ness. With him religion, politics, literature, and sci- 
 ence are one, and that one is comprehended under 
 the name of culture. Culture means the perfect and 
 equal development of man on all sides. 
 
 " Culture," he says, giving vent to his Hellenism, 
 " is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with 
 poetry ; " the dominant idea of poetry is " the idea 
 of beauty and of a human nature perfect in all its 
 sides ; " this idea is the Greek idea. " Human life," 
 he says, " in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with 
 a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy ; it is 
 full of what we call sweetness and light." " The 
 best art and poetry of the Greeks," he says, " in 
 which religion and poetry are one, in which the idea 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 93 
 
 of beauty and of human nature perfect on all sides 
 adds to itself a religious and devout energy, and works 
 in the strength of that, is on this account of such sur- 
 passing interest and instructiveness for us." But 
 Greece failed because the moral and religious fibre 
 in humanity was not braced and developed also. 
 
 " But Greece did not err in having the idea of 
 beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection so 
 present and paramount. It is impossible to have this 
 idea too present and paramount ; only, the moral fibre 
 must be braced too. And we, because we have 
 braced the moral fibre, are not on that account in 
 the right way, if at the same time the idea of beauty, 
 harmony, and complete human perfection is wanting 
 or misapprehended amongst us ; and evidently it is 
 wanting or misapprehended at present. And when 
 we rely, as we do, on our religious organizations, 
 which in themselves do not and can not give us this 
 idea, and think we have done enough if we make 
 them spread and prevail, then I say we fall into our 
 common fault of overvaluing machinery." 
 
 From the point of view of Greek culture, and the 
 ideal of Greek life, there is perhaps very little in the 
 achievements of the English race, or in the ideals 
 which it cherishes, that would not be pronounced the 
 work of barbarians. From the Apollinarian stand- 
 point, Christianity itself, with its war upon our natu- 
 ral instincts, is a barbarous religion. But no born 
 Hellene from the age of Pericles could pronounce a 
 severer judgment upon the England of to-day than 
 
94 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Arnold has in his famous classification of his coun- 
 trymen into Barbarians, Phillistines, and Populace, 
 an upper class materialized, a middle class vulgarized, 
 and a lower class brutalized. Arnold had not the 
 Hellenic joyousness, youthfulness, and spontaneity. 
 His is a " sad lucidity of soul," whereas the Greek 
 had a joyous lucidity of soul. " Solon, Solon ! " 
 said the priest of Egypt, " you Greeks are always 
 children." But the Englishman had the Greek pas- 
 sion for symmetry, totality, and the Hellenic abhor- 
 rence of the strained, the fantastic, the obscure. His 
 were not merely the classical taste and predilections 
 of a scholar, but of an alert, fearless, and thorough- 
 going critic of life ; a man who dare lay his hands on 
 the British constitution itself and declare that " with 
 its compromises, its love of facts, its horror of theory, 
 its studied avoidance of clear thought, it sometimes 
 looks a colossal machine, for the manufacture of Phil- 
 istines." Milton was swayed by the Greek ideals in 
 his poetry, but they took no vital hold of his life ; his 
 Puritanism and his temper in his controversial writ- 
 ings are the farthest possible remove from the seren- 
 ity and equipoise of the classic standards. But Ar- 
 nold, a much less poetic force certainly than Milton, 
 was animated by the spirit of Hellenism on all occa- 
 sions ; it was the shaping and inspiring spirit of his 
 life. It was not a dictum with him, but a force. Yet 
 his books are thoroughly of to-day, thoroughly occu- 
 pied with current men and measures, and covered 
 with current names and allusions. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 95 
 
 Arnold's Hellenism speaks very pointedly all 
 through " Culture and Anarchy," in all those assaults 
 of his upon the " hideousness and rawness " of so 
 much of British civilization, upon the fierceness and 
 narrowness, the Jacobinism of parties, upon " the 
 Dissidence of Dissent, and the Protestantism of the 
 Protestant religion ; " in his efforts to divest the 
 mind of all that is harsh, uncouth, impenetrable, ex- 
 clusive, self-willed, one-sided ; in his efforts to render 
 it more flexible, tolerant, free, lucid, with less faith 
 in individuals and more faith in principles. They 
 speak in him when he calls Luther a Philistine of 
 genius ; when he says of the mass of his countrymen 
 that they have " a defective type of religion, a narrow 
 range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of 
 beauty, a low standard of manner ; " that " Puritan- 
 ism was a prison which the English people entered 
 and had the key turned upon its spirit there for two 
 hundred years ; " when he tells the dissenters that in 
 preferring their religious service to that of the estab- 
 lished church they have shown a want of taste and 
 of culture like that of preferring Eliza Cook to Mil- 
 ton. " A public rite with a reading of Milton at- 
 tached to it is another thing from a public rite with a 
 reading from Eliza Cook." 
 
 His ideas of poetry as expressed in the preface to 
 his poems in 1853 are distinctly Greek, and they led 
 him to exclude from the collection his long poem 
 called " Empedocles on Etna," because the poem was 
 deficient in the classic requirements of action. He 
 says : — 
 
96 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 " The radical difference between the poetic theory 
 of the Greeks and our own is this : that with them 
 the poetical character of the action in itself, and the 
 conduct of it, was the first consideration ; with us at- 
 tention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate 
 thoughts and images which occur in the treatment of 
 an action. They regarded the whole ; we regard the 
 parts. "We have poems which seem to exist merely 
 for the sake of single lines and passages, not for the 
 sake of producing any total impression. We have 
 critics who seem to direct their attention merely to 
 detached expressions, to the language about the action, 
 not to the action itself. I verily think that the major- 
 ity of them do not in their hearts believe that there 
 is such a thing as a total impression to be derived from 
 a poem at all, or to be demanded from a poet ; they 
 think the term a commonplace of metaphysical criti- 
 cism. They will permit the poet to select any action 
 he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, 
 provided he gratifies them with occasional bursts of 
 fine writing, and with a shower of isolated thoughts 
 and images. That is, they permit him to leave their 
 poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies 
 their rhetorical sense and their curiosity." 
 
 Here we undoubtedly have the law as deducible 
 from the Greek poets, and perhaps as deducible from 
 the principles of perfect taste itself. Little wonder 
 Arnold found Emerson's poems so unsatisfactory, — 
 Emerson, the most unclassical of poets, with no 
 proper sense of wholeness at all, no continuity, no 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 97 
 
 power to deal with actions. Emerson has great pro- 
 jectile power, but no constructive power. His aim 
 was mainly to shoot a thought or an image on a line 
 like a meteor athwart the imagination of his reader, 
 to kindle and quicken his feeling for beautiful and 
 sublime truths. Valuable as these things are, it is to 
 be admitted that those poems that are concrete 
 wholes, like the organic products of nature, will al- 
 ways rank the higher with a pure artistic taste. 
 
 Whatever be our opinion of the value of his criti- 
 cism, we must certainly credit Arnold with a steady 
 and sincere effort to see things whole, to grasp the 
 totality of life, all the parts duly subordinated and 
 brought into harmony with one another. His watch- 
 word on all occasions is totality, or perfection. He 
 has shown us the shortcomings of Puritanism, of Lib- 
 eralism, and of all forms of religious dissent, when 
 tried by the spirit of Hellenism. We have been 
 made to see very clearly wherein John Bull is not a 
 Greek, and we can divine the grounds of his irrita- 
 tion by the comparison. It is because the critic could 
 look in the face of his great achievement in the world 
 and blame him for being John Bull. The concession 
 that after all he at times in his history exhibited the 
 grand style, the style of the Homeric poems, was a 
 compliment he did not appreciate. 
 
 " English civilization, — the humanizing, the bring- 
 ing into one harmonious and truly human life of the 
 whole body of English society, — that is what inter- 
 ests me. I try to be a disinterested observer of all 
 which really helps and hinders that." 
 
98 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 He recognizes four principal needs in the life of 
 every people and community, — the need of conduct, 
 the need of beauty, the need of knowledge, and the 
 need of social life and manners. The English have 
 the sense of the power of conduct, the Italians the 
 sense of the power of beauty, the Germans the sense 
 of the power of knowledge or science, the French the 
 sense of the power of social life and manners. All 
 these things are needed for our complete humaniza- 
 tion or civilization ; the ancient Greeks came nearer 
 possessing the whole of them, and of moving on all 
 these lines, than any other people. The ground of 
 his preference for the historic churches, the Catholic 
 and the Anglican, over the dissenting churches is 
 that, while they all have a false philosophy of reli- 
 gion, the former address themselves to more needs of 
 human life than the latter. 
 
 " The need for beauty is a real and now rapidly 
 growing need in man ; Puritanism cannot satisfy it ; 
 Catholicism and the English Church can. The need 
 for intellect and knowledge in him, indeed, neither 
 Puritanism, nor Catholicism, nor the English Church 
 can at present satisfy. That need has to seek satis- 
 faction nowadays elsewhere, — through the modern 
 spirit, science, literature." 
 
 He avers that Protestantism has no intellectual 
 superiority over Catholicism, but only a moral superi- 
 ority arising from greater seriousness and earnest- 
 ness. Neither have the Greek wholeness and pro- 
 portion. The attitude of the one towards the Bible 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 99 
 
 is as unreasoning as the attitude of the other towards 
 the church. 
 
 " The mental habit of him who imagines that Ba- 
 laam's ass spoke, in no respect differs from the men- 
 tal habit of him who imagines that a Madonna, of 
 wood or stone, winked." 
 
 The most that can be claimed for each sect, each 
 church, each party is that it is free from some special 
 bondage which still confines the mind of some other 
 sect or party. Those, indeed, are free whom the 
 truth makes free ; but each sect and church has only 
 a fragment of the truth, a little here and a little 
 there. Both Catholic and Protestant have the germ 
 of religion, and both have a false philosophy of the 
 germ. 
 
 " But Catholicism has the germ invested in an im- 
 mense poetry, the gradual work of time and nature, 
 and of the great impersonal artist, Catholic Christen- 
 dom." 
 
 The unity or identity of literature and religion, as 
 with the Greeks — this is the animating idea of " Lit- 
 erature and Dogma." In this work Arnold brings 
 his Hellenism to bear upon the popular religion and 
 the dogmatic interpretation of the Bible, upon which 
 the churches rest ; and the result is that we get from 
 him a literary interpretation of the Bible, a free and 
 plastic interpretation, as distinguished from the hard, 
 literal, and historical interpretation. He reads the 
 Bible as literature, and not as history or science. 
 He seeks its verification in an appeal to taste, to the 
 
100 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 simple reason, to the fitness of things. He finds that 
 the Biblical writers used words in a large and free 
 way, in a fluid and literary way, and not at all with 
 the exactness and stringency of science or mathema- 
 tics; or, as Sir Thomas Browne said of his own 
 works, that many things are to be taken in a " soft 
 and flexible sense." 
 
 In other words, the aim of Arnold's religious criti- 
 cism is to rescue what he calls the natural truth of 
 Christianity from the discredit and downfall which 
 he thinks he sees overtaking its unnatural truth, its 
 reliance upon miracles and the supernatural. The 
 ground, he says, is slipping from under these things ; 
 the time spirit is against them, and unless something 
 is done the very heart and core of Christianity itself, 
 as found in the teachings of Christ, will be lost to the 
 mass of mankind. Upon this phase of Arnold's crit- 
 icism I have this to remark : it is difficult to see how 
 Christianity, as a people's religion, can be preserved 
 by its natural or verifiable truth alone. This natural 
 truth the world has always had ; it bears the same 
 relation to Christianity that the primary and mineral 
 elements bear to a living organism ; what is distinc- 
 tive and valuable in Christianity is the incarnation of 
 these truths in a living system of beliefs and observ- 
 ances which not only take hold of men's minds but 
 which move their hearts. 
 
 We may extract the natural truth of Christianity, 
 a system of morality or of ethics, and to certain 
 minds this is enough ; but it is no more Christianity 
 
Matthew Arnold's criticism. 101 
 
 than the extract of lilies or roses is a flower-garden. 
 " Religion," Arnold well says, " is morality touched 
 with emotion." It is just this element of emotion 
 which we should lose if we reduced Christianity to its 
 natural truths. Show a man the natural or scientific 
 truth of answer to prayer, that is, that answer to 
 prayer is a purely subjective phenomenon, and his 
 lips are sealed ; teach him the natural truth of salva- 
 tion by Jesus Christ, namely, that self-renunciation, 
 that love, that meekness, that dying for others, is sav- 
 ing, and the emotion evaporates from his religion. 
 
 It is, he says, the natural truth of Christianity 
 that he is after ; but it is not the natural truth that 
 the world wants ; it is not this that has saved men 
 and that still saves them, that is, holds them up to the 
 standard of their better selves and sustains them in a 
 life of solitude and virtue. It is the legendary or ar- 
 tificial truth of Christianity which does this, that which 
 the human heart, in its fear, its faith, its hope, its cre- 
 dulity, or in all combined, supplies. It is what Arnold 
 calls extra-belief or aberglaube, the part he is trying 
 to get rid of, that makes Christianity a power for good 
 over the mass of mankind. Aberglaube, Goethe said, 
 is the poetry of life, and it is just this superadded ele- 
 ment to Christianity that to the mass of mankind give 
 it charm, its attraction, its truth to their hearts and 
 imaginations. It is this that touches the natural 
 truth of Christianity with emotion and makes it fruit- 
 ful. It is true that this Aberglaube or superstition is 
 not science, though it perpetually imagines itself to be 
 
102 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 so, but it is nevertheless real to the hearts and faiths 
 of men. To show them that it is not real, that it is 
 not science, is to strip the tree of its leaves ; the tree 
 will perish ; the natural truth of Christianity will not 
 save it to the masses. They can do nothing with the 
 natural truth ; the fairy tale, the exfra-belief, or the 
 superstition, whatever you please to call it, must be 
 added. Arnold himself says : " That the spirit of 
 man should entertain hopes and anticipations, beyond 
 what it actually knows and can verify, is quite nat- 
 ural." Yes, and beyond what is actually true. " Hu- 
 man life could not have the scope, and depth, and 
 progress it has were this otherwise." 
 
 The reader's mind does not pass readily from Ar- 
 nold's disbelief in what is called revealed religion 
 to his advocacy of any church or form of worship : 
 from his scientific passion, his effort to see things ex- 
 actly as they are, to his defense of empty and un- 
 meaning forms. There is a break here, a fault in his 
 mind. There is no logical connection between his at- 
 titude in reference to the interpretation of the Bible, 
 and his advocacy of a form of religious worship 
 upheld by the state. 
 
 If we give up the dogma we must give up the rite 
 founded upon the dogma. Our churches must be- 
 come halls of science or temples of art. Can we 
 worship an impersonal law or tendency? If public 
 worship is to be continued, if church organization is 
 still to go on, as Mr. Arnold advocates, it is impossi- 
 ble to see how the natural truth of Christianity will 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 103 
 
 alone suffice. The truths of the Bible differ from the 
 truths of science just as a picture or a parable differs 
 from an exact statement, not that they are any more 
 true, but that they are true in a way that makes 
 them take a deeper hold upon the spirit. Science 
 knows as clearly as religion that " the face of the 
 Lord is against them that do evil," but does it know 
 it in just the intimate and personal way ? it knows it 
 only as it knows the truth of one of Kepler's laws by 
 a process of cool ratiocination ; but religion knows it 
 through an emotional process, into which the personal 
 element of love and fear enter. I am not discussing 
 the superiority of one mode of belief over the other ; 
 I only urge that worship has its rise in the latter 
 and not in the former. Reason is not the basis of a 
 national religion and never has been. It is very 
 doubtful if the disclosure of a scientific basis for the 
 truths of religion would not be a positive drawback 
 to the religious efficacy of those truths ; because this 
 view of them would come in time to supplant and 
 to kill the personal emotional view, which worship re- 
 quires. 
 
 It is therefore considered as religion, as the basis 
 of public worship, that Arnold does injustice to the 
 popular faith. As science, or philosophy, what he has 
 to offer may be much more acceptable to certain ad- 
 vanced minds, but to the race as a whole a sublimated 
 extract of Christianity can never take the place of 
 the old palpable concrete forms. In fact, getting at 
 the natural truths of a people's religion is very much 
 
104 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 like burning their temples and their idols, and offer- 
 ing them the ashes. 
 
 Another form which Arnold's Hellenism takes is 
 that it begets in him what we may call the spirit of 
 institutionalism, as opposed to the spirit of individual- 
 ism. Greek culture centres in institutions, and the 
 high character of their literary and artistic produc- 
 tions was the expression of qualities which did not 
 merely belong to individuals here and there, but were 
 current in the nation as a whole. With the Greek 
 the state was supreme. He lived and died for the 
 state. He had no private, separate life and occupa- 
 tion, as has the modern man. The arts, architecture, 
 sculpture, existed mainly for public uses. There was 
 probably no domestic life, no country life, no individ- 
 ual enterprises, as we know them. The individual 
 was subordinated. Their greatest men were banished 
 or poisoned from a sort of jealousy of the state. 
 The state could not endure such rivals. Their games, 
 their pastimes, were national institutions. Public sen- 
 timent on all matters was clear and strong. There 
 was a common standard, an unwritten law of taste, 
 to which poets, artists, orators, appealed. Not till 
 Athens began to decay did great men appear, who, 
 like Socrates, had no influence in the state. This 
 spirit of institutionalism is strong in Matthew Ar- 
 nold ; and it is not merely an idea which he has 
 picked up from the Greek, but is the inevitable out- 
 cropping of his inborn Hellenism. This alone places 
 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 105 
 
 him in opposition to his countrymen, who are sus- 
 picious of the state and of state action, and who give 
 full swing to the spirit of individualism. It even 
 places him in hostility to Protestantism, or to the 
 spirit which begat it, to say nothing of the dissenting 
 churches. It makes him indifferent to the element 
 of personalism, the flavor of character, the quality of 
 unique individual genius, wherever found in art, lit- 
 erature, or religion. It is one secret of his prefer- 
 ence of the establishment over the dissenting churches. 
 The dissenter stands for personal religion, religion as 
 a private and individual experience ; the established 
 churches stand for institutional religion, or religion 
 as a public and organized system of worship ; and 
 when the issue is between the two, Arnold will al- 
 ways be found on the side of institutionalism. He 
 always takes up for the state against the individual, 
 for public and established forms against private and 
 personal dissent and caprice. " It was by no means 
 in accordance with the nature of the Hellenes," says 
 Dr. Curtius, " mentally to separate and view in the 
 light of contrast such institutions as the state and 
 religion, which in reality, everywhere most intimately 
 pervaded one another." 
 
 What Arnold found to approve in this country was 
 our institutions, our success in solving the social and 
 political problems, and what he found to criticise was 
 our excessive individualism, our self-glorification, the 
 bad manners of our newspapers, and, in general, the 
 crude state of our civilization. 
 
106 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 One would expect Arnold to prefer the religion of 
 the Old Testament to that of the New, for, as he him- 
 self says : " The leaning, there, is to make religion 
 social rather than personal, an affair of outward du- 
 ties rather than of inward dispositions ; " and, to a 
 disinterested observer, this is very much like what 
 the religion of the Anglican Church appears to be. 
 
 Arnold always distrusts the individual ; he sees in 
 him mainly a bundle of whims and caprices. The 
 individual is one-sided, fantastical, headstrong, nar- 
 row. He distrusts all individual enterprises in the 
 way of schools, colleges, churches, charities ; and, like 
 his teacher, Aristotle, pleads for state action in all 
 these matters. '' Culture," he says (and by culture 
 he means Hellenism), " will not let us rivet our atten- 
 tion upon any one man and his doings ; " it directs 
 our attention rather to the " natural current there is 
 in human affairs," and assigns " to systems and to 
 system makers a smaller share in the bent of human 
 destiny than their friends like." 
 
 " I remember, when I was under the influence of a 
 mind to which I feel the greatest obligations, the mind 
 of a man who was the very incarnation of sanity and 
 clear sense, a man the most considerable, it seems to 
 me, whom America has yet produced, — Benjamin 
 Franklin, — I remember the relief with which, after 
 long feeling the sway of Franklin's imperturbable 
 common sense, I came upon a pi'oject of his for a new 
 version of the Book of Job, to replace the old ver- 
 sion, the style of which, says Franklin, has become 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 107 
 
 obsolete, and hence less agreeable. ' I give,' he con- 
 tinues, ' a few verses, which may serve as a sample 
 of the kind of version I would recommend/ 1 We 
 all recollect the famous verse in our translation : 
 ' Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job 
 fear God for nought ? ' Franklin makes this : ' Does 
 your Majesty imagine that Job's good conduct is the 
 effect of mere personal attachment and affection ? ' 
 I well remember, how, when first I read that, I drew 
 a deep breath of relief, and said to myself : ' After 
 all, there is a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin's 
 victorious good sense ! ' So, after hearing Bentham 
 cried loudly up as the renovator of modern society, 
 and Bentham's mind and ideas proposed as the rulers 
 of our future, I open the ' Deontology.' There I 
 read : ' While Xenophon was writing his history and 
 Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato were 
 talking nonsense under pretense of talking wisdom 
 and morality. This morality of theirs consisted in 
 words ; this wisdom of theirs was the denial of mat- 
 ters known to every man's experience.' From the 
 moment of reading that, I am delivered from the 
 bondage of Bentham ! the fanaticism of his adher- 
 ents can touch me no longer. I feel the inadequacy 
 of his mind and ideas for supplying the rule of human 
 society, for perfection." 
 
 The modern movement seems to me peculiarly a 
 movement of individualism, a movement favoring the 
 
 1 It turns out that this was only a joke of Franklin's, audit 
 is very curious that Arnold did not see it. 
 
108 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 greater freedom and growth of the individual, as op- 
 posed to outward authority and its lodgment in insti- 
 tutions. It is this movement which has given a dis- 
 tinctive character to the literature of our century, a 
 movement in letters which Goethe did more to for- 
 ward than any other man — Goethe, who said that 
 in art and poetry personal genius is everything, and 
 that " in the great work the great person is always 
 present as the great factor." Arnold seems not to 
 share this feeling ; he does not belong to this move- 
 ment. His books give currency to another order of 
 ideas. He subordinates the individual, and lays the 
 emphasis on culture and the claims of the higher 
 standards. He says the individual has no natural 
 rights, but only duties. We never find him insisting 
 upon originality, self-reliance, character, independ- 
 ence, but, quite the contrary, on conformity and obe- 
 dience. He says that at the bottom of the trouble of 
 all the English people lies the notion of its being the 
 prime right and happiness for each of us to affirm 
 himself and to be doing as he likes. One of his ear- 
 liest and most effective essays was to show the value 
 of academies, of a central and authoritative standard 
 of taste to a national literature ; and in all his subse- 
 quent writings the academic note has been struck and 
 adhered to. With him right reason and the author- 
 ity of the state are one. " In our eyes," he says, 
 " the very framework and exterior order of the state, 
 whoever may administer the state, is sacred." " Ev- 
 ery one of us," he again says, " has the idea of coun- 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 109 
 
 try, as a sentiment ; hardly any one of us has the 
 idea of the state, as a working power. And why ? 
 Because we habitually live in our ordinary selves, 
 which do not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes of 
 the class to which we happen to belong." Which is 
 but saying because we are wrapped so closely about 
 by our individualism. His remedy for the democratic 
 tendencies of the times, tendencies he does not re- 
 gret, is an increase of the dignity and authority of 
 the state. The danger of English democracy is, he 
 says, " that it will have far too much its own way, 
 and be left far too much to itself." He adds, with 
 great force and justness, that " nations are not truly 
 great solely because the individuals composing them 
 are numerous, free, and active, but they are great 
 when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity 
 are employed in the service of an ideal higher than 
 that of an ordinary man, taken by himself." Or, as 
 Aristotle says, these things must be in " obedience to 
 some intelligent principle, and some right regulation, 
 which has the power of enforcing its decrees." 
 
 When the licensed victualers or the commercial 
 travelers propose to make a school for their children, 
 Arnold is unsparing in his ridicule. He says that to 
 bring children up " in a kind of odor of licensed vic- 
 tualism or of bagmanism is not a wise training to 
 give to children." The heads and representatives of 
 the nation should teach them better, but they do noth- 
 ing of the kind ; on the contrary, they extol the en- 
 ergy and self-reliance of the licensed victualers or 
 
110 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 commercial travelers, and predict fall success for their 
 schools. John Bull is suspicious of centralization, 
 bureaucracy, state authority, which carry things with 
 such a high hand on the Continent. Anything that 
 threatens, or seems to threaten, his individual liberty, 
 he stands clear of. The sense of the nation spoke in 
 the words lately uttered through the " Times " by Sir 
 Auberon Herbert. He says : — 
 
 " All great state systems stupefy ; you cannot make 
 the state a parent without the logical consequence of 
 making the people children. Official regulation and 
 free mental perception of what is right and wise do 
 not and cannot coexist. I see no possible way in 
 which you can reconcile these great state services and 
 the conditions under which men have to make true 
 progress in themselves." 
 
 But to preach such notions in England, Arnold 
 would say, is like carrying coals to Newcastle. They 
 would be of more service in France, where state ac- 
 tion is excessive. In England the dangers are the 
 other way. 
 
 " Our dangers are in exaggerating the blessings of 
 self-will and of self - assertion ; in not being ready 
 enough to sink our imperfectly formed self-will in 
 view of a large general result." 
 
 There seems to be nothing in Hellenism that sug- 
 gests Catholicism, and yet evidently it is Arnold's 
 classical feeling for institutions that gives him his 
 marked Catholic bias. The Catholic Church is a 
 great institution, the greatest and oldest in the world. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. Ill 
 
 It makes and always has made short work of the in- 
 dividual. It is cold, stately, impersonal. Says Emer- 
 son : — 
 
 " In the long time it has blended with everything 
 in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves 
 through a zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every day 
 of the year, every town and market and headland 
 and monument, and has coupled itself with the al- 
 manac, that no court can be held, no field plowed, no 
 horse shod, without some leave from the church." 
 
 It appeals to Arnold by reason of these things, and 
 it appeals to him by reason of its great names, its 
 poets, artists, statesmen, preachers, scholars ; its im- 
 posing ritual, its splendid architecture, its culture. 
 It has been the conserver of letters. For centuries 
 the priests were the only scholars, and its ceremonial 
 is a kind of petrified literature. Arnold clearly 
 speaks for himself, or from his own bias, when he 
 says that " the man of imagination, nay, and the phil- 
 osopher too, in spite of her propensity to burn him, 
 will always have a weakness for the Catholic Church ; " 
 "it is because of the rich treasures of human life 
 which have been stored within her pale." Indeed, 
 there is a distinct flavor of Catholicism about nearly 
 all of Matthew Arnold's writings. One cannot al- 
 ways put his finger on it ; it is in the air, it is in that 
 cool, haughty impersonalism, that ex cathedra tone, 
 that contempt for dissenters, that genius for form, 
 that spirit of organization. His mental tone and 
 temper ally him to Cardinal Newman, who seems to 
 
112 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 have exerted a marked influence upon him, and who 
 is still, he says, a great name to the imagination. 
 Yet he says Newman " has adopted, for the doubts 
 and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day, a 
 solution, which, to speak frankly, is impossible." 
 What, therefore, repels Arnold in Catholicism, and 
 keeps him without its fold, is its " ultramontanism, 
 sacerdotalism, and superstition." Its cast-iron dog- 
 mas and its bigotry are too much for his Hellenic 
 spirit ; but no more so than are the dogmas and big- 
 otry of the Protestant churches. It is clear enough 
 that he would sooner be a Catholic than a Presbyte- 
 rian or a Methodist. 
 
 The real superiority of the Catholic Church, he 
 says, is in " its charm for the imagination — its 
 poetry. I persist in thinking that Catholicism has, 
 from this superiority, a great future before it ; that it 
 will endure while all the Protestant sects (in which I 
 do not include the Church of England) dissolve and 
 pei'ish. I persist in thinking that the prevailing form 
 for the Christianity of the future will be the form of 
 Catholicism ; but a Catholicism purged, opening itself 
 to the light and air, having the consciousness of its 
 own poetry, freed from its sacerdotal despotism, and 
 freed from its pseudo-scientific apparatus of super- 
 annuated dogma. Its forms will be retained, as sym- 
 bolizing with the force and charm of poetry a few 
 cardinal facts and ideas simple indeed, but indispen- 
 sable and inexhaustible, and on which our race could 
 lay hold only by materializing them." 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 113 
 
 All this may well be questioned. To the disinter- 
 ested, observer, the ritual and the imposing ceremonial 
 of the Catholic Church has about it little of the char- 
 acter of true poetry, or of true beauty. These things 
 appeal to a low order of imagination and mentality, 
 and are one secret of the church's influence over the 
 vulgar masses. A man of true taste is no more 
 touched by them than by any rite of pagan faiths. 
 True, the great cathedrals are a part of the ceremo- 
 nial of the church, and here the height of true poetry 
 is reached, and the imagination is aroused, as it is 
 also by her great names, her poets, artists, scholars, 
 preachers, of the Middle Ages. But the secret of all 
 these things has now passed from the Catholic 
 Church. She is as impotent in art and architecture, 
 in literature and in the pulpit, as are the Protestant 
 churches. Raphaels, and Dantes, and Fenelons, and 
 Pascals, and Bossuets no longer appear within her 
 pale. Should we not rather look for the real supe- 
 riority of the Catholic Cburch, as an active force in 
 the world, to its authority, its vast overshadowing 
 power as an institution ? In this respect it is nearly 
 perfect, and does indeed touch the imagination. It 
 is as thorough as nature, as searching as fate. It 
 lays its hands upon every force of human life. It is 
 wonderfully adapted to the weakness, the ignorance, 
 and the helplessness of mankind. It establishes the 
 ways, it prescribes your belief, it settles doubts and 
 misgivings. Dr. Johnson said he could easily see 
 how many good but timid and credulous persons 
 
114 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 " might be glad to be of a church where there are so 
 many helps to get to heaven ; " and he adds of him- 
 self, " I would be a Papist if I could ; I have fear 
 enough, but an obstinate rationality prevents me." 
 It is, indeed, easy to get to heaven by way of the 
 Catholic Church. 
 
 It is as complete as Noah's Ark in which such 
 a motley crew found lodgment. The inmates are 
 housed from the winds, the waves, the storms. Prot- 
 estantism has taken to the open boats, while some of 
 the sects have hardly a plank beneath them. Yes, if 
 you are no swimmer, and must needs make the voy- 
 age with the least possible trouble and exposure, em- 
 bark in the great mother church. You have little 
 more to do than a passenger on board of one of the 
 Atlantic steamers. Herein we strike the secret of 
 the power of the Catholic Church, and the secret of 
 its hopes for the future. After one has passed 
 through a certain course of experience and develop- 
 ment, it is easy to see how men tire of the open boat, 
 or single plank, mode of navigation, and desire the 
 repose and security of a vessel that has withstood the 
 elements so long. Then people left to themselves 
 do make such wretched work with the Bible, do be- 
 little and vulgarize it so. They take a text here and 
 a text there, and brood over them, and make a great 
 noise over a nest full of addled eggs ; for a text, 
 wrenched from its context and read in any spirit but 
 that in which it was written, becomes as an addled 
 egg. Mormonism is one of the legitimate fruits of 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 115 
 
 Protestantism. The Catholic Church puts an end to 
 all this ; there are no more noisy sects and isms ; the 
 Bible is authoritatively interpreted. This alone com- 
 mends her to men of taste. 
 
 Arnold's Hellenism is the source of both bis weak- 
 ness and his strength ; his strength, because it gives 
 him a principle tbat cannot be impeached. In all 
 matters of taste and culture the Greek standards are 
 the last and highest court of appeal. In no other 
 race and time has life been so rounded and full and 
 invested with the same charm. " They were freer 
 than other mortal races," says Professor Curtius, 
 " from all that hinders and oppresses the motions of 
 the mind." 
 
 It is the source of his weakness, or ineffectualness, 
 because he has to do with an unclassical age and 
 unclassical people. It is interesting and salutary to 
 have the Greek standards applied to modern politics 
 and religion, and to the modern man, but the appli- 
 cation makes little or no impression save on the lit- 
 erary classes. "Well may Arnold have said, in his 
 speech at The Authors' Club in New York, that only 
 the literary class had understood and sustained him. 
 The other classes have simply been irritated or be- 
 wildered by him. His tests do not appeal to them. 
 The standards which the philosopher, or the political 
 economist, or the religious teacher brings, impress 
 them more. 
 
 The Greek flexibility of intellect cannot be too 
 
116 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 much admired, but the Greek flexibility of character 
 and conscience is quite another thing. Of the an- 
 cient Hellenes it may with truth be said that they 
 were the " wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind." 
 Such fickleness, treachery, duplicity, were perhaps 
 never before wedded to such aesthetic rectitude and 
 wholeness. They would bribe their very gods. Such 
 a type of character can never take deep hold of the 
 British mind. 
 
 When Arnold, reciting the episode of Wragg, tells 
 his countrymen that " by the Ilissus there was no 
 Wragg, poor thing," will his countrymen much con- 
 cern themselves whether there was or not? When 
 the burden of his indictment of the English Liberals 
 is that they have worked only for political expan- 
 sion, and have done little or nothing for the need of 
 beauty, the need of social life and manners, and the 
 need of intellect and knowledge, will the English 
 Liberals feel convicted by the charge? When he 
 says of the Pilgrim fathers that Shakespeare and 
 Virgil would have found their company intolerable, 
 is Puritanism discredited in the eye of English Pur- 
 itans ? Indeed, literary standards, applied to politics 
 or religion, are apt to be ineffectual with all except a 
 very limited circle of artistic spirits. 
 
 Whether it be a matter for regret or for congratu- 
 lation, there can be little doubt that man and all his 
 faculties are becoming more and more specialized, 
 more and more differentiated ; the quality of unique 
 individual genius is more and more valued, so that 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 117 
 
 we are wandering farther and farther from the unity, 
 the simplicity, and the repose of the antique world. 
 
 This fact may afford the best of reasons for the 
 appearance of such a man as Arnold, who opposes 
 so squarely and fairly this tendency, and who draws 
 such fresh courage and strength from the classic 
 standards. But it accounts in a measure for the 
 general expression of distaste with which his teach- 
 ings have been received. Still, he has shown us very 
 clearly how British civilization looks to Hellenic 
 eyes, where it needs pruning and where it needs 
 strengthening ; and he has doubtless set going cur- 
 rents of ideas that must eventually tell deeply upon 
 the minds of his countrymen. 
 
 It is undoubtedly as a critic of literature that 
 Arnold is destined to leave his deepest mark. In 
 this field the classic purity and simplicity of his mind, 
 its extraordinary clearness, steadiness, and vitality 
 are the qualities most prized. His power as a critic 
 is undoubtedly his power of definition and classifica- 
 tion, a gift he has which allies him with the great 
 naturalists and classifiers. Probably no other Eng- 
 lish critic has thrown into literature so many phrases 
 and definitions that are likely to become a permanent 
 addition to the armory of criticism as has Arnold. 
 Directness and definiteness are as proper and as easy 
 to him as to a Greek architect. He is the least be- 
 wildering of writers. With what admirable skill he 
 brings out his point on all occasions ! Things fall 
 away from it till it stands out like a tree in a field, 
 
118 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 which we see all around. His genius for definition 
 and analysis finds full scope in his works on " Celtic 
 Literature," wherein are combined the strictness of 
 scientific analysis with the finest literary charm. The 
 lectures, too, on " Translating Homer," seem as con- 
 clusive as a scientific demonstration. 
 
 A good sample of his power to pluck out the heart 
 of the secret of a man's influence may be found in 
 his essay on Wordsworth. 
 
 " Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the ex- 
 traordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the 
 joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in 
 simple elementary affections and duties, and because 
 of the extraordinary power with which, in case after 
 case, he shows us this joy and renders it so as to 
 make us share it." 
 
 Arnold has been compared to Sainte-Beuve, but 
 the resemblance is not very striking. Arnold has not 
 the vivacity of mind of the Frenchman, nor the same 
 power to efface himself and his opinions. It is not 
 an easy matter for an Englishman to efface himself 
 on any occasion. Sainte-Beuve is the better instru- 
 ment, but Arnold is the greater force. 
 
 In power of concentration and in power of defini- 
 tion, the English critic surpasses his French master. 
 Sainte-Beuve's power is a power of interpretation ; 
 he can adjust himself more closely and happily to a 
 wide diversity of minds than can Arnold. He was 
 not a critic of opinions, doctrines, teachings, but an 
 interpreter of genius in all its forms. No matter 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 119 
 
 what a man taught, so that he taught it well. He 
 has the same pleasure with Pope or Franklin as with 
 Pascal or Massillon. " One loves, one adopts with 
 pleasure," he says, "every kind of genius, every new 
 talent." His mind flows around and around his sub- 
 ject, and envelops it on all sides, and renders the 
 clearest and fullest image of it. He is a pure, dis- 
 embodied critical spirit, indulging itself to the utmost 
 in the mere pleasure of criticising, of interpreting ; 
 taking possession of every form or kind of genius with 
 like ease and enjoyment, blending itself with it and 
 drawing out its secret by a kind of literary clairvoy- 
 ance. 
 
 Arnold has not, in the same measure, this kind of 
 power. He is less sympathetic and more analytical 
 in his method, and more given to definition and to 
 final judgments. He is also fuller of the spirit of re- 
 proof and discipline than the Frenchman. The force 
 of nature and character are less with him, and the 
 authority of the rules and standards more. One 
 would rather submit a bold and original genius to the 
 judgment of the Frenchman ; he would see more 
 reason for justifying it upon its own grounds, for 
 allowing it to be a law unto itself ; but for a compar- 
 ative judgment, to know where your original genius 
 departs from the highest standards, wherein he trans- 
 gresses the law, etc., one would go to Arnold. 
 
 A recent English reviewer says that there are but 
 two English authors of the present day whose works 
 are preeminent for quality of style, namely, John 
 
120 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Morley and Cardinal Newman. But one would 
 say that the man of all others among recent English 
 writers who had in a preeminent degree the gift of 
 what we call style — that quality in literature which 
 is like the sheen of a bird's plumage — was Matthew 
 Arnold. That Morley has this quality is by no 
 means so certain. Morley is a vigorous, brilliant, 
 versatile writer, but his quality is not distinctively lit- 
 erary, and his sentences do not have a power and a 
 charm by virtue of their very texture and sequence 
 alone. Few writers, of any time or land, have had 
 the unity, transparency, centrality of Arnold's mind 
 — the piece or discourse is so well cast, it is so homo- 
 geneous, it makes such a clear and distinct impres- 
 sion. Morley 's vocabulary is the more copious ; more 
 matters are touched upon in any given space ; he is 
 more fruitful of ideas and suggestions ; his writings 
 may have a greater political, or religious, or scien- 
 tific value than Arnold's. But in pure literary value, 
 they, in my opinion, fall far below. Arnold's work is 
 like cut glass ; it is not merely clear, it has a distinc- 
 tion, a prestige which belongs to it by reason of its 
 delicate individuality of style. The writings of Car- 
 dinal Newman have much of the same quality — the 
 utmost lucidity combined with a fresh, distinct liter- 
 ary flavor. They are pervaded by a sweeter, more 
 winsome spiiut than Arnold's ; there is none of the 
 scorn, contemptuousness, and superciliousness in them 
 that have given so much offense in Arnold, and while 
 his style is not so crisp as the latter's, it is perhaps 
 more marvelously flexible and magnetic. 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 121 
 
 Arnold is, above all things, integral and consecu- 
 tive. He seems to have no isolated thoughts, no 
 fragments, nothing that begins and ends in a mere 
 intellectual concretion ; his thoughts are -all in the 
 piece and have reference to his work as a whole ; 
 they are entirely subordinated to plan, to structure, 
 to total results. He values them, not as ends, but as 
 means. In other words, we do not come upon those 
 passages in his works that are like isolated pools of 
 deep and beautiful meaning, and which make the 
 value to us of writers like Landor, for instance, but 
 we everywhere strike continuous currents of ideas 
 that set definitely to certain conclusions ; always clear 
 and limpid currents, and now and then deep, strong, 
 and beautiful currents. And, after all, water was 
 made to flow and not to stand, and those are the 
 most vital and influential minds whose ideas are 
 ivorking ideas, and lay hold of real problems. 
 
 Certainly a man's power to put himself in commu- 
 nication with live questions, and to take vital hold of 
 the spiritual and intellectual life of his age, should 
 enter into our estimate of him. We shall ask of a 
 writer who lays claim to high rank, not merely has 
 he great thoughts, but what does he do with his 
 great thoughts ? Is he superior to them ? Can he 
 use them ? Can he bring them to bear ? Can he 
 wield them to clear up some obscurity or bridge over 
 some difficulty for us, or does he sit down amid them 
 and admire them ? A man who wields a great capital 
 is above him who merely hoards it and keeps it. Let 
 
122 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 me refer to Landor again, in this connection, because, 
 in such a discussion, one wants, as they say in cro- 
 quet, a ball to play on, and because Landor's works 
 have lately been in my hands, and I have noted in 
 them a certain remoteness and ineffectualness which 
 contrast them well with Arnold's. Landor's sympa- 
 thies were mainly outside his country and times, and 
 his writings affect me like capital invested in jewels 
 and precious stones, rather than employed in any 
 great and worthy enterprise. One turns over his 
 beautiful sentences with a certain admiration and 
 enjoyment, but his ideas do not fasten upon one, and 
 ferment and grow in his mind, and influence his 
 judgments and feelings. It is not a question of ab- 
 straction or of disinterestedness, but of seriousness 
 of purpose. Emerson is more abstract, more given 
 up to ideal and transcendental valuations, than Lan- 
 dor ; but Emerson is a power, because he partakes of 
 a great spiritual and intellectual movement of his 
 times ; he is unequivocally of to-day and of New 
 England. So with Arnold, he is unequivocally of to- 
 day; he is unequivocally an Englishman, but an 
 Englishman thoroughly imbued with the spirit of 
 Greek art and culture. The surprise in reading 
 Arnold is never the novelty of his thought or expres- 
 sion, or the force with which his ideas are projected, 
 but in the clearness and nearness of the point of 
 view, and the steadiness and consistency with which 
 the point of view is maintained. He is as free from 
 the diseases of subtlety and over-refinement of thought 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 123 
 
 or expression, and from anything exaggerated or 
 fanciful, as any of the antique authors. His distin- 
 guishing trait is a kind of finer common-sense. One 
 remembers his acknowledgment of his indebtedness 
 to the sanity and clear sense of Franklin. It is here 
 the two minds meet ; the leading trait of each is this 
 same sanity and clear sense, this reliance upon the 
 simple palpable reason. 
 
 Arnold's reliance upon the near and obvious rea- 
 son, and his distrust of metaphysical subtleties and 
 curious refinements, are so constant, that he has been 
 accused of parading the commonplace. But the com- 
 monplace, when used with uncommon cleverness and 
 aptness, is always the most telling. He thinks the 
 great weakness of Christianity at the present time 
 is its reliance, or pretended reliance, upon the preter- 
 natural, and the whole burden of his own effort in 
 this field is to show its basis upon common-sense, 
 upon a universal need and want of mankind. For 
 ingenious, for abstruse reasons Arnold has no taste 
 at all, either in religion, in literature, or in politics, 
 and the mass of readers will sympathize with him. 
 " At the mention of that name metaphysics" he says, 
 " lo, essence, existence, substance, finite and infinite, 
 cause and succession, something and nothing, begin 
 to weave their eternal dance before us, with the con- 
 fused murmur of their combinations filling all the 
 region governed by her who, far more indisputably 
 than her late-born rival, political economy, has earned 
 the title of the Dismal Science." 
 
124 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 The dangers of such steadiness and literary con- 
 servatism as Arnold's are the humdrum and the com- 
 monplace ; but he is saved from these by his poetic 
 sensibility. How homogeneous his page is, like air 
 or water ! There is little color, little variety, but 
 there is an interior harmony and fitness, that are like 
 good digestion, or good health. Vivacity of mind 
 he is not remarkable for, but in singleness and con- 
 tinuity he is extraordinary. His seriousness of pur- 
 pose seldom permits him to indulge in wit ; humor is 
 a more constant quality with him. But never is there 
 wit for wit's sake, nor humor for humor's sake ; they 
 are entirely in the service of the main argument. 
 The wit is usually a thrust, as when he says of the 
 Nonconformist that he " has worshiped his fetich of 
 separatism so long that he is likely to wish to remain, 
 like Ephraim, ' a wild ass alone by himself.' " The 
 book in which he uses the weapons of wit and humor 
 the most constantly he calls, with refined sarcasm, 
 " Friendship's Garland " — a garland made up 
 mainly of nettles. Like all of his books, it is aimed 
 at the British Philistine, but it is less Socratic than 
 the other books and contains more of Dean Swift. 
 Arnold is always a master of the artful Socratic 
 method, but this book has, in addition, a playful hu- 
 mor and a nettle-like irony — an itch which ends in 
 a burn — that are more modern. "What a garland 
 he drops by the hand of his Prussian friend Arminius 
 upon the brow of Hepworth Dixon, in characterizing 
 his style as " Middle-class Macaulayese : " — 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CRITICISM. 125 
 
 ' I call it Macaulayese,' says the pedant, ' because 
 it has the same internal and external characteristics 
 as Macaulay's style ; the external characteristic being 
 a hard metallic movement with nothing of the soft 
 play of life, and the internal characteristic being a per- 
 petual semblance of hitting the right nail on the head 
 without the reality. And I call it middle-class Ma- 
 caulayese because it has these faults without the com- 
 pensation of great studies and of conversance with 
 great affairs, by which Macaulay partly redeemed 
 them.' " 
 
 By the hand of another character he crowns Mr. 
 Sala thus : — 
 
 " But his career and genius have given him some- 
 how the secret of a literary mixture novel and fascinat- 
 ing in the last degree : he blends the airy epicureanism 
 of the salons of Augustus with the full-bodied gayety 
 of our English Cider-cellar." 
 
 Most of the London newspapers too receive their 
 garland. That of " The Times " is most taking : — 
 
 " ' Nay,' often this enthusiast continues, getting 
 excited as he goes on, ' " The Times " itself, which so 
 stirs some people's indignation, — what is " The 
 Times " but a gigantic Sancho Panza, following by an 
 attraction he cannot resist that poor, mad, scorned, 
 suffering, sublime enthusiast, the modern spirit ; fol- 
 lowing it, indeed, with constant grumbling, expostula- 
 tion, and opposition, with airs of protection, of com- 
 passionate superiority, with an incessant by-play of 
 nods, shrugs, and winks addressed to the spectators ; 
 
126 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 following it, in short, with all the incurable recalci- 
 trancy of a lower nature, but still following it ? ' " 
 
 In " Friendship's Garland " many of the shafts 
 Arnold has aimed at his countrymen in his previous 
 books are refeathered and repointed and shot with 
 a grace and playful mockery that are immensely di- 
 verting. He has perhaps never done anything so 
 artistic and so full of genius. It fulfills its purpose 
 with a grace and a completeness tbat awaken in one 
 the feeling of the delicious ; it is the only one of his 
 books one can call delicious. 
 
 Anything like passion, or heat of the blood, Arnold 
 is especially shy of. As Marcus Aurelius said of his 
 imperial father, on all occasions he " stops short of 
 the sweating point." Heat begets fumes and fumes 
 cloud the sky, and Arnold's strength is always in his 
 unclouded intelligence. An unclouded intelligence 
 is among the supreme gifts, but it is not all. Ar- 
 nold makes us so in love with it that we quite forget 
 the broader and more intensely human qualities and 
 the part they play in our highest mental operations. 
 Truly, as he says in " Youth and Calm " — 
 
 " Calm 's not life's crown, though calm is well." 
 
 Arnold's desire for calm, for tranquillity, for per- 
 fection, probably stands in the way of his full appre- 
 ciation of certain types of men. All great movements 
 and revolutions are at the expense of calm, of meas- 
 ure, proportion, etc. A certain bias, a certain heat 
 
matthew Arnold's criticism. 127 
 
 and onesidedness, are necessary to break the equili- 
 brium and set the currents going. The master forces 
 of this world, like Luther in religion, or Cromwell in 
 politics, or Victor Hugo or Shakespeare in literature, 
 or Turner in art, are not nicely measured and ad- 
 justed. In the modern world, especially, is man one- 
 sided, unclassical, fragmentary ; a great talent here, 
 another there, but nowhere the wholeness and totality 
 Arnold pleads for. 
 
ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CAR- 
 LYLE. 
 
 During Matthew Arnold's first visit to this country 
 in 1883-84, he lectured in various cities upon Emer- 
 son, with whose name he linked that of Carlyle. I 
 had the pleasure of hearing him in New York on the 
 occasion of the second or third repetition of his lec- 
 ture in that city. Some weeks previously I had met 
 him at a reception at the house of a friend. In my 
 note-book I find I made the following note of the im- 
 pression he made upon me on this occasion : " Liked 
 him better than I expected to. A large tall man with 
 black hair streaked with gray, black close-cut side- 
 whiskers, prominent nose, large coarse (but pure) mouth 
 and muscular neck. In fact a much coarser man than 
 you would expect to see, and stronger looking. A 
 good specimen of the best English stock, plenty of 
 color, a wholesome coarseness and open air look. 
 One would say tbat he belonged to a bigger and 
 more powerful race than the rest of the people in 
 the room. His voice was more husky, more like a 
 sailor's, I thought, than the other voices I heard. 
 When he talks to you he throws bis head back (the 
 reverse of Emerson's manner), and looks out from 
 under his heavy eye-lids, and sights you down his 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 129 
 
 big nose — draws off as it were, and gives you his 
 chin. It is the critical attitude, not the sympathetic. 
 Yet he does not impress one as cold and haughty, 
 but quite the contrary." 
 
 He was not an entertaining speaker ; his voice was 
 too thick and foggy. One would rather read his dis- 
 course than hear it. 
 
 To one who knows Arnold's devotion to the classic 
 standards, the calm and moderation of Greek art, his 
 verdict upon such writers as Emerson and Carlyle 
 will not be much of a surprise. Tried by the classic 
 standards, both these illustrious men are undoubtedly 
 barbarians. Emerson has indeed the lofty serenity 
 of Greek art, but his fragmentary character, his mys- 
 ticism, his exaggeration, his ceaseless effort to sur- 
 prise, are anything but classical. The distinctive 
 features of classic literature, its repose, its measure, 
 its subordination of parts, and hence its wholeness, 
 he probably cared little for. Speaking in one of his 
 essays of how Greek sculpture has melted away like 
 ice and snow in the spring, he says, " The Greek 
 letters last a little longer, but are always passing 
 under the same sentence, and tumbling into the in- 
 evitable pit which the creation of new thought opens 
 for all that is old." Carlyle is a barbarian in his 
 style, his uncouthness, his vehemence, his despair, his 
 prejudices, and in the open conflict and incongruity 
 between his inherited and his acquired traits, between 
 his German culture, which was from without, and 
 his Scotch Presbyterianism, which was from within. 
 
130 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Carlyle had no tranquillity ; the waters of his soul 
 were lashed into fury the whole time. The Greek was 
 at ease in Zion, as Mr. Arnold somewhere says, but 
 think of Carlyle being at ease in Zion ! Indeed, one 
 must put his classic standards behind him, when he 
 gives an unqualified admiration to either Emerson or 
 Carlyle as men of letters. 
 
 The force of Arnold's criticism came from the fact 
 that it was by a man who had a real and tangible 
 point of view of his own, and who, therefore, gave a 
 real and consistent account of the subject he dis- 
 cussed. His view of Emerson was not the view of 
 Emerson generally held in this country, but it was 
 such a view of him as puts any man who holds a con- 
 trary one upon his mettle, and challenges him to give 
 as good an account of his own faith. Much of the 
 writing upon Emerson had been indiscriminating, and 
 by men who had no definite point of view of their 
 own. Even Mr. Morley's essay recently published is 
 not so satisfying a piece of work as Arnold's, though 
 he arrives at nearly the same conclusions ; but he 
 wanders more in reaching them ; his course is not so 
 direct and steady ; in fact, the point of view is not 
 so clear and definite. He may conduct us to as com- 
 manding a height, but there is often a tangle of words 
 and fine phrases in the way. 
 
 But it is the great merit of Matthew Arnold as a 
 critic that he always has a clear and unmistakable 
 point of view, that he always knows his point of view 
 and never wanders far from it. The opening pas- 
 
Arnold's view of ejierson and carlyle. 181 
 
 sages of Arnold's lecture were in a stream of such 
 noble and impressive eloquence that I must indulge 
 myself in transcribing some of them here. 
 
 " Forty years ago," he began, " when I was an 
 undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air then 
 which haunt my memory still. Hapjjy the man who 
 in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices ! 
 they are a possession to him forever. No such voices 
 as those we heard in our youth at Oxford are sound- 
 ing there now. Oxford has more criticism now, more 
 knowledge, more light ; but such voices as those of 
 our youth it has no longer. The name of Cardinal 
 Newman is a great name to the imagination still ; 
 his genius and his style are still things of power. But 
 he is over eighty years old ; he is in the Oratory at 
 Birmingham ; he has adopted for the doubts and dif- 
 ficulties which beset man's minds to-day, a solution 
 which, to speak frankly, is impossible." ..." But 
 there were other voices sounding in our ears besides 
 Newman's. There was the puissant voice of Car- 
 lyle ; so sorely strained, over-used, and misused since, 
 but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching 
 our hearts with true pathetic eloquence." ..." A 
 greater voice still — the greatest voice of the century 
 — came to us in those youthful years through Car- 
 lyle : the voice of Goethe." ..." And beside those 
 voices there came to us in that old Oxford time a 
 voice also from this side of the Atlantic — a clear 
 and pure voice, which for my ear, at any rate, 
 brought a strain as new, and moving, and unforgetta- 
 
132 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 ble as the strain of Newman or Carlyle or Goethe. 
 Mr. Lowell has well described the apparition of Em- 
 erson, to your young generation here, in the distant 
 time of which I am speaking, and of his workings 
 upon them. He was your Newman, your man of 
 soul and genius visible to you in the flesh, speaking 
 to your bodily ears — a present object for your heart 
 and imagination. Tbat is surely the most potent of 
 all influences ! nothing can come up to it. To us at 
 Oxford, Emerson was but a voice speaking from 
 three thousand miles away. But so well he spoke 
 that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord 
 were names invested to my ear with a sentiment akin 
 to tbat which invests for me the names of Oxford 
 and Weimar ; and snatches of Emerson's strain fixed 
 themselves in my mind as imperishably as any of the 
 eloquent words which I have been just now quoting." 
 A lofty and eloquent introduction was that, and one 
 well worth the subject and the occasion. The disap- 
 pointment and irritation which his hearers felt as the 
 lecturer proceeded arose from the fact that the critic 
 was at much less pains to justify this favorable view 
 of Emerson which he had sounded in his opening 
 note, than he was to establish the adverse view of 
 him as a poet and philosopher, which he felt sure 
 would in time be taken. The gist of the speaker's 
 view of Emerson was briefly as follows : Emerson 
 was not a great poet, was not to be ranked among the 
 legitimate poets, because his poetry had not the Mil- 
 tonic requirements of simplicity, sensuousness, and 
 
ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 133 
 
 passion. He was not even a great man of letters, be- 
 cause he had not a genius and instinct for style ; his 
 style had not the requisite wholeness of good tissue. 
 Who were the great men of letters ? They were 
 Plato, Cicero, Voltaire, La Bruyere, Milton, Addison, 
 Swift, — men whose prose is by a kind of native ne- 
 cessity true and sound. Emerson was not a great 
 philosopher, because he had no constructive talent, — 
 he could not build a system of philosophy. What 
 then was his merit ? He was to be classed with Mar- 
 cus Aurelius, who was " the friend and aider of those 
 who would live in the spirit." This was Emerson's 
 chief merit and service : he was the friend and aider 
 of those who would live in the spirit. The secret of 
 his influence was not in his thought ; it was in his 
 temper, his unfaltering spirit of cheerfulness and 
 hope. 
 
 In the opinion of the speaker, even Carlyle was not 
 a great writer, and his work was of much less impor- 
 tance than Emerson's. As Wordsworth's poetry was 
 the most important work done in verse in our lan- 
 guage during the nineteenth century, so Emerson's 
 essays were, in the lecturer's view, the most impor- 
 tant work done in prose. Carlyle was not a great 
 writer, because he was too impatient, too willful, too 
 vehement ; he did not work his material up into good 
 literary form. 
 
 In his essay on Joubert, Arnold says, following a 
 remark of Sainte-Beuve, that as to the estimate of its 
 own authors every nation is the best judge (the positive * 
 
134 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 estimate, not the comparative, as regards the authors 
 of other countries), and that, therefore, a foreigner's 
 judgments about the intrinsic merits of a nation's 
 authors will generally, when at complete variance 
 with that nation's own, be wrong. Arnold's verdict 
 upon Emerson's intrinsic merits was certainly at vari- 
 ance with that of the best judges among Emerson's 
 countrymen, and is likely, therefore, according to the 
 above dictum, to be wrong. But whether it was or 
 not, it is no doubt true that every people possesses a 
 key to its own great men, or to those who share its 
 tendencies and hopes, that a foreigner cannot possess, 
 whatsoever keys of another sort he may bring with 
 him. 
 
 From Arnold's point of view, his criticism of 
 Emerson was just and consistent ; but he said he 
 spoke not of himself, but assumed to anticipate the 
 verdict of time and fate upon this man. But time 
 and fate have ways of their own in dealing with rep- 
 utations, and the point of view of the future with 
 reference to this subject is, I imagine, as likely to be 
 different from Mr. Arnold's as it is to be one with it. 
 
 In the view which the speaker took of Emerson 
 and Carlyle, it seems to me that he laid too little 
 stress upon their intrinsic quality of genius and of the 
 real force and stimulus they left embodied in liter- 
 ary forms, — imperfect or inadequate forms if you 
 will, but still literary forms. Did the speaker draw 
 out for us and impart to us what of worth and signifi- 
 cance there was in these men ? Did he convey to us 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 135 
 
 a lively impression of their genius ? I think not. 
 And yet he has told us in his essay on Joubert that 
 this is the main matter ; he asks, " What is really 
 precious and inspiring, in all that we get from litera- 
 ture, except this sense of an immediate contract with 
 genius itself and the stimulus toward what is true and 
 excellent which we derive from it ? " Like all other 
 writers, when Arnold speaks from the traditions of 
 his culture and the influence of his environment, he is 
 far less helpful and satisfactory than when he speaks 
 from his native genius and insight, and gives free 
 play to that wonderfully clear, sensitive, flexible, 
 poetic mind of his. And in this verdict upon Emer- 
 son and Carlyle, it seems to me, he speaks more from 
 his bias, more from his dislike of nonconformists than 
 from his genius. 
 
 We have had much needed service from Arnold ; 
 he has taught his generation the higher criticism, as 
 Sainte-Beuve taught it to his. A singularly logical 
 and constructive mind, yet a singularly fluid and 
 interpretative one, giving to his criticism charm, as 
 well as force and penetration. 
 
 All readers of his know how free he is from any- 
 thing strained or fantastic or paradoxical, and how 
 absolutely single his eye is. His page flows as limpid 
 and tranquil as a meadow brook, loitering under this 
 bank and under that, but yet really flowing, really 
 abounding in continuous currents of ideas that lead 
 to large and definite results. His works furnish 
 abundant illustrations of the principle of evolution in 
 
136 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 literature, which he demands of others. He makes 
 no use of the Emersonian method of surprise ; his 
 ideas never suddenly leap out full-grown from his 
 Drain, but slowly develop and unfold before you, and 
 there are no missing links. Any given thought is 
 continuous with him, and grows and expands with 
 new ramifications and radiations, from year to year. 
 This gives a wonderful consecutiveness and whole- 
 ness to his work, as well as great clearness and sim- 
 plicity. Yet one sometimes feels as if his keen sense 
 of form and order sometimes stood between him and 
 the highest truths. I believe the notions we get 
 from him of the scope and function of poetry, and of 
 the value and significance of style, are capable of 
 revision. 
 
 Less stringency of form is to be insisted upon, less 
 servility to the classic standards. We live in an age 
 of expansion, not of concentration, as Arnold long 
 ago said ; " like the traveler in the fable, therefore, 
 we begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely." 
 In literature, we are coming more and more to look 
 beyond the form into the substance ; yea, into the 
 mood and temper that begat the substance. 
 
 " The chief trait of any given poet," says a recent 
 authority, "is always the spirit he brings to the obser- 
 vation of humanity and nature — the mood out of 
 which he contemplates his subject. What kind of 
 temper and what amount of faith reports these 
 things ? " 
 
 Of like purport is the well-known passage of Sainte- 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 137 
 
 Beuve, wherein, after referring to the demands and 
 standards of the classic age, he says that for us, to- 
 day, " the greatest poet is not he who has done the 
 best " — that is, written the most perfect poem from 
 the classic standpoint ; " it is he who suggests the 
 most, he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvi- 
 ous, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, 
 to study, much to complete in your turn." 
 
 In the decay of the old faiths, and in the huge 
 aggrandizement of physical science, the refuge and 
 consolation of serious and truly religious minds is 
 more and more in literature, and in the free escapes 
 and outlooks which it supplies. The best modern 
 poetry, and the best modern prose, take clown the 
 bars for us and admit us to new and large fields of 
 moral and intellectual conquest in a way the antique 
 authors could not and did not aim to do. New 
 wants, and therefore new standards, have arisen. 
 Purely literary poets like Shakespeare and Milton, 
 priceless as they are, are of less service to mankind 
 in an age like ours when religion is shunned by the 
 religious soul, than the more exceptional poets and 
 writers, like Goethe and Carlyle, or Wordsworth and 
 Emerson — the wise physicians and doctors who also 
 minister to our wants as moral and spiritual beings. 
 
 The type of men of which Emerson and Carlyle 
 are the most pronounced and influential examples in 
 our time, it must be owned, are comparatively a new 
 turn-up in literature, — men whose highest distinc- 
 tion is the depth and fervor of their moral conviction, 
 
138 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 whose greatness of character is on a par with their 
 greatness of intellect ; a new style of man writing 
 poems, essays, criticisms, histories, and filling these 
 forms with a spirit and a suggestiveness far more 
 needful and helpful to us in these times than the 
 mere spirit of perfection in letters — the classic spirit, 
 which Mr. Arnold himself so assiduously cultivates. 
 
 To say that Carlyle is not a great writer, or, more 
 than that, a supreme literary artist, is to me like 
 denying that Angelo and Rembrandt were great 
 painters, or that the sea is a great body of water. 
 His life of herculean labor was entirely given to let- 
 ters, and he undoubtedly brought to his tasks the 
 greatest single equipment of pure literary talent Eng- 
 lish prose has ever received. Beside some of the 
 men named by the lecturer, his illuminating power is 
 like the electric light beside a tallow dip. Not a 
 perfect writer certainly, nor always an agreeable one ; 
 but he exhibited at all times the traits which the 
 world has consented to call great. He bequeathed to 
 mankind an enormous intellectual force and weight of 
 character, embodied in enduring literary forms. 
 
 I know it has become the fashion to disparage 
 Carlyle's histories ; it is said he has been superseded 
 by the more scientific historians. When the scien- 
 tific artist supersedes Michael Angelo. and the scien- 
 tific poet supersedes Shakespeare, then probably the 
 scientific historian will supersede Carlyle. The sci- 
 entific spirit, when applied to historical problems, is 
 — like chemistry applied to agriculture — valuable. 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 139 
 
 but great results have been achieved in quite another 
 spirit. Scientific method can exhume the past, but 
 cannot breathe the breath of life into it, as Carlyle 
 did. Your scientific critic is usually a wearisome 
 creature. We do not so much want history explained 
 after the manner of science as we want it portrayed 
 and interpreted after the manner of literature. And 
 the explanations of these experts is usually only clever 
 thimble-rigging. If they ferret the mystery out of one 
 hole, they run it to cover in another. How clever, 
 for instance, is Taine's explanation of those brilliant 
 epochs in the history of nations when groups of great 
 men are produced, and literatures and arts get 
 founded. Why, it is only the result of a " hidden 
 concord of creative forces ; " and the opposite peri- 
 ods, the periods of sterility, are the result of " inward 
 contrarieties." Truly, a rose by any other name 
 would smell as sweet. What causes the hidden con- 
 cord, etc., so that we can lay our hand upon the 
 lever and bring about the splendid epochs at a given 
 time, the astute Frenchman does not tell us. I like 
 better the explanation of the old Roman, Paterculus, 
 namely, emulation among men ; yes, and emulation 
 in Nature herself. One great orator, or poet, will 
 make others. Or Emerson's suggestion, which is just 
 as near the truth, and much more taking to the imag- 
 ination : — 
 
 " Heats or genial periods arrive in history, or, 
 shall we say, plenitudes of Divine Presence, by 
 which high tides are caused in the human spirit, and 
 
140 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 great virtues and talents appear, as in the eleventh, 
 twelfth, thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries, when the nation (England) 
 was full of genius and piety." 
 
 Carlyle's bias does not, in my opinion, mar his 
 histories at all, and we can always allow for it when 
 he writes upon any subject, — upon America, for 
 instance, or " Shooting Niagara." It does not mar 
 his " Cromwell," but lends zest to it. He was him- 
 self the fiery partisan he was portraying. It does 
 not mar " Frederic," though the author's partialities 
 and prepossessions crop out on every page. "What 
 vivid portraiture, what rapid grouping, what reality, 
 what exhaustless wit and humor, what entertainment 
 for both heart and head this book holds ! 
 
 Most readers of " Frederic," I imagine, find the 
 work too long, and at times feel a strong inclination 
 to " skip," an inclination which the author himself 
 favors by putting his less important matter in finer 
 type. A little more rigid selection and abridgment, 
 and a little more patient fusing of the material so as 
 to have brought the work within the compass of one 
 third less space, and within the compass of the au- 
 thor's best time and strength, and literature would 
 have been the gainer. 
 
 Carlyle's prose has its defects most assuredly. His 
 periods are often like those swelled brick that have 
 got too much of the fire — crabbed and perverse. 
 His earnestness, his fury of conviction made it too 
 hot for them ; his style becomes distorted. In the 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 141 
 
 best prose there is always a certain smoothness and 
 homogeneity. " In the very torrent, tempest (and as 
 I may say), whirlwind of your passion," says Hamlet 
 in his address to the players, " you must acquire and 
 beget a temperance that will give it smoothness." If 
 not external smoothness, then certainly internal — a 
 fusion of blending that is like good digestion. Car- 
 lyle does not always have this ; Emerson does not 
 always have it ; Whitman does not always have it, 
 probably does not always strive for it ; Browning 
 rarely or never has it. There is a good deal in Car- 
 lyle that is difficult, not in thought but in expression. 
 To the reader it is a kind of mechanical difficulty, 
 like walking over bowlders. In his best work, like 
 the life of Sterling, his essays on Johnson and Vol- 
 taire, and the battle pieces in " Frederic," there is the 
 least of this. 
 
 " There is a point of perfection in art," says La 
 Bruyere, "as there is of goodness and ripeness in 
 nature. He who feels and loves it has perfect taste ; 
 he who feels it not, who loves something beneath or 
 beyond it, has faulty taste." In the life of Sterling, 
 more completely than in any other one of his books, 
 Carlyle attains to this goodness and ripeness of na- 
 ture. He is calm and mellow ; there is nothing to 
 inflame him, but everything to soften and quiet him, 
 and his work is of unrivaled richness in all the no- 
 blest literary qualities. But at other times he was 
 after something beneath or beyond the point of per- 
 fection in art. He was not primarily a critical or 
 
142 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 literary force like Arnold himself, but a moral force 
 working in and through literature. He was the con- 
 science of his country and times, wrought up to an 
 almost prophetic fervor and abandonment, and to cut 
 deep was more a point with him than to cut smooth. 
 
 Again, his defects as a writer probably arose out 
 of his wonderful merits as a talker. He was in the 
 first instance a talker, and he came finally to write 
 as he talked, so that the page, to retain all its charm 
 and effectiveness, needs the Carlyle voice and man- 
 ner, and the Carlyle laugh superadded. These would 
 give it smoothness and completion. One rather likes 
 a certain roughness in a man's style, but it must be a 
 smooth roughness ; the roughness of a muscular arm, 
 and not of a malformed or an ill-shapen one. 
 
 Of course all these considerations tell against Car- 
 lyle's claim to be considered a great writer ; yet one 
 may freely admit them and still call him a great 
 writer. Style alone does not make the great writer, 
 any more than faultless tactics make the great gen- 
 eral ; and the upshot of Carlyle's literary life is an 
 array of volumes, not without serious blemishes, it is 
 true, like the campaigns of Frederic, or Wellington, 
 or Grant, but which, nevertheless, represent a solidity 
 and splendor of achievement, such as the world calls 
 great. 
 
 Arnold criticised what he called Carlyle's " per- 
 verse attitude towards happiness," but it was only 
 a cheap, easy happiness that Carlyle railed against. 
 He taught that there was a higher happiness, namely, 
 
Arnold's view of emfrson and carlyle. 143 
 
 blessedness — the spiritual fruition that comes through 
 renunciation of self, the happiness of heroes that 
 conies from putting thoughts of happiness out of 
 sight ; and that the direct and persistent wooing of 
 fortune for her good gifts was selfish and unmanly, 
 — a timely lesson at all seasons. 
 
 Emerson, too, is a great figure in modern literary 
 history, and to his worth and significance, in this 
 connection, the speaker did very inadequate justice. 
 We know there is much in Emerson's works that will 
 not stand rigid literary tests ; much that is too fanci- 
 ful and ethereal, too curious and paradoxical, — not 
 real or true, but only seemingly so, or so by a kind 
 of violence and disruption. The weak place in him 
 as a literary artist is probably his want of continuity 
 and the tie of association — a want which, as he grew 
 old, became a disease, and led to a break in his mind 
 like that of a bridge with one of the piers gone, and 
 his power of communication was nearly or quite lost. 
 Anything like architectural completeness Emerson 
 did not possess. There is no artistic conception that 
 runs the length and breadth of any of his works ; no 
 unity of scheme or plan like that of an architect, or 
 of a composer, that makes an inevitable whole of any 
 of his books or essays ; seldom a central and leading 
 idea of which the rest are but radiations and unfold- 
 ings. His essays are fragmentary, successions of 
 brilliant and startling affirmations, or vaticinations, 
 with little or no logical sequence. In other words, 
 there are seldom any currents of ideas in Emerson's 
 
144 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 essays, but sallies and excursions of the mind, as if 
 to get beyond the region of rational thinking into the 
 region of surmise and prophecy, — jets and projec- 
 tiles of thought under great pressure, the pressure of 
 the moral genius. He says, speaking more for him- 
 self than for others : " We learn to prefer imperfect 
 theories and sentences, which contain glimpses of the 
 truth, to digested systems, which have no one valu- 
 able suggestion." It would be almost impossible to 
 condense any of his essays ; they are the last results 
 of condensation ; we can only cut them up and abridge 
 them. So far as this criticism tells against Emerson 
 as a literary artist, it must be allowed. 
 
 Emerson speaks slightingly of logic, but his own 
 prose is undoubtedly the best when it is the most 
 logical — that is, the most consecutive and flowing. 
 Logic in this sense is no more the enemy of sponta- 
 neity than his method of bold guessing is. " Logic," 
 he says, " is the procession or proportionate unfold- 
 ing of the intuition." This " unfolding " is indispen- 
 sable to all good prose, and Arnold did not lay too 
 much stress upon it. Emerson's prose does not al- 
 ways have it, and just in proportion as it is without 
 it, is it unsound prose. When the reader comes upon 
 a continuous passage in the Essays, one in which the 
 thought is unfolded and carried along from point to 
 point, how easily and joyously the mind passes over 
 it. It is like a continuous path, after we have been 
 picking our way from one isolated stone to another. 
 The first chapter in " Representative Men," on the 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 145 
 
 use of great men, is a stony and broken path ; the 
 mind labors more or less in getting through it ; but 
 the chapters that follow have much more unity and 
 wholeness — much more smoothness and continuity 
 of thought. So has " English Traits " more consecu- 
 tiveness and unity than the Essays. Among the Es- 
 says the one on Books, on Immortality, on Nature, 
 on Beauty, on Self-Reliance, have more logical se- 
 quence and evolution than certain others. 
 
 Emerson's style is best when he is dealing with 
 something real and tangible before him, as in his 
 biographical and descriptive papers, his " English 
 Traits," etc., and poorest in his " Dial " papers, etc. 
 His letters often seem stilted and affected, but they, 
 nevertheless, contain many samples of his best prose. 
 Take this from a letter to Carlyle about " Frederic." 
 " But the manner of it ! — the author sitting as Dem- 
 iurgus, trotting out his manikins, coaxing and banter- 
 ing them, amused with their good performance, pat- 
 ting them on the back, and rating the naughty dolls 
 when they misbehave ; and communicating his mind 
 ever in measure, just as much as the young public 
 can understand ; hinting the future, when it would 
 be useful ; recalling now and then illustrative anec- 
 dotes of the actor, impressing the reader that he is 
 in possession of the entire history centrally seen, that 
 his investigation has been exhaustive, and that he de- 
 scends too on the petty plot of Prussia from higher 
 and cosmical surveys." 
 
 Who will say that the pen which wrote that is not 
 
146 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 capable of good and sound prose as well as of very- 
 acute and telling criticism ? Carlyle's egotism and 
 patronizing ways in his histories have never been 
 better touched off. 
 
 If Emerson did not have the gift of style in the 
 rather exclusive sense in which Arnold uses the term, 
 he had something which is a very good substitute for 
 it, — he had a fresh tonic quality of mind which he 
 imparted to nearly everything he wrote. A man's 
 use of language reveals the very fibre and texture of 
 his mind. Silk is silk, and hemp is hemp, and the 
 hand knows the difference wherever it touches them, 
 but in literature the same words are silk or hemp, 
 according to the mind tbat uses them. Emerson's 
 page nearly always makes the impression of this finer 
 and more precious quality, and whatever may be its 
 defects belongs to literature pure and simple. 
 
 Probably the best test of good prose is this : It is 
 always creative ; it begets in the mind of the reader 
 a deep and pervading sense of life and reality. Now 
 that Arnold is gone, how many writers of creative 
 prose are there in England ? Now that Emerson is 
 gone, how many are there in America ? Is Mr. 
 Gladstone's prose creative ? Far from it, I think. 
 Is Mr. Ruskin's. With all his brilliancy, I think 
 Ruskin lacks the creative touch. Emerson falls short 
 of it many times, but at his best the creative power 
 of the best prose was assuredly his. He often had 
 that felicity of utterance that diffuses such light and 
 joy in the mind. 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 147 
 
 The greatness of his work consists in the measure 
 of pure genius and of inspiration to noble and heroic 
 conduct which it holds. As a writer he had but one 
 aim, namely, to inspire, to wake up his reader or 
 hearer to the noblest and the highest there was in 
 him ; and it was no part of his plan to enter into com- 
 petition with the Addisonian writers for the produc- 
 tion of perfect literary work — perfect from the 
 standpoint of extrinsic form, argument, logic, evolu- 
 tion. His purpose did not require it, his genius did 
 not demand it. He was to scatter the seed-germs of 
 nobler thinking and living, not to rear a temple to the 
 Muses ; and from our point of view the former is by 
 far the more important service. To get at the full 
 worth of Emerson, I say, we must appraise him for 
 his new and fundamental quality of genius, not for his 
 mere literary accomplishments, great as these were. 
 
 li it is replied that this is just what the lecturer 
 did, I say the word of highest praise, all through the 
 discourse, was given to the master of mere literary 
 form. There was a tone of disparagement toward 
 Emerson as a man of letters, when there should have 
 been generous approval of the quickening and liber- 
 ating spirit he brought to letters. 
 
 Emerson's message is of the highest importance, 
 and he renders it with rare effectiveness and charm. 
 His page is an enticement to the aesthetic sense of the 
 intellect, and a stimulus and tonic to the ethical sense 
 of the moral nature. 
 
 The essay makes no unit of impression, though 
 
148. INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 undoubtedly the personality of the writer does ; and 
 this, I think, largely makes up, in such a writer as 
 Emerson, for the want of inclosing design to which 
 I have referred. The design that gives unity and 
 relevancy to these isolated paragraphs is the person- 
 ality of Emerson, his peculiar type and idiosyncrasy. 
 This is the plan, the theme which these musical pe- 
 riods illustrate. The artist, says Goethe, " make 
 what contortions he will, can only bring to light his 
 own individuality." Of men of the Emersonian and 
 Woi'dsworthian stamp, this is preeminently true ; and 
 it is this which finally interests us and gives the to- 
 tality of impression in their works. The flavor of 
 character is over all ; the features of the man are 
 stamped upon every word. From this point of view, 
 much faultless and forcible writing — the writer al- 
 ways under the sway of Arnold's law of pure and 
 flawless workmanship — is destitute of intrinsic style, 
 because it is destitute of individuality. In the case 
 of Emerson, the only new thing in the book is the 
 man ; this is the surprising discovery ; but this makes 
 all things new ; we see the world through a new per- 
 sonal medium. 
 
 Everything Emerson wrote belongs to literature, 
 and to literature in its highest and most serious 
 mood. If not a great man of letters, then a great 
 man speaking through letters, and delivering himself 
 with a charm and a dignity few have equaled. We 
 cannot deny him literary honors, though we honor 
 him for much more than his literary accomplishments. 
 
ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 149 
 
 No more could a bird fly without wings, than could 
 Emerson's thought have reached and moved Arnold 
 in his early Oxford days, without rare qualities of 
 literary style. 
 
 All Emerson's aspirations were toward greatness 
 of character, greatness of wisdom, nobility of soul. 
 Hence, in all his writings and speakings the great 
 man shines through and ecbqsses the great writer. 
 The flavor of character is stronger than the flavor of 
 letters, and dominates the pages. 
 
 If he is " the friend and aider of those who would 
 live in the spirit," he is equally the friend and aider 
 of those who would found a great state, a great liter- 
 ature, a great art. The spirit he brought to his task, 
 and which he displayed through his life, is a stimulus 
 and a support to all noble endeavor, of whatever kind 
 or in whatever field. 
 
 Yet it is to be said that neither Emerson nor Car- 
 lyle was a typical literary man. They both had too 
 great moral vehemence, or bent, to be the doctors and 
 professors of mere literature for and of itself. They 
 both belong to that class of writers who are not so 
 much critics of life, as feeders and reinforcers of 
 life ; who gather in from wide lying realms not al- 
 ways with nice judgment or wise selection, but always 
 with bold, strong hands, much that nourishes and fer- 
 tilizes the very roots of the tree Igdrasil. Such writ- 
 ers were Emerson and Carlyle. Such a writer is not 
 Mr. Arnold, though his function as pruner and culti- 
 vator of the tree is scarcely less in importance. 
 
150 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Disinterestedness is to be demanded of the critic, 
 but the creative imagination may have free play- 
 within the limits of a strong intellectual bias. The 
 charm and value of Darwin is his disinterestedness, 
 but Darwin is a critic of the scheme of creation : he 
 is interested only in finding and stating the largest 
 truth, in outlining the theory that will cover the great- 
 est multitude and the widest diversity of facts. But 
 the charm and value of such a writer as Abram Cow- 
 ley, or Mr. Ruskin, or our Thoreau, is largely given 
 by a peculiar moral and mental bias. It is Thoreau's 
 stoicism and vehement partiality to nature that gives 
 his page such a fillip and genial provocation. And 
 what would Mr. Ruskin be without his delightful one- 
 sidedness and bright unreasonableness ? 
 
 Few men eminent in literature have been free from 
 some sort of bias. Arnold himself has the academic 
 bias. There is in him a slight collegiate contemptu- 
 ousness and aloofness which stands a little in the way 
 of his doing full justice, say, to the nonconformist, 
 and to the bereaved mortal who wants to marry his 
 deceased wife's sister, and in the way of his full ac- 
 ceptance by his countrymen, to which he is justly en- 
 titled. Was he not also just a little interested in giv- 
 ing our pride in Emerson a fall, at least a shaking 
 up ? Milton is biased by his Puritanism ; his " Par- 
 adise Lost " is the pageant or drama of the Puritan 
 theology ; but he is undoubtedly best as a poet when 
 he forgets his Puritanism. "Wordsworth has the di- 
 dactic bias ; his steed of empyrean is yoked with 
 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 151 
 
 another of much commoner clay. Carlyle's bias is 
 an over-weening partiality for heroes ; he cuts all his 
 cloth to this one pattern. Among our own writers, 
 Bryant, Longfellow, Irving have little or no bias : 
 they are disinterested witnesses, but they are not men 
 of the first order. Our younger corps of writers are 
 free from bias, which is less a merit than their want 
 of earnestness is a defect. 
 
 Arnold's view of Emerson as a poet is not entirely 
 new, though perhaps it has never before been set 
 forth in quite so telling and authoritative a form. 
 The British literary journals have been in the habit 
 of saying for years, whenever the subject was up, that 
 Emerson was not a poet. An able London critic 
 likened him to a Druid who wanders among the 
 bards, and smites the harp with even more than bar- 
 dic stress. And a poet on the usual terms we must 
 admit Emerson was not. He truly had a druidical 
 cast. His song is an incantation. Not a minstrel at 
 the feast of life is he, but a chanter of runes at life's 
 shrine. Arnold gave us the worst that could be said 
 of Emerson as a poet, namely, that he lacked con- 
 creteness, sensuousness, and passion. Perhaps the 
 best that can be said of him as a poet is that, not- 
 withstanding these deficiencies, there is usually a 
 poetic stress in his verse, a burden and an intensity 
 of poetic appeal, that would be hard to match in any 
 other poet. He had the eye and ear of the poet pre- 
 ternaturally sharpened, but lacked the full poetic ut- 
 terance. It would seem as if he besieged the Muses 
 
152 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 with all the more seriousness and eloquence, because 
 of the gifts that had been denied him. His verse is 
 full of disembodied poetic values, of "melody born of 
 melody." Compared with the other poets, he is like 
 an essence compared to fruits or flowers. He pierced 
 the symbol, he discarded the corporeal ; his science 
 savors of magic, his power of some mysterious occult 
 force. Yet to say he is not a true poet implies too 
 much ; he does not stop short of the achievements of 
 other poets, but goes beyond them. He would get 
 rid of the bulk, the mass, and save the poetry ; get 
 rid of the concrete and catch the ideal ; in other 
 words, turn your mountain of carbon into diamonds. 
 
 As a rule, the qualities we miss from his verse, he 
 did not aim to put there ; he did not himself value 
 them in poetry. He knew the classic models were 
 not for him. He valued only the memorable pas- 
 sages, the lightning strokes of genius, the line that 
 
 "overleapt the horizon's edge," 
 and 
 
 "Searched with Apollo's privilege." 
 He hung his verses in the wind : — 
 
 ' ' All were winnowed through and through, 
 Five lines lasted sound and true ; 
 Five were smelted in a pot 
 Than the South more fierce and hot ; 
 These the siroc could not melt, 
 Fire their fiercer flaming felt, 
 And the meaning was more white 
 Than July's meridian light. 
 
ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 153 
 
 Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, 
 Nor time unmake what poets know. 
 Have you eyes to find the five 
 Which five hundred did survive ? ' ' 
 
 This was Emerson's method, — not to write a per- 
 fect poem, a poem that should be an inevitable whole, 
 as Arnold would have him, but to write the perfect 
 line, to set the imagination ablaze with a single verse, 
 leaving the effects of form, of proportion, to be 
 achieved by those who were equipped for it. His 
 poetry is undoubtedly best when it is most concrete, 
 as in the " Humblebee," " Rhodora," " Seashore," 
 "The Snow -Storm," "The Problem," "The Tit- 
 mouse," and like poems, and poorest in " Wood 
 Notes," " Celestial Love," etc. " Unless the heart is 
 shook," says Landor, " the gods thunder and stride in 
 vain ; " and the heart is seldom shook by Emerson's 
 poetry. It has heat, but it is not that of English 
 poetical literature, the heat of the blood, of the affec- 
 tions, the emotions ; but arises from the ecstasy of 
 contemplation of the universality of the moral law. 
 
 It is hard to reconcile Arnold's criticism of Emer- 
 son's poetry with what many of us feel to be its 
 beauty and value. It is irritating to Emersonians to 
 be compelled to admit that his strain lacks any essen- 
 tial quality. I confess that I would rather have his 
 poetry than all Milton, Cowper, Gray, Byron, and 
 many others ever wrote, but doubtless in such a con- 
 fession I am only pointing out my own limitations as 
 a reader of the poets. This is the personal estimate 
 
154 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 which Arnold condemns. I see the grounds upon 
 which Milton's poetry is considered greater, but I do 
 not care for it, all the same. Emerson's poetry does 
 not dilate me, as Wordsworth's does, because the hu- 
 man emotional element in it is weaker. It has not 
 the same touch of nature that makes the whole world 
 kin, the touch of commonalty heightened and vivified. 
 
 Whether we know it or not, we doubtless love 
 Emerson all the more because he is not a legitimate 
 poet or the usual man of letters, but an exceptional 
 one. We do not love Shakespeare in the same way, 
 because he is of no special and peculiar service to us 
 as men and moral beings ; he is not dear to any 
 man, but generously beloved by all men. He is in 
 the midst of the great currents of life and nature. 
 'T is the universal air, the universal water we get 
 here. But Emerson stands apart. 
 
 We go to him as we go to a fountain to drink, and 
 to a fountain of peculiar virtues, a fountain that con- 
 tains iron, or sulphur, or some other medicinal prop- 
 erty. Hence, while to criticism Emerson is less than 
 Gray or Milton, to us who need his moral and spir- 
 itual tonics he is more, vastly more. We live in a 
 sick age, and he has saved the lives of many of us. 
 So precious has his service been, so far beyond the 
 reach of mere literature, that we are irritated, I say, 
 when we hear the regular literary men placed above 
 him. When I think of Emerson, I think of him as 
 a man, not as an author ; it was his rare and charm- 
 ing personality that healed us and kindled our love. 
 
ARNOLD'S VIEW OF EMERSON AND CARLYLE. 155 
 
 When he died, it was not as a sweet singer, like 
 Longfellow, who had gone silent ; but something 
 precious and paternal had departed out of nature ; 
 a voice of hope and courage, and inspiration to all 
 noble endeavor, had ceased to speak. 
 
 As a prose writer there is one note in Emerson 
 which we get with the same emphasis and clearness 
 in no other writer. I mean the heroic note, the note 
 of manhood rising above the accidents of fortune and 
 the tyranny of circumstances, the inspiration of cour- 
 age and self-reliance. It is in Carlyle, but is often 
 touched by his ill-humor. When Teufelsdrockh fulmi- 
 nates his " Everlasting No " in " Sartor," it rings out 
 like a thunder-peal ; this is the wrath and invincibility 
 of the hero at bay. If, in Emerson's earlier essays, 
 this note seems to us now a little too pronounced, 
 savoring just a little of " tall talk," it did not seem so 
 when we first read them, but was as clear, and frank, 
 and sweet as the note of a bugle. Carlyle once de- 
 fined poetry as the " heroic of speech," a definition 
 that probably would not suit Mr. Arnold, but which 
 describes much of Emerson's verse, and many of 
 those brave sentences in his essays. 
 
 If in Addison the note is that of genial urbanity, 
 in Franklin that of worldly prudence ('' There is a 
 flower of religion, a flower of honor, a flower of 
 chivalry," says Sainte-Beuve, " which must not be 
 required from Franklin "). in Bacon of large wisdom, 
 in Pope of polished common sense, in Arnold himself 
 the classical note or note of perfection, in Emerson 
 
156 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 we come at once upon the chivalrous, heroic attitude 
 and temper. No scorn, no contempt, no defiance, 
 hut a bright and cheerful confronting of immense 
 odds. In other writers there are words of prudence, 
 words of enlightenment, words of grave counsel, 
 words that divide one thing from another like a 
 blade, words of sympathy and love ; but in Emerson 
 more than in any other there are words that are like 
 banners leading to victory, symbolical, inspiring, 
 rallying, seconding, and pointing the way to your 
 best endeavor. " Self-trust," he says, " is the essence 
 of heroism," and this martial note pulses through all 
 his utterances. It is found in others, too, but it is 
 the leading note in him. In others it is often the in- 
 spiration of conduct ; in him it is the inspiration of 
 morals. 
 
 The quality I refer to is in this passage from Mar- 
 cus Aurelius : — 
 
 " Suppose that men kill thee — cut thee in pieces 
 — curse thee. What, then, can these things do to 
 prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, 
 just ? " 
 
 It is in these lines from Beaumont and Fletcher's 
 " Sea Voyage," quoted by Emerson himself : — 
 
 " Jidietta. Why, slaves, 'tis in our power to hang ye. 
 " Master. Very likely. 'Tis in our power, then, to be 
 hanged, and scorn ye." 
 
 It is the salt of this passage of another poet : — 
 
 " How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed ! 
 How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a 
 man's or woman's look ! " 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 157 
 
 It is in the reply of the Spartan soldier who, when 
 the threatening Persian told him their arrows would 
 darken the sun, answered: "Very well, then; we 
 will fight in the shade." Emerson sounds the same 
 note throughout his essays, takes the same attitude 
 toward circumstances, toward conventions, toward 
 tradition, toward theological dogma, toward every- 
 thing that would hamper and limit him. It shines in 
 his famous boast : — 
 
 " Give me health and a day, and I will make the 
 pomp of emperors ridiculous." 
 
 There is a glint of it in this passage, which might 
 have been written to comfort John Brown, or reas- 
 sure a certain much-abused poet, had it not been be- 
 fore the fact, a prophecy and not a counsel : — 
 
 " Adhere to your own act, and congratulate your- 
 self if you have done something strange and extrav- 
 agant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age." 
 
 Here it takes another key : — 
 
 " If we dilate on beholding the Greek energy, the 
 Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating 
 the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great 
 guest in our small houses. The first step of worthi- 
 ness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious associ- 
 ations with places and times, with number and size. 
 Why should these words Athenian, Roman, Asia, and 
 England so tingle in the ear ? Where the heart is, 
 there the muses — there the gods sojourn, and not in 
 any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut 
 River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and 
 
158 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 the ear loves names of foreign and classical typog- 
 raphy. But here we are, and if we will tarry a little, 
 we may come to learn that here is best. See to it 
 only that thyself is here — and art and nature, hope 
 and fate, friends and angels, and the Supreme Being, 
 shall not be absent from the chamber where thou 
 sittest." 
 
 Half the essays are to this tune. " Books," he 
 said, " are for nothing but to inspire ; " and in writ- 
 ing his own he had but one purpose in view, to be, as 
 Arnold so well says, " the friend and aider of those 
 who would live in the spirit" — in the spirit of truth, 
 in the spirit of virtue, in the spirit of heroism. 
 
 The lecturer was unfortunate in what he said of 
 Emerson's " Titmouse." We do not learn, he said, 
 what his titmouse did for him ; we are reduced to 
 guessing; he was not poet enough to tell us. But 
 the bird sounded the heroic note to the poet, and 
 inspired him with courage and hope when he was 
 about to succumb to the cold. 
 
 ' ' Here was this atom in full breath, 
 Hurling defiance at vast death. 
 
 Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine ; 
 Ashes and jet all hues outshine. 
 
 I think old Caesar must have heard 
 In northern Gaul my dauntless bird, 
 And, echoed in some frosty wold, 
 Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold. 
 
 Paan! Veni, vidi, vici." 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 159 
 
 It is one of Emerson's most characteristic poems. 
 Burns, the speaker said, would have handled the 
 subject differently, thinking probably of Burns's 
 " Mouse." Certainly he would. He was pitched in 
 a different key. The misfortunes of his mouse 
 touched his sympathy and love, appealed to his hu- 
 man tenderness, and called up the vision of his own 
 hard lot. Each poet gives us the sentiment proper 
 to him ; the heroic from Emerson, the human from 
 Burns. The lecturer was right in saying that the 
 secret of Emerson's influence is his temper, but it is 
 not merely his good temper, his cheerfulness, hope- 
 fulness, benevolence, etc. These he shared with the 
 mass of his countrymen. The American tempera- 
 ment is sanguine and turns confidently to the future. 
 But it is again his heroic temper, his faith in " the 
 ideal tendencies," in the value of personal force and 
 character, in the grandeur of the present moment, 
 the present opportunity ; a temper he shares with but 
 few, but shares, say, with his friend and master, Car- 
 lyle:- 
 
 "One equal temper of heroic hearts." 
 and more especially in Carlyle's case, 
 
 " Made weak by time and fate, hut strong in will 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 
 
 It has long been clear to me that Carlyle and 
 Emerson were in many important respects closely 
 akin, notwithstanding the wrath and melancholy of 
 the one, and the serenity and hopefulness of the 
 
160 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 other. Their main ground of kinship is the heroic 
 sentiment which they share in common. Their effects 
 upon the mind are essentially the same : both have the 
 " tart cathartic virtue " of courage and self-reliance ; 
 both nourish character and spur genius. Carlyle 
 does not communicate the gloom he feels ; 't is the 
 most tonic despair to be found in literature. There 
 is a kind of felicity in it. For one thing, it sprang 
 from no personal disappointment or selfishness. It 
 always has the heroic tinge. In a letter to Emerson 
 he refers to it as a " kind of imperial sorrow that is 
 almost like felicity, — so completely and composedly 
 wretched, one is equal to the very gods." His 
 wretchedness was a kind of sorrow ; that is always 
 its saving feature. One's unhappiness may be selfish 
 and ignoble, or it may be noble and inspiring; all 
 depends upon the sentiment from which it springs. 
 Men selfishly wretched never laugh, except in deri- 
 sion. Carlyle was a man of sorrow, and sorrow 
 springs from sympathy and love. A sorrowing man 
 is a loving man. His is the Old World sorrow, the 
 inheritance of ages, the grief of justice and retribu- 
 tion over the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of 
 centuries. In him it became a kind of poetic senti- 
 ment, a fertile leaf-mould that issued at last in positive 
 verdure and bloom. Not happiness, but a kind of 
 blessedness, he aspired to, the satisfaction of suffer- 
 ing in well-doing. How he loves all the battling, 
 struggling, heroic souls ! "Whenever he comes upon 
 one such in his histories, no matter how obscure, he 
 
Arnold's view of emerson and carlyle. 161 
 
 turns aside to lay a wreath upon his tomb. It "was 
 his own glory that he never flinched ; that his despair 
 only nerved him to work the harder ; the thicker the 
 gloom, the more his light shone. Hope and heart 
 never left him ; they were of the unquenchable, the 
 inextinguishable kind, like those ragged jets of flame 
 the traveler used to see above the oil wells or gas 
 wells in Pennsylvania, which the wildest tempest 
 could not blow out, so tenaciously and desperately 
 did the flame cling. 
 
 Carlyle's lamentations are loud ; a little of his own 
 doctrine of silence would have come in well here. 
 What he said of Voltaire, the world is bound to say 
 of himself : " Truly M. de Voltaire had a talent for 
 speech, but lamentably wanted that of silence." But 
 he worked like a Hercules. He does not charm the 
 demons away like Emerson, but he defies them. 
 Emerson wins them over, but Carlyle explodes them 
 with their own sulphur. Both men rendered their 
 age and country a signal service, and to rule them 
 out of the company of the great authors is to rob 
 that company of the two names of this century it can 
 least afford to lose. 
 
GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 
 
 I was moved to take down my White's " Selborne " 
 and examine it again for the source of the delight I 
 had had in it, on hearing a distinguished literary man, 
 the late Richard Grant White, say it was a book he 
 could not read with any degree of pleasure : to him 
 its pages were a bare record of uninteresting facts. 
 It was not because he felt no interest in or sympathy 
 with the kind of literature to which White's " Sel- 
 borne " belongs, for he confessed a liking for certain 
 other writers in this field, but because both White's 
 matter and manner were void of interest to him. 
 The book was doubtless pitched in too low a key for 
 him : it was tame and commonplace, like the country 
 itself. There is indeed something a little disappoint- 
 ing in White's book when one takes it up for the first 
 time, with his mind full of its great fame. It is not 
 seasoned quite up to the modern taste. White is 
 content that the facts of nature should be just what 
 they are ; his concern alone is to see them just as 
 they are. When I myself first looked into his book, 
 many years ago, I found nothing in it that attracted 
 me, and so passed it by. Much more recently it fell 
 into my hands, when I felt its charm and value at 
 once. Indeed, the work of the Selborne naturalist 
 
GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 163 
 
 belongs to the class of books that one must discover 
 for himself : their quality is not patent ; he that runs 
 may not read them. Like certain fruits, they leave a 
 lingering flavor in the mouth that is much better than 
 the hrst taste promised. In some congenial mood or 
 lucky moment you find them out. I remember I had 
 the little book of Essays of Abraham Cowley some 
 years before I succeeded in reading it. One sum- 
 mer day I chanced to take it with me on my walk to 
 the woods, and at the foot of a waterfall in a very 
 secluded place I suddenly discovered that the essays 
 had a quality and a charm that I had never sus- 
 pected they possessed. The book was the fruit of a 
 certain privacy and seclusion from the world, and it 
 required in the reader the frame of mind which these 
 beget to enter fully into it. I suspect that some such 
 auspicious moment or preparation is necessary to a 
 full appreciation of White's letters. It is necessary, 
 in the first place, that you be a born countryman, ca- 
 pable of a certain fellowship and intimacy with your 
 brute neighbors and with the various shows of rural 
 nature. Then a quiet, even tenor of life, such as can 
 be had only in the country, is also necessary, — a 
 way of life that goes slow, and lingers upon the im- 
 pression of the moment, and returns to it again and 
 again, that makes much of little things, and is closely 
 observant of the face of the day and of the landscape, 
 and into which the disturbing elements of the great 
 hurly-burly outside world do not enter. Being thus 
 surrounded and thus inclined, in the fall, when you 
 
164 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 first build a fire in your grate and begin to feel again 
 like browsing along the old paths, open White's 
 " Selborne," and read a chapter here and there, and 
 bend your ear attentively to his quiet, cheerful, but 
 earnest talk. Each letter shall seem addressed to 
 you personally with news from the fields and by-ways 
 you so lately visited. The pastoral quiet and sweet- 
 ness and harmony of the English landscape pervade 
 them all, with just that tinge of reminiscence, that 
 flavor of human sympathy and human absorption, that 
 English fields suggest. The style is like a rich, ten- 
 der sward, simple and unobtrusive, with scarcely a 
 flower of rhetoric anywhere, but very pleasing and 
 effective and entirely adequate : it is nature and art 
 perfectly married, each seconding the other. Its 
 brevity, its directness, its simplicity, its dealings with 
 familiar and near-at-hand objects, shows, occur- 
 rences, etc., make it a book which never sates and 
 never tires the reader. It is little more than an ap- 
 petizer, but as such it takes high rank. As a stimu- 
 lus and spur to the study of natural history, it has no 
 doubt had more influence than any other work of the 
 century. Its merits in this direction alone would 
 perhaps account for its success. But, while it has 
 other merits, and great ones, it has been a fortunate 
 book : it has had little competition ; it has had the 
 wind always with it, so to speak. It furnished a 
 staple the demand for which was always steady and 
 the supply small. There was no other book of any 
 merit like it for nearly a hundred years. It contains 
 
GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 165 
 
 a great deal of good natural history and acute obser- 
 vations upon various rural subjects, put up in a cheap 
 and portable form. The contemporary works of 
 Pennant are voluminous and costly, — heavy sailing- 
 craft that come to port only in the great libraries, 
 while this is a nimble, light-draught vessel that has 
 found a harbor on nearly every man's book-shelf. 
 
 Hence we say that while it is not one of the great 
 books, it is one of the very real books, one of the very 
 live books, and has met and supplied a tangible want 
 in the English reading world. It does not appeal to 
 a large class of readers, and yet no library is com- 
 plete without it. It is valuable as a storehouse of 
 facts, it is valuable as a treatise on the art of observing 
 things, and it is valuable for its sweetness and charm 
 of style. 
 
 What an equable, harmonious, and gracious spirit 
 and temper pervade the book, and withal what an air 
 of summer-day leisure and sequestration ! The great 
 world is far off. Its sound is less than the distant 
 rumble of a wagon, heard in the midst of the fields. 
 The privacy and preoccupation of the author are like 
 those of the bird building her nest or of the bee gath- 
 ering her sweets. He was eager for news, but it was 
 only for news from the earth and the air, or from 
 the dumb life about him. Yet it would not be safe 
 to affirm that White was not an interested and sym- 
 pathetic spectator of the events of his time, like other 
 men, for doubtless he was. There is no evidence 
 that he was anything like the petulant recluse and 
 
166 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 man-hater that our own Thoreau at times was. He 
 had the wide, generous eye, and his love of nature 
 was not in any sense a running away from the world. 
 But he was not the historian of his time, nor even of 
 his own moods and fancies, but the chronicler of the 
 unobserved life of nature about him ; and as such he 
 attained a pure result. And this is one secret of his 
 keeping qualities, — a pure result, untainted and un- 
 refracted by any peculiarity of the medium through 
 which it came. Mankind, in the long run, cares less 
 what you think, unless your plummet goes very deep, 
 than what you feel, and are, and experience. White 
 valued his facts for what they were, not for any 
 double meaning he could wring out of them or any 
 airy structure he could build upon them. He loved 
 the bird, or the animal, or a walk in the fields, di- 
 rectly and for its own sake, and his book makes a 
 distinct impression, like any of the creatures or any 
 of the phases and products of nature of which it 
 treats. The perennial and antiseptic quality in liter- 
 ature or art is something as simple as water or milk, 
 or as the oxygen of the air ; it does not come from 
 afar ; it is more common and familiar than we are 
 apt to think. One may not say dogmatically that it 
 is this or that, but I think it safe to say that it is in- 
 separable from perfect seriousness and singleness of 
 purpose. This singleness and seriousness of purpose 
 White had. He is as honest and direct as the rain 
 or the wind. No levity, no seeing double, no intellec- 
 tual astigmatism, no make-believe, no spinning of 
 
GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 167 
 
 webs, hardly any conscious humor, no o'er-ripe senti- 
 ment, but a steady effort and puqjose to see and re- 
 cord the simple fact. It is not more what he has put 
 into his book than what he has kept out of it that has 
 made it keep a hundred years. Carlyle says of a cer- 
 tain celebrated Frenchman that he was always at the 
 top less by power of swimming than by lightness in 
 floating. In no disparaging sense is this true of 
 White's "Selborne." It has an inherent principle of 
 buoyancy like a bird. It is a light book in the best 
 sense. It makes no severe demand upon the read- 
 er's time or attention. It is as easy reading as the 
 letters of a friend. The epistolary form of the chap- 
 ters, a form that lends itself so readily, almost inevit- 
 ably, to directness and simplicity of statement is no 
 doubt one secret of the book's charm. Dullness in 
 private letters is perhaps rarer than dullness in any 
 other species of writing. Plenty of persons write 
 fresh and entertaining letters who are lead itself in 
 the essay or the sermon. White is less pleasing in 
 his " Observations of Nature " than in his letters. It 
 is a great matter to have a fair and definite mark to 
 aim at and a good reason for obtruding the personal 
 pronoun. White was the type of the true observer. 
 He had the alert, open sense, the genial, hospitable 
 habit of mind, the healthful objectivity and receptiv- 
 ity that at once placed him in right relations with 
 outward nature. He had great curiosity and genuine 
 enthusiasm, and permitted no moods, or humors, or 
 bias, or what not, to stand between him and what he 
 
168 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 saw. His mind transmitted clearly ; the image is 
 exact. To be a good observer is not merely to see 
 things : it is to see them in their relations and bear- 
 ings ; it is to separate one thing from another, the 
 wheat from the chaff, the significant from the unim- 
 portant. The sagacity of the hound is in his scent, 
 the skill of the musician seems in his hands and 
 fingers, the mind of the observer is in his eye. To 
 untrained perceptions the color of the clouds is this or 
 that, gray, or blue, or drab ; the artist picks out the 
 primary tints, the separate colors of which this hue is 
 composed. In like manner the true observer, the 
 true eye-poet or analyst, disentangles the facts and 
 threads of meaning of the dumb life about him, and 
 gives you a distinct impression. It is true that White 
 made a business of observing. For more than forty 
 years he went out daily to take note of what was 
 going on in his open-air parish. He knew his ground 
 by heart, and every new move at once caught his eye. 
 If a new bird appeared upon the scene he was sure 
 to be on hand to take note of it ; or if a swallow 
 lingered a little later than usual or came a day or two 
 earlier, the fact did not escape him. The pine gross- 
 beak is a rare visitant in England, as it is in the 
 United States, yet if one came it was pretty sure to 
 report to White at an early day. The hoopoe is also 
 a rare bird there ; but one summer a pair took up 
 their abode in an ornamental piece of ground that 
 joined White's garden. One can imagine how ea- 
 gerly he watched them. " They used to march about 
 
GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 169 
 
 in a stately manner," he says, " feeding in the walks 
 many times a day, and seemed disposed to breed in 
 my outlet, but were frightened and persecuted by 
 idle boys, who Avould never let them be at rest." 
 The grasshopper-lark is one of the shyest of British 
 birds, and one of the most baffling to the observer. 
 It creeps around under the thorns and bushes and in 
 the bottom of the hedge-rows, like a mouse or a wea- 
 sel. Its note or song was thought to proceed from 
 a grasshopper ; and White says the country-people 
 laugh when told it is a bird. But the sharp-eyed 
 curate could not be baffled : he would watch the bird 
 till he saw it in the very act. His eye was not only 
 quick, it was patient and tenacious, and would not let 
 go till it had the secret. He saw the fern-owl feed 
 itself while on the wing ; he saw swallows feed their 
 young in the air, which few people have perhaps ever 
 seen. He timed the white owls that nested under 
 the eaves of his church, and, with watch in hand, 
 found that one or the other of them returned about 
 every five minutes with food for the young. They 
 did not proceed directly to the nest, but always 
 perched upon the roof of the chancel first. He 
 quickly saw what this was for : it was to shift the 
 mouse from the claws to the bill, that their feet might 
 be free to aid them in climbing to the nest. His ob- 
 servation is often of the minutest character. " When 
 redstarts shake their tails," he says, "they move 
 them horizontally, as dogs do when they fawn ; the 
 tail of a wagtail when in motion bobs up and down 
 
170 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 like that of a jaded horse." " Most birds drink sip- 
 ping at intervals ; but pigeons take a long continued 
 draught, like quadrupeds." When he saw the stilt- 
 plover, he observed at once that it had no back toe, 
 and must therefore be a bad walker. " Without 
 that steady prop to support its steps, it must be liable, 
 in speculation, to perpetual vacillations, and seldom 
 able to preserve the true centre of gravity." There 
 is a sly humorous twinkle in this passage that our 
 author seldom indulges in. 
 
 White's interest and curiosity in every phase of 
 natural history were so lively and his habit of mind 
 was so frank and open that much came in his way to 
 record that would otherwise have been passed by. His 
 neighbor had a hog which he kept to an advanced 
 age, and our curate writes to Mr. Barrington one of 
 his characteristic letters about it. " The natural 
 term of a hog's life," he begins, " is little known, 
 and the reason is plain, — because it is neither profit- 
 able nor convenient to keep that turbulent animal to 
 the full extent of its time : however, my neighbor, a 
 man of substance, who had no occasion to study every 
 little advantage to a nicety, kept an half-bred Bantam 
 sow, who was as thick as she was long, and whose 
 belly swept on the ground, till she was advanced to 
 her seventeenth year, at which period she showed 
 some tokens of age by the decay of her teeth and 
 the decline of her fertility." Two or three of his 
 most charming letters are devoted to the " old family 
 tortoise." What a clear and vivid impression we get 
 
GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 171 
 
 of the creature ! and what a lively interest we feel 
 in his stupid ways ! " No part of his behavior," 
 says White, " ever struck me more than the extreme 
 timidity it always expresses with regard to rain ; for, 
 though it has a shell that would secure it against the 
 wheel of a loaded cart, yet does it discover as much 
 solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her best 
 attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings and 
 running its head up in a corner." The old tortoise 
 begins to dig a hole in the ground to go into winter 
 quarters early in November. " It scrapes out the 
 ground with its fore-feet," says the historian, " and 
 throws it up over its back with its hind ; but the mo- 
 tion of its legs is ridiculously slow, little exceeding 
 the hour-hand of a clock." " This creature not only 
 goes under the earth from the middle of November 
 to the middle of April, but sleeps great part of the 
 summer ; for it goes to bed in the longest days at 
 four in the afternoon, and often does not stir in the 
 morning till late. Besides, it retires to rest for every 
 shower, and does not move at all in wet days." 
 Though so stupid and sleepy most of the time, " yet 
 there is a season of the year (usually the beginning 
 of June) when his exertions are remarkable. He 
 then walks on tiptoe, and is stirring by five in the 
 morning, and, traversing the garden, examines every 
 wicket and interstice in the fences, through which he 
 will escape if possible, and often has eluded the care 
 of the gardener and wandered to some distant field. 
 The motives that impel him to undertake these ram- 
 
172 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 bles seem to be of the amorous kind ; his fancy then 
 becomes intent on sexual attachments, which trans- 
 port him beyond his usual gravity and induce him to 
 forget for a time his ordinary solemn deportment." 
 
 Not less graphic and interesting is his account of 
 the idiot-boy who had a passion for bees and honey, 
 — was, in fact, a veritable bee-eater, seeking the bees 
 in the field and about the hives, and as he ran about 
 making a humming noise with his lips that resembled 
 tbe buzzing of bees. Nothing, in fact, escaped White's 
 attention, and his interest in things is so sane and 
 natural, and at the same time so lively, that his pages 
 never become obsolete. 
 
 The American reader of his book will hardly fail 
 to give many of his notes and observations an appli- 
 cation at home and see wherein our own familiar 
 natural history agrees with or differs from that of 
 the mother-country. The toad appears to be a com- 
 mon reptile in England, yet White confessed his ig- 
 norance of its manner of propagation, — whether it 
 laid eggs or brought forth its young alive, — and 
 could get no light from the authorities of his time 
 upon the subject. But the fact with regard to frogs, 
 he said, was notorious to everybody. With us the 
 fact with regard to toads is just as obvious. Their 
 spawning habits may be noticed in the spring in 
 every marsh and road-side pool, the large, sedate, 
 grandmotherly female toad bearing the pert, dapper 
 little male, looking like her ten-year-old grandson, 
 upon her back. It is apparently a copartnership be- 
 
GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 173 
 
 tween a dwarf and a giant. When the female is dis- 
 turbed, she plunges to the bottom of the pool and 
 buries herself in the mud, carrying the clinging male 
 with her, as if he was a very slight appendage indeed. 
 The chain of eggs that trails behind, and that may be 
 many yards in length, looks like a knitted black yarn 
 in a cord of transparent jelly. White says of the 
 British frogs that as soon as they have passed out of 
 the tadpole state they take to the land, and that at 
 times the lanes, paths, and fields swarm with myriads 
 of them on their travels. A similar phenomenon 
 may be witnessed in this country, except that the tiny 
 travelers are toads, and not frogs, and they are not 
 migrating, but are out only when it rains, and then 
 to wet their jackets. I have never seen them except 
 along the highway upon gravelly hills in early sum- 
 mer. They are then scarcely as large as bumble-bees. 
 White repeatedly speaks of the house - swallow, 
 which corresponds to our barn - swallow, as a fine 
 songster. In soft, sunny weather, he says, it sings 
 both perching and flying. If this is so, it is a point 
 in favor of the British bird. Our swallow is not a 
 songster ; and yet the epithet which Virgil applies to 
 the swallow — garvula — fits our bird. It twitters 
 and squeaks and calls ; but is that singing ? Our cliff- 
 swallow does the same ; and yet White says the Eng- 
 lish martin, or martlet, which is like our bird, is not a 
 songster, though it twitters in a pretty, inward, soft 
 manner in its nest. Again, the swift, which answers 
 to our chimney-swallow, he says, has only a harsh, 
 
174 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 screaming note or two. But our swift has a very 
 pretty chippering note or call, which it indulges in 
 on the wing and which approaches very nearly to a 
 song. On the whole, I conclude from White's ac- 
 count that the common European swallow has more 
 music in him than ours has, while our swift and mar- 
 tin are more musical than the corresponding species 
 in that country. There is this marked difference be- 
 tween the habits of the birds in the two hemispheres ; 
 the swallow that in Europe builds in chimneys, and 
 is called the house or chimney-swallow, in this coun- 
 try builds in barns and other out-houses, and is called 
 the barn-swallow ; while the swift, which builds in 
 chimneys here, and uses as material small twigs 
 gathered from the tops of dry trees, in England 
 builds in crannies of castles and towers and steeples, 
 and uses for material dry grasses and feathers, — 
 which, however, it seems to gather on the wing, as 
 our bird does its twigs. 
 
 White says that birds that build on the ground do 
 not make much of their nests, — that is, I suppose, 
 are not much attached to them. But this observa- 
 tion would not hold in this country. Our song-spar- 
 row and field-sparrow, our bobolink, and oven-bird, 
 and chewink, and brown thrasher, and Canada war- 
 bler, show as strong an attachment for their nests as 
 do the tree-builders, and use as many arts to decoy 
 the intruder away from them. They build quite as 
 elaborate nests, too ; which does not seem to be the 
 case with ground-builders in Europe. There are few 
 
GILBERT WHITE'S BOOK. 175 
 
 finer and neater architects among the birds than our 
 song-sparrow and snow-bird. 
 
 White lays it " down as a maxim in ornithology 
 that as long as there is any incubation going on there 
 is music." This is true of our birds also : they con- 
 tinue in song until the young are hatched. But the 
 converse of tbe proposition is not true, that there is 
 incubation as long as there is music. Certain species 
 continue in song long after the last brood has flown. 
 I am convinced that more birds continue in song in 
 late summer and in early autumn in this country than 
 do in England. 
 
 The main features of White's country are appar- 
 ently but little changed since his time. The Hanger 
 is there, with its noble beeches, and a large part of 
 Woolmer Forest still remains. I passed two rainy 
 days and one night at Selborne in June, 1 882. At 
 the hotel where I stopped a copy of White's book 
 could not be produced. The village is small, com- 
 pact, and humble. The postman handed me my let- 
 ters upon the street without remark, as if I was the 
 only stranger in the place, — which was probably 
 true. The soil of that part of England is a heavy, 
 greasy clay. On the steepest part of the Hanger the 
 boys ride or slide down the hill in summer. The 
 turf is removed, and the slippery clay is a fair substi- 
 tute for ice. White's house had been recently much 
 changed. It stands in the midst of the village, close 
 to the street, and not amid spacious grounds, as one 
 has been led to believe. I looked a long; time for his 
 
176 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 tomb amid the graves that surrounded the old church, 
 and finally found a plain slab with " G. W." upon it, 
 and that was all. There was no mark that indicated 
 that the grave was more frequently visited than any 
 other. The church is essentially the same as in 
 White's time, and the immense yew that stands near 
 the entrance must date back several hundred years. 
 The yew is a striking-looking tree. In this country 
 the species is represented by a low, reclining bush, 
 which reaches out laterally, with but a slight ten- 
 dency upward. In England the lateral tendency of 
 growth is still very marked, the trunk being short 
 and squat, and by its ridgy, corrugated character 
 looking more like a bundle or sheaf of smaller trees 
 than like a single bole. 
 
 Thus far White stands alone among English writers 
 in his field. Much pleasant literature has of late 
 years been inspired by nature-studies in Great Brit- 
 ain, but the new books have not quite the sweetness 
 and charm, not quite the sincerity, of that of the 
 Selborne parson. 
 
A MALFORMED GIANT. 1 
 
 De Quincey somewhere remarks that the Roman 
 mind was great in the presence of man, never in the 
 presence of nature. I am not going to undertake to 
 say whether or not this observation is wholly true. 
 Undoubtedly there is truth in it. I remember Gib- 
 bons says that to the Romans the ocean was an object 
 of terror rather than of curiosity, and that that warlike 
 people was never " actuated by the enterprising spirit 
 which had prompted the navigators of Tyre, of Car- 
 thage, and even of Marseilles to enlarge the bounds of 
 the world, and to explore the most remote coasts of the 
 ocean." But empire upon the land came easy to the 
 Roman. He was great in war, in government, in juris- 
 prudence, and in the administration of all human af- 
 fairs. 
 
 De Quincey's distinction came to my mind in medi- 
 tating upon Victor Hugo. Here, I said, is a great 
 
 1 Perhaps I ought to apologize to my reader for the polem- 
 ical tone of the latter part of this essay. It was written 
 many years ago in reply to an able critic, the late William D. 
 O'Connor, who had resented my epithet of "mad-dog" as 
 applied to Victor Hugo's nature, and I find it impossible to 
 change it now. As a protest against the glaring vice of 
 Hugo's art I think it well enough ; I would only change its 
 vehement and controversial tone and temper. 
 
178 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 man, unquestionably a great man, who shows to least 
 advantage in his dealings with nature. He seems to 
 feel something of the Roman dread and horror in the 
 presence of the ocean. Great in dealing with social 
 problems, or historical events, great in describing Wa- 
 terloo, or the sewers of Paris, or Paris itself, tremen- 
 dous in the realism of his characters, in the presence of 
 storms or tempests, or of any phase of elemental nature, 
 his imagination runs away with him. His nature is 
 a kind of mad-dog nature, and the physical universe, 
 in his handling of it, seems smitten with hydrophobia. 
 The continence, the moderation, the self-denial which 
 the Anglo-Saxon temperament loves, and which char- 
 acterizes nearly all first-class poets and artists, are 
 nowhere to be found. If he mentions the song of the 
 skylark, he must call upon the infinite and the immen- 
 sities to bear witness. One fully understands what 
 Heine means when he speaks of Hugo's "huge and 
 tasteless excrescences." Yet it is impossible not to 
 feel the man's power even in the poorest translation of 
 his books. He is about the only writer of his country 
 who impresses one as a man, who rises above the lit- 
 erature, whose love of letters is dominated by his love 
 of country, his love of man, his love of liberty and 
 right, — a fact which makes him a great moral and 
 political force aside from his influence in the region of 
 letters. There is somewhat aboriginal and elemental 
 in him as in all first-class men. The bare concep- 
 tion of " The Man who Laughs" is tremendous. Only 
 the first order of minds can conjure up such material 
 
A MALFORMED GIANT. 179 
 
 and deal with such a motif. It is like the granite rock. 
 But oh, the absurdities and anachronisms in the 
 working of it up ! " The Toilers," too, faces realities 
 of the largest kind, but there are things in it which, 
 as Robert Louis Stevenson well says, simply make 
 the reader cover his face with his hands, the artistic 
 falsehoods are so glaring. The description of the 
 storm which overtakes Gilliat just as his task is about 
 finished resembles the work of the great artists 
 about as nearly as a nightmare resembles the reality. 
 Yet in all these romances everything is large, 
 elemental ; no hair-splitting, nothing petty, or over-re- 
 fined. It is the work of a giant, but one malformed. 
 Hugo at once strikes a louder, stronger key than any of 
 his contemporaries. His voice rises above all others, 
 and is as full of cheer and hope as it is full of de- 
 nunciation and wrath. He was like dynamite and 
 giant powder, which make themselves heard and felt 
 afar. He had no repose, and this is one reason why 
 he is so irritating to the English mind. Another 
 reason is his want of self-restraint. As a literary 
 artist he out-Herod s Herod. In the torrent, tempest, 
 and whirlwind of his passion, all goes by the board. 
 " The modesty of nature," which Hamlet laid such 
 stress upon in his address to the players, is not only 
 " o'erstepped," it is outrageously insulted. Probably 
 never before in the history of literature has a master 
 spirit cut such fantastic tricks before the high heaven 
 of literary art. He illustrates in his field excesses and 
 violences as great as those which have marked the 
 
180 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 history of the French people. His offenses against 
 good taste, against one's sense of fitness and propor- 
 tion, are, in their way, on a par with the monstrous 
 doings of the French Revolution. The writer shocks 
 one's artistic perceptions, as the people shock one's 
 reason and humanity. And in both cases it was re- 
 bellion run mad. The revolt of the people against 
 the authority of the state and of the priests became 
 frenzy, and the revolt of Hugo against the classic 
 standards became rodomontade. He was a romanti- 
 cist, which he construed to mean just the contrary of 
 the classicist. One law of Greek art and of Greek 
 life was, nothing in excess — a wise measure in all 
 things ; therefore Hugo piles on the agony ; the 
 classic authors were calm, they avoided everything 
 sensational, all undue emphasis ; therefore will Hugo 
 rave and be sensational ; they cultivated a sobriety 
 and temperance which instinctively avoided everything 
 that was calculated to weaken an impression ; there- 
 fore does the Frenchman give free reign to his rhet- 
 oric and ride rough shod over all such tame consid- 
 eration. Relevancy, harmony of parts, unity of 
 impression — these are some of the excellences of 
 the classics, but " Les Miserables," with all its power 
 and effectiveness, is like a man with elephantiasis in 
 some of his members. When about a third of it is 
 cut away the story has some unity. Where the clas- 
 sics are dramatic, Hugo is melodramatic — note Gilliat 
 in " The Toilers " sitting himself upon the shore to be 
 drowned by the tide and his head disappearing under 
 
A MALFORMED GIANT. 181 
 
 the water at the moment the sloop he is watching 
 drops behind the horizon. Where the old writers are 
 simple, he is sensational. The Anglo-Saxon mind, 
 and every other normal and healthful type of mind, 
 is classical in this : it loves proportion, restraint, self- 
 denial, and has a lively sense of the fitness of things ; 
 does not like any trifling with the centre of gravity 
 and keeps close to the simple truth. Let a man fire 
 hot shot if he will, but let him keep his own guns 
 cool. In nearly all Victor Hugo's political tracts and 
 manifestoes the gun is hotter than the shot which it 
 throws, and we are more concerned for the writer 
 than we are for his enemy. He will spur his earnest- 
 ness until it becomes frenzy and his rhetoric until it 
 becomes rodomontade. Note his manifesto to the 
 Prussians during the siege of Paris. To see him 
 rending his flesh, livid with rage and almost foaming 
 at the mouth, read certain pages in his "Napoleon 
 the Little ; " or to see him again, under a different 
 pressure, beating the air wildly and goading his imag- 
 ination after his climax is reached, like a rider bury- 
 ing his rowel into his steed after the poor beast has 
 long done its best, read the concluding parts of his 
 description of the battle of Waterloo, or the last 
 stages of the storm that overtakes Gilliat in " The 
 Toilers," or the threefold agony of the rhetoric of a 
 similar description in " The Man who Laughs " (the 
 machine that grins, a friend says). To be great in 
 the presence of nature, to be great in any presence, is 
 to stand firmly on your feet, to use all gently, and in 
 
182 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirl- 
 wind of your passion, acquire and beget a temper- 
 ance that will give it smoothness. In the case of 
 Victor Hugo, when the pressure of his passion mounts 
 to a certain pitch, he invariably flies from his orbit 
 and from being planetary, as iEschylus and Shakes- 
 peare always are, becomes cometary and lawless, los- 
 ing fervor in fury and reason in riot. He would 
 have every storm a cyclone, every fish a monster, 
 every clown a gnome, a medusa ; and if they are not 
 so it is not his fault. He " pushes the passions till the 
 bond of nature snaps and all the furies come screech- 
 ing in." Let me explain myself further. Close along- 
 side of the sphere of the normal lies the sphere of the 
 abnormal ; of the sane, lies the insane ; of pleasure, 
 lies disgust ; of cohesion, lies dissolution ; of the gro- 
 tesque, lies the hideous ; of the sublime, lies the ridicu- 
 lous ; of power, lies plethora ; of sense, lies twaddle, 
 etc. Take but a step sometimes and you pass from one 
 to the other, from a shout to a scream, from the heroic 
 to the vainglorious. Victor Hugo, in his imaginative 
 flights, is forever hovering about this dividing line, fas- 
 cinated, spellbound by what lies beyond, and in his 
 Teachings after it outraging the " modesty of nature " 
 till the very soul blushes. It would seem as if he loved 
 the unnatural simply because it is the unnatural, and 
 the malformed simply because it is the malformed. 
 He loves to push the normal till it becomes the abnor- 
 mal, the dramatic till it becomes the melodramatic, the 
 intense till it becomes the hysterical ; he loves to push 
 
A MALFORMED GIANT. 183 
 
 anger, jealousy, remorse, grief till the bond snaps and 
 Termagant is o'erdone. His characters rave, gnash, 
 rend their hair, froth at the mouth, and even die in 
 paroxysms of passion. No doubt in the opinion of 
 Victor Hugoites like Swinburne there is no reason why 
 their eyes should not leap from their sockets, thei r 
 flesh wither on their bones, or serpents hiss from their 
 ears, nose, and mouth, if the " imperial fantasy " of 
 the novelist orders it. I am not now thinking of his 
 poems, some of which I regard as truly great, but of 
 his leading characteristics as a novelist ; of " Bug- 
 Jargal " and " Notre Dame." How fares the modesty 
 of nature in these volumes ? The former is not so 
 well known, but what shall we say of the latter ? Let 
 us examine it a little, since this is one of his master- 
 pieces. As a work of art what is it a faithful trans- 
 script of ? It is full of monstrosities, both moral and 
 physical, full of distorted passions, unhallowed lusts, 
 fiendish brutality, diabolical ravings, writhing agonies, 
 hideous grimaces, sepulchral wailings — full of all 
 manner of underground horrors and aboveground 
 abominations. It is a carnival of the loathsome. If 
 underneath these things, and inclosing them, one rec- 
 ognized the great remedial forces of nature, or the 
 compensations of time and history, there would be 
 some refuge, some escape. But the earth is rotten, 
 the sunshine pestiferous, the waters stygian, Paris a 
 den of cutthroats and thieves, love is lechery, and re- 
 ligion death. This fact alone quashes all minor ex- 
 cellence. No work is permissible that flies in the 
 
184 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 teeth of the established order of the universe. It is 
 the business of the artist, above all else, to preserve 
 the balance of things. Creation is not by one ele- 
 ment alone. Fire alone consumes; earth, air, water, 
 are also necessary. 
 
 In struggling through the blistering, arid wastes of 
 Hysteria that abound in this novel, one remembers 
 with profound emotion the silence of Ajax in Hell, 
 and sees with Longinius that it was more impressive 
 than anything he could have said ; or the soldier of 
 Waterloo, who, when asked to surrender in that crater 
 of fire and death, could find but one word in which 
 to express his scorn and defiance and that a word of 
 filth, not permissible in print. (Is there any doubt 
 about how the same spirit would greet Hugo's grand 
 burst over the circumstance ?) 
 
 The action of the story of " Notre Dame " perhaps 
 culminates when the monster Quasimodo defends the 
 church of Notre Dame against the midnight assault 
 of about six thousand Truancls — the nocturnal hu- 
 man vermin of Paris during the Middle Ages — com- 
 posed of thieves, harlots, murderers, beggars, gypsies, 
 argots — a reeking, fetid, scrofulous, chaotic mass, that 
 smelled to heaven. As they surge about the building 
 in the darkness, the Hunchback hurls upon them from 
 a height of nearly two hundred feet, first a huge 
 beam, that spatters them in fragments about ; then 
 bricks, stones, rocks, that bury themselves in their 
 heads. Finally, not being able to make an impres- 
 sion on this nightmare of a mob, he kindles a huge 
 
A MALFORMED GIANT. 185 
 
 fire in one of the towers and piles upon it sheets of 
 lead, and presently two huge gutters vomit upon the 
 assailants a shower of molten metal which is repre- 
 sented as burning them to cinders. In any less vivid 
 imagination than Victor Hugo's, molten lead, after 
 running some distance over stone gutters and falling 
 one hundred and eighty feet through a cool atmos- 
 phere would have resulted in a shower of bullets — to 
 say nothing of its burning people to cinders. 
 
 But this is no doubt an instance in which he exer- 
 cises the prerogative of his " imperial fantasy." 
 
 In the same assault a mere youth heavily laden 
 with armor is represented as bringing with celerity a 
 ladder which must have been seventy feet long ; and 
 not only carrying it but placing it in position. Quite 
 a feat for a mere youth, what indeed ten men could 
 not do (allowing that a single ladder of that length 
 was ever made, which of course is absurd) but a mere 
 straw to the imperial fantasy of Victor Hugo. It 
 was the same imperial fantasy no doubt that kept the 
 naked feet, to say nothing of his half -clad body, of the 
 boy Gwynplaine from freezing in that four or six 
 hours' ramble, over the Portland hills through the 
 snow and bitter cold, now on the ice, now in the 
 water, now floundering through drifts, his rags stiff, 
 the icy edges chafing the flesh till the blood comes (?). 
 The same fantastic sovereignty causes the cyclone in 
 the Northern hemisphere to revolve in the direction 
 of the hands of a watch, and sends an unincumbered 
 sailor, when he leaps from a sinking wreck to swim 
 
186 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 to a distant rock, several fathoms under water and sets 
 him groping around on the submarine ledges before 
 he rises to the surface in order that the apochryphal 
 devil-fish may get hold of him. 
 
 But to continue the review of " Notre Dame." In 
 the concluding chapters of this novel the author in- 
 dulges to the utmost his love for the monstrous and 
 abnormal exhibitions of the human passions, and there 
 is no escape ; not even does the stern visage of Justice 
 loom above the scene, or the grander visage of Destiny. 
 
 In the distance a man ascends a ladder to a per- 
 manent gibbet, carrying a female figure on his shoul- 
 der — a young girl clad in white. The noose is ad- 
 justed, the ladder kicked away, and the delicate form 
 is launched into the air with the figure of a man 
 squatted upon its shoulders. 
 
 At this moment, in the foreground, on one of the 
 towers of Notre Dame, a priest who is contemplating 
 the scene with outstretched neck, starting eyeballs, and 
 livid visage, being driven to the verge of insanity by 
 sheer brutal lust for the girl, but thwarted in his de- 
 signs by her horror of himself and her love for an- 
 other, is suddenly set upon from behind by the en- 
 raged Hunchback, who, it seems, is also in love with 
 the girl, and precipitated over the balustrade into the 
 abyss. But the gutter arrests his fall and he clings 
 to it with desperate grip. 
 
 Here Hugo dallies with him and gloats over him. 
 He is suspended two hundred feet above the pave- 
 ment and cannot long maintain his hold. It is a 
 
A MALFORMED GIANT. 187 
 
 startling situation, and Hugo loves startling situations. 
 He contemplates him panting, perspiring, his nails 
 bleeding against the stones, his knees grazing the 
 wall, the lead pipe gradually yielding, his strength 
 failing, his hands slipping, his vitals freezing, till the 
 inevitable moment comes, and he falls through the 
 void to the earth beneath. We repeat that there would 
 be no objection to all this if it contained food for the 
 imagination, if it opened any ideal depths in the mind 
 or was relieved by any background ; but excepting 
 that the verbal workmanship is vastly better, it ranks 
 no higher as art than the blood-and-thunder stories 
 of the weekly novelette. 
 
 If a man is drawn into the maelstrom, or falls into 
 a volcano, or is lost at sea, or goes down in battle, or 
 meets suffering and death in a heroic manner, there is 
 room for the imagination to work, but art would have 
 little interest in a man being sawed in two, or roasted 
 alive, or crushed under a weight, or dangling at the 
 end of a rope. If the " Prometheus " of iEschylus 
 had nothing to recommend it but the aspect of physi- 
 cal torture which it depicts, however vividly painted 
 it would at once lose its value as a work of art. 
 
 There is therefore this final remark to be made 
 upon the element of the hideous and the monstrous 
 that figures so largely in Victor Hugo's novels, and 
 that is this : It has little or no artistic value, because 
 it has little or no interest to the imagination. When 
 employed by the old artists and poets, these things 
 are so charged and surcharged with meaning and 
 
188 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 power that the literal import is lost sight of and the 
 mind breathes a higher atmosphere. 
 
 Hugo's novels are marked by a feverish preternat- 
 ural intensity, not so much good human soul-shaking 
 emotion, as a sort of psychological typhoon and hurri- 
 cane that means death to every green thing and to 
 every sane impulse. I am aware that a microscopi- 
 cal examination of his works reveals many fine pas- 
 sages, green spots, idylic touches here and there (but 
 even in these I can smell the sulphur), but to say they 
 are characteristic of him is as absurd as it would be 
 to say that humor is characteristic of him because he 
 made a " machine that grins." 
 
 The Bishop in " Les Miserables " is perhaps Hugo's 
 most serious attempt to paint (for he does not cre- 
 ate) a lofty character. And what is the Bishop's at- 
 titude toward the All-mother ? " The universe ap- 
 peared to him like a vast disease," for aught I know 
 as if " smitten with hydrophobia." His tenderness 
 toward nature is so excessive as to become silliness. 
 " One day he received a sprain rather than crush an 
 ant." " One morning he was in his garden and thought 
 himself alone ; but his sister was walking behind him ; 
 all at once he stopped and looked at something on the 
 ground ; it was a large, black, hairy, horrible spider. 
 His sister heard him say : ' Poor thing ; it is not his 
 fault.' " A galley slave whom he had hospitably fed 
 and lodged in his house makes off in the night with his 
 silver. In the morning he is walking in the garden 
 again, when his " women folks " make the discovery, 
 
A MALFORMED GIANT. 189 
 
 and raise the alarm, but so far from sharing in the 
 surprise, or the indignation which was quite proper 
 on the occasion, he thinks only of a little flower that 
 the man had crushed in passing out, and bends over it 
 with a look of sadness and pity. There may be per- 
 sons to whom this sort of thing is impressive and 
 grand, but for my part I cannot see how it can ever 
 be possible to one having a genuine feeling or ap- 
 preciation of nature. 
 
 The mighty poet does not recreate nature in any 
 radical sense. He redistributes, re-moulds, re-mar- 
 ries, when occasion requires, always bearing in mind 
 the almighty edict, " Thus far shalt thou go and no 
 farther," and it is the final test and glory of his work 
 that though vast and imposing it falls easily within 
 the scope of the natural universal. 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 
 
 THE BIOLOGIST'S TREE OF LIFE. 
 
 One of the most helpful and satisfactory concep- 
 tions of modern biological science is the conception of 
 the animal life of the globe, under the image of a 
 tree — a tree which has its root and trunk in the 
 remote past and its outermost twigs and branches in 
 our own day ; and, moreover, a tree which has at- 
 tained its growth, which has reached its maturity, and 
 whose history in the far future must be marked by a 
 slow decline. This is the Tree of Life of the evolu- 
 tionist, and affords the key to the natural classifica- 
 tion of the animal kingdom as taught by Darwin and 
 others, and as opposed to the artificial or arbitrary 
 classification of Cuvier and the older naturalists. 
 This tree first emerges into view in the Silurian age, 
 probably not less than fifty million years ago, and 
 emerges as a pretty well-developed tree, that is, as 
 having many branches. Its trunk is beyond our ken, 
 hidden in still more remote ages. No fossils have 
 been found in rocks older than the Silurian. But if 
 evolution is true, it is pretty certain that there must 
 have been life on the globe long before that date. 
 Our tree must have started as a single shoot, but 
 this single stem, our first parent form, has not been 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 191 
 
 found. The biologist is convinced that the very first 
 forms of life were soft and very perishable, and that 
 therefore no record of them could be preserved in 
 the sedimentary rocks. But the later forms, which 
 led up to and were the parents of those which emerge 
 into view in the Silurian age, must have been capable 
 of fossilization. A record of them doubtless exists 
 somewhere, and may, in time, be brought to light. 
 Darwin thought the record was probably in the rocks 
 beneath the sea, as it is certain the sea and the land 
 have changed places. Or the record may be in the 
 Arctic regions, where some naturalists believe life 
 first began, seeing this part of the earth's surface 
 would be the first to cool and become of a tempera- 
 ture that admitted of animal life. In any case but 
 a mere fraction of the record — hardly more than a 
 few pages out of many large volumes — is accessible 
 and has been subject to scrutiny. The roots and 
 trunk of our tree must be assumed to have existed. 
 We assume that language began in rude sounds and 
 grunts and signs, as we see it begin in a child, though 
 of course no record of them could be preserved, and 
 that it has developed from these into the marvelous 
 structure which we now behold, branching and refin- 
 ing and specializing almost endlessly. 
 
 In the Silurian age, then, we strike the top of our 
 tree of life. All the great branches are represented, 
 all the important classes of animals have made their 
 appearance, even the vertebrates being represented in 
 the upper Silurian by fishes. Of this tree the sub- 
 
192 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 kingdoms represent the great branches, the classes 
 represent their division, the orders, theirs, the family, 
 theirs, and so up to species which represent the ter- 
 minal twigs. The abundance of specialized forms in 
 the Silurian age, that is, the many smaller branches 
 that appear, and the absence of two generalized 
 forms, or main branches, that must have preceded 
 them, is one of the main obstacles in the way of the 
 evolution theory, a theory of generic descent; but 
 those parent branches, as I have said, are hidden, the 
 record of them has not been found, probably never 
 can be found. 
 
 It is very certain, not only from direct evidence, 
 but in the light of analogy, that the forces of nature, 
 vital and other, were much more active in the early 
 geologic ages than they are now. It was the youth 
 of the world ; why should they not be more active ? 
 Why should there not have been more fluids and 
 gases and more rapid growths and changes ? There 
 was more heat, doubtless more rapid evaporation, 
 and more copious precipitation. Our rivers and 
 lakes and water-courses are but a fraction of what 
 they were in comjjaratively recent geologic times. 
 This tree of life grew rapidly in those warm, moist 
 May and June days of the Silurian and Devonian 
 epochs. New species appeared with comparative 
 suddenness ; the life of the globe was full and riot- 
 ous. Enormous forms began to appear — flying 
 dragons and terrible and grotesque monsters of the 
 deep. There was a plethora of jjower, an excess of 
 mere animal life. 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 193 
 
 But as the ages rolled on Nature began to sober 
 down : her pace became slower and more deliberate, 
 and she began to rise on stepping-stones of her dead 
 self. The higher forms of life began to appear. 
 Birds emerged, mammals came forth. In the Tertiary- 
 age the brains of mammals, according to Marsh, be- 
 gan to increase in size ; henceforth the struggle was 
 not to be one of physical strength merely, but intelli- 
 gence began to play a part. The maturity of the 
 tree of life was approaching. 
 
 That the geological changes were more rapid in 
 the earlier history of the earth than they are now, 
 seems to me to admit of no doubt. The forces of 
 the globe were more restless and titanic. They had 
 not yet attained to the equilibrium and the repose 
 that we now see. The crust of the earth was thin- 
 ner ; the internal fires were nearer ; the solid ground 
 was less solid than that we now walk upon. Volca- 
 noes were more active ; earthquakes more frequent. 
 The crust of the earth still throbs and palpitates 
 under the influence of lunar and solar attraction and 
 of unequal atmospheric pressure. Think, then, how 
 much more it must have done so, say in the Silurian 
 age. The cataclysmal theories of the earlier geolo- 
 gists have been much modified by Lyell and his 
 school, but so far as they imply greater volume and 
 activity in past ages of the physical forces that have 
 shaped the earth, they are doubtless true. In the 
 Tertiary age these forces became much more gentle 
 and uniform in their workings. As changes in the 
 
194 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 earth's surface would be the most powerful factor in 
 bringing about changes of species, we see why new 
 species seem to have made their appearance so sud- 
 denly in early geologic times. 
 
 There can be but little doubt that the earth has at 
 last reached the maturity of her powers. She is like 
 a ripe apple upon the bough. Henceforth its excel- 
 lence must slowly decline. The game of life upon 
 this planet has been essentially played. That is, no 
 new developments remain, no new species on any 
 extended scale, as in the past, are to appear. The 
 bird has been evolved from the reptile, but the bird 
 is doubtless the top of that branch of our tree of life ; 
 no new form is to be evolved from the bird. "We 
 know pretty well the descent of the horse ; he has 
 arisen through various lower and lesser forms, but 
 probably nothing is to come after the horse. The 
 same with other forms. No higher form is to suc- 
 ceed man, as he has succeeded the lower. Monkeys 
 and ourangs are left behind ; they will not give birth 
 to a being superior to themselves ; they are twigs 
 that have been outstripped by other and more fa- 
 vored branches. Man is the last of the series. Su- 
 perior races may arise, but not a new and superior 
 type of being. And it is very doubtful about the 
 superior race ; there are those who believe the race 
 culminated in the Greeks over two thousand years 
 ago. After the earth has been thoroughly subdued 
 and possessed by the dominant races, as it will be in 
 a few hundred years more, this topmost branch of 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 195 
 
 the tree will probably begin to fall in vitality and 
 fruitfulness. But just what form the decline will 
 take can be only a matter of speculation. We only 
 know that all things have their periods, and are safe 
 in inferring that the life of the globe, as a whole, 
 will have its period, just as surely as any tree in the 
 forest or any plant in the fields has its period. Why 
 should it not be so ? We know any and every single 
 form perishes ; why should not the earth itself grow 
 old and die ? The life of a man is typical of the life 
 of the earth. The stages of an orb's life, says the 
 astronomers, are stages of cooling. So are the 
 stages of man's life. It is a process of cooling and 
 hardening from youth to age. Think of the gaseous, 
 nebulous youth out of which the man is gathered and 
 consolidated ! Fiery, stormy, vapory, at first, then 
 cold, hard, sterile at last. 
 
 DR. JOHNSON AND CARLYLE. 
 
 Glancing at a remark in the London " Times," 
 the author of " Obiter Dicta," in his late essay on Dr. 
 Johnson, asks : "Is it as plain as the ' old hill of 
 Howth,' that Carlyle was a greater man than John- 
 son ? Is not the precise contrary the truth ? " There 
 are very many people, I imagine, who would be slow 
 to admit that the " precise contrary " were the truth ; 
 yet it is a question not to be decided off-hand. Both 
 were great men, unquestionably, apart from their 
 
196 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 mere literary and scholastic accomplishments. Each 
 made a profound impression by virtue of his force of 
 character, his weight and authority as a person. As 
 to which was the greater moral, or literary, or politi- 
 cal force, as embodied in his works, it seems to me 
 there can be but one opinion. But the quantity of 
 manhood each gave evidence of in his life, and the 
 quantity of genius he gave evidence of in his books 
 — these of course are two different questions. As 
 regards the genius, Carlyle ranks far above Johnson. 
 
 Indeed, the intellectual equipment of the two men, 
 and the value of their contributions to literature, ad- 
 mit of hardly any comparison. But the question still 
 is of the man, not of the writer. Which was the 
 greater and more helpful force as a human being ? 
 which bore himself the more nobly and victoriously 
 through life ? — in short, which was the greater 
 man ? Mr. Birrell seems to base his conviction that 
 Johnson was the greater, upon the latter's simple res- 
 ignation and acceptance of the ills of life : — 
 
 " Johnson was a man of strong passions, unbending 
 spirit, violent temper, as poor as a church-mouse and 
 as proud as the proudest of church dignitaries ; en- 
 dowed with the strength of a coal-heaver, the courage 
 of a lion, and the tongue of Dean Swift, he could 
 knock down booksellers and silence bargees ; he was 
 melancholy almost to madness, ' radically wretched,' 
 indolent, blinded, diseased. Poverty was long his 
 portion ; not that genteel poverty that is sometimes be- 
 hind-hand with its rent, but that hungry poverty that 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 197 
 
 does not know where to look for its dinner. Against 
 all these things had this ' old struggler ' to contend ; 
 over all these things did this ' old struggler ' prevail. 
 Over even the fear of death, the giving up of this 
 'intellectual being,' which had haunted his gloomy 
 fancy for a lifetime, he seems finally to have prevailed, 
 and to have met his end as a brave man should." 
 
 This is excellently said, and is true enough. This 
 kind of victory is one test of character certainly, but 
 if it is the highest test by which to try a man's claims 
 to greatness, then is the world full of silent heroes, 
 greater than either Johnson or Carlyle. How many 
 men and women receive an avalanche of the ills of 
 life upon their heads and shoulders, and die and make 
 no sign ! How many nameless " old stragglers " there 
 are in nearly every community, who fight a losing 
 battle with fortune all their lives, and utter no com- 
 plaint ! And it is not always, or commonly, because 
 they are made of pure adamant : it is oftener because 
 they are stolid and insensible. If stolidity and insen- 
 sibility are terms too strong to apply to Johnson, yet 
 we must admit there was a kind of dullness and slug- 
 gishness about him, which he in vain spurred with 
 good resolutions, and which shielded him from the 
 acute suffering that Carlyle's almost preternatural ac- 
 tivity and sensibility laid him open to. If a man is 
 born constitutionally unhappy, as both these men 
 seem to have been, his suffering will be in propor- 
 tion to the strength and vividness of the imagination ; 
 and Carlyle's imagination, compared with Johnson's, 
 
198 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 was like an Arctic night with its streaming and flash- 
 ing auroras, compared with the midnight skies of 
 Fleet Street 
 
 Carlyle fought a Giant Despair all his life, and 
 never for a moment gave an inch of ground. In- 
 deed, so far as the upshot of his life was concerned, 
 the amount of work actually done, and its value as a 
 tonic and a spur to noble endeavor of all kinds, it is 
 as if he had fought no Giant Despair at all, but had 
 been animated and sustained by the most bright and 
 buoyant hopes. The reason of this probably is that 
 his gloom and despair did not end in mere negation. 
 If he fulminated an Everlasting No, he also fulmi- 
 nated an Everlasting Yes. Johnson fought many 
 lesser devils, such as moroseness, laziness, irritability 
 of temper, gloominess, and tendency to superstition, 
 etc. " My reigning sin," he says in his journal, " to 
 which perhaps many others are appendant, is a waste 
 of time and general sluggishness to which I was al- 
 ways inclined and, in part of my life, have been 
 almost compelled by morbid melancholy and disturb- 
 ance of mind. Melancholy has had in me its par- 
 oxysms and remissions, but I have not improved the 
 intervals, nor sufficiently resisted my natural inclina- 
 tion, or sickly habits." He was always resolving to 
 rise at 8 o'clock in the morning, but does not seem 
 ever to have been able to keep the resolution. What 
 takes one in Johnson is his serious self-reproof and 
 the perfect good faith in which he accuses himself 
 of idleness, forbidden thoughts, a liking for strong 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 199 
 
 liquors, a shirking of church-going, and kindred sins. 
 His sense of duty, and in particular of his duty, 
 never slumbered for a moment. On the 21st of 
 April, 1764, he got up at three in the morning to 
 accuse himself thus : " My indolence since my last 
 reception of the Sacrament has sunk into grosser 
 sluggishness, and my dissipation spread into wider 
 negligence. My thoughts have been clouded with 
 sensuality, and, except that from the beginning of 
 this year I have in some measure forborne excess of 
 strong drink, my appetites have predominated over 
 my reason. A kind of strange oblivion has over- 
 spread me, so that I know not what has become of 
 the last year," etc. This earthiness, these frailties of 
 Johnson through which his pious hopes and resolu- 
 tions shine so clearly, is a touch of nature which 
 makes him kin to all the world. Carlyle does not 
 touch us in just this way, because his ills are more 
 imaginary and his language more exaggerated. 
 "What takes one in Carlyle is the courage and help- 
 fulness that underlie his despair, the humility that 
 underlies his arrogance, the love and sympathy that 
 lie back of his violent objurgations and in a way 
 prompt them. He was a man of sorrow, and felt the 
 " burthen and the mystery of all this unintelligible 
 world " as Johnson never felt it, nor ever could feel 
 it. 
 
 Again, Johnson owed much more to his times than 
 Carlyle did to his. Both his religion and his politics 
 were the religion and the politics of his age and coun- 
 
200 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 try, and they were like ready-made highways along 
 which his mind and soul traveled. In comparison 
 Carlyle was adrift in the wilderness, where the way 
 and the bridges had to be built by himself. What 
 gulfs he encountered, what quagmires he floundered 
 through ! Johnson " stood by the old formulas," says 
 Carlyle ; and adds significantly, " the happier was it 
 for him that he could so stand." What would the 
 great hulking hypochondriac have done in such a 
 world as Cai'lyle traversed, the ground cut clean from 
 under him by German thought and modern science, 
 awful depths opening where before was solid earth ? 
 
 Johnson has survived his works. Mr. Birrell de- 
 clares very emphatically that they are still alive, and 
 are likely to remain so ; but the specimens he gives, 
 whether of prose or of verse, are not at all reassur- 
 ing. But our interest in the man seems likely to be 
 perennial. This is probably because he was a much 
 greater and more picturesque force personally than 
 he was intellectually. His power was of a kind that 
 could not fully be brought to bear in literature, that 
 is to say, he is greater as a talker in personal encoun- 
 ter than in his writings, or in the depth of his thought. 
 He said that " no man but a blockhead ever wrote 
 except for monejr." But the man who writes for 
 money alone, it is pretty sure, will not make a deep 
 and lasting impression with his pen. The saying is 
 like another one of his — namely, that " a man seldom 
 thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does 
 of his dinner." When Johnson wrote his famous let- 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 201 
 
 ter to Lord Chesterfield, it is safe to say he did not 
 write for money, and that he was thinking of some- 
 thing more earnestly than he was wont to think of 
 his dinner ; and it is the one piece of his prose that 
 is likely to live. But these remarks of his, and oth- 
 ers like them — this, for instance, that " great abili- 
 ties are not requisite for an historian ; for in histori- 
 cal composition all the greatest powers of the human 
 mind are quiescent " — such remarks, I say, of 
 themselves show his limitations in the direction of 
 literature. Johnson lives through Boswell ; without 
 Boswell his fame would hardly have reached our 
 time, except as a faint tradition. In the pages of 
 his biographer the actual man lives for us ; we can 
 almost see his great chest heave, and hear the terri- 
 ble " Sir ! " with which he held his interlocutor at 
 good striking distance. If some Boswell had done 
 the same thing for Coleridge, is it probable that he 
 would have lived in the same way ? I think not. 
 As a personality Coleridge was much less striking 
 and impressive than Johnson. As an intellectual 
 force he is, of course, much more so. But it is 
 hardly possible to feel a deep interest in or admira- 
 tion for him on personal grounds alone. 
 
 Is it possible to feel as deep an interest in and ad- 
 miration for Carlyle, apart from his works, as we do 
 in Johnson ? Different temperaments will answer 
 differently. Some people have a natural antipathy to 
 Carlyle, based largely, no doubt, on misconception. 
 But misconception is much easier in his case than in 
 
202 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Johnson's. He was more of an exceptional being. 
 He was pitched in too high a- key for the ordinary- 
 uses of life. He had fewer infirmities than Johnson, 
 moral and physical. Johnson was a typical English- 
 man, and appeals to us by all the virtues and faults 
 of his race. Carlyle stands more isolated, and held 
 himself much more aloof from the world. On this 
 account, among others, he touches us less nearly. 
 Women are almost invariably repelled by Carlyle ; 
 they instinctively flee from a certain hard, barren 
 masculinity in him. If not a woman-hater, he cer- 
 tainly had little in his composition that responded to 
 the charms and allurements peculiar to the opposite 
 sex ; while Johnson's idea of happiness was to spend 
 his life driving briskly in a postchaise with a pretty 
 and intelligent woman. Both men had the same 
 proud independence, the same fearless gift of speech, 
 the same deference to authority or love of obedience. 
 In personal presence, the Englishman had the advan- 
 tage of mere physical size, breadth, and a stern for- 
 bidding countenance. Johnson's power was undoubt- 
 edly more of the chest, the stomach, and less of the 
 soul, than Carlyle's, and was more of a blind, grop- 
 ing, unconscious force ; but of the two men he seems 
 the more innocent and child-like. His journal is far 
 less interesting and valuable as literature than Car- 
 lyle's, but in some way his fervent prayers, his re- 
 peated resolutions to do better, to conquer his laziness, 
 " to consult the resolve on Tetty's coffin," " to go to 
 church," "to drink less strong liquors," " to get up 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 203 
 
 at 8 o'clock," "to reject or expel sensual images and 
 idle thoughts," " to read the Scriptures," etc., touch 
 one more nearly than Carlyle's exaggerated self-re- 
 proaches and loud bemoanings of the miseries of life. 
 Yet the fact remains that Johnson lived and moved 
 and thought on a lower plane than Carlyle, and that 
 he cherished less lofty ideals of life and of duty. It 
 is probably true also tbat his presence and his conver- 
 sation made less impression on his contemporaries 
 than did Carlyle's ; but, through the wonderful Bos- 
 well, a livelier, more lovable, and more real image of 
 him is likely to go down to succeeding ages than of 
 the great Scotchman through his biographer. 
 
 LITTLE SPOONS vs. BIG SPOONS. 
 
 When I was in England, whether in lodgings or in 
 a hotel, one of the hardest things to get at table was 
 a teaspoon to eat my dessert or sweetmeats with. 
 They always brought a dessert spoon, which usually 
 seems large and awkward to the American mouth. 
 Neither were there any small dishes, such as we have 
 at home. They brought you jam, or preserves, or 
 strawberries, on a plate as large as a dinner plate. 
 This fact would not be worth mentioning, were it not 
 characteristic of much one sees there. In England, 
 nearly all the arts and appliances of life show, to 
 American eyes, a superabundance of material. There 
 is more timber and iron in the wagon, more bulk in 
 the horse that draws the wagon, and more leather in 
 
204 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 the harness the horse wears. Yes, and more hair in 
 the horse's coat. Our domestic animals, our tools, 
 our vehicles, our architecture, and our women, look 
 trim and slim compared with the English. There is 
 probably material enough in an English van to make 
 two of our farm wagons. It is a sigbt to behold. It 
 looks like a pontoon boat mounted upon huge artil- 
 lery wheels. It is usually drawn by three horses, 
 tandem, with a boy walking by their side or riding 
 the foremost. It would be quite useless in this coun- 
 try, as on our poorly made dirt roads it would be a 
 load in itself. The running works of the English 
 dog-cart, a pleasure vehicle, would be considered 
 nearly heavy enough for a light farm cart in this 
 country. Easy roads and heavy vehicles are the rule 
 in England, and poor roads and light vehicles with 
 us. John Bull would hardly trust himself in our 
 cobweb " buggies ; " certainly not upon our outlandish 
 roads. He does not know the virtues of hickory, a 
 tree native to this country. Hickory gives us the 
 most strength with the least bulk, and this is no 
 doubt one reason of the lightness and slenderness of 
 our tools and vehicles. Compare an English ax with 
 an American ax ; how crude and awkward the for- 
 mer looks beside the latter ; how shapely our tool is ! 
 Our tools suggest a more deft and supple and a 
 lighter race. The tendency in us to pare down and 
 cut away every superfluous ounce is very marked. 
 We are great whittlers. Have we not whittled away at 
 the hulls of our ships until we have made the swiftest 
 sailing vessels in the world ? 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 205 
 
 The English, in most things, seem to like the look 
 of mass and strength ; we like best the look of light- 
 ness and speed. Even the type in which their books, 
 newspapers, and magazines are printed, is larger than 
 the type in which ours are printed. Indeed, it would 
 seem as if there was not room enough in our great 
 country for generous-sized type. English houses and 
 buildings all have a look of greater solidity than 
 ours ; their walls are thicker, their tiles heavier. 
 "What would they think of our balloon frames over 
 there ? What would our grandfathers think of them ? 
 Dickens said the houses in this country looked as if 
 made of pasteboard. 
 
 This lightness and airiness is becoming a fixed 
 national trait, and is in keeping with the general ten- 
 dency of all natural forms in this country. Nearly 
 all organic growths here show greater refinement of 
 form than in the British Isles. Our wild flowers are 
 more graceful and delicate. Our climbing plants, the 
 foliage of our trees, the trees themselves, our grasses 
 and wild weedy growths, are all more slender and 
 fluent in form than the corresponding English species. 
 English trees, English groves, have a wonderful ex- 
 pression of solidity and repose. The leaves are larger 
 and stiffer, and adjust themselves with more ease to 
 the fainter light. Even the British bumble-bee is a 
 coarser and more hairy creature than ours, and the 
 fox and the squirrel, as well as the domestic animals, 
 are less sleek and trim than with us. Our bright, 
 sharp climate has its effect upon all things, but it is 
 
206 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 only up to a certain point that this effect is matter 
 for congratulation. All European forms are refined 
 here, but presently there is danger that they may 
 become attenuated and weakened. The children of 
 European parents born here — Irish, English, Ger- 
 man — are, as a rule, much more shapely and clear 
 cut in feature than when born in the same rank of 
 life in Europe. But they are less robust and virile, 
 especially the girls ; while, probably, the next genera- 
 tion will be still less so. Here comes in the set-back. 
 What appears to be the most serious danger now 
 threatening the American race is just this tendency to 
 ■ over-refinement, and the consequent failure in repro- 
 duction. 
 
 This tendency has set its stamp upon our mentality, 
 so that our literary and scientific works, and all the 
 varied outcomes of our mental life, are characterized 
 by clearness, quickness, aptness, rather than by force, 
 or depth, or real mastery. Our literature, as such, 
 has less bulk than the English or German, less body 
 and more grace and refinement. Compare Emerson 
 with Carlyle, or Fiske with Spencer, or Hawthorne 
 with Scott, or Prescott with Macaulay, or Howells 
 with George Eliot. Up to a certain point this deft- 
 ness and clearness of our authors gives them the 
 advantage ; but when great tasks are to be under- 
 taken, our lightness and brightness are less telling. 
 Our second considerable crop of authors, born (say) 
 since 1825, has less force, less body, less breadth, than 
 our first great crop, which included Cooper, Bryant, 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 207 
 
 Irving, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, etc. There 
 are things in Stedman that have the old hreadth and 
 generosity, but there are not enough of them. It 
 seems to me that we are refining now at the expense 
 of strength. Our poets and critics, like our " bug- 
 gies " and pleasure vehicles, lack timber, lack mass. 
 Our popular novelists have point but lack body. 
 The workmanship is admirable, but the material upon 
 which it is expended is abominable. What a boon 
 to them would be a little of Scott's, or Dickens's power 
 and heartiness, or of Turgenef's grasp of the fun- 
 damental human qualities ! The men and women 
 turned out are by no means the equal of those one 
 meets daily among all ranks of the people, except 
 perhaps in the single qualities of wit and " smart- 
 ness." The rank, primary, inarticulate human qual- 
 ities are suffering decay among us ; there can be 
 little doubt of that. Probably they are suffering — 
 or are threatened with — the same decay in Europe. 
 A cheap press, much and hasty reading, rapid com- 
 munication, tend to give us surface dominion, with- 
 out corresponding depth. 
 
 Yet, as contrasted with the American, the English- 
 man reaps great advantage in his greater stolidity, 
 inertia, mass, depth of character, because these things 
 make a solid ground to build upon, and when faculty 
 and insight are added, they give that weight and 
 force which have made the English race what it is. 
 There is one notable exception in our later literature 
 to this American tendency to over-refinement of form, 
 
208 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 which I am not likely to forget ; and that is fur- 
 nished hy Walt Whitman. Mass and strength, and 
 all the primary qualities of both body and mind, are 
 fully attended to by him. Probably this, more than 
 anything else, is the reason why his poems are so dis- 
 tasteful to the majority of his countrymen, and why 
 his reception abroad has been more cordial than at 
 home. It is, at any rate, the ground upon which his 
 appearance in our literature has always been regarded 
 by myself as so suggestive and so welcome. 
 
 THE ETHICS OF WAR. 
 
 Why it is that we look so much more compla- 
 cently upon war, upon a fight between two nations, 
 than we do upon a fight between two individuals. If 
 my neighbor and I have a difficulty or a misunder- 
 standing and proceed to settle it with clubs, or pis- 
 tols, or with our fists, in the opinion of all decent 
 people we behave shamefully, wickedly, and reduce 
 ourselves to a level with the brutes. But when na- 
 tions settle their difficulties by an appeal to arms, and 
 thousands upon thousands of lives are sacrificed, and 
 millions upon millions of treasure squandered, we take 
 quite a different view of the matter. We may say 
 " What a pity ! " or " How unwise ! " but we do not 
 experience the same feeling of contempt and disgust 
 that we do in the case of personal encounters brought 
 about by like provocation. If two men of rival trades 
 or interests come into collision, and the victor robs 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 209 
 
 the other of his purse to indemnify himself for his 
 scratches and bruises and torn clothes, he would at 
 once forfeit any sympathy and respect which the just- 
 ness of his cause might have inspired in the specta- 
 tors. Instead of a hero we should look upon him as 
 a robber. Yet Germany beats France in battle and 
 indemnifies herself for her bruises and torn clothes 
 by a large slice of French territory and many mil- 
 lions of French treasure, and we do not feel that she 
 has sacrificed her honor. Does might make right be- 
 tween nations, while the principle will not hold good 
 at all as between individuals ? 
 
 It is certainly true that we do not apply the same 
 standard of morality in the one case that we do in 
 the other, certainly true that we do not look for the 
 same acts of generosity or magnanimity between 
 nations that we expect to be shown between neigh- 
 bors. Nations are invariably selfish, and they are 
 rarely as honest as their individual citizens. Legis- 
 lative bodies have deliberately done things, or re- 
 frained from doing things, that the individual mem- 
 bers composing them would blush to be found guilty 
 of. What meanness, narrowness, selfishness has not 
 England been guilty of ? and yet the individual 
 Englishman is by no means insensible to the obliga- 
 tions of truth and fair play. States and communi- 
 ties in this country have repudiated their honest 
 debts in a way that would have ruined the standing 
 of any business man in them had he resorted to the 
 same trick to defraud his creditors. The American 
 
210 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Congress had for more than fifty years behaved in 
 the most shameful and dishonest manner in refusing 
 to authorize the payment of the French spoliation 
 claims. The precepts of religion have had little or 
 no influence upon the policy of nations. Love your 
 neighbor as yourself ; do to others as you would that 
 others should do unto you ; think no evil, etc. ; what 
 should we think if governments acted upon these 
 principles ? Is the nation, then, a remnant of bar- 
 barism that the moral law should not apply to it ? 
 that religion should not affect it ? 
 
 It is because nations are not as civilized as individ- 
 uals, and, probably, never will be, that war is still 
 possible. The nation is still the tribe, and the tribal 
 instincts for self-preservation are still active ; tribal 
 jealousies and animosities are still easily kindled. 
 Our admiration for war is the same as our admira- 
 tion for the virtues of the stern heroic ages — cour- 
 age, self-sacrifice, contempt of death, personal prow- 
 ess, great leadership. The nation, as such, still rests 
 upon these qualities. Genius and power always take 
 us, and war is a great field for the display of genius 
 and power. 
 
 All readers of " Sartor Resartus " will remember 
 the striking, though not quite just, light in which 
 Carlyle sets war : — 
 
 " What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is 
 the net purpose and upshot of war ? To my own 
 knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil in the 
 British village of Dumdrudge usually some five hun- 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 211 
 
 dred souls. From these, by certain natural enemies 
 of the French, there are successively selected during 
 the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dum- 
 drudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed 
 them ; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed 
 them up to manhood, and even trained them to 
 crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another 
 hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty 
 stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weep- 
 ing and swearing, they are selected ; all dressed in 
 red, and shipped away on the public charges some 
 two thousand miles, or say only to the south of 
 Spain ; and fed there till wanted. And now to that 
 same spot in the south of Spain are thirty similar 
 French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like 
 manner wending ; till at length, after infinite effort, 
 the two parties come into actual juxtaposition ; and 
 thirty stands fronting thirty, each with a gun in his 
 hand. Straightway the word ' Fire ! ' is given ; and 
 they blow the souls out of one another ; and in place 
 of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty 
 dead carcasses which it must bury and anew shed 
 tears for. Had these men any quarrel ? Busy as 
 the devil is, not the smallest ! They lived far 
 enough apart ; were the entirest strangers ; nay, in 
 so wide a universe, there was even, unconsciously, by 
 Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. 
 How then ? Simpleton ! their Governors had fallen 
 out ; and, instead of shooting one another, had the 
 cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot." 
 
212 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 This is very witty, but is it a true picture of mod- 
 ern war ? The Governors of these sixty men had 
 not fallen out ; they had no personal quarrel ; they 
 may even have had a warm feeling of friendship for 
 each other ; it was in their representative capacities 
 that they had a quarrel ; the two nations quarreled 
 through them, and it is fit the two nations should 
 send men to fight it out, and that the Governors 
 themselves should keep out of harm's way. It is the 
 narrow feeling of patriotism, of sectionalism, and 
 race prejudices that make wars possible. The Euro- 
 pean nations are jealous and suspicious of each other, 
 like African tribes. Did they all form one federa- 
 tion, and see that the best interests of one were in 
 the end the best interests of all, war between them 
 would be impossible. 
 
 Our admiration for war, then, is a mixed feeling, in 
 some of its elements laudable, in others questionable. 
 Our love of the heroic overrides our humanitarian 
 feelings ; our attraction for power blunts our sense 
 of right. If a man steals a chicken we hold him in 
 contempt, but if he steals a railroad, we feel quite 
 differently toward him. Anybody can rob a hen- 
 roost, but it requires a genius and capacity to steal 
 a great corporate interest. But there are grounds 
 upon which our admiration for war is laudable. In 
 the first place war is not personal, as a quarrel be- 
 tween individuals is ; the personal feelings of anger, 
 hatred, etc., which brutalize men in personal con- 
 flicts, are not appealed to. It is a school of disci- 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 213 
 
 pllne in all the more manly and heroic virtues. It 
 begets courage, coolness, self-control. It is a great 
 game between great forces, in which the clearest and 
 longest heads win. It fosters patriotism and the 
 feeling of nationality. It is said of certain African 
 tribes that those that are the most warlike as nations 
 are the least so as individuals, and vice versa. Quar- 
 relsome and vindictive men do not make good sol- 
 diers. The most peaceable and high-minded make 
 the best. The more brutal qualities that seek per- 
 sonal encounter are not the qualities that inspire a 
 great soldiery. It is not an encounter between men 
 wherein one seeks in a passion of anger to overthrow 
 the other and aggrandize himself ; it is a collision of 
 the great forces that rule men. Moral force does as 
 much, or more, than physical force. The great pas- 
 sion or inspiration of heroism has play ; men are 
 called on to face great odds ; they are called upon to 
 offer their lives for others. Men who lead a charge 
 and do not flinch or turn back have achieved the 
 noblest victory over themselves, whether they break 
 the enemy or not. The element of destiny comes in. 
 Large bodies of men are subject to laws and condi- 
 tions that touch not the individual. Their wrath is 
 not as the wrath of a man ; their blood-shedding is 
 not as the crime of a person. So many elements 
 enter into a great battle beside the personal element ; 
 all the forces of nature take part. It often happened 
 in the ancient wars that the army was defeated that 
 had the sun in its eyes. Often some false rumor, 
 
214 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 some accidental cry, turns the tide. The morale of 
 an army is everything — faith in their general and 
 in the justness of their cause — there are no rein- 
 forcements like these. Indeed, every impulse that 
 is manly and noble and elevating tells tremendously 
 in war. 
 
 These are perhaps some of the considerations that 
 lead us to judge war between nations by a different 
 standard from the one we apj)ly to individual encoun- 
 ters. It has not the demoralizing element of base 
 anger. There must be something that vastly more 
 than offsets the brutal element in it, else the good 
 could never have flowed from it that we know has 
 flowed. Men who settle their differences by blows 
 and blood are always the worse for it. But nations 
 are often the better for it. It sets new and larger 
 currents going. The nation is above the individual, 
 and the national life is often cemented and strength- 
 ened by the blood of the best citizens. 
 
 SOLITUDE. 
 
 Emerson says, " Now and then a man exquisitely 
 made can live alone, and must ; but coop up most men 
 and you undo them." Solitude tries a man in a way 
 society does not; it throws him upon his own re- 
 sources and if these resources be meagre, if the 
 ground he occupies in and of himself be poor and 
 narrow he will have a sorry time of it. Hence we 
 readily attributed some extra virtue to those persons 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 215 
 
 who voluntarily embrace solitude, who live alone in 
 the country or in the woods, or in the mountains, and 
 find life sweet. We know they cannot live without 
 converse, without society of some sort, and we credit 
 them with the power of invoking it from themselves, 
 or else of finding more companionship with dumb 
 things than ordinary mortals. In any case they give 
 evidence of resources which all do not possess. If 
 not " exquisitely made," hermits generally have a fine 
 streak in them, which preserves them in solitude. If 
 a man wants to get away from himself or from a 
 guilty conscience he does not retreat into the country, 
 he flees to the town. If he is empty, the town will 
 fill him ; if he is idle, the town will amuse him ; if he 
 is vain, here is a field for his vanity ; if he is ambi- 
 tious, here are dupes waiting to be played upon ; but 
 if he is an honest man, here he will have a struggle 
 to preserve his integrity. The rapid growth of cities 
 in our time, has its dark side. Every man who has 
 a demon to flee from, a vice to indulge, an itching for 
 notoriety to allay, money to squander, or a dream of 
 sudden wealth to cherish, flees to the city, and as 
 most persons have one or the other of these things, 
 the city outstrips the country. It is thought that 
 the more a man is civilized, the more his tastes are 
 refined, the more he will crave city life and the more 
 benefit he will get from it. But this may be ques- 
 tioned. It is not as a rule a refined taste that takes 
 men to cities, but a craving for a vain superficial ele- 
 gance, the pride of dress, of equipage, of fashion, of 
 
216 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 fast living, and the shams and follies of the world. 
 The more simple and refined taste loves the serious- 
 ness and sobriety of the country. 
 
 People find country life dull because they are 
 empty and frivolous ; having only themselves on their 
 hands they can extract no entertainment from such a 
 subject. How can a man profitably commune with 
 himself, if the self is small and frivolous and un- 
 worthy ? He will not go to his own garden for fruit 
 if there be only thorns there. 
 
 The finest spirits are not gregarious ; they do not 
 love a crowd. Crows and wolves go in flocks and 
 packs, but the eagle and the lion are solitary in their 
 habits. 
 
 Solitude is not for the young ; the young have no 
 thoughts, or experience, but only unsatisfied desires ; 
 it is for the middle-aged and the old, for a man when 
 he has ripened and wants time to mellow his thoughts. 
 A man who retires into solitude must have a capital 
 of thought and experience to live upon, or his soul 
 will perish of want. This capital must be reinvested 
 in the things about him or it will not suffice. Either 
 as a farmer or as a student and lover of nature, or 
 as both, can he live as it were on the interest of his 
 stored up wisdom. 
 
 " There are things that never show themselves till 
 you are alone," said an old recluse in Mexico to an 
 American traveler, who had claimed the hospitality 
 of his hut, " but if you once make up your mind that 
 there is no harm in them, you find out that they are 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 217 
 
 pretty good company." The old recluse knew what 
 he was saying. Things do show themselves when one 
 is alone ; they emerge on all sides ; they come in 
 troops from all points of the compass, and one is only 
 master of the situation when he can make good com- 
 pany of them. How your misdeeds find you out ; 
 the still small voice of conscience, which you could 
 not hear amid the roar of the town, makes itself heard 
 now; all the past beleaguers you, whether with an 
 army of angels or of demons, depends upon what 
 your past has been. 
 
 The old recluse above referred to, the traveler 
 found living in a hut alone in the mountains. He 
 had lived there many years, with no companionship 
 but his dogs. An Irishman by birth, he had tried 
 many parts of the world, and seen many phases of 
 life, and had at last found his place in the solitude of 
 the Mexican mountains. He had learned the art of 
 dreaming with his eyes open, which is the charm of sol- 
 itude. A man who cannot dream with his eyes open 
 had better not court solitude. Such an old dreamer 
 was found the other day by some railroad surveyors on 
 a mountain in North Carolina. He had lived there in 
 his hut for fifty years. He, too, had for companion 
 a dog. If Thoreau had made friends with a dog to 
 share his bed and board in his retreat by Walden Pond, 
 one would have had more faith in his sincerity. The 
 dog would have been the seal and authentication of 
 his retreat. A man who has no heart for a dog, how 
 can he have a heart for nature herself ? For many rea- 
 
218 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 sons women seldom voluntarily face solitude, but in my 
 boyhood, I knew an aged widow who lived all alone 
 on her little farm, in her little brown house, for many 
 years. She kept five or six cows which she took care 
 of herself winter and summer. She hired her hay gath- 
 ered, her wood cut, and that was all. She was a gentle 
 and pious little woman and her house was as neat as 
 a pin. But think of those long years of solitary life ; 
 the nights, the mornings, the meals, the Sundays, the 
 week days, and no sound but what you made yourself ! 
 How intimately acquainted with one's self one must 
 become in such a life ? If one's self was not a pretty 
 good fellow, how cordially one would learn to dislike 
 his company. One Sunday, as my people were passing 
 the house on their way to church, they saw her wash- 
 ing. " Hello, Aunt Debby ! don't you know it is Sun- 
 day ? " Behold the consternation of the old dame. 
 She had lost her reckoning and had kept Sabbath on 
 Saturday. The last time I passed that way I saw 
 only a little grassy mound where Aunt Debby's 
 house used to stand. 
 
 The poet of solitude is Wordsworth. What a sense 
 of the privacy of fields and woods there is over all 
 his poetry ; what stillness, what lonesome dells, what 
 sounds of distant water-falls ! How fondly he lingers 
 upon the simple objects of nature, upon rural scenes 
 and events, and how perpetually he returns upon his 
 own heart ! His companionship with hills and trees 
 and rocks and shepherds does not relieve, but rather 
 sets off his loneliness. He is encompassed with soli- 
 tude wherever he goes. 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 219 
 
 " In November days, 
 When vapors rolling' down the valley make 
 A lonely scene more lonesome ; among woods 
 At noon ; and mid the calm of summer nights, 
 When by the margin of the trembling lake, 
 Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went 
 In solitude." 
 
 And has the same sweet and fruitful fellowship with 
 nature and with his own heart. In his " A Poet's 
 Epitaph," he has drawn his own portrait : — 
 
 " He is retired as noontide dew, 
 
 Or fountain in a noonday grove ; 
 And you must love him, ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love. 
 
 " The outward shows of sky and earth, 
 Of hill and valley, he has viewed ; 
 And impulses of a deeper birth 
 Have come to him in solitude. 
 
 " In common things that round us lie 
 Some random truths he can impart ; 
 The harvest of a quiet eye 
 
 That broods and sleeps on his own heart." 
 
 "Wordsworth was solitary because of his profound 
 seriousness and because great thoughts or deep emo- 
 tions always create a solitude of their own. What is 
 communing with nature but communing with our- 
 selves ? Nature gives back our thoughts and feelings, 
 as we see our faces reflected in a pool. Wordsworth 
 found himself whenever he walked ; all nature was 
 
220 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Wordsworthian. Another man of equal profundity 
 and sympathy finds nature stamped with his image. 
 
 Wordsworth felt akin to all solitary things ; he is 
 drawn hy every recluse and wanderer ; he loves to 
 contemplate heggars, and dwellers or watchers in se- 
 cluded dells, and to sing the praises of " The Solitary 
 Reaper." A solitary flower, a solitary scene of al- 
 most any kind never failed to move him. What a 
 charm of seclusion in the poem beginning, — 
 
 ' ' I wandered lonely as a cloud 
 That floats on high o'er vales and hills." 
 
 or in this other, — 
 
 " I heard a thousand blended notes 
 While in a grove I sat reclined 
 In that sweet mood where pleasant thoughts 
 Bring sad thoughts to the mind." 
 
 or again in this immortal song, — 
 
 " She dwelt among the untrodden ways, 
 Beside the springs of Dove, 
 A maiden whom there were none to praise 
 And very few to love ; 
 
 " A violet hy a mossy stone 
 Half hidden from the eye ; 
 Fair as a star when only one 
 Is shining in the sky." 
 
 Before Wordsworth solitude had a lover and poet 
 in Abraham Cowley. Through nearly all his essays 
 there runs a desire to escape from the world and to 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 221 
 
 be alone with nature and with his own thoughts. 
 And who has better expressed this desire and the sat- 
 isfaction which its fulfillment brings ? He longed for 
 the country as an exile longs for home. He says to 
 Evelyn that he had never had any other desire so 
 strong and so like to covetousness as the one he had 
 always had, namely, to be master at last of a small 
 house and a large garden with very moderate conven- 
 iences joined to them, and there to dedicate the re- 
 mainder of his life only to the culture of them and 
 to the study of nature. 
 
 He says, " As far as my memory can return back 
 into my past life, before I knew or was capable of 
 guessing what the world, or the glories or business of 
 it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a 
 secret bent of aversion from them." When he was a 
 boy at school he was wont to leave his play-fellows, 
 and walk alone into the fields. How charmingly he 
 praises " Obscurity," and how pungently he sets forth 
 the " Dangers of an honest man in much company." 
 
 He knew well the virtues which solitude necessi- 
 tated and implied. 
 
 " The truth of the matter is, that neither he who is 
 a fop in the world is a fit man to be alone ; nor he 
 who has set his heart much upon the world, though 
 he have never so much understanding ; so that soli- 
 tude can be well fitted and sit right but upon a very 
 few persons. They must have enough knowledge of 
 the world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue 
 to despise all vanity ; if the mind be possessed with 
 
222 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 any lust or passion, a man had better be in a fair 
 than in a wood alone." 
 
 But after all has been said about the solitude of na- 
 ture, that is the best solitude that comes clothed in the 
 human form, your friend, your other self, who leaves 
 you alone, yet cheers you, who peoples your house or 
 your field and wood with tender remembrances, who 
 stands between your yearning heart and the great 
 outward void that you try in vain to warm and fill, 
 who in his own person and spirit clothes for you and 
 endows with tangible form, all the attractions and 
 subtle relations and meanings that draw you to the 
 woods and fields. What the brooks and the trees 
 and the birds said so faintly and vaguely, he speaks 
 with warmth and directness. Indeed your friend 
 compliments and completes your solitude and you ex- 
 perience its charm without its desolation. I cannot 
 therefore agree with Marvell that 
 
 " Two paradises are in one, 
 To live in paradise alone." 
 I should want at least my friend to share it with me. 
 
 AN OPEN DOOR. 
 
 How the revelations of science do break in upon 
 the sort of private and domestic view of the universe 
 which mankind have so long held. To many minds 
 it is like being fairly turned out into the cold, and 
 made to face without shield or shelter the eternities 
 and the infinities of geologic time and sidereal space. 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 223 
 
 We are no longer cozily housed in pretty little an- 
 thropomorphic views of things. The universe is no 
 longer a theatre constructed expressly for the drama 
 of man's life and salvation. The race of man be- 
 comes the mere ephemera of an hour, like insects of 
 a summer day. In an hour of the summer of the 
 earth's geologic history he appears, and in an hour 
 he is gone ; a few hours more and all is gone, and 
 the earth itself is frozen into the everlasting death 
 and night of the winter of the solar system. Science 
 says in just so many words, " there is no reason to 
 deny the final cessation of the sun's activity, and the 
 consequent death of the system." 
 
 Our hearts, our affections, all our peculiarly human 
 attributes draw back from many of the deductions of 
 science. We feel the cosmic chill. We cannot warm 
 or fill the great void. The universe seems orphaned. 
 This is the reason why many people who accept sci- 
 ence with their understanding, still repudiate it in 
 their hearts ; the religious beliefs of their youth still 
 meet a want of their natures. 
 
 It makes a great difference whether we look upon 
 things from the point of view of our personal wants 
 and needs, or from the point of view of reason. It 
 takes mankind, as it takes every individual man, a 
 long and hard struggle to break away from the 
 former standpoint, and to gain the mountain top im- 
 plied in the latter. When I look upon the sun from 
 my place and surroundings he seems to be a mere 
 appurtenance of the earth. How he seems to attend 
 
224 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 us, and to swing around us to give light and warmth. 
 How immense seems the earth ; how small, compara- 
 tively, the sun. See him setting behind the hills or 
 riding up out of the wave. Xenophanes, according 
 to Plutarch, thought the earth had many suns and 
 many moons. An eclipse of the sun, he said, hap- 
 pened when the orb of the sun, falling upon some 
 part of the world which is uninhabited, wandered in 
 a vacuum and became eclipsed. Herodotus also 
 looked upon the sun as something thus special to the 
 earth. On the approach of winter, he says, he grows 
 feeble, and retreats to the south, because he can no 
 longer face the cold and the storms of the north. 
 One is reminded of these things when he sees the 
 good people appropriate God to themselves in a way 
 they are perpetually doing. What a special interest 
 He takes in their lives. Their well being or their ill 
 being seems his main concern. All the early races 
 — the Bible races — do this. How the old Hebrews 
 claimed God. He was the Lord God of Israel and 
 of no one else. How imminent, how personal He is 
 in their Scriptures ; how cruel, how terrible, how 
 jealous — a magnified and heaven-filling despot and 
 king. All the good old pious people still refer the 
 events of their daily lives to Providence. Indeed, 
 the popular conception of God is still essentially 
 Ptolemaic. Our religion is built upon the notion that 
 man and man's life are the objects of his especial 
 care and solicitude. And so they are, but not just 
 in the way we are so fond of thinking. 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 225 
 
 Astronomers figure out for us the infinitesimal frac- 
 tion of the sun's light which our earth intercepts in 
 the infinite void ; in the same way and to the same 
 extent does the providence of God transcend not only 
 the wants of our little lives, but the life of the globe 
 itself. Yet each and all get enough. The sun seems 
 near to us — is near by its power. The light that 
 floods our houses, that shines upon our fields ; how 
 potent it is. What marvelous transformations it 
 works ! If the sun did, indeed, shine for this world 
 alone, and was only just there behind the horizon as 
 it seems, we could not be better looked after. 
 
 To all intents and purposes, God is and exists for 
 each one of us alone. His providence is exemplified 
 in every movement of our lives. Out of the abuse 
 of this feeling or faith comes our arrogating to our- 
 selves special providences, special interference in our 
 petty affairs. But until the sun does shoot some spe- 
 cial ray for you, and the attraction of gravity make 
 some exception in your favor, count not upon God's 
 doing so. Our very life, the beating of our very 
 hearts depend upon the sun, not because the sun is 
 special, but because the sun is universal ; not because 
 it is adjusted and adapted to us, but because we are 
 adjusted and adapted to it. Its bounty and power 
 extend in every direction alike ; it shoots into the 
 void myriads of rays as vivifying as those that make 
 our blood flow. The same with this power we call 
 God. In it we live and move and have our being, 
 but it is not an attendant of our lives ; we are an 
 
226 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 accident of it ; it is imminent to us, because it is im- 
 minent everywhere. Light was not made for the 
 eye, but we have eyes because there is light. The 
 outward world is not accommodated to us, but vice 
 versa. There are no special acts of Providence that 
 have reference to you and to me, to this or to that 
 event of our lives, any more than the North Star was 
 placed there for the guidance of mariners or that 
 anything in nature was made for the use of man. 
 Was water made to quench thirst ? No ; Ave have 
 thirst because there is water. Were the beauties and 
 harmonies of nature made to delight our senses or 
 for our edification ? No ; we have the sense of the 
 beautiful because beauty exists. The beneficent forces 
 of nature brought us forth and sustain us, therefore 
 we love beneficence. The loving kindness and the 
 tender mercies of God, of which we hear so much, 
 are such not because they are directed to us, but be- 
 cause they are directed to all, because the laws of the 
 universe are so, and not otherwise. God answers 
 prayer, not by a particular providence, but by a gen- 
 eral providence. You may light your fire by focus- 
 ing the sun's rays with a burning-glass ; but the rays 
 are no different ; they are the same as those that are 
 shot into space on all sides at all times. Still, Provi- 
 dence is imminent in human affairs, not by special 
 acts, but by universal, eternal, unceasing acts. Does 
 it rain to make things grow and to fill our wells and 
 cisterns ? We are apt to take this view of things, 
 but I noticed that it rained at sea the same as upon 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 227 
 
 the land. Men and nations at war with each other, 
 each seeking to slay or overthrow the other, pray to 
 the same God for victory. And God helps one just 
 as much as He helps the other, not by special provi- 
 dences, hut by general providences, like the rain or 
 snow, or light or gravitation. His laws prevail, and 
 whoso obeys them (his will) best triumphs ; God 
 gives him the victory. I notice that when the chil- 
 dren of Israel are defeated, or suffer any disaster, 
 God is always against them, but when they triumph 
 it is God who gives the victory, and it is all true in a 
 strict scientific sense. 
 
 A clergyman on the wrecked train thanked God 
 most fervently that the train did not go into the 
 river. It was clearly the hand of Providence that 
 saved them, he said. One would have thought that 
 if God had interested himself at all in the incident 
 He would have interested himself to have prevented 
 it. If not we must either suppose He was unable to 
 prevent it, or else unwilling, and either horn of the 
 dilemma is a bad horn. At New Hamburg a few 
 years ago, when a passenger train ran into an oil 
 train and hundreds of people perished, He seems to 
 have taken no hand at all in the matter. Why should 
 He save this crowd and not that ? Or the Ashtabula 
 horror — where was God then ? Hiding from the 
 disaster He might have averted ? Ah ! me, as soon 
 as we make God out to be a person who interferes 
 in the events of this world, into what straits are we 
 forced ? We are forced to conclude either that He 
 
228 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 is not omnipotent or else that He is a monster of 
 cruelty — that He is capricious and changeable, or 
 an ogre that delights in human suffering and blood. 
 I know the well-known text we take shelter under — 
 the ways of Providence are past finding out ; but 
 that is begging the question. You presume to know 
 them and to have found them out when you say He 
 chose to throw the train on the upper side of the 
 track instead of on the lower. No, He is not that 
 kind of a God. The only way He interferes or takes 
 a hand in is through the eternal laws which He has 
 established. In this case the laws of force, the laws 
 of resistance and of matter were the hand of God 
 that threw the train against the bank ; had the forces 
 clashed a little differently the train would have gone 
 into the river. No miracle was performed to pre- 
 vent it. A good engineer could tell you exactly how 
 it happened. And yet the feeling to thank God in 
 such a case is a natural one and a worthy one ; it 
 proceeds from a true religious attitude of the soul. 
 
 The balance, the adjustment, the equipoise which 
 we see in the physical world and which we see in the 
 world of man, too, was not brought about by any 
 guidance or principle of action that bears the slight- 
 est resemblance to human methods and aims ; but is 
 the result of eons upon eons of conflict, of clashing, 
 of waste and destruction, the fittest or the luckiest 
 surviving. What principle of benevolence, or of jus- 
 tice, or of wise foresight has regulated the distribu- 
 tion of the various human races upon the globe, or 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 229 
 
 determined the relative ascendancy of the various 
 nationalities ? Just the principle that determines 
 which of a hungry pack of dogs shall get and keep 
 the bone you toss them. Think of the wrongs, the 
 cruelties, the waste, the slaughters of history. Think 
 of that mad carnival of lust and power which the 
 history of the Roman Empire alone shows. The past 
 of the race is knee-deep with blood, largely innocent 
 blood, and the past of nature is black with convul- 
 sion and struggle. Admitted that good has come out 
 of it all, yet how unlike has been the method to any- 
 thing we know as goodness or benevolence. Good 
 has come out of it because our constitutions are 
 adapted to it. To us it is good ; to differently con- 
 stituted beings it might be bad. The principle or 
 power which underlies all things is like the principle 
 of gravitation, which is exerted equally in all direc- 
 tions, and which spares no crashing or crushing, no 
 floods of water or downfall of mountains, or subsid- 
 ence of continents in bringing about the equilibrium 
 which we behold. Some things sink and some things 
 swim ; but whichever it be, gravity has its way. 
 There is no waste in nature ; waste in nature is but 
 taking out of one pocket and putting into the other. 
 
 Prayer is practically a belief in miracles or special 
 providences — a belief that the world is governed, 
 not by immutable law, but by a being whose favor 
 may be won, whose anger may be appeased, or whose 
 purpose may be changed like that of a great monarch 
 or king. " Most men, in their prayers," says Turge- 
 
230 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 nef, " ask God that two and two may not make 
 four." " The best prayers," says Joubert, " are those 
 which have nothing distinct, and which thus partake 
 of adoration. God listens but to thoughts and senti- 
 ments." " To ask is to receive, when we ask for a 
 genuine good," because the genuine good is in the 
 devout and sincere asking ; but convince your ortho- 
 dox neighbor of this and he will probably cease to 
 pray. Prayer with him is a petition to some power 
 external to himself for some definite, tangible, meas- 
 urable good. He will pray for rain or for sun ; and 
 the faith which prompts him is a stay to him, whether 
 the rain comes or not. The wisest man cannot pray, 
 has no need of prayer, because his whole life is an 
 aspiration toward, and a desire for, the supreme good 
 of the world. 
 
 In every emergency that requires courage and 
 presence of mind the great danger is in the fear of 
 danger. The man who, lost in the woods or on the 
 plains, or going into battle, prays earnestly to God 
 for help and guidance has his wits and senses sharp- 
 ened and his courage strengthened by that act of 
 faith. Because this is so, because mankind have in 
 all ages, the pagan as well as the Christian, been 
 blessed by sincere prayer to their gods, they have 
 come finally to pervert and vulgarize prayer by ask- 
 ing for outward material good. To pray for rain is 
 like praying for a change in the moon or in the tides 
 and seasons. All Christendom prayed for President 
 Garfield, but without avail, because the wound was 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 231 
 
 mortal. Did prayer ever stop the yellow fever be- 
 fore frost came ? Is it ever safe to let your piety 
 offset sanitary observances ? If sewer gas gets into 
 your house will holiness keep the distemper out ? 
 No ; and vaccination is a better safeguard against 
 small-pox than prayer, however fervent and serious. 
 
 What remains, then, for those who cannot pray ; 
 who cannot look upon God as a being apart from 
 themselves, a supreme parent, seated somewhere in 
 the universe, and withholding or bestowing gifts and 
 goods upon man ? This alone, and this is enough : 
 To love virtue, to love truth, to cherish a lofty ideal, 
 to keep the soul open and hospitable to whatsoever 
 things are true, to whatsoever things are beautiful, 
 to whatsoever things are of good report. 
 
 THE TRUE EEALISM. 
 
 "Without at all aiming to impeach the value of 
 what is known in current criticism as realism in art, 
 I think it may safely be said that any imaginative 
 work, or any work aspiring to the rank of literature 
 which does not afford a sure and a speedy escape 
 into the ideal, is of little value. 
 
 The true literary artist is not afraid of the real, 
 the concrete ; indeed, he loves real things as the 
 painter his pigments, but they are only a means to an 
 end, and that end is not the literal truth, but the ideal 
 truth. Strict fidelity to nature, to fact, is to be de- 
 manded, and equal fidelity to the spirit, the imagina- 
 
232 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 tion. The artist must give us a true picture, but he 
 must give us much more than that ; he must give us 
 himself. 
 
 It is the province of literature to make us free of 
 the ideal, and of science to make us acquainted with 
 demonstrable fact. It seems to me it matters little 
 whether a writer draws his material from what we 
 call the real, or from the ideal, so that the result be 
 good literature. Why exalt the realist at the expense 
 of the idealist ? Why commend Zola's method over 
 that of Hawthorne, when both are failures, unless 
 they reach and move the imagination, and both suc- 
 ceed when they do move it ? 
 
 If in such a connection one may be allowed to 
 speak of his own work, I may say that I should think 
 much more meanly of my own books than I do, if I 
 did not believe that my account of bird, or flower, or 
 forest, or stream, contained some stimulus or quality, 
 or suggestion, which the reality itbelf does not hold, 
 and which is purely the gift of the spirit. Your fact 
 or observation is not literature until it is put in some 
 sort of relation to the soul. 
 
 There probably never was a time when the craving 
 for the real in art, the real as opposed to the fantas- 
 tic, the impossible or visionary, was more acute than 
 it is now ; but the need and the demand are equally 
 urgent for that real to be set in such a light, or in 
 such relation to the mind that it fuse readily with 
 the spirit and become one with it. The soul of man 
 is the source and the only source of that charm which 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 233 
 
 a true work of art possesses. The real itself, however 
 faithfully set forth, has no charm. A photograph is 
 barren ; the rudest sketch of the same, seen by a true 
 artist, has far more power to touch and move the 
 soul. Only the man who looks upon the real with 
 passion, with emotion, will succeed in transmuting it 
 into something higher, and thus permanently interest 
 mankind in it. And if he looks upon the imaginary, 
 the fantastic, with passion and emotion, he will inter- 
 est mankind in that also. He will make that real 
 and living to us. 
 
 " The highest problem of any art," says Goethe, 
 " is to produce by semblance the illusion of some 
 higher reality. But it is a false endeavor to realize 
 the appearance until at last only something commonly 
 real remains." 
 
 I think the complaint one has to make of the cur- 
 rent realistic fiction is that it fails to produce this 
 " illusion of some higher reality." It rests with the 
 " commonly " or meanly realistic. After we have 
 finished the book, we feel as if we had been in the 
 company of people whose acquaintance was not worth 
 the making. They are or may be copied from our 
 friends and acquaintances, but there is this difference : 
 In real life, there is something, it may not be easy to 
 say just what, that gives pathos and significance to 
 the most humdrum and frivolous — something that 
 points to the higher reality ; but in the story the peo- 
 ple are cut off, isolated, and we feel only their petti- 
 ness or silliness. It is often said that the commonest 
 
234 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 and dullest life, if truly written, would have some- 
 thing of perennial interest ; but it must be sympathet- 
 ically written and shown off against a proper back- 
 ground. There are few more commonplace characters 
 in themselves in fiction than Partridge in " Tom 
 Jones," but Partridge witnessing his first play at the 
 theatre is immortal. The meanest life has poetry in 
 it, but it takes a poet to bring the poetry out. In 
 writing " Werther," Goethe said he succeeded in 
 breathing into the work " all that warmth which leaves 
 no distinction between the poetical and the actual." 
 Whether or not it was realistic in the sense that it 
 was a faithful picture of the life of his times is of 
 little moment, compared with the question : Was it 
 vital and serious, or informed with real passion ? 
 And if the passion of the story or poem is real, do we 
 care for any other reality ? If the mood and temper 
 in which an author contemplates his subject are gen- 
 uine, his realism will take care of itself. 
 
 Paradoxical as it may seem, it is only the idealist 
 who can adequately deal with the real, who can fuse 
 it and use it and bring out its full significance. 
 There may be a barren realism, just as well as a bar- 
 ren idealism ; the proper marriage of the two is the 
 end and aim of art. To make the idea tangible to us, 
 whether in poetry or in prose, so that the mind can 
 rest upon it, and feel braced and excited by it, is not 
 that also an end to be aimed at ? And, on the other 
 hand, to make the actual, the concrete fluid and plas- 
 tic, and inform it with meaning and power, is not 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 235 
 
 that also to be striven for ? In the same proportion 
 in which literature is real, must it also be ideal ; just 
 so much earth as there is, just so much sky must arch 
 over it. The actual must be transmuted, the ideal 
 must be embodied ; both must be brought within the 
 sphere of the spiritual faculty and fixed there. If 
 the novelist transfers to his page the real life about 
 him and adds no charm or illusion or suggestion from 
 his own spirit, he is less a realist than he is a materi- 
 alist ; his work has little value. The writers who can 
 describe the actual and make it real to us, tbat is, 
 make us share their experience and their emotion, are 
 very rare. They tell us what they saw or what they 
 felt, but they do not put the reader in the presence of 
 the actual thing, or occurrence. How many histori- 
 ans make the past alive again for us ? Only the man 
 with an enormous grasp of the ideal, or great imag- 
 inative power can do it. Shakespeare can do it, Car- 
 lyle can do it. "What a sense of reality in all Car- 
 lyle's histories. The dead reality is not enough, it 
 must be made alive again. Equally few are the writ- 
 ers who can make the ideal tangible or warm to us. 
 
 In any case, whatever the theme, the first requisite 
 in the mind of the writer is a vivid sense of reality. 
 I sometimes think this sense of reality the main thing 
 which distinguishes the master from the tyro. In the 
 great writer, in whatever field, we encounter real 
 tilings, real values, real differences, real emotions, 
 real impressions ; his sense of reality always saves 
 him from phantoms. The mind in which this sense 
 
236 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 of reality is weak, no matter whether it deals with the 
 concrete or the abstract, will always fail to make an 
 impression. 
 
 For my part I want no better realists than the 
 great masters of the ideal, from Homer down to Haw- 
 thorne and Turgenef. How they all differ both in 
 their material and treatment, but in the page of each 
 you encounter that reality, that sense of substance and 
 vitality which are to the mind what the ground is to 
 the foot, or the air to the lungs. 
 
 LITERARY FAME. 
 
 Goldsmith, according to Boswell, said that he had 
 come too late into the world ; that Pope and other 
 poets had carried off all the literary prizes, etc. Dr. 
 Johnson confirmed the remark, and said it was dif- 
 ficult to get literary fame and was every day becom- 
 ing more and more difficult. This is probably the 
 feeling of all writers who have reached the measure 
 of their powers ; they mistake the limits of their own 
 tether for the end of the world. The possibilities 
 that are not open to them they think do not exist. A 
 man of genius and power makes the world his own, 
 and when he is done Avith it he fancies there is noth- 
 ing left. Every one of us repeats the same experi- 
 ence on a different scale. As our careers draw to a 
 close, we fancy we have exhausted the whole of life 
 and that there will be nothing left for those who are 
 to come after us. But life is always new to the new 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 237 
 
 man. Think of the great names in British litera- 
 ture since Goldsmith and Johnson ; think of Burns, 
 Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Macaulay, Car- 
 lyle, Arnold, etc., each one of whom, probably, in ex- 
 hausting his own possibilities fancied he had exhausted 
 the possibilities of nature. 
 
 Probably literary fame is no more difficult of 
 achievement at one time than at another, just as easy 
 to Thackeray as it was to Goldsmith ; and this not- 
 withstanding an achievement that would have given 
 a measure of fame a century ago would attract far 
 less attention to-day. Is it at all likely that if the 
 " Spectator " essays were written to-day they would 
 attract any considerable notice, or that " The Idler " 
 and " Adventurer " would find any readers ? But 
 the writer of to-day has all this past to stand upon, 
 he profits by all these accumulated achievements. 
 A man is largely the creature of his times ; he is 
 strong by the strength of the age in which he lives. 
 An invention that would have seemed marvelous a 
 century ago might be a very tame affair to-day, and 
 yet the same genius, the same power in achieving a 
 noteworthy result to-day, would probably have no 
 more obstacles to overcome, or mysteries to solve, 
 than one hundred years ago. He has a great fund 
 to work with ; he sees farther because he stands 
 higher. If the achievement is measured by the 
 standard of to-day, it is to be remembered that the 
 achiever is strong by the strength of to-day. The 
 same in science. Now the quarry is so thoroughly 
 
238 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 opened, larger and more valuable results ought to be 
 easier than ever before. Of course the poet or liter- 
 ary man cannot avail himself of the results of the 
 labor of others in the same way the man of science 
 can and does, but he cannot escape the general lift of 
 the age in which he lives ; he shares in the momen- 
 tum, moral and intellectual, of his contemporaries. 
 In a certain sense also he inherits, as an available 
 personal fund, what others have done before him. It 
 is the common mind which has been refined and en- 
 larged, and of this advantage he partakes. Literature 
 is an investment of genius which pays dividends to 
 all subsequent times. 
 
 If nature were guilty of endless repetition in turn- 
 ing out men of exceptional powers, of course every 
 new man would find his task already done in the 
 world ; but nature forever varies the pattern so that 
 the new man has a new standpoint and sees things in 
 new combinations and discovers new values, and he 
 is never forestalled by those who have gone before 
 him. Every new genius is an impossibility until he 
 appears ; we cannot forecast his type. He is a reve- 
 lation, and through his eyes we shall see undreamed-of 
 effects. It is doubtful if contemporary writers of orig- 
 inal power ever stand in each other's way. There is 
 always room and demand for any number of original 
 men. The lesser poets of course suffer in competition 
 with the greater ; the large stars draw our eyes away 
 from the smaller ; we should make more of Bayard 
 Taylor, for instance, if he was our only poet ; but is 
 
BRIEF ESSAYS. 239 
 
 it probable that Longfellow or Whittier or Bryant or 
 Emerson ever intercepted any portion of the fame 
 due and within reach of the other ? Have Tennyson 
 or Browning in any sense ever been rivals ? Literary 
 fame is not a limited quantity which must lessen in 
 proportion as it is divided up, but, like the sunlight, 
 each man may have it all and not rob his neighbor. 
 Inventors and discoverers and men of science may 
 anticipate each other, but literary genius can never 
 be anticipated ; the value of the gift which it brings 
 is in its uniqueness. I heard it remarked the other 
 day of one of our promising young poets that his work 
 lacked flavor. It is this flavor which is indispensa- 
 ble and which can never be forestalled by another. 
 There is rivalry in the trades and the professions, but 
 you poet, or you novelist, or you essayist, if your 
 work has flavor or character of its own, your chance 
 for fame is just as good as if there were no competi- 
 tors in the field. It is not a vacant niche in the 
 Temple of Fame which you are striving for, and 
 which only one can fill : it is a niche in the hearts of 
 men, where the room is boundless. 
 
 Goldsmith felt himself under the shadow of Pope's 
 great fame, but of course he was a gainer from Pope's 
 career. His performance was as unique as Pope's 
 and has probably been of more service to mankind. 
 But Pope cleared and sharpened the mind of his age ; 
 dull wits found less acceptance after than before him, 
 and in this benefit Goldsmith, like others, was a 
 sharer. 
 
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 
 
 A few years ago the editor of a popular magazine 
 inveigled a good many people, myself among the 
 number, into writing about themselves and their expe- 
 riences in life. None of us, I imagine, needed very 
 much persuading, for as a rule there is no subject 
 which a man or woman is more ready or willing to 
 talk about than him or herself. One's ailments is al- 
 ways a favorite subject ; next to that one's luck or ill 
 luck in his last undertaking, then one's experiences, 
 one's likes and dislikes, and lastly self-analysis and 
 criticism. And it has been said that a man " is never 
 so sure to please as when he writes of himself with 
 good faith, and without affectation." Aye, there 's the 
 rub ; to write of one's self without affectation ! A false 
 note of this kind is fatal to the interest and value of 
 the criticism. 
 
 In a certain sense a man of the literary or artistic 
 tempex*ament never portrays or writes of anything 
 but himself ; that is, he gives us things as seen 
 through the intimate personal medium which he him- 
 self is. All things reflect his hue and quality. This 
 is the bane of science, but it is the life of literature. 
 I have probably unwittingly written myself in my 
 books more fully and frankly than I ever can by any 
 
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 241 
 
 direct confession and criticism ; but the latter may- 
 throw some side light at least, and on looking over 
 what I wrote for the editor above referred to I find 
 that portions of it possess a certain interest and value 
 to myself, and therefore I trust may not seem en- 
 tirely amiss to my reader. 
 
 If a man is not born into the environment best 
 suited to him, he, as a rule, casts about him until he 
 finds such environment. My own surroundings and 
 connections have been mainly of the unliterary kind. 
 I was born of and among people who neither read 
 books nor cared for them, and my closest associations 
 since have been with those whose minds have been 
 alien to literature and art. My unliterary environ- 
 ment has doubtless been best suited to me. Proba- 
 bly what little freshness and primal sweetness my 
 books contain is owing to this circumstance. Con- 
 stant intercourse with bookish men and literary cir- 
 cles I think would have dwarfed or killed my literary 
 faculty. This perpetual rubbing of heads together 
 as in the literary clubs, seems to result in literary 
 sterility. In my own case at least what I most 
 needed was what I had, — a few books and plenty of 
 real things. I never had any aptitude for scholarly 
 attainments ; my verbal or artificial memory, so to 
 speak, was poor, but my mind always had a certain 
 magnetic or adhesive quality for things that were 
 proper to it and that belonged to me. 
 
 I early took pleasure in trying to express myself, 
 upon paper, probably in my sixteenth or seventeenth 
 
242 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 year. In my reading I was attracted by everything 
 of the essay kind. In the libraries and book-stores 
 I was on the lookont for books of essays. And I 
 wanted the essay to start, not in a casual and inconse- 
 quential way, but the first sentence must be a formal 
 enunciation of a principle. I bought the whole of 
 Dr. Johnson's works at a second-hand book-store in 
 New York, because, on looking into them, I found 
 his essays appeared to be of solid essay-stuff from be- 
 ginning to end. I passed by Montaigne's Essays at 
 the same time, because they had a personal and gos- 
 sipy look. Almost my first literary attempts were 
 moral reflections, somewhat in the Johnsonian style. 
 I lived on the " Rambler " and the " Idler " all one 
 year, and tried to produce something of my own in 
 similar form. As a youth I was a philosopher ; as 
 a young man I was an Emersonian ; as a middle- 
 aged man I am a literary naturalist ; but always have 
 I been an essayist. 
 
 It was while I was at school, in my nineteenth 
 year, that I saw my first author ; and I distinctly re- 
 member with what emotion I gazed upon him, and 
 followed him in the twilight, keeping on the other 
 side of the street. He was of little account, — a man 
 who had failed as a lawyer, and then had written a 
 histoiy of Poland, which I have never heard of since 
 that time ; but to me he was the embodiment of the 
 august spirit of authorship, and I looked upon him 
 with more reverence and enthusiasm than I had ever 
 before looked upon any man. I do not think I 
 
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 243 
 
 could have approached and spoken to him on any 
 consideration. I cannot at this date divine why I 
 should have stood in such worshipful fear and awe of 
 this obscure individual, but I suppose it was the in- 
 stinctive tribute of a timid and imaginative youth to 
 a power which he was just beginning vaguely to see, 
 — the power of letters. 
 
 It was at about this time that I first saw my own 
 thoughts in print, — a communication of some kind 
 to a little country paper published in an adjoining 
 town. In my twenty-second or twenty-third year I 
 began to send rude and crude essays to the magazines 
 and to certain New York weekly papers, but they 
 came back again pretty promptly. I wrote on such 
 subjects as " Revolutions," " A Man and his Times," 
 " Genius," " Individuality," etc. At this period of 
 my life I was much indebted to Whipple, whose style 
 as it appears in his earlier essays and in the thin vol- 
 ume of lectures published by Ticknor, Reed & Fields 
 about 1853 is, in my judgment, much better than in 
 his later writings. It was never a good style, not 
 at all magnetic or penetrating, but it was clear and 
 direct, and to my mind, at that period, stimulating. 
 Higginson had just begun to publish his polished es- 
 says in the " Atlantic ; " and I found much help in 
 them also. They were a little cold, but they had the 
 quality which belongs to the work of a man who looks 
 upon literature as a fine art. My mind had already 
 begun to turn to outdoor themes, and Higginson 
 gave me a good send-off in this direction. But the 
 
244 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 master-enchanter of this period of my life and of 
 many following years was Emerson. While at school, 
 in my nineteenth year, in my search for essays I had 
 carried to my room one volume of his, hut I could do 
 nothing with it. What, indeed, could a Johnsonian 
 youth make of Emerson ? A year or so later I again 
 opened one of his books in a Chicago book store, and 
 was so taken with the first taste of it that I then and 
 there purchased the three volumes, — the Essays and 
 the Miscellanies. All that summer I fed upon them 
 and steeped myself in them : so that when, a year or 
 two afterwards, I wrote an essay on " Expression " 
 and sent it to the "Atlantic," it was so Emersonian 
 that the editor thought some one was trying to palm 
 off on him an early essay of Emerson's which he had 
 not seen. Satisfying himself that Emerson had pub- 
 lished no such paper, he printed it in the November 
 number of 1860. It had not much merit. I re- 
 member this sentence, which may contain some truth 
 aptly put : " Dr. Johnson's periods act like a lever of 
 the thn-d kind : the power applied always exceeds 
 the weight raised." 
 
 It was mainly to break the spell of Emerson's in- 
 fluence and get upon ground of my own that I took 
 to writing upon outdoor themes. I wrote half a 
 dozen or more sketches upon all sorts of open-air 
 subjects, which were published in the New York 
 " Leader." The woods, the soil, the waters, helped 
 to draw out the pungent Emersonian flavor and re- 
 store me to my proper atmosphere. But to this day 
 
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 245 
 
 I am aware that a suggestion of Emerson's manner 
 often crops out in my writings. His mind was the 
 firmer, harder substance, and was bound to leave its 
 mark upon my own. But, in any case, my debt to 
 him is great. He helped me to better literary ex- 
 pression, he quickened my perception of the beauti- 
 ful, he stimulated and fertilized my religious nature. 
 Unless one is naturally more or less both of a 
 religious and of a poetic turn, the writings of such 
 men as Emerson and Carlyle are mainly lost upon 
 him. Two thirds of the force of these writers, at 
 least, is directed into these channels. It is the qual- 
 ity of their genius, rather than the scope and push of 
 their minds, that endears them to us. They quicken 
 the conscience and stimulate the character as well as 
 correct the taste. They are not the spokesmen of 
 science or the reason, but of the soul. 
 
 About this period I fell in with Thoreau's " Wal- 
 den ; " but I am not conscious of any great debt to 
 Thoreau : I had begun to write upon outdoor themes 
 before his books fell into my hands, but he undoubt- 
 edly helped confirm me in my own direction. He was 
 the intellectual child of Emerson, but added a certain 
 crispness and pungency, as of wild roots and herbs, 
 to the urbane philosophy of his great neighbor. But 
 Thoreau had one trait which I always envied him, 
 namely, his indifference to human beings. He seems 
 to have been as insensible to people as he was open 
 and hospitable to Nature. It probably gave him 
 more pleasure to open his door to a woodchuck than 
 to a man. 
 
246 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Let me confess that I am too conscious of persons, 
 — feel them too much, defer to them too much, and 
 try too hard to adapt myself to them. Emerson 
 says, " A great man is coming to dine with me : I do 
 not wish to please him, I wish that he should wish to 
 please me." I should he sure to overdo the matter 
 in trying to please the great man : more than that, 
 his presence would probably take away my appetite 
 for my dinner. 
 
 In speaking of the men who have influenced me, 
 or to whom I owe the greatest debt, let me finish the 
 list here. I was not born out of time, but in good 
 time. The men I seemed to need most were nearly 
 all my contemporaries ; the ideas and influences 
 which address themselves to me the most directly 
 and forcibly have been abundantly current in my 
 time. Hence I owe, or seem to owe, more to con- 
 temporary authors than to the men of the past. I 
 have lived in the present time, in the present hour, 
 and have invested myself in the objects nearest at 
 hand. Besides the writers I have mentioned, I am 
 conscious of owing a debt to Whitman, Ruskin, Ar- 
 nold, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Tennyson. To 
 Whitman I owe a certain liberalizing influence, as 
 well as a lesson in patriotism which I could have got 
 in the same measure from no other source. Whit- 
 man opens the doors, and opens them wide. He 
 pours a flood of human sympathy which sets the 
 whole world afloat. He is a great humanizing power. 
 There is no other personality in literature that gives 
 
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 247 
 
 me such a sense of breadth and magnitude in the 
 purely human and personal qualities. His poems are 
 dominated by a sense of a living, breathing man as no 
 other poems are. This would not recommend them 
 to some readers ; but it recommends them to such as 
 myself, who value in books perennial human qualities 
 above all things. To put a great personality in poetry 
 is to establish a living fountain of power, where the 
 jaded and exhausted race can refresh and renew it- 
 self. 
 
 To a man in many ways the opposite of Whitman, 
 who stands for an entirely different, almost antago- 
 nistic, order of ideas, — to wit, Matthew Arnold, — 
 I am indebted for a lesson in clear thinking and clean 
 expression such as I have got from no other. Ar- 
 nold's style is probably the most lucid, the least em- 
 barrassed by anything false or foreign, of that of any 
 writer living. His page is as clear as science and as 
 vital and flexible as poetry. Indeed, he affords a 
 notable instance of the cool, impartial scientific spirit 
 wedded to, or working through, the finest poetic deli- 
 cacy and sensibility. 
 
 I have not been deeply touched or moved by any 
 English poet of this century save Wordsworth. 
 Nearly all other poetry of nature is tame and insin- 
 cere compared with his. But my poetic sympathies 
 are probably pretty narrow. I cannot, for instance, 
 read Robert Browning, except here and there a short 
 poem. The sheer mechanical effort of reading him, 
 of leaping and dodging and turning sharp corners to 
 
248 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 overtake his meaning, is too much for me. It makes 
 my mental bones ache. It is not that he is so subtile 
 and profound, for he is less in both these respects 
 than Shakespeare, but that he is so abrupt and ellip- 
 tical and plays such fantastic tricks with syntax. 
 His verse is like a springless wagon on a rough road. 
 He is full of bounce and vigor, but it is of the kind 
 that bruises the flesh and makes one bite his tongue. 
 Swinburne has lilt and flow enough, certainly, and 
 yet I cannot read him. He sickens me from the op- 
 posite cause : I am adrift in a sea of melodious 
 words, with never an idea to cling to. There is to 
 me something gruesome and uncanny about Swin- 
 burne's poetry, like the clammy and rapidly-growing 
 fungi in nature. It is not health but disease ; it is 
 not inspiration, but a mortal flux. The " Saturday 
 Review," in noticing my last volume, " Signs and 
 Seasons," intimates that I might have found better 
 specimens of sea-poetry to adorn the chapter called 
 " A Salt Breeze " in Mr. Swinburne than those I 
 have given, and quotes the following stanzas from 
 him as proof : — 
 
 " Hardly we saw the high moon hanging, 
 Heard hardly through the windy night 
 Far waters ringing, low reefs clanging, 
 Under wan skies and waste white light. 
 
 " With chafe and change of surges chiming, 
 The clashing channels rocked and rang 
 Large music, wave to wild wave timing, 
 And all the choral waters sang." 
 
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 249 
 
 Words, words, words ! and all struck with the leprosy 
 of alliteration. Such poetry would turn my blood to 
 water. " Wan skies and waste white light," — are 
 there ever any other skies or any other light in Swin- 
 burne ? 
 
 But this last is an ill wind which I fear can blow 
 no good to any one. I have lived long enough to 
 know that my own private likes and dislikes do not 
 always turn out to be the decrees of the Eternal. 
 Some writers confirm one and brace him where he 
 stands ; others give him a lift forward. I am not 
 aware that more than two American writers have 
 been of the latter service to me, — Emerson and 
 Whitman. Such a spirit as Bryant is confirmatory. 
 I may say the same of Whittier and Longfellow. I 
 owe to these men solace and encouragement, but no 
 new territory. 
 
 Still, the influences that shape one's life are often 
 so subtile and remote, and of such small beginning, 
 that it will not do to be too positive about these mat- 
 ters. At any rate, self-analysis is a sort of back- 
 handed work, and one is lucky if he comes at all near 
 the truth. 
 
 As such a paper must of necessity be egotistical, 
 let me not flinch in any part of my task on that ac- 
 count. 
 
 What little merit my style has is the result of much 
 study and discipline. I have taught myself always 
 to get down to the quick of my mind at once, and not 
 fumble about amid the husks at the surface. Unless 
 
250 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 one can give the sense of vitality in his pages, no 
 mere verbal brightness or scholarly attainments will 
 save him. In the best writing every sentence is filled 
 with the writer's living, breathing quality, just as in 
 the perfected honey-comb every cell is filled with 
 honey. But how much empty comb there is even in 
 the best books ! I wish to give an account of a bird, 
 or a flower, or of any open-air scene or incident. My 
 whole effort is to see the thing just as it was. I ask 
 myself, " Exactly how did this thing strike my mind ? 
 What was prominent ? What was subordinated ? " 
 I have been accused of romancing at times. But it 
 is not true. I set down the thing exactly as it fell 
 out. People say, " I do not see what you do when I 
 take a walk." But for the most part they do, but 
 the fact as it lies there in nature is crude and raw : 
 it needs to be brought out, to be passed through the 
 heart and mind and presented in appropriate words. 
 This humanizes it and gives it an added charm and 
 significance. This, I take it, is what is meant by 
 idealizing and interpreting Nature. We do not add 
 to or falsely color the facts : we disentangle them, 
 and invest them with the magic of written words. 
 
 To give anything like vitality to one's style, one 
 must divest one's self of any false or accidental or 
 factitious mood or feeling, and get down to his real 
 self, and speak as directly and sincerely as he does 
 about his daily business or affairs, and with as little 
 affectation. One may write from the outside of his 
 mind, as it were, write and write, glibly and learn- 
 
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 251 
 
 edly, and make no impression ; but when one speaks 
 from real insight and conviction of his own, men are 
 always glad to hear him, whether they agree with 
 him or not. So much writing or speaking is like 
 mere machine-work, as if you turned a crank and the 
 piece or discourse came out. It is not the man's real 
 mind, his real exjjerience. This he does not know 
 how to get at ; it has no connection with his speak- 
 ing or writing faculty. How rare are real poems, — 
 poems that spring from real feeling, a real throb of 
 emotion, and not from a mere surface-itching of the 
 mind for literary expression ! The world is full of 
 " rhyming parasites " as Milton called them. The 
 great mass of the poetry of any age is purely artifi- 
 cial, and has no root in real things. It is a kind of 
 masquerading. The stock poetic forms are masks be- 
 hind which the poetlings hide their real poverty of 
 thought and feeling. In prose one has no such fac- 
 titious aids ; here he must stand upon his own mer- 
 its ; he has not the cloak of Milton, or Tennyson, or 
 Spenser, to hide in. 
 
 It is, of course, the young writer who oftenest fails 
 to speak his real mind or to speak from any proper 
 basis of insight and conviction. He is carried away 
 by a fancy, a love of novelty, or an affectation of 
 originality. The strange things, the novel things, 
 are seldom true. Look for truth under your feet. 
 To be original, Carlyle said, is to be sincere. When 
 one is young, how many discoveries he makes, — real 
 mares'-eggs, which by and by turn out to be nothing 
 but field-pumpkins ! 
 
252 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 Men who, like myself, are deficient in self-asser- 
 tion, or whose personalities are flexible and yielding, 
 make a poor show in politics or business, but in cer- 
 tain other fields these defects have their advantages. 
 In action, Renan says, one is weak by his best 
 qualities, — such, I suppose, as tenderness, sympathy, 
 religiousness, etc., — and strong by his poorer, or at 
 least his less attractive, qualities. But in letters the 
 reverse is probably true. How many of us owe our 
 success in this field to qualities which in a measure 
 disqualified us for an active career ! A late writer 
 upon Carlyle seeks to demonstrate that the " open 
 secret of his life " was his desire to take a hand in 
 the actual affairs of English politics ; but it is quite 
 certain that the traits and gifts which made him such 
 a power in literature — namely his tremendous imag- 
 ination and his burdened prophetic conscience — 
 would have stood in his way in dealing with the 
 coarse affairs of this world. 
 
 In my own case, what hinders me with the world 
 helps me with impersonal Nature. I do not stand in 
 my own light. My will, my personality, offer little 
 resistance : they let the shy delicate influences pass. 
 I can surrender myself to Nature without effort, but 
 am more or less restrained and self-conscious in the 
 presence of my fellows. Bird and beast take to me, 
 and I to them. I can look in the eye of an ugly dog 
 and win him, but with an ugly man I have less suc- 
 cess. 
 
 I have unmistakably the feminine idiosyncrasy. 
 
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 253 
 
 Perhaps this is the reason that my best and most en- 
 thusiastic readers appear to be women. In the gen- 
 esis of all my books feeling goes a long way before 
 intellection. What I feel I can express, and only 
 what I feel. If I had run after the birds only 
 to write about them, I never should have written 
 anything that any one would have cared to read. 
 I must write from sympathy and love, or not at 
 all : I have in no sort of measure the gift of the 
 ready writer who can turn his pen to all sorts of 
 themes, or the dramatic, creative gift of the great 
 poets, which enables them to get out of themselves 
 and present vividly and powerfully things entirely 
 beyond the circle of their own lives and experiences. 
 I go to the woods to enjoy myself, and not to report 
 them ; and if I succeed, the expedition may by and 
 by bear fruit at my pen. When a writer of my lim- 
 ited range begins to " make believe " or to go outside 
 of his experience, he betrays himself at once. My 
 success, such as it is, has been in putting my own per- 
 sonal feelings and attractions into subjects of univer- 
 sal interest. I have loved Nature no more than 
 thousands upon thousands of others have, but my 
 aim has been not to tell that love to my reader, but to 
 tell it to the trees and the birds and to let them tell 
 him. I think we all like this indirect way the best. 
 It will not do in literature to compliment Nature 
 and make love to her by open profession and dec- 
 laration : you must show your love by your deeds or 
 your spirit and by the sincerity of your service to her. 
 
254 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 For my part, I can never interview Nature in the 
 reporter fashion : I must camp and tramp with her 
 to get any good, and what I get I absorb through my 
 emotions rather than consciously gather through my 
 intellect. Hence the act of composition with me is a 
 kind of self-exploration to see what hidden stores my 
 mind holds. If I write upon a favorite author, for 
 instance, I do not give my reader sometbing which 
 lay clearly defined in my mind when I began to 
 write : I give him what I find, after closest scrutiny, 
 in the subconscious regions, — a result as unknown 
 to me as to him when I began to write. The same 
 with outdoor subjects. I come gradually to have a 
 feeling that I want to write upon a given theme, — 
 rain, for instance, or snow, — but what I may have 
 to say upon it is as vague as the background of one 
 of Millet's pictures ; my hope is entirely in the feel- 
 ing or attraction which draws my mind that way ; 
 the subject is congenial, it sticks to me ; whenever it 
 recurs to me, it awakens as it were a warm personal 
 response. 
 
 Perhaps this is the experience of all other writers : 
 their subjects find them or bring the key to their hid- 
 den stores. Great poets, like Milton, however, cast 
 about them and deliberately choose a theme : they 
 are not hampered by their sympathies, nor are they 
 prisoners of their own personalities, like writers who 
 depend upon this pack of unconscious impressions at 
 their back. An experience must lie in my mind a 
 certain time before I can put it upon paper, — say 
 
AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER. 255 
 
 from three to six months. If there is anything in it, 
 it will ripen and mellow in that time. I rarely take 
 any notes, and I have a very poor memory, but rely 
 upon the affinity of my mind for a certain order of 
 truths or observations. What is mine will stick to 
 me, and what is not will drop off. When I returned 
 from England after a three months' visit in the sum- 
 mer of 1882, I was conscious of having brought back 
 with me a few observations that I might expand into 
 two or three short essays. But when I began to open 
 my pack the contents grew so upon my hands that it 
 reached many times the measure I at first proposed. 
 Indeed, when I look back over my seven volumes I 
 wonder where they have all come from. I am like a 
 boy who at the close of the day looks over his string 
 of fish curiously, not one of which did he know of in 
 the morning, and every one of which came to his hand 
 from depths beyond his ken by luck and skill in fish- 
 ing. I have often caught my fish when I least ex- 
 pected to, and as often my most determined efforts 
 have been entirely unavailing. 
 
 It is a wise injunction, " Know thyself," but how 
 hard to fulfill ! This unconscious region in one, this 
 unconscious setting of the currents of his life in cer- 
 tain directions, — how hard to know that! The 
 influences of his family, his race, his times, his envi- 
 ronment, are all deeper than the plummet of his self- 
 knowledge can reach. Yet how we admire the 
 ready man, the man who always has complete con- 
 trol of his resources, who can speak the right word 
 
256 INDOOR STUDIES. 
 
 instantly ! My own wit is always belated. After 
 the crisis is past, the right word or the right sentence 
 is pretty sure to appear and mock me by its tardi- 
 ness. 
 
 There is, no doubt, a great difference in men with 
 reference to this knowledge and command of their 
 own resources. Some writers seem to me to be like 
 those military states wherein every man is numbered 
 drilled, and equipped, and ready for instant service : 
 the whole male population is a standing army. Then 
 there are men of another type who have no standing 
 army. They are absorbed in mere living, and, when 
 the occasion requires, they have to recruit their ideas 
 slowly from the vague, uncertain masses in the back- 
 ground. Hence they never cut a brilliant figure 
 upon paper, though they may be capable of doing 
 real heart-felt work. 
 
 
OUT-DOOR BOOKS 
 
 Selected from the Publications of 
 
 Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 
 
 4 Park St., Boston ; 11 East 17th St., New York. 
 
 Adirondack Stories. By P. Deming. 18hio, 
 
 75 cents. 
 
 A-Hunting of the Deer ; How I Killed a Bear ; 
 Lost in the "Woods ; Camping Out ; A "Wilderness Ro- 
 mance ; "What Some People call Pleasure. By Charles 
 Dudley Warner. 16mo, paper covers, 15 cents. 
 
 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack 
 Rivers. By Henry D. Thoreau. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 
 
 Birds and Bees. By John Burroughs. With 
 an Introduction by Mary E. Burt, of the Jones School, 
 Chicago. 16mo, paper covers, 15 cents. 
 
 Birds and Poets, with Other Papers. By John 
 
 Burroughs. 16mo, $1.25. 
 
 Birds in the Bush. By Bradford Torrey. 16mo, 
 
 $1.25. 
 
 Contents : On Boston Common ; Bird-Songs ; Character 
 in .Feathers; In the White Mountains ; Phillida and Coridon ; 
 Scraping Acquaintance ; Minor Songsters ; Winter Birds about 
 Boston ; A Bird-Lover's April ; An Owl's Head Holiday ; A 
 Month's Music. 
 
 Birds through an Opera-Glass. By Florence 
 A. Merriam. In Riverside Library for Young People. 
 
 16mo, 75 cents. 
 
 Bird-Ways. By Olive Thorne Miller. 16mo, 
 
 $1.25. 
 
 Cape Cod. By Henry D. Thoreau. 12mo, gilt 
 
 top, $1.50. ' 
 
 Country By- Ways. By Sarah Orne Jewett. 
 
 18mo, $1.25. 
 
Drift-Weed. Poems. By Celia Thaxter. 18mo, 
 
 full gilt, $1.50. 
 
 Early Spring in Massachusetts. Selections 
 from the Journals of Henry D. Thoreau. 12mo, gilt top, 
 $1.50. 
 
 Excursions in Field and Forest. By Henry 
 
 D. Thoreau. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 
 
 Contents : Biographical Sketch, by E. W. Emerson ; Nat- 
 ural History of Massachusetts ; A Walk to Wachusett ; The 
 Landlord ; A Winter Walk ; The Succession of Forest Trees ; 
 Walking ; Autumnal Tints ; Wild Apples ; Night and Moon- 
 light. 
 
 Fishing with the Fly. A volume of original 
 
 Essays on Angling. By Lovers of the Art. Edited by 
 Charles F. Orvis and A. Nelson Cheney. With col- 
 ored Plates of 149 standard varieties of Flies. With Map 
 and Index. Crown 8vo, $2.50. 
 
 Frank's Ranche ; or, My Holiday in the 
 
 Rockies. Being a Contribution to the Inquiry into what 
 we are to do with our Boys. By Edward Marston. With 
 Illustrations. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 
 
 Fresh Fields. English Sketches. By John Bur- 
 roughs. 16mo, $1.25. 
 
 The Gypsies. By Charles G. Leland. With 
 Sketches of the English, Welsh, Eussian, and Austrian 
 Eomany ; and papers on the Gypsy Language. Crown 8vo, 
 $2.00. 
 
 The most delightful Gypsy book with which we are ac- 
 quainted. — The Spectator (London). 
 
 Homestead Highways. By H. M. Sylvester. 
 
 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 
 
 Indoor Studies. By John Burroughs. A new 
 Book. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 
 
 In Nesting Time. By Olive Thorne Miller. 
 
 16mo, $1.25. 
 
 In the Wilderness. Adirondack Essays. By 
 Charles Dudley Warner. New edition, enlarged. 18mo, 
 $1.00. 
 
 Locusts and Wild Honey. By John Bur- 
 roughs. 16mo, $1.50. 
 
 I 
 
The Maine "Woods. By Henry D. Thoreau. 
 
 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 
 
 Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. By 
 Clarence King. With Maps. 12mo, $2.00. 
 
 My Garden Acquaintance and a Moosehead 
 Journal. By James Russell Lowell. Illustrated. 32mo, 
 75 cents. School Edition, 40 cents. 
 
 My Summer in a Garden. By Charles Dud- 
 ley Warner. 16mo, $1.00. 
 
 Nantucket Scraps. Being the Experiences of an 
 Off- Islander, in Season and out of Season. By Jane G. 
 Austin. 16mo, $1.50. 
 
 Nature. « Little Classics," Vol. XIV. 18mo, $1.00. 
 
 Nature, together with Love, Friendship, Do- 
 mestic Life, Success, Greatness, and Immortality. By 
 R. W. Emerson. S2mo, 75 cents ; School Edition, 40 cents. 
 
 Pepacton. By John Burroughs. 16mo, $1.50. 
 Poems. By R. W. Emerson. With Portrait. 
 
 Riverside Edition. 12mo, gilt top, $1.75. 
 The collection includes a very large number of poems de- 
 voted to nature and natural scenery. 
 
 Poems. By Celia Thaxter. 18mo, full gilt, 
 
 $1.50. 
 
 Our bleak and rocky New England sea-coast, all the won- 
 ders of atmospherical and sea-change, have, I think, never 
 before been so musically or tenderly sung about. — John G. 
 Whittier. 
 
 Poetic Interpretation of Nature. By Principal 
 J. C. Shairp. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 
 
 Prose Pastorals. By Herbert M. Sylvester. 
 
 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 
 
 The Round Year. By Edith M. Thomas. Prose 
 
 Papers. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. 
 
 Rural Hours. By Susan Fenimore Cooper. New 
 
 Edition, abridged. 16mo, $1.25. 
 
 The Saunterer. By Charles G. Whiting. Es- 
 says on Nature. Illustrated. 16mo, $1 25. 
 
Seaside Studies in Natural History. By Alex- 
 ander Agassiz and Elizabeth C. Agassiz. Illustrated. 
 8vo, $3.00. 
 The scene of these " Studies " is Massachusetts Bay. 
 
 Sharp Eyes, A Taste of Maine Birch, The 
 
 Apple, and other Essays. By John Burroughs. 16mo, 
 paper covers, 15 cents. 
 
 The Shaybacks in Camp. Ten Summers under 
 Canvas. By Samuel J. and Isabel C. Barrows. With 
 Map of Lake Memphremagog. 16mo, $1.00. 
 
 The Succession of Forest Trees, etc. By H. 
 D. Thoreau. With Biographical Sketch by K. W. Emer- 
 son. 16mo, paper covers, 15 cents. 
 
 Summer. Selections from the Journals of H. D. 
 Thoreau. With Map of Concord. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. 
 
 Tenting at Stony Beach. By Maria Louise 
 
 Pool. 16 mo, $1.00. 
 
 Up and Down the Brooks. By Mary E. Bam- 
 ford. In Riverside Library for Young People. 16mo, 75 
 cents. 
 
 Wake -Robin. By John Burroughs. Revised 
 
 and enlarged edition. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.25. 
 
 Walden ; or, Life in the Woods. By Henry 
 D Thoreau. 12mo, gilt top, $1 50. 
 
 Winter. From the Journal of Thoreau. Edited by 
 H. G. O. Blake. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50 
 
 Winter Sunshine. By John Burroughs. New- 
 edition, revised and enlarged. With Frontispiece. 16mo, 
 $1.25. 
 
 Woods and Lakes of Maine. A Trip from 
 
 Moosehead Lake to New Brunswick in a Birch-Bark Canoe. 
 By Lucius L. Hubbard. With Indian Place-Names and 
 their Meanings, Illustrations, and large Map. 8vo, $3.00. 
 
 *** For sale by all Booksellers. Sent by mail, post-paid, on 
 receipt of price by the Publishers, 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 
 4 Park St., Boston; 11 East 17th St., New York. 
 
LIBRARY