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V 
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 "The Critic 
 
 » 
 
 BY 
 
 IN BURROUGHS 
 
 EDMUND C. STEDMAN 
 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 R. H. STODDARD 
 
 F. B. SANBORN 
 
 E. W. GOSSE 
 
 AND OTHERS 
 
 ' 
 
 3] 
 
 No 
 
 ■7* 
 
 fill 
 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY 
 
 1882 
 
 V'iSH^^S^ 
 
0^ 
 
 
 Copyright, 1881 and 1882, 
 By J. L. & J. B. GILDER. 
 
 jFranklt'n ^ress: 
 
 RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, 
 BOSTON. 
 
The essays and sketches of which this volume 
 is composed are taken, as the name implies, from 
 " The Critic." In the conviction that some, if 
 not all of them, are, despite their brevity, of per- 
 manent literary value, it has been deemed well 
 to reproduce them in a form more durable than 
 that of a fortnightly review. This step is ren- 
 dered doubly advisable by the fact that some of 
 the earlier numbers of ' ' The Critic ' ' are already 
 out of print. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Thoeeau's Wildness. John Burroughs . . 9 
 II. William Blake, Poet and Paintee. 
 
 Edmund C Stedman 21 
 
 HI. Death of Caelyle. Walt WJiitman. ... 31 
 
 IV. Death of Longfellow. Walt WJiitman . . 41 
 Y. Geoege Eliot and the Novel. Edward 
 
 Eggleston 49 
 
 • VI. Feances Hodgson Buenett. R. H. Stoddard, 57 
 VII. Thoeeau's Unpublished Poetey. F. B. 
 
 Sanborn 71 
 
 VIII. Emeeson and the Supeelative. John Bur- 
 roughs 81 
 
 IX. A Company of Speing Poets. Edith 31. 
 
 TJwmas 91 
 
 • X. Natuee in Liteeatuee. John Burroughs . 103 
 
 XI. Austin Dobson. E. W. Gosse 109 
 
 XII. Alphonse Daudet. P. 31. Potter 121 
 
 XIII. The Boston Culture. J. H. Morse .... 133 
 
 XIV. The Late Sidney Laniee. E. C. Stedman . 141 
 XV. English Society and Endymion. Julia Ward 
 
 Howe 153 
 
 XVI. Histoeical Criticism of Cheist. H. W. 
 
 Belloics 165 
 
 XVII. Whitman's Leaves of Geass 175 
 
 5 
 
I. 
 
 THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 
 
Essays from "The Critic." 
 
 THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 
 
 Doubtless the wildest man New England 
 has turned out since the red aborigines va- 
 cated her territory was Henry Thoreau, — a 
 man in whom the Indian re-appeared on the 
 plane of taste and morals. One is tempted 
 to apply to him his own lines on "Elisha 
 Dugan," as it is very certain they fit himself 
 much more closely than they ever did his 
 neighbor : — 
 
 " O man of wild habits, 
 
 Partridges and rabbits, 
 
 Who hast no cares 
 
 Only to set snares, 
 
10 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 Who liv'st all alone 
 Close to the bone, 
 And where life is sweetest 
 Constantly eatest." 
 
 His whole life was a search for the wild, 
 not only in nature, but in literature, in life, 
 in morals. The shyest and most elusive 
 thoughts and impressions were the ones 
 that fascinated him most, not only in his 
 own mind, but in the minds of others. His 
 startling paradoxes are only one form his 
 wildness took. He cared little for science, 
 except as it escaped the rules and technicali- 
 ties, and put him on the trail of the ideal, 
 the transcendental. Thoreau was of French 
 extraction ; and every drop of his blood seems 
 to have turned toward the aboriginal, as the 
 French blood has so often done in other ways 
 in this country. He, for the most part, de- 
 spised the white man; but his enthusiasm 
 kindled at the mention of the Indian. He 
 envied the Indian ; he coveted his knowl- 
 
THOREAU'8 WILDNESS. 11 
 
 edge, his arts, his wood-craft. He accred- 
 ited him with a more " practical and vital 
 science " than was contained in the books. 
 " The Indian stood nearer to wild Nature 
 than we." "It was a new light when my 
 guide gave me Indian names for things for 
 which I had only scientific ones before. In 
 proportion as I understood the language, I 
 saw them from a new point of view." And 
 again : " The Indian's earthly life was as far 
 off from us as heaven is." In his " Week," 
 he complains that our poetry is only white 
 man's poetry. " If we could listen but for 
 an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, 
 we should understand why he will not 
 exchange his savageness for civilization." 
 Speaking of himself, he says, " I am con- 
 vinced that my genius dates from an older 
 era than the agricultural. I would at least 
 strike my spade into the earth with such 
 careless freedom, but accuracy, as the wood- 
 pecker his bill into a tree. There is in my 
 
12 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward 
 all wildness." Again and again he returns 
 to the Indian : " We talk of civilizing the 
 Indian, but that is not the name for his im- 
 provement. By the wary independence and 
 aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves 
 his intercourse with his native gods, and is 
 admitted from time to time to a rare and 
 peculiar society with Nature. He has glances 
 of starry recognition, to which our saloons 
 are strangers. The steady illumination of 
 his genius, dim only because distant, is like 
 the faint but satisfying light of the stars 
 compared with the dazzling but ineffectual 
 and short-lived blaze of candles." " We 
 would not always be soothing and taming 
 nature, breaking the horse and the ox, but 
 sometimes ride the horse wild, and chase the 
 buffalo." The only relics that interest him 
 are Indian relics. One of his regular spring 
 recreations or occupations is the hunting of 
 arrow-heads. He goes looking for arrow- 
 
THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 13 
 
 heads as other people go berrying or bota- 
 nizing. In his journal, parts of which have 
 recently been published, under the title of 
 " Early Spring in Massachusetts," he makes 
 a long entry under date of March 28, 1859, 
 about his pursuit of arrow-heads. " I spend 
 many hours every spring," he says, "gather- 
 ing the crop which the melting snow and 
 rain have washed bare. When, at length, 
 some island in the meadow or some sandy 
 field elsewhere has been ploughed, perhaps 
 for rye, in the fall, I take note of it, and do 
 not fail to repair thither as soon as the earth 
 begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot 
 chances never to have been cultivated before, 
 I am the first to gather a crop from it. The 
 farmer little thinks that another reaps a har- 
 vest which is the fruit of his toil." "As 
 the dragon's teeth bore a crop of soldiers, so 
 these [arrow-heads] bear crops of philoso- 
 phers and poets, and the same seed is just as 
 good to plant again. It is a stone fruit. 
 
14 ESSAYS FROM TT1E CRITIC. 
 
 Each one yields roe a thought. I come 
 nearer to the maker of it than if I found 
 his bones." He probably picked up thou- 
 sands of arrow-heads. He had an eye for 
 them. The Indian in him recognized its 
 own. 
 
 His genius itself is arrow-like, and typical 
 of the wild weapon he so loved, — hard, 
 flinty, fine-graiued, penetrating, winged, — a 
 flying shaft, bringing down its game with 
 marvellous sureness. His literary art was 
 to let fly with a kind of quick inspiration ; 
 and though his arrows sometimes go wide, 
 yet it is always a pleasure to watch their 
 aerial course. Indeed, Thoreau was a kind 
 of Emersonian or transcendental red man, 
 going about with a pocket-glass and an her- 
 barium, instead of with a bow and toma- 
 hawk. He appears to have been as stoical 
 and indifferent and unsympathetic as a veri- 
 table Indian ; and how he hunted without 
 trap or gun, and fished without hook or 
 
THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 15 
 
 snare ! Everywhere the wild drew him. He 
 liked the telegraph, because it was a kind of 
 seolian harp ; the wind blowing upon it made 
 wild, sweet music. He liked the railroad 
 through his native town, because it was the 
 wildest road he knew of : it only made deep 
 cuts into and through the hills. " On it are 
 no houses nor foot-travellers. The travel on 
 it does not disturb me. The woods are left 
 to hang over it. Though straight, it is wild 
 in its accompaniments, keeping all its raw 
 edges. Even the laborers on it are not like 
 other laborers." One day he passed a little 
 boy in the street who had on a home-made 
 cap of a woodchuck's skin, and it completely 
 filled his eye. He makes a delightful note 
 about it in his journal. That was the kind 
 of cap to have, — "a perfect little Idyl, as 
 they say." Any wild trait unexpectedly 
 cropping out in any of the domestic animals 
 pleased him immensely. The crab-apple was 
 liis favorite apple, because of its beauty and 
 
16 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 perfume. He perhaps never tried to ride a 
 wild horse, but such an exploit was in keep- 
 ing with his genius. 
 
 Thoreau hesitated to call himself a natu- 
 ralist. That was too tame : he would per- 
 haps have been content to have been an 
 Indian naturalist. He says in this journal, 
 and with much truth and force, " Man cannot 
 afford to be a naturalist, 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." When he was applied to by the 
 secretary of the Association for the Advance- 
 ment of Science, at Washington, for informa- 
 tion as to the particular branch of science he 
 was most interested in, he confesses he was 
 ashamed to answer for fear of exciting ridi- 
 cule. But he says, "If it had been the 
 secretary of an association of which Plato or 
 Aristotle was the president, I should not 
 
THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 17 
 
 have hesitated to describe my studies at 
 ODce and particularly." " The fact is, I am 
 a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural 
 philosopher to boot." Indeed, what Thoreau 
 was finally after in nature was something 
 ulterior to science, something ulterior to 
 poetry, something ulterior to philosophy; it 
 was that vague something which he calls 
 44 the higher law," and which eludes all 
 direct statement. He went to Nature as to 
 an oracle ; and though he sometimes, indeed 
 very often, questioned her as a naturalist 
 and a poet, yet there was always another 
 question in his mind. He ransacked the 
 country about Concord in all seasons and 
 weathers, and at all times of the day and 
 night ; he delved into the ground, he probed 
 the swamps, he searched the waters, he dug 
 into woodchuck holes, into muskrats' dens, 
 into the retreats of the mice and squirrels ; 
 he saw every bird, heard every sound, found 
 every wild-flower, and brought home many a 
 
18 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 
 
 fresh bit of natural history ; but he was 
 always searching for something he did not 
 find. This search of his for the transcen- 
 dental, the unfindable, the wild that will not 
 be caught, he has set forth in a beautiful 
 parable in " Walden : " — 
 
 " I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and 
 a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. 
 Many are the travellers I have spoken con- 
 cerning them, describing their tracks, and 
 what calls they answered to. I have met 
 one or two who had heard the hound, and 
 the tramp of the horse, and even seen the 
 dove disappear behind a cloud; and they 
 seemed as anxious to recover them as if they 
 had lost them themselves." 
 
 JOHN BURROUGHS. 
 
II. 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 21 
 
 II. 
 
 WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 
 
 If Blake was not a great master, he had in 
 him certain elements that go to the making 
 of one. Often these were beyond his own 
 control. One does not need to be a painter 
 or a poet to see, in his extraordinary work, 
 that he frequently was the servant rather 
 than the master; that he was swept away, 
 like his own Elijah, by the horses and chariot 
 of fire, and that when, like Paul, he reached 
 the third heaven, whether he was in the 
 body or out of it he could not tell. This 
 was not so at all times. The conception and 
 execution of his " Job " are massive, pow- 
 erful, sublime, maintained throughout the 
 series. " The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" 
 
22 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 
 
 is a wonderful, a fearlessly imaginative, pro- 
 duction. But much of his labor with pen 
 or pencil does not show that union of genius 
 with method which declares the master. He 
 does not always sit above the thunder: he 
 is enrapt, whirled, trembling in the electric 
 vortex of a cloud. 
 
 What is this, you say, but to be the more 
 inspired ? True, no man ever lived who had, 
 at intervals, a more absolute revelation. He 
 was obedient to the heavenly vision; but 
 great masters, obeying it, find it in harmony 
 with their own will and occasion. They 
 have, moreover, the power to discern be- 
 tween false and foolish prophecies, — be- 
 tween the monitions from a deity, and those 
 from the limbo of dreams, delusions, and 
 bewildered souls. 
 
 Did Blake see the apparitions he claimed 
 to see? Did the heads of Edward and 
 Wallace, and the Man that built the Pyra- 
 mids, rise at his bidding, like the phantoms 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 23 
 
 summoned for Macbeth? I have no doubt 
 of it. Neither, I think, will painters doubt 
 it; for I suspect that they also have such 
 visions, — they who are born with the sense 
 that makes visible to the inward eye the 
 aspect of forms and faces which they have 
 imagined or composed, and with the faculty 
 that retains them until the art of reproduc- 
 tion has done its service. We, who are not 
 painters, at times see visions with our 
 clouded eyes, — one face swiftly blotting 
 out another, as if in mockery at our power- 
 lessness to capture and depict them. 
 
 Men like Swedenborg and Blake, sensitive 
 in every fibre and exalted by mysticism, ac- 
 cept as direct revelation the visions which 
 other leaders understand to be the concep- 
 tions of their own faculty, and utilize in the 
 practice of their art. 
 
 One of Blake's masterly elements was 
 individuality. His drawings are so original 
 as to startle us: they seem like pictures 
 
24 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 from some new-discovered world, and require 
 time for our just appreciation of their unique 
 beauty, weirdness, and power. 
 
 Another element was faith, — unbounded 
 faith in his religion, his mission, and the way 
 revealed to him. To say that he had faith 
 is to say also that he believed in himself; 
 for his ecstatic piety and reverence and his 
 most glorious visions were the unconscious 
 effluence of his own nature. And that a 
 poet or an artist should have faith is most 
 vital and essential. He cannot be a mere 
 agnostic. The leaders have had various 
 beliefs, but each has held fast to his own. 
 Take the lowest grade of Shakespeare's con- 
 victions: he believed in royalty and the 
 divine right of kings. His kings, then, are 
 chiefs indeed, hedged with divinity, and 
 speaking in the kingliest diction of any 
 language or time. If I were asked to name 
 the most grievous thing in modern art, I 
 should say it is the lack of some kind of 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 25 
 
 faith. Doubt, distrust, the question "What 
 is the use ? " make dim the canvas, and bur- 
 den many a lyre. The new faith looks to 
 science and the reign of law. Very well : 
 these must breed its inspiration, as in time 
 they will. But the processes of reason are 
 slower than the childish instincts of an early 
 and poetic age. 
 
 Blake had the true gift of expression : he 
 was not merely learned, but inventive, in 
 his methods of drawing, etching, and color. 
 Here, and in his talks concerning art, he 
 showed power and wisdom enough to equip 
 a host of ordinary draughtsmen. He was 
 mad, only in the sense that gave the clown 
 warrant for saying all Englishmen are mad ; 
 only when he left the field in which he was 
 thoroughly grounded, for speculations in 
 which he was self-trained and half-trained. 
 It is useless, however, to wonder what such 
 an one might have been: he was what he 
 was, and as great as he could be. There is 
 
26 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 
 
 no gainsaying his marvellous and instant 
 imagination. He saw not the sunrise, but 
 an innumerable company of the angelic host, 
 crying, " Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God 
 Almighty ! " Heaven and Hell are spirits, 
 alike naked and alike clothed with beauty, 
 rushing together in eternal love. Job and 
 his friends are almost pre-Adamite in mould 
 and visage. His daughters are indeed they 
 of whom we are told that there were not 
 found others so fair in all the land. Jehovah 
 himself came within Blake's vision : the 
 dreamer walked not only with sages and 
 archangels and Titans, but with the very 
 God. 
 
 Among his other qualities were a surpris- 
 ingly delicate fancy, human tenderness and 
 pity, industry and fertility in the extreme. 
 He had ideas of right and government, and 
 was grandly impatient of dulness and of 
 hypocrisy in life or method. Finally, even 
 his faults, and the grotesqueness which re- 
 
WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 27 
 
 peatedly brings his mark below the highest, 
 add to the fascination that attends the re- 
 vival and study of this artist. All that I 
 say of his drawings applies in many respects 
 to his rhymed and unrhymed verse. But his 
 special gift was the draughtsman's. It 
 would not be correct to say that he often 
 hesitated with the pen but never with the 
 pencil ; since, whether as an artist or as a 
 maker of songs and " prophetic books," his 
 product was bold and unstinted: but his 
 grotesque errors are found more frequently 
 in his poetry than in his designs, while his 
 most original and exquisite range of verse 
 is far below that attained by him in his 
 works of outline and color. 
 
 These are the merest, the most fragment- 
 ary impressions of a man whom some have 
 dismissed with a phrase, terming him a sub- 
 lime madman, and concerning whom others 
 — poets and critics of a subtle and poetic 
 type — have written essay upon essay, or 
 
28 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 deemed whole volumes too brief for their 
 glowing studies of his genius. If he did 
 not found a school, it may almost be said 
 that a modern school has founded itself upon 
 the new understanding of his modes and 
 purpose. But in copying the external quali- 
 ties of Blake, it does not follow that his 
 self-elected pupils are animated by his genius, 
 rapture, and undaunted faith. 
 
 EDMUND C. STEDMAN. 
 
III. 
 
 DEATH OF CARLYLE. 
 
 \ 
 
DEATH OF CARLYLE. 31 
 
 m. 
 
 DEATH OF CARLYLE. 
 
 And so the flame of the lamp, after long 
 wasting and flickering, has gone out entirely. 
 
 As a representative author, a literary fig- 
 ure, no man else will bequeath to the future 
 more significant hints of our stormy era, its 
 fierce paradoxes, its din, and its struggling 
 parturition periods, than Carlyle. He be- 
 longs to our own branch of the stock too, — 
 neither Latin nor Greek, but altogether 
 Gothic. Rugged, mountainous, volcanic, he 
 was himself more a French Revolution than 
 any of his volumes. 
 
 In some respects, so far in the nineteenth 
 century, the best-equipt, keenest mind, even 
 from the college point of view, of all Brit- 
 
32 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 ain ; only lie had an ailing body. Dyspep- 
 sia is to be traced in every page, and now 
 and then fills the page. One may include 
 among the lessons of his life, — even though 
 that life stretched to amazing length, — how 
 behind the tally of genius and morals stands 
 the stomach, and gives a sort of casting 
 vote. 
 
 Two conflicting agonistic elements seem 
 to have contended in the man, sometimes 
 pulling him different ways, like wild horses. 
 He was a cautious, conservative Scotchman, 
 fully aware what a foetid gas-bag much of 
 modern radicalism is; but then his great 
 heart . demanded reform, demanded change, 
 — an always sympathetic, always human 
 heart, often terribly at odds with his scorn- 
 ful brain. 
 
 No author ever put so much wailing and 
 despair into his books, sometimes palpable, 
 oftener latent. He reminds me of that pas- 
 sage in Young's poems, where, as Death 
 
DEATH OF CARLYLE. 33 
 
 presses closer and closer for his prey, the 
 Soul rushes hither and thither, appealing, 
 shrieking, berating, to escape the general 
 doom. 
 
 Of shortcomings, even positive blur-spots, 
 from an American point of view, he had 
 serious share ; but this is no time for speci- 
 fying them. When we think how great 
 changes never go by jumps in any depart- 
 ment of our universe, but that long prep- 
 arations, processes, awakenings, are indis- 
 pensable, Carlyle was the most serviceable 
 democrat of the age. 
 
 How he splashes like leviathan in the seas 
 of modern literature and politics ! Doubt- 
 less, respecting the latter, one needs first to 
 realize, from actual observation, the squalor, 
 vice, and doggedness ingrained in the bulk- 
 population of the British Islands, with the 
 red-tape, the fatuity, the flunkyism every- 
 where, to understand the last meaning in his 
 
34 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 
 
 Accordingly, though he was no chartist or 
 radical, I consider Carlyle's by far the most 
 indignant comment or protest anent the 
 fruits of feudalism to-day in Great Britain, 
 — the increasing poverty and degradation of 
 the homeless, landless twenty millions, while 
 a few thousands, or rather a few hundreds, 
 possess the entire soil, the money, and the 
 fat berths. Trade and shipping, and clubs 
 and culture, and prestige, and guns, and a 
 fine select class of gentry and aristocracy, 
 with every modern improvement, cannot 
 begin to salve or defend such stupendous 
 hoggishness. 
 
 For the last three years we in America 
 have had transmitted glimpses of Carlyle's 
 prostration and bodily decay, — pictures of 
 a thin-bodied, lonesome, wifeless, childless, 
 very old man, lying on a sofa, kept out of 
 bed by indomitable will, but of late never 
 well enough to take the open air. News of 
 this sort was brought us last fall by the sick 
 
DEATH OF CARLYLE. 35 
 
 man's neighbor, Moncure Conway; and I 
 have noted it from time to time in brief 
 descriptions in the papers. A week ago I 
 read such an item just before I started out 
 for my customary evening stroll between 
 eight and nine. 
 
 In the fine, cold night, unusually clear 
 (Feb. 5, '81), as I walked some open 
 grounds adjacent, the condition of Carlyle, 
 and his approaching — perhaps even then 
 actual — death, filled me with thoughts, 
 eluding statement, and curiously blending 
 with the scene. The planet Venus, an hour 
 high in the west, with all her volume and 
 lustre recovered (she has been shorn and 
 languid for nearly a year), including an 
 additional sentiment I never noticed before 
 — not merely voluptuous, Paphian, steeping, 
 fascinating — now with calm, commanding, 
 dazzling seriousness and hauteur — the Milo 
 Venus now. Upward to the zenith, Jupiter, 
 Saturn, and the moon past her quarter, trail- 
 
36 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 ing in procession, with the Pleiades follow- 
 ing, and the constellation Taurus, and red 
 Aldebaran. Not a cloud in heaven. Orion 
 strode through the south-east, with his glit- 
 tering belt ; and a trifle below hung the sun 
 of the night, Sirius. Every star dilated, 
 more vitreous, nearer than usual. Not as in 
 some clear nights when the larger stars 
 entirely outshine the rest. Every little star 
 or cluster just as distinctly visible, and just 
 as nigh. Berenice's Hair showing every 
 gem, and new ones. To the north-east and 
 north the Sickle, the Goat and Kids, Cassi- 
 opeia, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dip- 
 pers. 
 
 While through the whole of this silent 
 indescribable show, enclosing and bathing 
 my whole receptivity, ran the thought of 
 Carlyle dying. (To soothe and spiritualize 
 and, as far as may be, solve the mysteries of 
 death and genius, consider them under the 
 stars at midnight.) 
 
DEATH OF CARLYLE. 37 
 
 And now that he has gone hence, can it 
 be that Thomas Carlyle, soon to chemically 
 dissolve in ashes and by winds, remains an 
 identity still? In ways perhaps eluding all 
 the statements, lore, and speculations of ten 
 thousand years, — eluding all possible state- 
 ments to mortal sense, — does he yet exist, a 
 definite, vital being, a spirit, an individual, — 
 perhaps now wafted in space among those 
 stellar sytems, which, suggestive and limit- 
 less as they are, merely edge more limitless, 
 far more suggestive systems ? 
 
 I have no doubt of it. In silence, of a fine 
 night, such questions are answered to the 
 soul, the best answers that can be given. 
 With me too, when depressed by some spe- 
 cially sad event, or tearing problem, I wait 
 till I go out under the stars for the last 
 voiceless satisfaction. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
IV. 
 
 DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 
 / 
 
DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 41 
 
 IV. 
 
 DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 
 
 I have just returned from a couple of 
 weeks down in some primitive woods where 
 I love to go occasionally away from parlors, 
 pavements, and the newspapers and maga- 
 zines ; and where, of a clear forenoon, deep 
 in the shade of pines and cedars, and a tan- 
 gle of old laurel-trees and vines, the news of 
 Longfellow's death first reached me. For 
 want of any thing better, let me lightly 
 twine a sprig of the sweet ground-ivy, trail- 
 ing so plentifully through the dead leaves at 
 my feet, with reflections of that half-hour 
 alone, there in the silence, the mottled light, 
 'mid those earth-smells of the Jersey woods 
 in spring, and lay it as my contribution on 
 the dead bard's grave. 
 
42 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 Longfellow in his voluminous works seems 
 to me not only to be eminent in the style 
 and forms of poetical expression that mark 
 the present age (an idiocrasy, almost a sick- 
 ness, of verbal melody), but to bring what 
 is always dearest as poetry to the general 
 human heart and taste, and probably must be 
 so in the nature of things. He is certainly 
 the sort of bard and counteractant most 
 needed for our materialistic, self-assertive, 
 money-worshipping, Anglo-Saxon races, and 
 especially for the present age in America, — 
 an age tyrannically regulated with refer- 
 ence to the manufacturer, the merchant, the 
 financier, the politician, and the day work- 
 man ; for whom and among whom he comes 
 as the poet of melody, courtesy, deference, — 
 poet of the mellow twilight of the past in 
 Italy, Germany, Spain, and in Northern 
 Europe, poet of all sympathetic gentleness, 
 and universal poet of women and young 
 people. I should have to think long if I 
 
DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 43 
 
 were asked to name the man who has done 
 more, and in more valuable directions, for 
 America. 
 
 I doubt if there ever was before such a 
 fine intuitive judge and selecter of poems. 
 His translations of many German and Scan- 
 dinavian pieces are said to be better than 
 the vernaculars. He does not urge or lash. 
 His influence is like good drink or air. He 
 is not tepid either, but always vital, with 
 flavor, motion, grace. He strikes a splendid 
 average, and does not sing exceptional pas- 
 sions, or humanity's jagged escapades. He 
 is not revolutionary, brings nothing offensive 
 or new, does not deal hard blows. On the 
 contrary, his songs soothe and heal, or, if 
 they excite, it is a -healthy and agreeable 
 excitement. His very anger is gentle, is 
 at second hand (as in " The Quadroon Girl," 
 and "The Witnesses"). 
 
 There is no undue element of pensiveness 
 in Longfellow's strains. Even in the early 
 
44 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 translations, the " Manrique," the movement 
 is as of strong and steady wind or tide hold- 
 ing up and buoying. Death is not avoided 
 through his many themes ; but there is some- 
 thing almost winning in his original verses 
 and renderings on that dread subject — as, 
 closing " The Happiest Land " dispute, — 
 
 " And then the landlord's daughter 
 Up to heaven raised her hand, 
 And said, « Ye may no more contend,— 
 There lies the happiest land 1 ' " 
 
 To the ungracious complaint-charge (as 
 by Margaret Fuller many years ago, and 
 several times since), of his want of racy 
 nativity and special originality, I shall only 
 say that America and the world may well be 
 reverently thankful — can never be thankful 
 enough — for any such singing-bird vouch- 
 safed out of the centuries, without asking 
 that the notes be different from those of 
 other songsters; adding what I have heard 
 
DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 45 
 
 Longfellow himself say, that ere the New 
 World can be worthily original, and an- 
 nounce herself and her own heroes, she must 
 be well saturated with the originality of 
 others, and respectfully consider the heroes 
 that lived before Agamemnon. 
 
 Without jealousies, without mean pas- 
 sions, never did the personality, character, 
 daily and yearly life of a poet, more steadily 
 and truly assimilate his own loving, cultured, 
 guileless, courteous ideal, and exemplify it. 
 In the world's arena he had some special 
 sorrows ; but he had prizes, triumphs, rec- 
 ognitions, the grandest. 
 
 Extensive and heartfelt as is to-day, and 
 has been for a long while, the fame of Long- 
 fellow, it is probable, nay certain, that years 
 hence it will be wider and deeper. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 Camden, N. J., April 3, '82. 
 
V. 
 GEORGE ELIOT AND THE NOVEL. 
 
GEORGE ELIOT AND TEE NOVEL. 49 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT AND THE NOVEL. 
 
 Every writer of the first rank makes 
 some modification in his genre. The modern 
 French comedy was created by Moliere ; the 
 English drama changed its form and aims 
 in the hands of Shakespeare ; the French 
 stage was turned upside down by the ap- 
 pearance of "Hernani." A like change, I 
 take it, far-reaching in its effect, has begun 
 to take place in the modern novel since the 
 " Scenes of Clerical Life " and " Adam 
 Bede " appeared to a public still enamoured 
 of the historical romances of Walter Scott. 
 I know that some of our ablest critics have 
 thought that George Eliot, though a great 
 writer, was not great as a novelist, according 
 
50 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 
 
 to the common standard. Neither is Shake- 
 speare a great dramatist according to the old 
 classical standard. The novel is the most 
 flexible form of literature. There is hardly 
 such a thing as a legitimate and an illegiti- 
 mate novel. I suppose that even " Wilhelm 
 Meister," that most structureless work of 
 genius, is a novel. A species of writing 
 that can contain Mr. Roe's homiletic tales, 
 Judge Tourgee's picturesque political bro- 
 chures, Lord Beaconsfield's autobiographies 
 and malice, Spielhagen's weird nightmares, 
 and Erckmann - Chatrian's photographs, is 
 certainly the most catholic of literary gen- 
 era. But it needs no latitudinarianism to 
 include George Eliot's works. To my 
 mind, it is as a novelist that she is great- 
 est. Ah, but her stories are not dra- 
 matic, it is objected ! But who limited the 
 novel to a dramatic form ? Is Charles Reade 
 the normal novelist? Must there always 
 be tableaux with red lights ? Fielding, the 
 
GEORGE ELIOT AND THE NOVEL. 51 
 
 creator of the novel, was not "dramatic." 
 But open " Daniel Deronda " at the incom- 
 parable river scene, where Deronda rescues 
 Mira, and tell me by what scene in any- 
 novel it is surpassed in artistic interest? 
 Read on to the meeting of the sweet lost 
 little Jewess with the Meyricks; or take 
 Gwendolen's confession to Deronda ; or go 
 to Middlemarch, and see Dorothea whisper- 
 ing confidences in the ear of Lydgate's wife. 
 These scenes live ineffaceably in the memory, 
 and are worth a thousand dramatic denoti- 
 ments of the artificial sort. 
 
 But what has this novelist of the first 
 rank taught those who come after her about 
 her art? What peculiarities of George 
 Eliot's are likely to leave a strong impress 
 after her? I answer, She, of all novelists, 
 has attacked the profound problems of our 
 existence. She has taught that the mystery 
 worthy of a great artist is not the shallow 
 mystery of device, but the infinite perspec- 
 
52 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 tive of the great, dark enigmas of human 
 nature; that there is a deeper interest in 
 human life seen in the modern, scientific 
 daylight, than in life viewed through a mist 
 of ancient and dying superstitions ; that the 
 interest of human character transcends the 
 interest of invented circumstances; that 
 the epic story of a hero and a heroine is not 
 so grand as the natural history of a com- 
 munity. She, first of all, has made cross 
 sections of modern life, and shown us the 
 busy human hive in the light of a great 
 artistic and philosophic intellect. She has 
 not sought to see men in the dim haze of a 
 romantic past, but to bring men into close 
 vision who by difference of race, condition, 
 or the lapse of time, were far away. George 
 Eliot has made the typical novel of this age 
 of scientific thought and growing unbelief in 
 the supernatural. Knights, corsairs, bucca- 
 neers, highwaymen, witches, charms, ghosts, 
 miracles, second-sight, — these are the worn- 
 
GEORGE ELIOT AND THE NOVEL. 53 
 
 out stage property of the past. But George 
 Eliot, more than any other, has shown that 
 romance, so far from dying under the influ- 
 ence of the stern scepticism of our time, 
 has had opened to it a new and more vigor- 
 ous life. She has made the great ruthless 
 forces of nature into dramatis personal, — not 
 writing books of fortune, but books of fate. 
 Now, the book of fate is the book of failure, 
 partial or entire. The man seeks to climb 
 to the sun, but at most he attains to the 
 mountain-top, or, perchance, the church- 
 steeple; or he falls, and breaks his neck. 
 The book of fate has few " dramatic " denotfr 
 ments : nevertheless it is the sublimest book 
 of all, and the most interesting, if we learn 
 to read it rightly. A literary primate has 
 come and gone. We must revise our notion 
 of the novel. It has taken on new possibili- 
 ties, and received a new impress. 
 
 EDWARD EGGLESTON. 
 
VI. 
 
 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 y 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 57 
 
 VI. 
 
 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 I AM frequently struck with the difference 
 between an impression as it exists in my 
 mind, and the same impression as it struggles 
 through the best expression that I can give 
 it on paper. I have never been able to satisfy 
 myself with any thing I wrote about a book 
 or a person ; for there is that about books 
 and persons which one feels, and very deeply 
 perhaps, but which one cannot define, even 
 shallowly. Poe wrote an ingenious little 
 essay, in which he maintained the power of 
 words ; but the time came when he dis- 
 claimed his mad pride of intellectuality, and 
 confessed his impotence to utter the un- 
 thought-like thoughts which two words, — 
 
58 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 two foreign, soft dissyllables, — stirred from 
 out the abysses of his heart. I desire to 
 state, in what is to follow, the estimation in 
 which I hold the genius of Mrs. Burnett : 
 but I am not at all certain that I shall suc- 
 ceed in doing so; for much that I wish to 
 say will either escape me before I can grasp 
 it, or will refuse to be put in words. Criti- 
 cism may be an art, but it is not an exact 
 science. It perceives intellectual qualities 
 which it cannot classify; for, the more it 
 exercises itself upon them, the more they 
 defy analysis. They are elusive, shadowy, 
 — emotions, not thoughts ; emanations of 
 the original soul whence they proceed, that 
 obey no will but their own in revealing 
 themselves to the souls of others, and they 
 choose their own time for that. 
 
 There is a quality in the work of Mrs. 
 Burnett which reminds me of Dickens, but 
 nothing which reminds me of Dickens's man- 
 ner. Roughly speaking, I should say it was 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 59 
 
 a profound sympathy with, and an intimate 
 knowledge of, what English statisticians call 
 the lower classes, and American statisticians, 
 the democratic masses — in other words, the 
 people, the poor. I should also say that she 
 was drawn to them in her early years, with- 
 out knowing how, or caring why. They 
 had, I think, the same attractions for her 
 that they had for the young Shakespeare, who 
 mastered the humors of clowns and consta- 
 bles long before he mastered the emotions of 
 kings, queens, and lovers ; and that they 
 had for the young Dickens, who tried his 
 " 'prentice han' " on every-day characters. 
 The bent of her genius directed her girlish 
 observation toward the miners of Lancashire, 
 as it directed her maiden observation, at a 
 later period, toward the mean whites of 
 North Carolina. There have been great 
 writers to whom the people were of much 
 less account than they were to Shakespeare, 
 or Scott, or Dickens. Balzac was one of 
 
60 ESS ATS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 these, Thackeray another, and Hawthorne a 
 third. Not that they did not introduce 
 them in their stories, when they were needed 
 for artistic purposes, but that they did not 
 handle them as if they loved them — as Wal- 
 ton said of the angler's worm. There may 
 be a wider scope and a deeper philosophy in 
 the writings of this latter class; they may 
 be more metropolitan, more national, more 
 cosmical even, if the phrase may be allowed ; 
 but they are apt to lack a charm which is 
 characteristic of provincial writing, of which 
 the songs of Burns and Miss Blamire are 
 good examples in verse, and the stories of 
 Mr. Cable and Mrs. Burnett in prose. 
 
 Mrs. Burnett discovers gracious secrets in 
 rough and forbidding natures, — the sweet- 
 ness that often underlies their bitterness, — 
 the soul of goodness in things evil. She im- 
 presses me as understanding her suffering 
 and sinning characters as fully as Dickens 
 ever understood his, — as having a more 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 61 
 
 genuine affection for them, and as never at 
 any time caricaturing them. I find no im- 
 possibilities among them, no monsters of light 
 and darkness, and no attempt to capture my 
 sensibilities by trickery. Her pathos, when 
 she is pathetic, is so natural that I am not 
 ashamed of the tears in my eyes; and her 
 humor, when she is humorous, is so unforced 
 that I do not despise myself for laughing at 
 it. I never question her domination over 
 me when I am reading her books ; and when 
 I close them it is not to criticise, but to 
 admire. I do not mean to say that she has 
 not faults, and that I do not feel them : far 
 from it. There are chapters in " That Lass 
 o' Lowrie's " which are tantalizing with un- 
 fulfilment; they stop when they should go 
 on, bringing up suddenly like balky horses. 
 What is the matter here ? I ask myself. Did 
 Mrs. Burnett write when she ought not to 
 have written, — when the soul was in a fer- 
 ment, as Keats says, the character undecided, 
 
62 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 the ambition thick-sighted, — or did she lop 
 away her work to bring it within editorial 
 requirements ? There are branches which the 
 pruning-knife would seem to have trimmed, 
 and gaps which only a broadaxe could have 
 made. I feel these faults, I say, and feel, 
 besides, a certain indecision of invention 
 here and there : but I never feel that the 
 story is not true to the nature it depicts; 
 that it is not true to the imagination of the 
 writer ; and that, with all its faults, it is not 
 admirable. 
 
 Mrs. Burnett seems to have an intuitive 
 perception of character, and what belongs to 
 it. If we apprehend her personages, and I 
 think we do clearly, it is not because she 
 describes them to us, but because they reveal 
 themselves in their actions. She is not re- 
 sponsible for what they say or do, or not 
 more so than Thackeray would allow himself 
 to be for the love between Henry Esmond 
 and Lady Castlewood. " Why did you 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 63 
 
 marry them ? " asked Mrs. Jameson (I think 
 it was), whose sense of propriety was some- 
 how shocked by that incident. " I did not," 
 he answered : " they married themselves." 
 Mrs. Burnett's characters are as veritable as 
 Thackeray's ; though her range, of course, is 
 much narrower than his, as her sympathies 
 are more nearly allied to sentiment. The 
 word "sentimental," however, which so just- 
 ly describes the work of many lady novelists, 
 does not apply to her work ; though the word 
 " romantic," in its highest sense, does. She 
 has an impassioned mind, that conceives with 
 tenderness as well as strength. Only such 
 a mind could have conceived Jean Lowrie, 
 who, whether she follows Derrick in the 
 darkness, night after night, to protect him 
 from the wrath of her brutal father, or walks 
 her room crooning to the child of poor fool- 
 ish Liz, is alike womanly and alike noble. 
 She is a glorious creature, — elemental, 
 primitive, cast in the mould of the mothers 
 
64 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC- 
 
 of the race, — the daughters of Job, as they 
 live in the vigorous drawings of Blake, or 
 the daughters of men, whom the sons of 
 God saw were fair. She belongs to a sister- 
 hood of heroic heroines whom the novelists 
 of the period are fond of delineating (nota- 
 bly Mr. Charles Reade), but she overtops 
 them all in massive simplicity of character 
 and thorough womanhood. Very different, 
 but very lovely and touching, is that shy, sen- 
 sitive, rustic little lady, Louisiana Rogers; 
 and very charming and lovable is Miss O eta via 
 Bassett, who seemed to have a divine right to 
 embody the American girl abroad. The three 
 women of whom I have spoken represent 
 their sex, in a certain sense, in Mrs. Bur- 
 nett's three novels, " That Lass o' Lowrie's," 
 "Louisiana," and "A Fair Barbarian;" and 
 represent, also, the growth and change of her 
 intellect during the three years in which she 
 was writing them. Other women of hers 
 recur to my remembrance, though not with 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 65 
 
 the same vividness (I may mention, in pass- 
 ing, Esmeralda and Lodusky) ; and others, I 
 am sure, would recur to it if I had read her 
 early stories as they appeared in the maga- 
 zines, or if I could bring myself to make their 
 acquaintance now in certain unauthorized 
 books. As I do not remember her men with 
 the same distinctness as her women, I con- 
 clude that her strength hitherto has lain in 
 drawing the latter. I state this conclusion 
 for what it is worth, as tentative, and not 
 final; for I clo not accept the finality of 
 genius until it has gone down into the dark 
 and narrow house, nor even then when I be- 
 think me of " Denis Duval " and " Hyperion." 
 As I like to know something about the 
 lives of the writers whom I admire, I take it 
 for granted that the readers of Mrs. Burnett 
 will like to know something about her life. 
 I therefore proceed to tell them what I know 
 about it. It is not much. She was born on 
 Nov. 24, 1849, in Manchester, Eng., where 
 
66 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 she passed the first fifteen years of her life. 
 No particulars of her childhood have reached 
 me, except that, like Charlotte Bronte, she 
 developed a talent for improvising stories at 
 an early age, and that while at school she 
 wrote poems, and began to write novels. At 
 the close of our civil war her parents emi- 
 grated to the United States, and settled at 
 Newmarket, a small village in Eastern Ten- 
 nessee, some twenty-five miles from Knox- 
 ville. About a year later they removed to 
 Knoxville, where, at the age of sixteen, she 
 completed a story which she had planned, 
 and partly written, in her thirteenth year, 
 and sent it to a Boston periodical. It was 
 accepted, and an early insertion promised; 
 but, as the editor stated that no remuneration 
 could be given for it, she reclaimed it, and 
 sent it to " Godey's Lady's Book," where it 
 was published, paid for, and followed by 
 other stories. From Godey's she passed to 
 " Peterson's Magazine," for which she wrote 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 67 
 
 largely. The turning-point in her literary 
 fortunes was " Surly Tim's Trouble," an 
 English dialect story, which she sent to the 
 editor of " Scribner's Monthly." It was 
 published there ; and the writer, Miss Frances 
 Hodgson, was invited to furnish more stories, 
 which she hastened to do. About this time 
 (1873) Miss Hodgson married a young Ten- 
 nessee physician, and became Mrs. Burnett. 
 Her next work of importance was " That 
 Lass o' Lowrie's," which was published in 
 " Scribner's," and which made a great sensa- 
 tion, especially when it was issued in book 
 form. It was reprinted in England, where 
 of one edition alone about thirty thousand 
 copies were sold. It was burlesqued in 
 "Punch," and was dramatized and played 
 with success. Mrs. Burnett's subsequent 
 works are " Surly Tim and Other Stories " 
 (1877), "HaworthV (1879), " Louisiana " 
 (1880), and " A Fair Barbarian " (1881). 
 The latest work to which she has put her 
 
68 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 hand is a novel of Washington life, entitled 
 " Through One Administration," the mate- 
 rials for which have been gathered during a 
 residence of several years in the capital. 
 This story is now running as a serial in "The 
 Century." Just before the publication of 
 the first instalment (in the November num- 
 ber), Mrs. Burnett's dramatization of her 
 story of " Esmeralda " was produced at the 
 Madison-square Theatre. Its success is un- 
 questioned ; and it is important as indicating 
 the line in which her best work may be done. 
 
 R. H. STODDARD. 
 
VII. 
 
 THOREAU'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 
 
 / 
 
TEOBEAU'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 71 
 
 VII. 
 
 THOREAU'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 
 
 Soon after the death of Miss Sophia 
 Thoreau, in October, 1876, I received from 
 her executor in Maine, where she died, her 
 brother Henry's copy of " The Dial," in four 
 volumes, which she had asked me to keep in 
 memory of her and of him. Opening the 
 volumes, I found in one of them a sheet of 
 verses in Henry Thoreau's handwriting, and 
 evidently copied out of his commonplace- 
 book many years ago. Some of them have 
 never been printed, and all are arranged in a 
 manner that may suggest how this man of a 
 great and peculiar genius regarded his own 
 poems. He seldom published any except as 
 parts of his prose essays, where they occur 
 
72 ESS ATS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 either as choruses, or hymns, or as word- 
 pictures to illustrate more clearly the move- 
 ment of his thought. It is true he allowed 
 several of his poems to appear in " The Dial," 
 beginning with " Sympathy " in the first 
 number, which Mr. Emerson has reprinted 
 with a few more at the end of his selection 
 from Thoreau's letters. But these were 
 probably obtained from him by friends who 
 desired to see them printed, after reading 
 them in his manuscripts. I have heard it 
 said that the earliest poem he showed to any 
 friend was "Sic Vita," which was printed 
 years afterward in " The Dial," and then in 
 the "Week." This was written on a sheet 
 of paper that was wrapped round a bunch of 
 violets, tied loosely with a straw, and 
 thrown into a lady's window. It was not 
 deemed worthy of a place among those 
 selected for printing in 1865 (though it had 
 been read at his funeral by Mr. Alcott in 
 1862), and is indeed far less striking than 
 
THOREAU 'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 73 
 
 his " Inspiration," which is perhaps his 
 longest poem ; but only a few extracts from 
 this appeared during the author's lifetime. 
 Thoreau had much skill in selecting from 
 his own verses; and no doubt these frag- 
 ments were the best lines in the poem, 
 which consists of twenty-one stanzas. Mr. 
 Emerson printed seven of these stanzas, 
 omitting the less significant parts, but also 
 omitting much which the author would have 
 deemed essential to the full statement of his 
 thought. Having received the manuscript 
 from Miss Thoreau in 1863, I thought it 
 right to print it entire in the Boston " Com- 
 monwealth," just as it was left by the poet. 
 Any differences noticed between the lines as 
 there given, and as published by Mr. Emer- 
 son, are caused by changes made by another 
 hand. Miss Thoreau did not object to these 
 slight changes ; and in regard to one short 
 essay, entitled "Prayers," which she pub- 
 lished in the last collection of her brother's 
 
74 ESSAYS FRO 31 THE CRITIC 
 
 papers that was made by her, she fell into a 
 singular error. This essay is not Henry 
 Thoreau's at all, but Mr. Emerson's. It 
 contains some verses of Thoreau's, — which 
 in his manuscripts are entitled " Prayer," — 
 but nothing else from his hand. The essay 
 was originally published in " The Dial " for 
 July, 1842 ; and, as the verses there appear 
 in a fuller form than that given below, I as- 
 sume that the sheet of verses found in my 
 " Dial " was written out, in the form which 
 came to me, some time before 1842, or at 
 least twenty years previous to Thoreau's 
 death (May 6, 1862). In this form it is 
 simply a collection of rhymed sentences, 
 each with its title, like epigrams ; and this, I 
 conclude, was the way that Thoreau's verses 
 were made. They might be, and often were, 
 afterward joined together in a connected 
 poem ; and sometimes the framework of this 
 poem was arranged beforehand, as in the 
 piece called " The Fisher's Boy," contain- 
 
THOREAU'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 76 
 
 ing the line so well known and so often 
 quoted, — 
 
 " My life is like a stroll upon the beach." 
 
 After tins long preface, let us come to the 
 sheet of verses : — 
 
 OMNIPRESENCE. 
 
 Who equalleth the coward's haste, 
 And still inspires the faintest heart; 
 "Whose lofty fame is not disgraced, 
 Though it assume the lowest part. 
 
 INSPIRATION. 
 
 If thou wilt but stand by my ear, 
 
 When through the field thy anthem's rung, 
 
 When that is done I will not fear 
 
 But the same power will abet my tongue. 
 
 PRAYER. 
 
 Great God ! I ask thee for no meaner pelf, 
 Than that I may not disappoint myself ; 
 That in my conduct I may soar as high 
 As I can now discern with this clear eye ; 
 That my weak hand may equal my firm faith, 
 And my life practise more than my tongue saith ; 
 
76 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 That my low conduct may not show, 
 Nor my relenting lines, 
 That I thy purpose did not know, 
 Or overrated thy designs. 
 
 MISSION. 
 
 I've searched my faculties around, 
 
 To learn why life to me was lent : 
 
 I will attend the faintest sound, 
 
 And then declare to man what God hath meant. 
 
 DELAY. 
 
 No generous action can delay 
 
 Or thwart our higher, steadier aims ; 
 
 But if sincere and true are they, 
 
 It will arouse our sight, and nerve our frames. 
 
 THE VIREO. 
 
 Upon the lofty elm-tree sprays 
 The Vireo rings the changes meet, 
 During these trivial summer days, 
 Striving to lift our thoughts above the street. 
 
 MORNING. 
 
THOREAU 'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 11 
 
 Here the sheet abruptly ends, and what 
 was to be said about "Morning" we may 
 never know. The quatrain describing the 
 vireo singing in the elms above a Concord 
 street was printed in " The Dial " for July, 
 1842; another indication that these verses 
 are of earlier date than that. Perhaps they 
 may be found among the "verses in the long 
 book," to which Thoreau refers by pencil- 
 notes in his copy of " The Dial," if indeed 
 the " long book " may not have been long 
 ago destroyed. For during his last illness, 
 in the winter of 1861-62, Henry Thoreau 
 told me, in one of the conversations we had 
 in his sick-room, that he had once destroyed 
 many of his verses, because they did not 
 please the friend (Mr. Emerson) to whose 
 eye he had submitted them; but he added, 
 "I am sorry now that I burned them, for 
 perhaps they were better than he thought." 
 I doubt not they were, and am anxious now 
 that every line he left behind him should be 
 
78 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 printed ; for he had examined his own work 
 with great care, and certainly left 
 
 "No line which, dying, he could wish to blot." 
 
 Why, then, should his friends erase one, 
 or withhold it from publication? Even 
 those which do not rise into his loftiest mood 
 cast a tender light on his own life and char- 
 acter, which were far more sweet and amia- 
 ble than some have supposed. 
 
 F. B. SANBOKN. 
 
VIII. 
 
 EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 
 
 / 
 
EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 81 
 
 VIII. 
 
 EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 
 
 Emerson on the Superlative (in "The 
 Century") is the same Emerson we have 
 known of old. This is perhaps one of the 
 essays of his prime, as it is certainly on a 
 par with any of the chapters of his later 
 volumes. How he hates the superlative in 
 speech, the gas and insincerity of the popu- 
 lar orator ! When he went West a few 
 years ago, he said the only thing he saw that 
 equalled the brag was the Yosemite. This 
 was the kind of superlative he liked, — the 
 superlative of fact, — grandeur that beggared 
 comparison. 
 
 Yet Emerson is himself a master exag- 
 gerator, the lord of extremes, holding the 
 
82 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 zenith and the nadir in his two hands. But 
 at his best his superlative runs the other 
 way, — runs to excess of truth, rather than 
 to excess of form. Without adjective or 
 adverb, he reaches the superlative degree 
 by the sheer projectile force of his verbs 
 and nouns. It is the exaggeration of quality, 
 not of quantity; of essence, not of bulk. 
 His sentences are a steam-chest: the force 
 of expansion is there without the expansion ; 
 the gas is held by an iron grip, and made 
 to work. He praises a low style, moderate 
 statement ; but there must be a good many 
 pounds pressure to the square inch in the 
 low style that suits him. The rivet-heads 
 must be ready to fly, only they must not 
 fly on any account. Perfect control and 
 moderation though you are handling thunder- 
 bolts. 
 
 . If there is a difference between an extreme 
 statement and an exaggerated statement, 
 then we should say Emerson makes the 
 
EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 83 
 
 extreme statement, the compact, iron-bound, 
 high-pressure statement. There is never any 
 admixture of a lie, not the least taint of 
 insincerity, but always the plus, the pressure 
 of a purpose that would make the extreme 
 more available and submissive. The last 
 degree, the last limit of power, he wants; 
 but he wants it without striving or contor- 
 tion. He cuts no fantastic tricks before 
 high heaven, but he deals in plain speech 
 before the Olympian dignitaries. " There 
 is no god dare wrong a worm," he says 
 somewhere. Speaking for Brahma, he says 
 to the " meek lover of the good," " Find me, 
 and turn thy back on heaven." His rhetoric 
 is a search for an extreme, but for a safe and 
 well-clinched statement, — for the arousing 
 superlative, the superlative that freezes the 
 mercury, or — boils it. He likes an under- 
 statement when it is bold or stimulates by 
 what it omits ; as when the village father of 
 whom he speaks in this article gave as a 
 
84 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 toast at an agricultural fair, after the speaker 
 had finished his discourse, this sentiment, 
 " The orator of the day : his subject deserves 
 the attention of every farmer ; " or the boy 
 who on the top of the Catskill Mountains 
 said to his companion, " Come up here, 
 Tony, it looks pretty out-of-doors ; " and he 
 likes an over-statement when it is equally 
 bold, when it is a blow and not a word, a 
 double shot and not a blank cartridge. In 
 short, the statement must be forcible, whether 
 under or over. He says the low expression 
 is strong and agreeable. He means it is 
 agreeable when it is strong, — when it is full 
 of powder and bullet. This article on the 
 Superlative is a good example of Emerson's 
 Spartan exaggeration, his heroic hyperbole. 
 Speaking of a person with the superlative 
 temperament, he says, " If the talker lose a 
 tooth, he thinks the universal thaw and dis- 
 solution of things has come. Controvert 
 his opinion, and he cries, ; Persecution ! ' 
 
EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 85 
 
 and reckons himself with St. Barnabas, who 
 was sawed in two." He says " every favor- 
 ite is not a cherub, nor every cat a griffin, 
 nor each unpleasing person a dark diabolical 
 intriguer ; nor agonies executions, nor ecsta- 
 sies our daily bread." " The secrets of 
 death, judgment, or eternity are tedious 
 when recurring as minute-guns. Thousands 
 of people live and die who were never, on a 
 single occasion, hungry or thirsty, or furious 
 or terrified." But this tameness and monot- 
 ony is just what our philosopher would avoid 
 in speech. "The books say, 'It made my 
 hair stand on end ! ' Who, in our municipal 
 life, ever had such an experience ? " Yet 
 the phrase, when first used, was a sample 
 of the true Emersonian exaggeration. "It 
 froze my blood," too, he dislikes ; yet he has 
 used the phrase "the shudder of joy," and 
 in his poem on the " Titmouse," he says of 
 the severe cold that it " curdles the blood to 
 the marble bones." In one of his earlier 
 
86 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 essays lie speaks of that hunger of the soul 
 that could eat the solar system like ginger- 
 cake. " Religion and poetry," he says, speak- 
 ing of the superlative character and manners 
 of the Eastern races, " are all the civilization 
 of the Arab." The exaggeration of a strik- 
 ing and telling antithesis is always agreeable 
 to Emerson. " Dante," he says, in " Letters 
 and Social Aims," " was free imagination, — 
 all wings, — yet he wrote like Euclid." 
 " Turnpike is one thing," he says, speaking 
 of Dryden, " blue sky another." 
 
 Emerson's exaggeration, either way, up 
 or down, unlike that, say, of such a writer 
 as Victor Hugo, great as the latter is, always 
 strikes fire, always kindles the mind ; and we 
 get a glimpse of noble manners, or feel the 
 religious or else the poetic thrill. The 
 heroic quality lurks in every line he writes. 
 There is always the stimulus of great exam- 
 ple, — of that high and undaunted attitude 
 and the cheerful confronting of great odds, 
 
EMERSON AND TEE SUPERLATIVE. 87 
 
 which is like the reply of the Athenian 
 soldier to his Persian enemy, " Our arrows 
 will darken the sun," said the latter. " Then 
 we will fight in the shade," said the Greek. 
 
 JOHN BURROUGHS. 
 
IX. 
 A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 
 
A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 91 
 
 IX. 
 
 A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 
 
 If there be a Tenth Muse, let her be 
 known henceforth as the Muse of Spring 
 Poetry ! This is the season when the ed- 
 itor's waste-basket is filled to overflowing 
 with odes, sonnets, and nameless other spe- 
 cies of metrical composition in praise of the 
 god Yertumnus. The season which puts a 
 "spirit of youth in every thing" affects as 
 well the laity as the recognized priesthood 
 of poesy, and makes the usually discreet 
 dumb spirit break forth in unadvised dithy- 
 rambs. There may possibly be a singing 
 contagion in the atmosphere, — a dancing 
 of the air we breathe, which rhythmically 
 affects our pulse, and urges us to seek a 
 
92 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 vocal embodiment for our "organic num- 
 bers." It is certain that the most sponta- 
 neous couplet, inside or outside the rhyming 
 dictionary, is " spring " and " sing ; " and the 
 commonest bit of song, if its keynote be 
 spring, never falls into contempt or out of 
 good usage. Witness : — 
 
 April showers 
 
 Bring forth May flowers. 
 
 This is undoubtedly the briefest lyric ever 
 composed on the subject of spring ; but, for 
 any thing known to the contrary by philolo- 
 gists, it may have come down to us from the 
 remotest " Aryan antiquity." 
 
 Anacreon, whose three - stringed lyre 
 sounded only love, wine, and himself, makes 
 an agreeable exception when, for once, he 
 takes up the praise of spring. Very charm- 
 ing is the picture which the old pleasure- 
 lover gives us of the youthful season, as he 
 beheld it: a world of flowers; the Graces 
 
A COMPANY OF SPEING POETS. 93 
 
 dancing on the fresh green turf; the return 
 of the cranes; the sunshiny water with its 
 sailing ducks; the thrifty shoots of the 
 olive ; flowers, leaves, fruit, crowding the 
 same branches ; and, last of all, Bacchus and 
 himself rejoicing at the prospect of a great 
 grape-yield next autumn ! Anacreon was, 
 without question, the chief " spring poet " 
 of Teos: but he encountered no editorial 
 malison, for he seems to have had little 
 ambition for " rushing into print ; " on the 
 contrary, being quite content with private 
 recitals and the applause of his fellow bons 
 vivants. But poets of the South and Orient 
 could not, from the nature of the climate, 
 have known all the rich surprises and deli- 
 cate coquetries of the spring as they were 
 known to the bards of more northern lati- 
 tudes, where the changes of the year are 
 more emphatically marked. Early English 
 poetry, we may say, began with a melodious 
 somnambulism on a May morning of the 
 
94 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 fourteenth century. Chaucer was the first 
 " spring poet " of our tongue. There is but 
 one induction to nearly all his performances, 
 greeting to the springtime, and particularly 
 " observance to May." There were light 
 sleepers in those days, folk longing to go on 
 pilgrimages, and impatient for the coming 
 of daylight, like the birds themselves, as 
 Chaucer describes them in the Canterbury 
 Prologue : — 
 
 " And smale fowles maken melodie 
 That slepen al the night with open yhe." 
 
 It was on a " morne of May " that Palamon 
 first saw Emelie, who had risen early to do 
 honor to the day, and was walking in the 
 garden gathering flowers to make a " certeyn 
 gerland " for her head. Again, in the story 
 of the " Cuckow and the Nightingale," a 
 sleepless wight wanders through a grove in 
 the morning twilight, early in the month of 
 May. Unluckily for the success of his love- 
 
A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 95 
 
 suit, he hears the cuckoo sing before the 
 nightingale ; but, in partial compensation, he 
 finds a mysterious land " all white and 
 green," — grass-green, " ypoudred with dai- 
 sie." There he sits down among the flowers, 
 and listens to the singing of the birds. 
 
 The old dramatists are never happier than 
 when they draw their comparisons from 
 vernal nature. Shakespeare makes Prince 
 Florizel pay a pretty compliment to Perdita, 
 who is attired as the queen of the sheep- 
 shearing frolic. He tells her that she seems 
 
 "no shepherdess, but Flora 
 Peering in April's front." 
 
 In the course of the festivities, Perdita 
 
 wishes for some "flowers o' the spring," 
 
 suitable for her young companions, and 
 
 names the following: — 
 
 " Daffodils, 
 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 
 The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, 
 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, 
 
 Or Cytherea's breath." 
 
96 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 Other delicacies in this bouquet of spring 
 beauties are pale primroses, bold oxslips, the 
 crown imperial, lilies of all kinds, including 
 the flower-de-luce. Yet another clerk calls 
 the flower-roll of spring. It was inevitable 
 that the memory of Lycidas should be fra- 
 grant, embalmed as it was in such sweets as 
 those he names. (No wonder if New Eng- 
 land poets cast jealous and covetous regards 
 upon the floral treasures of Old England. 
 The flowers of our continent are only half- 
 souled, if fragrance constitutes the soul of a 
 flower.) 
 
 We cannot go by Robin Herrick's garden, 
 with its fantastic parterres, without begging 
 a holiday souvenir. We will ask for violets. 
 In what trim and tripping measures does he 
 celebrate their beauty ! 
 
 " Welcome, maids of honor ! 
 Ye do bring 
 In the Spring, 
 And wait upon her." 
 
A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 97 
 
 Bright and early we hear him calling 
 Corinna to go a-maying. This Corinna, we 
 infer, was a very phlegmatic young person to 
 require so much reminding that May Day had 
 come, and that her friends were impatiently 
 waiting for her to join them in their quest for 
 white-thorn and greens for decoration. The 
 playful despatch and impatience of the verse 
 are altogether irresistible. We, at least, have 
 no two minds about the matter : — 
 
 ..." Wash, dress, be briefe in praying : 
 Few prayers are best, when once we goe a-maying." 
 
 Collins, who stands a long remove from 
 the poets best read in Nature's traditions, 
 has nevertheless one drop of pure quintes- 
 sence distilled from the very atmosphere of 
 spring. There is something more than mere 
 elegant personification in the following 
 couplet : — 
 
 " When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, 
 Returns to deck their hallowed mould ; " 
 
98 ESSATS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 The poet, indeed, must have seen those 
 dewy fingers (as we have often seen them) 
 fitfully stirring among the slim, weak blades 
 of the young grass, at the close of a chilly 
 April day, or smoothing out the creases of 
 earliest-opened leaves in the midst of a 
 " sweet, un calendared spring rain." 
 
 Never has the divinity of May been more 
 divinely hymned than in Keats's ode for 
 May Day, opening with an invocation to 
 "Mother of Hermes, and still youthful 
 Maia ! " Did we not know its authorship, 
 we could readily believe it a fragment de- 
 scended from some sublime-hearted Grecian 
 bard, one of those who 
 
 " died content on pleasant sward, 
 Leaving great verse unto a little clan." 
 
 This ode contains but fourteen lines, long 
 and short ; but they are, as their poet wished 
 them to be, " rich in the simple worship of 
 a day." 
 
A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 99 
 
 Everywhere the poetic scriptures bear 
 record of the dangerous reciprocity existing 
 between love and springtime, — no other 
 season so fatally propitious for love-making. 
 When Launcelot brings Guinevere home to 
 Camelot, it is the "boyhood of the year." 
 The spring has come in a "sunlit flood of 
 rain ; " the tallest forest elms have already 
 gathered a green mist about their tops ; the 
 yellow river runs full to its grassy brim ; 
 the linnet pipes, and the throstle whistles 
 strong. As for Guinevere, she might pass 
 for the Faerie Queen herself, having on the 
 suit in fashion at the elfin court, — a grass- 
 green robe with golden clasps, and light- 
 green plumes held by a ring of gold, floating 
 from her cap as she rides swiftly along. 
 " She seemed a part of joyous spring," we are 
 told; and to one who had beheld her then 
 it would have been none too great a sacrifice 
 
 " To waste his whole heart in one kiss 
 Upon her perfect lips." 
 
100 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 Alas for Launcelot and Guinevere, and for 
 good King Arthur, that this journey was 
 not made in the dull unelectric days of 
 later summer, or under the November sky, — 
 at any time save when the spirits of April 
 were weaving their enchantments for idle 
 pilgrims with empty hearts ! 
 
 The spring poets ! May their race never 
 die out ! They cannot be too many, too 
 early, or too long-delaying. Let them not 
 be put down by Philistine depreciation any- 
 where. Let nothing less than a fillip on 
 the ear from Apollo himself put them to 
 shame. What though their notes be small 
 and tame, abounding in melodious iterations 
 that were not new last year, or the year 
 before last ? 
 
 " Remember, never to the hill or plain, 
 Valley or wood, without her cuckoo strain, 
 Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed." 
 
 EDITH M. THOMAS. 
 
X. 
 
 NATURE IN LITERATURE. 
 
 ! 
 
 
 
NATURE IN LITERATURE. 103 
 
 X. 
 
 NATURE IN LITERATURE. 
 
 Seveeal different kinds or phases of this 
 thing we call Nature have at different times 
 appeared in literature. For instance, there 
 is the personified or deified Nature of the 
 towering Greek bards, an expression of 
 Nature born of wonder, fear, childish igno- 
 rance, and the tyranny of personality: the 
 Greek was so alive himself that he made 
 every thing else alive, and so manly and 
 human that he could see only these qualities 
 in Nature. Or the Greek idyllic poets, 
 whose nature is simple and fresh, like 
 spring-water, or the open air, or the taste of 
 milk or fruit or bread. The same thing is 
 perhaps true in a measure of Virgil's Nature. 
 
104 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 In a later class of writers and artists that 
 arose in Italy, Nature is steeped in the faith 
 and dogmas of the Christian Church : it is a 
 kind of theological Nature. 
 
 In English literature there is the artifi- 
 cial Nature of Pope and his class, — a kind 
 of classic liturgy repeated from the books, 
 and as dead and hollow as fossil shells. 
 Earlier than that, the quaint and affected 
 Nature of the Elizabethan poets; later, the 
 melodramatic and wild-eyed Nature of the 
 Byronic muse ; and lastly, the transmuted 
 and spiritualized Nature of Wordsworth, 
 which has given the prevailing tone and cast 
 to most modern poetry. Thus, from a god- 
 dess Nature has changed to a rustic nymph, 
 a cloistered nun, a heroine of romance, be- 
 sides other characters not so definite, till 
 she has at last become a priestess of the soul. 
 What will be the next phase is perhaps 
 already indicated in the poems of Walt 
 Whitman, in which Nature is regarded 
 
NATURE IN LITERATURE. 105 
 
 mainly in the light of science — through 
 the immense vistas opened up by astronomy 
 and geology. This poet sees the earth as 
 one of the orbs, and has sought to adjust 
 his imagination to the modern problems 
 and conditions, always taking care, however, 
 to preserve an outlook into the highest 
 regions. 
 
 I was much struck with a passage in 
 Whitman's last volume, " Two Rivulets," in 
 which he says that he has not been afraid of 
 the charge of obscurity in his poems, "be- 
 cause human thought, poetry or melody, 
 must have dim escapes and outlets, — must 
 possess a certain fluid, aerial character, akin 
 to space itself, obscure to those of little or 
 no imagination, but indispensable to the 
 highest purposes. Poetic style, when ad- 
 dressed to the soul, is less definite form, out- 
 line, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, 
 half-tints, and even less than half-tints." I 
 know no ampler justification of a certain 
 
106 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 elusive quality there is in the highest poetry 
 — something that refuses to be tabulated or 
 explained, and that is a stumbling-block to 
 many readers — than is contained in these 
 sentences. 
 
 JOHN" BURROUGHS. 
 
XI. 
 
 AUSTIN DOBSON. 
 
AUSTIN DOBSON. 109 
 
 XL 
 
 AUSTIN D0BS0N. 
 
 There is something kindred to humorous 
 poetry in the warm and humid climate of 
 Devonshire. All our best writers of vers- 
 de-sociStS have been Devon men, except 
 Prior, who had the misfortune to be born 
 just over the border in Dorset. A year ago 
 I made a pilgrimage to the neat little house 
 in Dodbrooke, where Peter Pindar saw the 
 light, and looked across the muddy creeks of 
 Kingsbridge harbor to the home of Praed. 
 Mr. Austin Dobson, however, though born 
 at Plymouth, on the 18th of January, 1840, 
 is really of French extraction. His father, 
 Mr. George Clarisse Dobson, who was a 
 civil engineer, came to England early in life. 
 
110 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 As the name shows, he, in his turn, was of 
 English descent, so that the nationalities in 
 the poet are nicely confounded. At the age 
 of eight or nine the latter was taken with 
 his parents to Holyhead, in the island of 
 Anglesea ; he was educated at Beaumaris, 
 at Coventry, and finally at Strasburg, whence 
 he returned at the age of sixteen with the 
 intention of becoming a civil engineer. It 
 was decided, however, that he should enter 
 the civil service ; and accordingly, in Decem- 
 ber, 1856, he received an appointment at the 
 Board of Trade, where he has remained ever 
 since, nearly a quarter of a century. Mr. 
 Dobson's first ambition, like that of The*o- 
 phile Gautier and others, was to be a painter. 
 He did, as a matter of fact, design with great 
 delicacy; but professional training, at the 
 schools of art in South Kensington, seemed 
 merely to destroy this native faculty. Strange 
 to say, it was not until his twenty-fourth year 
 that he began to write ; but his success at 
 
AUSTIN DOBS ON. Ill 
 
 once showed this to be his true vocation. 
 When Mr. Anthony Trollope started his 
 magazine St. Paul's, in 1868, Mr. Dobson 
 was one of the authors whom he first intro- 
 duced to the public. " Une Marquise," 
 printed in that serial in March of that year, 
 was the earliest intimation that was given to 
 the world of this new and striking talent. 
 Nothing is more quiet than the life of a man 
 of letters. Mr. Dobson's career has been as 
 uneventful as that of most modern poets. 
 In 1873, at the age of thirty-three, he first 
 collected his scattered lyrics in a volume 
 which he called " Vignettes in Rhyme." 
 This book achieved, as it deserved, a very 
 wide success. In 1874 he lost his father and 
 his mother, and a brother, who died in 
 Brazil. Fate often seems to concentrate her 
 blow when she persuades herself to strike 
 one of her favorites. When Mr. Dobson's 
 next volume, "Proverbs in Porcelain," ap- 
 peared, in 1877, the consensus of critical 
 
112 E8SAYJ3 FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 attention showed how much position the 
 writer had gained among the judicious in 
 these four years. Since then he has pub- 
 lished many charming things ; and I cannot 
 help fancying — not too indiscreetly, I hope — 
 that we may see a third volume of his deli- 
 cate work before many months are past. I 
 hope it will be as welcome in America as it 
 is sure to be in England. For the time 
 being, the American public possesses, in the 
 collection published last year by Mr. Holt, a 
 great deal more of Mr. Dobson's late work 
 than he has yet given to us. 
 
 There is no one living on this side of the 
 Atlantic in whom Mr. Dobson can, in my 
 opinion, see a dangerous rival. He has made 
 the field his own : it is, after all, but a narrow 
 plot, and there is scarcely standing-room 
 upon it for more than one at a time. He 
 reigns where Prior and Praed have reigned 
 before him, and this is no little thing to be 
 able to say of any man. I do not know that 
 
AUSTIN DOBSON. 113 
 
 he has ever reached the highest level of 
 Prior, that true and exquisite poet, who so 
 seldom was true to his own force and music. 
 "The God of us Yerse Men" has a manly 
 tenderness, a sort of heroic and sentimental 
 levity, which surpasses all modern writing of 
 the same kind; and even the author of the 
 "Ballad of the Spanish Armada" has not 
 quite the roar and animal spirits of the " Ode 
 on the Taking of Namur." It is more fair 
 and more easy to compare our latest humor- 
 ous poet with Praed ; nor do I think that 
 this is a comparison by which the living 
 writer will suffer. The turns of Praed are 
 rapid and telling, his vivacity extraordinary, 
 and his rhythmical movement singularly 
 bright ; but he is slight and monotonous in 
 sentiment, and his muse is like a performing 
 bullfinch, that goes through three tricks with 
 infinite skill, and whistles one tune and a 
 half as prettily as possible. Now, in Mr. 
 Dobson's work we do not find these limita- 
 
114 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 
 
 tions : he can do many things very well. He 
 is not merely a writer of vers-de-societe : he 
 is a fabulist, a dramatist in parvo, sl lyrist 
 pure and simple. The only occasions upon 
 which he seems to me to fail are those in 
 which he attempts the romantic and heroic 
 styles. " The Prayer of the Swine to Circe " 
 is flawless in construction ; but it leaves us as 
 cold and indifferent as the " Solomon " of 
 Prior, or Gay's tragedy of "Dione." We 
 are obliged to say, as Dryden said to Swift, 
 " Ah ! Cousin Dobson, you will ne\eT be a 
 pindaric poet ! " But in his own way, how 
 perfect an artist, how exquisite a poet ! 
 Whether he rattles, in ballad-style, through 
 the adventures of Beau Brocade and his 
 cynical crew of admirers ; whether he whis- 
 pers worldly wisdom, and sighs a note of 
 regret over the fish-pool with Denise and the 
 princess; whether, behind a curtain in the 
 chateau corridor, he giggles at the discom- 
 fiture of the Abbe* Tirili, — he is always 
 
AUSTIN DOBSON. 115 
 
 the same acute and refined observer, passing 
 lightly over the surface of things, because 
 to go deeper would wound a heart not callous 
 at all, but indolent, perhaps, and touching 
 the harmonious frivolities of by-gone times 
 as the fingers of some maestro might lightly 
 run over the keys of an old-fashioned harpsi- 
 chord. He is most at home, it seems to me, 
 in the first half of the eighteenth century. 
 Had he been a contemporary of Hogarth, 
 how singular would it have been to note the 
 different point of view of two such observant 
 artists ! From Mr. Dobson we should have 
 had no satire of any crushing or slashing 
 kind ; but what new lights on the career of 
 Counsellor Silvertongue, what urbane con- 
 sideration of the merits of Farinelli, what a 
 disposition to throw warm color and fra- 
 grance over the absurdities of Mrs. Fox 
 Lane ! Since we are set upon comparisons, 
 we may say that Dobson is really a sort of 
 Thackeray in miniature ; a more timid, a 
 
116 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 more indulgent, but a not less perspicuous, 
 student of society. There are many passages 
 in the " Roundabout Papers " that are pitched 
 in exactly the same key as such verses as 
 these : — 
 
 You are just a porcelain trifle, 
 
 Belle Marquise I 
 Just a thing of puffs and patches, 
 Made for madrigals and catches, 
 Not for heart-wounds, hut for scratches, 
 
 O Marquise ! 
 Just a pinky porcelain trifle, 
 
 Belle Marquise I 
 Wrought in rarest rose-Dubarry ! 
 Quick at verbal point and parry, 
 Clever, doubtless — but to marry, 
 
 No, Marquise I 
 
 There is plenty of room in the world for 
 social verse when it is done in this way, by 
 an artist and a gentleman ; but it is limited 
 ground, after all, as we began by saying. 
 Not merely is the least breath of vulgarity 
 
AUSTIN DOBS ON. 117 
 
 fatal to the entire structure, which melts 
 upon us in a damp horror, like Cowper's 
 vitreous palace, but the interest of the flying 
 buttresses and onion-domes is easily ex- 
 hausted. In vers-de-societe not only is noth- 
 ing tolerable short of the best, but the best 
 itself should not be too often repeated. I 
 think Mr. Dobson has felt that he must 
 adventure, like Ulysses, upon new seas, and 
 make fresh conquests. The province of fable 
 is one that lies open to his invasion, and 
 which has been utterly neglected of late. I 
 hope he will return to those exquisite little 
 dramas in octosyllabic rhyme, with which he 
 opened his " Proverbs in Porcelain," and 
 which so much delighted the best critics. 
 These tiny pieces will never be broadly 
 popular ; but Mr. Dobson has now so firm a 
 place in literature that he may be content to 
 address only the judicious. It would be 
 fatuous to lay down any limit to the advance 
 yet to be made by a poet who began to write 
 
118 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 rather late in life, and is still so young ; but 
 it may be prophesied that he will write suc- 
 cessfully just in so far as he remains true to 
 the French streak in his blood, and to the 
 picturesque instinct that has only just missed 
 finding expression with brush or pencil. 
 
 EDMUND W. GOSSE. 
 
XII. 
 
 ALPHOXSE DAUDET. 
 J 
 
ALP HON SE DATJDET. 121 
 
 XII. 
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET. 
 
 The distinctive quality of Alphonse Dau- 
 det's genius is his passion for nature. Since 
 notoriety came upon him unawares, he has 
 devoted himself to the arts by which noto- 
 riety is preserved, describing the flash 
 manners of the town, the flaunting vices of 
 metropolitan life ; and if each successive book 
 of this period shows little advance upon 
 its predecessors, it is because the novelist's 
 heart is not in his work. He is sighing for 
 the Provencal woods, for the mill where he 
 sang the charms of rusticity, for the monas- 
 tery of the White Fathers where he sipped 
 the golden cordial, and listened to Erasmian 
 stories while the mistral rushed howling 
 
122 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 through the belfry. He has never been very 
 happy when absent from the scenes in which 
 his childhood was spent. He was born at 
 Nismes forty-one years ago ; and there, while 
 his father was busy at a silk-manufactory, 
 and his mother and aunt, strict Church- 
 women both, discussed at home the mis- 
 fortunes that had befallen the Papacy, the 
 boy would slip away to the river, playing 
 truant from school, selling his books, for the 
 sake of an afternoon on the water. Often, 
 in those summer days, tying his boat to the 
 chain of barges which were being towed 
 down the stream, he would silently watch 
 the beauties of the passing landscape, his 
 meditation only broken by the noise of the 
 screw or the barking of a dog on the steam- 
 tug. Often, caught in the reeds, he would 
 gaze for hours on the river, the bridges that 
 gradually grew smaller and smaller, the 
 green islets that trembled on the horizon. 
 Then coming home, he would every day seek 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET. 123 
 
 a new excuse for his truancy. "Mother," 
 said he, on one of these occasions, " I staid 
 from school because I had heard that — the 
 Pope was dead." Thereupon dismay fell on 
 the household. The father sat silent at the 
 table, the mother wept ; the aunt alone had 
 courage to discuss the event, recalling the 
 days when Pius VII. had passed in post- 
 chaise through her village ; and next morn- 
 ing, when the boy's news was found to be 
 false, the joy was so great that nobody had 
 the heart to scold him. The youth of Al- 
 phonse Daudet lay in scenes like these. 
 They were more typical of his life than the 
 stories which he wrote of " Le Petit Chose," 
 and which were manifestly constructed for 
 dramatic effect. 
 
 When he came to Paris to make his way 
 in literature, he was very poor, and put up 
 with such company as he could get. There 
 were in those days many clever men in the 
 Latin Quarter ; and the young poet, wander- 
 
124 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 ing through the cafes, saw something of 
 Rochefort and Gambetta. He also received 
 an occasional invitation to the houses of 
 actresses or of such literary notorieties as 
 lived in the neighborhood of the Ode*cn. 
 These experiences seem to have gained for 
 him the reputation of an incorrigible Bohe- 
 mian. No reputation could fit him less well. 
 He was then, as he is now, the most sensitive 
 of men. He delighted in solitary rambles, 
 wherein he could study odd phases of life at 
 his ease. While his comrades were singing 
 in the brasserie, he would quietly make his 
 way to the Seine, peep through the windows 
 of the little riverside house, where a muslin 
 dress hung dripping on a nail, and an old 
 man sat roasting apples at a stove, viewing 
 in his lap the objects which had been found 
 with the muslin dress, — a thimble filled with 
 sand, a purse with a sou in it, a rusty pair of 
 scissors, — and turning for a moment aside 
 to write in his official register, " Felicie Ra- 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET. 125 
 
 meau, milliner, seventeen years old." Or he 
 would cross the bridge, and enter the work- 
 men's quarter, watching the lights that 
 gleamed in the low cabaret, the drunken 
 orator who was bellowing at one of its 
 tables, and the thin, pale wife's face that 
 was pressed against the glass, trying to 
 make a signal to the speaker and warn him 
 that the night was spent and the children 
 were starving at home. Or, again, he would 
 pass before the old-fashioned houses of the 
 Marais, now turned into stores and ware- 
 houses, and re-clothe them with their antique 
 glories of two centuries ago, when torches 
 flashed, and sedan - chairs swung in the 
 streets, and in the drawing-rooms there was 
 a rustle of silks and clank of swords, and 
 minuets were danced to the music of four 
 violins, with smirkings, and trippings, and 
 bowings innumerable. 
 
 The change in Daudet's life began with 
 his introduction to the Due de Morny. 
 
126 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 Many stories are told of that first interview, 
 and most of them are apocryphal. The poet 
 is reported to have said, that, as the son of a 
 Legitimist, he could hardly serve a Bona- 
 partist. To which, according to one ac- 
 count, the duke replied, "Be whatever you 
 will. The empress is more Legitimist than 
 you ; " or, according to another, " Have 
 whatever political views you please. All I 
 ask of you is that you shall cut your hair." 
 His new life was very novel, and not very 
 palatable, to Daudet. He had no thought in 
 those days of writing sensational novels. In 
 the duke's antechamber he would see the 
 late King of Hanover, the King of Naples, 
 Don Carlos, and Queen Isabella, and was not 
 careful to study them for the purposes of 
 fiction. He would hear of the scandals of 
 royalty, the Prince of Orange's escapades, 
 the intrigues of Russian grand dukes, and 
 was not struck with the idea of using them 
 to spice the history of King Christian II. of 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET. 127 
 
 Illyria. If he went to the agencies of the 
 Rue Castiglione, or hunted for bric-a-brac at 
 the Hotel Drouot, or carried a diplomatic 
 message to Worth the dressmaker, or watched 
 the gamblers at the Mirlitons or the dancers 
 at Mabille, he was not in search of Mr. J. 
 Tom Levis, Sephora Leemans, M. Spricht, 
 the Prince d'Axel, or any of the personages 
 whom he afterward introduced to fame in 
 "Les Rois en Exil." These people and their 
 doings he afterward recalled when he found 
 that the public wanted to hear about them. 
 He sickened of their company in the daj^s 
 when he knew them. He obtained a long 
 furlough from the duke, and fled from Paris. 
 In a ruined mill of the country around Avi- 
 gnon, he wrote many of those short stories 
 which should be his best title to the regard 
 of posterity ; and, when the strong southern 
 winds came to disturb his solitude, he made 
 his way to a little island off the Corsican 
 coast, and took up his abode in a light-house. 
 
128 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 The whole day he would spend in quiet 
 contemplation on the rocks, the seagulls 
 whirling over his head. At night he slept 
 beneath the rays of the huge lantern. It 
 was the happiest period of Daudet's life. 
 
 When the war of 1870 was drawing to a 
 close, he was enrolled as a volunteer. None 
 of his later work can rival the sketches 
 which he then made. While Ducrot was 
 fighting on the heights of Champigny, the 
 battalions of the Marais were encamped at 
 night in the Avenue Daumesnil, and tried to 
 kill time as best they could. " The Eighth 
 are giving a concert," said some one to Dau- 
 det : " come and hear it." They entered a 
 large booth, lighted with candles on the 
 points of bayonets, and filled with men half 
 asleep and half drunk. The singer, mounted 
 on a platform, was shouting in a hoarse voice 
 the popular song of the period, — 
 
 " C'est la canaille 1 
 C'est la canaille ! 
 Eh, bien ! J'en suis." 
 
ALPHONSE DAUDET. 129 
 
 He was followed by other singers, all blas- 
 phemous, ribald, and obscene ; and in the 
 distance the cannon joined in the refrain. 
 Daudet hastened from the tent, speechless 
 with indignation, and did not stop till he 
 reached the Seine. The night was dark. 
 Paris was sleeping in a circlet of fire. 
 Dimly a gunboat could be seen trying to 
 force its way up the river against the tide. 
 Again and again the river swept it down, 
 again and again it returned to the effort; 
 and at last, as it began to conquer the 
 stream, and made its way toward the scene 
 of battle, a cheer burst from the crew. 
 " Ah ! " cried Daudet, " how far away is the 
 concert of the Eighth ! " No historian of the 
 war will be able to paint it so vividly as 
 Daudet painted it. His pen has the quali- 
 ties of De Neuville's brush. His story of 
 the "Siege of Berlin" — of the paralyzed 
 veteran who thought the French would win, 
 and of the imaginary campaign which his 
 
130 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 granddaughter planned for him — is only 
 rivalled in pathos by his tale of " La Derniere 
 Classe," — of the schoolmaster who, being 
 told that he must never more teach French 
 in Alsace, could say nothing to the boys, but 
 with a heart bursting with grief, wrote in 
 large letters on the slate, "Vive la France," 
 and then, leaning his head against the wall, 
 signed with his hand, " C'est fini. Allez- 
 vous-en." 
 
 Ten years have passed since then. To- 
 day Alphonse Daudet is famous. Emile 
 Zola slaps him noisily on the back, and 
 claims him as a disciple of realism. Popu- 
 larity may have its advantages for Daudet, 
 but the familiarity of Zola is a heavy price 
 to pay for it. 
 
 P. M. POTTER. 
 
XIII. 
 THE BOSTON CULTURE. 
 
 K 
 
 \ 
 
THE BOSTON CULTURE. 133 
 
 xm. 
 
 THE BOSTON CULTURE. 
 
 A pkofoukd thinker, returning some 
 years ago from a visit to Boston, where he 
 had been entertained in the " Culture " 
 clubs, declared that he could almost see the 
 fine essence of inspiration steaming upward 
 as a visible vapor from the scalps of the 
 members. Whatever satire lay under this 
 grotesque imagery, there can be no doubt 
 that the New-England atmosphere is and 
 has long been one of scholarship ; and it is 
 the essential pride of Boston and its neigh- 
 borhood that the best element of this at- 
 mosphere finds its origin there. To be sure, 
 it would be easy to name a dozen towns 
 that are little Bostons, with circles as re- 
 
134 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 
 
 served, as severe in their tastes, as refined, 
 as the best in the metropolis ; and it would 
 also be easy to show that a hundred New- 
 England villages, from Lenox to Lexington, 
 possess the essential quality, — -an innate 
 respect for scholarship, for intellectual su- 
 premacy, — which makes Boston what it 
 is. 
 
 The quality goes far back, and spreads 
 widely in New-England life. It has never 
 been confined to a select circle. One is 
 sometimes inclined to test with a sharpened 
 weapon the apparent claim of a few Boston 
 families to the noble inheritance of the 
 Puritan. The claim is shared with equal 
 justice by many a farmer and cobbler and 
 tin-peddler. Whatever fine ichor there was 
 in the colonial magistrate and the scholarly 
 divine is inherited in equal proportions by 
 the elegant diplomat and the rustic squash- 
 vender. It has been our good luck in past 
 summers to be served with milk by one 
 
THE BOSTON CULTURE. 135 
 
 who bears the name of an illustrious vice- 
 president, to find in our wood-chopper blood 
 from a stock which furnished the most elo- 
 quent defender of colonial liberty, to hand 
 over our horses to a man whose ancestral 
 tree for many years supplied the two colo- 
 nies of Massachusetts with their governors. 
 The blood contains the old elements still in 
 all that produces energy and sound action, 
 and may in a generation find its way to as 
 high station as it has ever reached. With 
 such a population there is a basis for any 
 degree of greatness. With such an equality 
 of inheritance there is all the stimulus of a 
 great past to make a great future. Where 
 the blood lacks only the refinement which 
 education brings, or the opportunity which 
 belongs to locality, every New-England boy 
 is taught to feel that he has only to pack 
 his book in his bundle, and start on the 
 road which leads to a foreign mission. If he 
 reaches the court of England at last, he will 
 
136 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 find the ancestral blood in the best veins 
 there. This is that which makes what we 
 may call the Boston culture a pervading 
 element in all New-England life. Where 
 there is such a proud inheritance, such a 
 stern present necessity, and such a glorious 
 possibility, the conditions of a fine life are 
 always present. New England has certainly 
 held the mastership in energetic intellectual 
 life, and to-day finds its chief competitors 
 in its own transplanted stock. Its suprem- 
 acy is threatened, if threatened at all, in 
 the house of its children. Some years ago 
 we asked a distinguished lawyer to name 
 the twenty leading men of the New- York 
 bar. When he had done so, we found that 
 the larger half were born, and had received 
 their early training, in New England. The 
 same rule held good for the leading clergy- 
 men — those, that is, whose names were 
 known outside of their own denomination ; 
 for the great journalists, orators, and public 
 writers. 
 
THE BOSTON CULTURE. 137 
 
 If we were asked to mention the one 
 leading quality in this inherited excellence, 
 we should say that it lay in the home life, 
 in the spirit of reading, and independent 
 thinking, the reverence for learning and the 
 learned, which pervades almost every home 
 there. A good book finds entrance and 
 welcome in the New-England home as no- 
 where else. It is respected by the father, 
 reverenced by the mother, and read by the 
 children. It may be a poem, or the last 
 report of the Department of Agriculture ; 
 it may be a literary magazine, or the Farm- 
 er's Almanac, — it finds readers in the fam- 
 ily, — appreciative, it may be, or merely am- 
 bitious, but anyhow readers. The same may 
 be sometimes true of the New- York home. 
 In rural districts it is often so, but of city 
 life who would dare to claim it as the rule ? 
 Here the student reads, — the scholar, the 
 professional man in his department ; but the 
 family does very little reading. Books are 
 
138 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 
 
 bought, and put upon the centre-table, but 
 they are seldom opened. They are rarely 
 discussed, and almost never reverenced. In 
 Boston, Cambridge, Concord, Plymouth, they 
 are at least read, — whether they are assimi- 
 lated, or only cause intellectual dyspepsia. 
 There is an audience, therefore, always pres- 
 ent for the speaker or the thinker. The 
 greater part of New Englanders may be 
 classed as lecturers and audience. Here in 
 New York there is no audience anywhere 
 for the best products of intellectual activity. 
 There is none visible from the platform, 
 none in the parlor. The audience in Boston 
 is often sophomoric and brags. It too often 
 reminds us of that precept of Sir Philip 
 Sidney: "If yon heare a wise sentence, or 
 an apt phrase, commytt it to your memorye, 
 with respect to the circumstance, when you 
 shall speak it." But it presents the material 
 of growth. The lecturer, the thinker, is 
 generally worthy; and the silent, invisible 
 
THE BOSTON CULTURE. 139 
 
 auditors in the home circle are vastly more 
 than the visible ones. The " Culture " clubs 
 are but a showy efflorescence, but the genu- 
 ine culture is sweet and rich and modest. 
 It is a real gift to New York whenever it 
 feels the currents of this intellectual life. 
 We have virtues of our own with which 
 New England cannot equip us, — our un- 
 guarded generosity, our unflinching charity, 
 a wide receptivity, and richer experience in 
 practical activities : but a reverence for the 
 best in thought, for the inspiration of fine 
 sentiment, we have not ; and as long as we 
 are without this, we shall produce million- 
 naires, but not high thinkers, — Vanderbilts, 
 but not Emersons. We shall have bustle, 
 but not fine recreation, and shall be known 
 abroad for the immensity of our railroad 
 system, rather than for the soundness and 
 elevation of our mental life. The shrewd 
 observer who praised Newport because it 
 was equally removed from the virtues of 
 
140 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 Boston and the vices of New York, might 
 have constructed from the two extremes a 
 possible metropolis nearer to the millennial 
 city even than Newport. Let us hope that 
 we see the beginning of such a city in the 
 fresh impulse given here of late in art, in 
 music, in architecture, in science, and in 
 some departments of literature. 
 
 J. H. MOUSE. 
 
XIV. 
 
 THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 
 / 
 
THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 143 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 
 
 [The following brief essay on the life and genius of the 
 late Mr. Sidney Lanier was read at a memorial gathering 
 in Hopkins Hall, Baltimore, on the evening of Saturday, 
 Oct. 22, 1881. The meeting was not only a tribute to the 
 memory of Mr. Lanier, but was designed to initiate a 
 movement to raise money for the support of his widow 
 and the education of his children. President Gilman, 
 of Johns Hopkins University (in which Mr. Lanier served 
 as lecturer on English literature), presided, and to him 
 Mr. Stedman's letter was addressed. It was courteously 
 withheld from publication in any report of the meeting, 
 in order that it might be printed in " The Critic." ] 
 
 My dear Sir, — I have expressed already 
 my regret that I cannot be present at your 
 assembly commemorative of the poet and 
 gentle scholar, Sidney Lanier. But I gladly 
 avail myself of your permission to write a 
 
144 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 few words in recognition of his original 
 genius, and in expression of the sorrow with 
 which his fellows lament him, as one gone 
 before his time. 
 
 Certainly all who care for whatsoever 
 things are pure, lovely, and of good report, 
 must be deeply concerned in the record and 
 ending of Lanier's earthly pilgrimage ; con- 
 cerned no less, if ever they chanced to meet 
 him, in the mingled softness and strength of 
 his nature, the loyalty with which he sang 
 his song, pursued his researches, and took 
 the failures and successes of his consecrated 
 life. For, if there ever was a pilgrim who 
 bore a vow, or a life consecrate to an ideal, 
 such a votary was this poet-artist, and so 
 manifestly ordered was his too brief life. 
 
 You will speak to one another of his brave 
 spirit, of the illness and trials that handi- 
 capped him, and of the cheerful industry 
 with which he went through daily tasks, and 
 yet so often escaped to the region of poetry 
 
THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 145 
 
 and art. That he had the graceful and prac- 
 tical talent that can adapt itself to use, and 
 give pleasure to the simplest minds, was 
 proved by his admirable books for the young, 
 and the professional labors fresh in your rec- 
 ollection. But in the mould of Lanier, as 
 in that of every real poet, the imaginative 
 qualities and the sense of beauty governed 
 and gave tone to all other senses and motive 
 powers. He was first of all a poet and artist, 
 and of a refined and novel order. 
 
 No man, in fact, displayed more clearly 
 the poetic and artistic temperaments in their 
 extreme conjunction. It may be said that 
 they impeded, rather than hastened, his 
 power of adequate expression. He strove 
 to create a new language for their utter- 
 ance, and a method of his own. To reach 
 the effects toward which his subtle instincts 
 guided him, he required a prolonged lifetime 
 of experiment and discovery; and to him how 
 short a life was given, — and that how full 
 
146 ESS ATS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 of impediment ! He had scarcely sounded 
 the key-note of his overture, when the bow 
 fell from his hand; and beyond all this he 
 meant to compose, not an air or a tune, but 
 a symphony, — one involving all harmonic 
 resources, and combinations before unknown. 
 I find that I am involuntarily using the 
 diction of music to express the purpose of 
 his verse ; and this fact alone has a bearing 
 upon what he did, and what he did not do, 
 as an American poet. What seemed affecta- 
 tion in him was his veritable nature, which 
 differed from, and went beyond, or outside, 
 that of other men. He gave us now and 
 then some lyric, wandering or regular, that 
 was marked by sufficient beauty, pathos, 
 weir dn ess, to show what he might have 
 accomplished, had he been content to sing 
 spontaneously — as very great poets have 
 sung — without analyzing his processes till 
 the song was done. But Lanier was a musi- 
 cian, and still heard in his soul " the music 
 
THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 147 
 
 of wondrous melodies." He had, too, the 
 constructive mind of the artist who compre- 
 hends the laws of form and tone. How 
 logical was his exposition of the mathematics 
 of beauty, is seen in that unique work, " The 
 Science of English Verse." 
 
 Now, it is a question whether, art being so 
 long and time so fleeting, a poet should con- 
 sider too anxiously the rationale of his song. 
 Again, he strove to demonstrate in his verse 
 the absolute co-relations of music and poetry 
 — and seemed at times to forget that rhythm 
 is but one component of poetry, albeit one 
 most essential. While music is one of the 
 poet's servitors, and must ever be compelled 
 to his use, there still remains that boundary 
 of Lessing's between the liberties of the two 
 arts, though herein less sharply defined than 
 between those of poetry and painting. The 
 rhythm alone of Lanier's verse often had a 
 meaning to himself that others found it hard 
 to understand. Of this he was conscious. 
 
148 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITTC. 
 
 In a letter to me, he said that one reason for 
 his writing " The Science of English Verse " 
 was, that he had some poems which he hoped 
 soon to print, but which " he could not hope 
 to get understood, generally, without edu- 
 cating their audience." To this he added 
 that the task was "inexpressibly irksome" 
 to him, and that he " never could have found 
 courage to endure it save for the fact that in 
 all directions the poetic art was suffering 
 from the shameful circumstance that criti- 
 cism was without a scientific basis for even 
 the most elementary of its judgments." 
 
 If, in dwelling upon the science of his art, 
 he hampered the exercise of it, he was none 
 the less a man of imagination, of ideality; 
 none the less, at first sight, in bearing, fea- 
 tures, conversation, a poet and lover of the 
 beautiful. His name is added to the names 
 of those whose haunting strain — 
 
 " Ends incomplete, while through the starry night 
 The ear still waits for what it did not tell." 
 
THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 149 
 
 Yet the sense of incompleteness and of 
 regret for his broken life is tempered by 
 the remembrance that the most suggestive 
 careers of poets have not always been those 
 which were fully rounded, but often of those 
 whose voices reach us from early stages of 
 the march which it was not given them long 
 to continue. 
 
 EDMUND 0. STEDMAK. 
 Daniel C. G-iuoan, LL.D., Baltimore, Md. 
 
XV. 
 
 ENGLISH SOCIETY AND "ENDYMION.' 
 
 / 
 
 
ENGLISH SOCIETY AND " ENDYMION." 153 
 
 XV. 
 
 ENGLISH SOCIETY AND "ENDYMION." 
 
 A classic name, as little suggestive of 
 the work that bears it as was Mr. Long- 
 fellow's " Hyperion " of the accompanying 
 narrative. Books nowadays are often named 
 like ships, with a view to what will sound 
 and look well, and with no possible reference 
 to what they are or to what they carry. 
 This work of Lord Beaconsfleld's will hardly 
 add more to his reputation than will Mr. 
 Tennyson's last volume to his half-century 
 of fame. A dull book, with a rambling, 
 insignificant story, it has yet, from one point 
 of view, a certain importance and interest 
 for the student of men and manners. It 
 unfolds some of the secrets of that dazzling 
 
154 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 London life whose features, imperfectly 
 translated through various mediums, have 
 always had for most polite Americans a 
 great attraction. 
 
 This book does or should do much to 
 dispel the illusions with which distance and 
 imagination are wont to invest the "high 
 life " of Great Britain. Its author does not 
 give us a single glimpse of the noblesse 
 oblige as we understand it. The society 
 which his facile pen depicts is at once shal- 
 low and silly. Even the tradition of the 
 blue blood which, Heaven knows why, so 
 touches our transatlantic reverence, gives 
 way before his treatment. In his narrative, 
 men of the humblest rank rise to posts of 
 high honor and influence. The butler of 
 Endymion's father, married to his mother's 
 maid, makes such a transition from humble 
 to high life, while the sister of the female 
 attendant just mentioned weds a noble lord, 
 and becomes a leader of fashion. A London 
 
ENGLISH SOCIETY AND " ENDYMION." 155 
 
 tailor gives entertainments at which a peer 
 of the realm finds it delightful to be present, 
 and in time attains to a baronetcy and a 
 seat in the House of Commons. Why not ? 
 some may ask; and we will say in reply, 
 that, according to American views of life, 
 all this is natural enough. There is nothing 
 repugnant to our theories in such changes 
 of outward fortune. What should shock 
 the worshipper of rank is the discovery 
 which Lord Beaconsfield allows us to make, 
 that human nature, in its intrinsic qualities 
 and genuine manifestations, is much the 
 same in Belgravia as elsewhere. Stripped 
 of their exceptional wealth and of the pres- 
 tige of their position, the men and women 
 he depicts are rather more commonplace and 
 uninteresting than the average of our own 
 acquaintance. They have nothing whatever 
 upon which to found a claim of superiority 
 in character, talent, or true breeding. Love, 
 ambition, anger, avarice, are the same with 
 
156 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 them as with the civilized world in general. 
 Among them, as among ns, the parvenu 
 whose object in life has been to climb from 
 the base to the top of the social ladder is 
 the true bigot of rank and distiuction. 
 Those born in recognized position are famil- 
 iar with its conditions, which they usually 
 do not exaggerate. Those who "with a 
 great sum (of money or of effort) obtain 
 this freedom " often manifest a fantastic 
 devotion to that which has cost them so 
 much. The historical value of Lord Bea- 
 consfield's book is far beyond the interest 
 of his story. He speaks as an eye-witness 
 of political changes and complications which 
 occurred during the two reigns preceding 
 the long-continued dominion of the present 
 sovereign. He has inevitably known some- 
 thing of the internal history of events which 
 the sexagenarian of to-day will remember 
 as having been matters of comment and of 
 interest in his own early days. He has 
 
ENGLISH SOCIETY AND " ENDYMION." 157 
 
 seen Bismarck and Lonis Napoleon at a 
 time in which the world troubled itself 
 little about them. He represents them as 
 meeting on friendly terms at the great en- 
 tertainments of fashionable houses during 
 the London season. They are very likely 
 so to have met, and the suggestion calls 
 grimly to mind the denoument of their rela- 
 tions which the future held in store. 
 
 The circle to which Lord Beaconsfield's 
 talents and personal attractions gave him 
 access in early manhood was indeed an 
 exceptionally brilliant one. London society 
 might be proud when it could boast of such 
 men as S} T dney Smith, Samuel Rogers, 
 Monckton Milnes, Edwin Landseer, Dickens, 
 and Thackeray. These luminaries were 
 matched by an equally brilliant set of 
 women, among whom we may name the 
 Duchess of Sutherland and her beautiful 
 daughters, Lady Blessington (in her re- 
 stricted but privileged coterie), and the 
 
158 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 Sheridan sisters, of whom the Hon. Mrs. 
 Norton was pre-eminent in beauty and 
 talent. More than one American still lives 
 who has grateful remembrance of those 
 palmy days, to whose high pleasures a good 
 introduction or an exceptional reputation 
 sometimes admitted a transatlantic cousin. 
 To know a little even of what Lord Beacons- 
 field must have known of some of these 
 persons is a boon of interest, even if his 
 presentment of them must involve some 
 disappointment. The noble lord does not 
 describe this exceptional time, these excep- 
 tional people at their best. His story is like 
 a game of chess, in which lord and lady, 
 prelate, commoner, and men of letters, are 
 but the pieces which his skill manoeuvres 
 on the checkered board. It is a devil's 
 game too, in which the victory rests with 
 ambition, freighted with talent, and guided 
 by cool judgment. The glimpse which he 
 tries to give us of the world of letters in 
 
ENGLISH SOCIETY AND " ENDYMION." 159 
 
 the persons of one or two of its prominent 
 citizens is scarcely worthy of one who mnst 
 have himself enjoyed the freedom of the 
 intellectual guild. The two great satirists 
 of the age, Dickens and Thackeray, are 
 spoken of in the novel under the names 
 of Gushy and St. Barbe ; and the portraiture 
 of the latter is so unpleasing that we are 
 glad to hear of the former only as hated and 
 decried by his literary rival. The charac- 
 terizations of Baron Rothschild and Cardinal 
 Manning, under the pseudonymes of Mr. 
 Neufchatel and Nigel Penrucldock, are more 
 happily hit off. The one has the calm poise 
 and kindliness of the man who has achieved 
 transcendent fortune by fair means. The 
 other starts in life with that mistaking of 
 the symbol for the substance which makes 
 him first the slave, then the instrument, of 
 spiritual tyranny. The family of the rich 
 manufacturer, Job Thornberry, is also well 
 painted. The sound sense and genuine 
 
160 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 pluck of the farmer's son, who becomes not 
 only a rich man, but also a political power, 
 the snobbish aristocracy of his son, the easy 
 surrender of his wife to the blandishments 
 of the Romanist archbishop, — all of these 
 points are simply and strongly given. 
 
 The attitude of the writer in relation to 
 the society which he describes is perhaps 
 the most singular feature of the book. No 
 depth of his own contrasts with the shal- 
 lowness of his characters. Their likings 
 and dislikings, acts, prejudices, and under- 
 takings, are all painted in the flattest relief. 
 We find in his picture no background of 
 affection, philanthropy, or steadfast belief. 
 All is glittering surface, from which there 
 is no retreat. Thackeray's " Vanity Fair " 
 seems to us the only parallel of " Endymion," 
 for the dreary moral waste which it unfolds 
 to us. Pride, ambition, cunning, vanity, 
 make up the feast of life, to which the 
 apples of Sodom furnish the only appropriate 
 
ENGLISH SOCIETY AND "ENDY3II0N." 161 
 
 dessert. From such a kingdom an empire 
 of India would be a relief. The greatest 
 point of interest for Americans is the con- 
 trast which this life of shams affords to the 
 realities of freedom, energy, and affection 
 which form the staple of our national life. 
 And this interests us most because it is this 
 very quintessence of frivolity which seems 
 to attract the golden youth of our own 
 country. Our literary men and women 
 once looked to England for the seal and 
 sanction of their merit. We have now 
 developed a literature of our own by which 
 England is glad to profit. Heaven forbid 
 that we should look to the England of Lord 
 Beaconsfield for our standard of morals and 
 manners ! He does not depict our mother 
 country, for motherhood there is none in 
 his portraiture. A different England some 
 of us know, — cheery, hospitable, rich in 
 family life, earnest in philanthropy, reserved 
 but steadfast in reform and progress. Give 
 
 
162 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 us the England of Wordsworth, Tennyson, 
 and Browning ; the England of Shakespeare, 
 Bacon, and Milton. She lives in an un- 
 rivalled literature, in thrifty colonies, in a 
 robust and well-dowered daughter. To her 
 we may look with love and veneration. Of 
 her we may learn in the future as we have 
 learned in the past. Honor to those who 
 can show us this truly noble England! 
 Honor to those who study her great . lessons, 
 and cherish her grand traditions ! And as 
 for the fribble of the Old World and the 
 fribble of the New, it is perhaps well enough 
 to let them pair off harmlessly together. 
 
 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
XVI. 
 
 HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. 
 
 / 
 
HISTORICAL CRITICISM CF CHRIST. 165 
 
 XVI. 
 
 HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. 
 
 Theee are two natural processes in re- 
 spect of all great personalities that attract 
 the interest and win the honor and rever- 
 ence of the race, — the process by which they 
 are magnified and exalted into demi-gods and 
 mythic divinities ; and the process by which, 
 in ages of critical inquisitiveness, they are 
 reduced to their original historic proportions. 
 The two processes are by no means necessa- 
 rily contradictory. The mythic greatness, 
 the glamour and imaginative exaltation, of 
 the human spirits that have wrought upon 
 the souls of men with transcendent power, is 
 just as truly a part of the history of hu- 
 manity, and a deserved tribute to their mag- 
 
166 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 nitude as persons of vast original force, as if 
 it were biographically true in its details. 
 And the later necessity which the critical or 
 strictly historic spirit falls under, of discover- 
 ing just what the literal facts were touching 
 the person who is thus idealized, does little to 
 disturb the place the object of this inquiry 
 holds in the reverence of men. We have 
 seen a general resurrection of the heroes and 
 martyrs and poets and patriots of the past, 
 called up in the last half-century by the 
 spirit of modern historic criticism, to pass 
 under the review of a strictly rational in- 
 quest, and to undergo not the last, but a 
 later judgment, from the beneficiaries of 
 their genius, or their doings and sayings. 
 An intense curiosity has animated the mod- 
 ern world to see the kings, the patriots, the 
 poets, the saints and heroes of the past, as 
 men, and not merely as splendid apparitions ; 
 to bring them not down to, but within, the 
 immediate range of human sympathies; to 
 
HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. 167 
 
 know them as they really lived and moved, 
 and get as near to their private hearts and 
 experiences as the utmost pains could bring 
 the closest and most microscopic investiga- 
 tors. We have, perhaps, lost some beloved 
 personalities under a process which has 
 undraped figures that seemed warm with 
 human blood, to discover beneath only an 
 idea that had passed into human form, and 
 taken a name — like that of Tell — where only 
 a group of national feelings really existed. 
 But, as a rule, the greatness and glory of 
 historic names have not suffered from mod- 
 ern criticism, even when it has revealed 
 much that was private and human on the 
 feebler side. What they have seemed to 
 lose by familiarity they have regained by 
 sympathy and reality. The more human 
 they have been made, the more interesting. 
 Washington is himself growing in estimation 
 from the critical development of his human 
 personality; for it is not only supernatural 
 
168 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 beings to whom the world assigns a double 
 nature, — the nature that belongs to their 
 public, and the nature that belongs to their 
 private character. 
 
 The multiplication of works on the strictly 
 human nature of Jesus is one of the most 
 marked features of the times. The Chris- 
 tian world for eighteen centuries was wholly 
 occupied with the supernatural side of the 
 founder of Christianity. His humanity was 
 deemed of comparatively little importance, 
 except as a sign of his humiliation, and a 
 ground of doctrine. That the Supreme 
 Being should have condescended to incar- 
 nate himself in flesh and blood, and take 
 upon him the nature of man, was indeed a 
 matter of profound theological interest, and 
 naturally became the foundation-stone of a 
 vast dogmatic system which still rules the 
 creeds and the religious imagination of the 
 Church and the world. But the life of 
 Jesus from a human point of view necessa- 
 
% 
 
 HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. 169 
 
 rily became denaturalized by the hypothesis, 
 however well founded, of his being really a 
 god, shrouded in a human form. Human he 
 must be considered on one side, to make 
 effectual the very dogma of his divine conde- 
 scension, and to render him capable of expi- 
 ating the sins of the race, whose lineage and 
 nature he shared, and whom he came to save 
 by his self-sacrifice. But this humanity of 
 Christ's was, after all, if metaphysically real, 
 practically fictitious. He was a man, and 
 human only so far as a God of omniscient 
 and omnipotent wisdom and power could be 
 a man; and he could only be a man as a 
 king could be a beggar if he put on his rags 
 and assumed his filth and poverty, and went 
 about asking alms. All the while the king 
 keeps his crown, and knows his royalty, and 
 must feel the unreality of his destitution; 
 and it is at least very difficult to conceive 
 how the man in Jesus could be a real man, 
 while the God in him was a real God. The 
 
170 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 
 
 difficulties of this union made a large part of 
 the dogmatic speculation and controversy of 
 the early Church. But the double nature 
 got itself at last established as a funda- 
 mental dogma, — a mystery and riddle of 
 hopeless obscurity, but none the less an arti- 
 cle of faith, fruitful of the most intricate and 
 puzzling, but also of the most awful and 
 decisive convictions. Under its influence 
 the man Jesus for eighteen centuries wholly 
 disappeared. The Christ came forward, 
 wearing indeed his human habiliments, and 
 carrying in his divine person all the dog- 
 matic fruits of his crucified humanity, but 
 really only a god; nay, God himself, and 
 overwhelmingly interesting as God, while 
 his proper humanity continued only as a foil, 
 or means of setting off more effectively and 
 dramatically his divinity. 
 
 But in the last half-century the Church has 
 brought forth children in all its branches, to 
 whom the study of Jesus, not so much as the 
 
HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. Ill 
 
 Christ, but in himself as a genuine man, — a 
 man to himself, to his first disciples, to his 
 mother and brethren, to his fellow Galileans, 
 and to the Jewish people, — has become a 
 matter of the same interest it seems to have 
 been to his original biographers, the Synop- 
 tics. How easy it was to lose this interest 
 in contemplating the Christ, and not Jesus, 
 appears in the extraordinary departure made 
 in the Fourth Gospel from the simplicity of 
 the three Synoptics; and still more in that 
 departure, once for all, which Paul in his 
 epistles made from the biographical or purely 
 historic and actual Jesus of Nazareth, to set 
 up the Christ, the divine Saviour, or deific 
 Messiah, as the sole object of contemplation, 
 faith, and confidence, for his disciples. Paul, 
 who must have known fully the earthly 
 history of Jesus, hardly thinks it worth while 
 to dwell on any part of it, — not his birth, or 
 his works of mercy or love, or his human 
 graces, — but only on his death and resurrec- 
 
172 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 tion, and elevation to heavenly powers, and 
 his speedy return in the clouds of heaven to 
 set up his divine kingdom amid his risen 
 saints in the earth. Is it any wonder that 
 the Church for eighteen centuries has mainly 
 followed in the track it so early took under 
 the great authority of Paul, in neglecting 
 the strictly human side of the founder of the 
 faith? 
 
 H. W. BELLOWS. 
 
XVII. 
 WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 
 
WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 175 
 
 XVII. 
 
 WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 1 
 
 Virtually, but not actually, this is the 
 first time that Mr. Whitman has issued his 
 poems through a publishing-house instead of 
 at his private cost. The two volumes called 
 " Leaves of Grass " and " The Two Rivu- 
 lets," which he had printed and himself sold 
 at Camden, N.J., are now issued in one, 
 under the former title, without special accre- 
 tions of new work, but not without a good 
 deal of re-arrangement in the sequence of 
 the poems. Pieces that were evidently writ- 
 ten later, and intended to be eventually put 
 under "Leaves of Grass," now find their 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass. By "Walt Whitman. Boston: 
 James R. Osgood & Co. 
 
176 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 
 
 place ; some that apparently did well enough 
 where they were have been shifted to other 
 departments. On the whole, however, the 
 changes have been in the direction of greater 
 clearness as regards their relation to the sub- 
 titles. It is not apparent, however, that the 
 new book is greatly superior to the old in 
 tj^pography, although undeniably the fault 
 of the privately printed volumes, a variation 
 in types used, is no longer met with. The 
 margins are narrower, and the look of the 
 page more commonplace. The famous poem 
 called " Walt Whitman " is now the " Song 
 of Myself." It still maintains : — 
 
 I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable ; 
 I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. 
 
 It still has the portrait of Whitman when 
 younger, standing in a loose flannel shirt and 
 slouched hat, with one hand on his hip, the 
 other in his pocket. " Eidolons " has been 
 taken from the second volume, and placed, 
 
WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." Ill 
 
 for good reasons that the reader may not be 
 ready to understand, among the first pieces 
 gathered under the sub-title " Inscriptions." 
 It ends with the " Songs of Parting," under 
 which the last is " So Long," a title that a 
 foreigner, and perhaps an American, might 
 easily consider quite as untranslatable as 
 Mr. Whitman proclaims himself to be. The 
 motive for the publication seems to be to 
 take advantage of that wider popularity 
 which is coming somewhat late in life to him 
 whom his admirers like to call "the good 
 gray poet." 
 
 One great anomaly of Whitman's case has 
 been, that while he is an aggressive cham- 
 pion of democracy and of the working-man, 
 in a broad sense of the term working-man, 
 his admirers have been almost exclusively of 
 a class the farthest possibly removed from 
 that which labors for daily bread by manual 
 work. Whitman has always been truly cavi- 
 are to the multitude. It was only those who 
 
178 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 
 
 knew much of poetry, and loved it greatly, 
 who penetrated the singular shell of his 
 verses, and rejoiced in the rich, pulpy kernel. 
 Even with connoisseurs, Whitman has been 
 somewhat of an acquired taste ; and it has 
 always been amusing to note the readiness 
 with which persons who would not or could 
 not read him, raised a cry of affectation 
 against those who did. This phenomenon is 
 too well known in other departments of taste 
 to need further remark ; but it may be added 
 that Mr. Whitman has both gained by it and 
 lost. He has gained a vigorousness of sup- 
 port on the part of his admirers that probably 
 more than out-balances the acrid attacks of 
 those who consider his work synonymous 
 with all that is vicious in poetical technique, 
 and wicked from the point of morals. As 
 to the latter, it must be confessed, that, ac- 
 cording to present standards of social rela- 
 tions, the doctrines taught by Whitman 
 might readily be construed, by the over-hasty 
 
WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 179 
 
 or unscrupulous, into excuses for foul living ; 
 for such persons do not look below the sur- 
 face, nor can they grasp the whole idea of 
 Whitman's treatment of love. However 
 fervid his expressions may be, and however 
 scornful he is of the miserable hypocrisies 
 that fetter but also protect the evilly dis- 
 posed, it is plain that the idea he has at 
 heart is that universal love which leaves no 
 room for wickedness, because it leaves no 
 room for doing or saying unkind, unchari- 
 table, unjust things to his fellow-man. With 
 an exuberance of thought that would supply 
 the mental outfit of ten ordinary poets, and 
 with a rush of words that is by no means 
 reckless, but intensely and grandly labored, 
 Whitman hurls his view of the world at the 
 heads of his readers with a vigor and bold- 
 ness that takes away one's breath. This 
 century is getting noted among centuries 
 for singular departures in art and literature. 
 Among them all, there is none bolder or 
 
180 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 
 
 more original than that of Whitman. Per- 
 haps Poe in his own line might be cited as 
 an equal. It is strange, and yet it is not 
 strange, that he should have waited so long 
 for recognition, and that by many thousands 
 of people of no little culture his claims to 
 being a poet at all are either frankly scouted 
 or else held in abeyance. Literature here 
 has remarkably held aloof from the vital 
 thoughts and hopes of the country. It 
 seems as if the very crudity of the struggle 
 here drove people into a petty dilettante 
 atmosphere of prettiness in art and literature 
 as an escape from the dust and cinders of 
 daily life. Hence our national love for 
 " slicked up " pictures, for instance, by 
 which it is often claimed in Europe that 
 promising geniuses in painting, there, have 
 been ruined for higher work. Hence our 
 patronage of poets that have all the polish 
 of a cymbal, but all a cymbal's dry note and 
 hollowness. Hence, at one time, our admi- 
 
WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 181 
 
 ration for orators that were ornate to the 
 verge of inanity. Into this hot-house air of 
 literature Walt Whitman bounded with the 
 vigor and suppleness of a clown at a funeral. 
 Dire were the grimaces of the mourners in 
 high places, and dire are their grimaces still. 
 There were plenty of criticisms to make, 
 even after one had finished crying " Oh ! " at 
 the frank sensuality, the unbelievable naked- 
 ness of Walt. Every thing that decent folk 
 covered up, Walt exhibited, and boasted of 
 exhibiting ! He was proud of his nakedness 
 and sensuality. He cried, " Look here, you 
 pampered rogues of literature, what are you 
 squirming about, when you know, and every- 
 body knows, that things are just like this, 
 always have been, always will be ? " But it 
 must be remembered that this was what he 
 wrote, and that he did it with a plan, and 
 by order from his genius. It has never been 
 heard of him that he was disgusting in talk, 
 or vile in private life; while it has been 
 
182 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 known that poets celebrated for the lofty- 
 tone of their morality, for the strictness of 
 their Christianity, the purity of their cabinet 
 hymns, can condescend in private life to 
 wallow in all that is base. That is the other 
 great anomaly of Whitman. He rhapsodizes 
 of things seldom seen in print with the en- 
 thusiasm of a surgeon enamoured of the won- 
 derful mechanism of the body. But he does 
 not soil his conversation with lewdness. If 
 evil is in him, it shows only in his book. 
 
 Whitman's strength and Whitman's weak- 
 ness lie in his lack of taste. As a mere 
 external sign, look at his privately printed 
 volumes. For a printer and type-setter, re- 
 porter and editor, they do not show taste in 
 the selection and arrangement of the type. 
 A cardinal sin in the eyes of most critics is 
 the use of French, Spanish, and American- 
 Spanish words, which are scattered here and 
 there, as if Whitman had picked them up, 
 sometimes slightly incorrectly, from wander- 
 
WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 183 
 
 ing minstrels, Cubans, or fugitives from one 
 of Walker's raids. He shows crudely the 
 American way of incorporating into the 
 language a handy or a high-sounding word 
 without elaborate examination of its original 
 meaning, just as we absorb the different 
 nationalities that crowd over from Europe. 
 His thought and his mode of expression 
 are immense, often flat, very often monoto- 
 nous, like our great sprawling cities with 
 their endless scattering of suburbs. Yet 
 when one gets the " hang " of it, there is a 
 colossal grandeur in conception and execu- 
 tion that must finally convince whoever will 
 be patient enough to look for it. His 
 rhythm, so much burlesqued, is all of a part 
 with the man and his ideas. It is apparently 
 confused ; really most carefully schemed ; 
 certainly to a high degree origin al. It has 
 what to the present writer is the finest thing 
 in the music of Wagner, — a great booming 
 movement or undertone, like the noise of 
 
184 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 
 
 heavy surf. His crowded adjectives are like 
 the mediaeval writers of Irish, those extraor- 
 dinary poets who sang the old Irish heroes 
 and their own contemporaries, the chiefs of 
 their clans. No Irishman of to-day has 
 written a nobler lament for Ireland, or a 
 more hopeful, or a more truthful, than has 
 Walt Whitman. Yet it is not said that he 
 has Irish blood. Nor is there to be found in 
 our literature another original piece of prose 
 so valuable to future historians as his notes 
 on the war. Nor is there a poet of the war- 
 time extant who has so struck the note of 
 that day of conflict as Whitman has in 
 "Drum Taps." He makes the flesh creep. 
 His verses are like the march of the long 
 lines of volunteers, and then again like the 
 bugles of distant cavalry. But these are 
 parts of him. As he stands complete in 
 " Leaves of Grass," in spite of all the things 
 that regard for the decencies of drawing- 
 rooms and families may wish away, he cer- 
 
WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 185 
 
 tainly represents, as no other writer in the 
 world, the struggling, blundering, sound- 
 hearted, somewhat coarse, but still magnifi- 
 cent, vanguard of Western civilization that 
 is encamped in the United States of America. 
 He avoids the cultured few. He wants to 
 represent, and does in his own strange way 
 represent, the lower middle stratum of hu- 
 manity. But, so far, it is not evident that 
 his chosen constituency cares for, or has even 
 recognized him. Wide readers are beginning 
 to guess his proportions. 
 
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