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Title: Confessions and Criticisms

Author: Julian Hawthorne

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CONFESSIONS AND CRITICISMS

BY
JULIAN HAWTHORNE




CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

   I. A PRELIMINARY CONFESSION
  II. NOVELS AND AGNOSTICISM
 III. AMERICANISM IN FICTION
  IV. LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN
   V. THE MORAL AIM IN FICTION
  VI. THE MAKER OF MANY BOOKS
 VII. MR. MALLOCK'S MISSING SCIENCE
VIII. THEODORE WINTHROP'S WRITINGS
  IX. EMERSON AS AN AMERICAN
   X. MODERN MAGIC
  XI. AMERICAN WILD ANIMALS IN ART




CONFESSIONS AND CRITICISMS.




CHAPTER I.

A PRELIMINARY CONFESSION.


In 1869, when I was about twenty-three years old, I sent a couple of
sonnets to the revived _Putnam's Magazine_. At that period I had no
intention of becoming a professional writer: I was studying civil
engineering at the Polytechnic School in Dresden, Saxony. Years before, I
had received parental warnings--unnecessary, as I thought--against writing
for a living. During the next two years, however, when I was acting as
hydrographic engineer in the New York Dock Department, I amused myself by
writing a short story, called "Love and Counter-Love," which was published
in _Harper's Weekly_, and for which I was paid fifty dollars. "If fifty
dollars can be so easily earned," I thought, "why not go on adding to my
income in this way from time to time?" I was aided and abetted in the idea
by the late Robert Carter, editor of _Appletons' Journal_; and the latter
periodical and _Harper's Magazine_ had the burden, and I the benefit, of
the result. When, in 1872, I was abruptly relieved from my duties in the
Dock Department, I had the alternative of either taking my family down to
Central America to watch me dig a canal, or of attempting to live by my
pen. I bought twelve reams of large letter-paper, and began my first
work,--"Bressant." I finished it in three weeks; but prudent counsellors
advised me that it was too immoral to publish, except in French: so I
recast it, as the phrase is, and, in its chastened state, sent it through
the post to a Boston publisher. It was lost on the way, and has not yet
been found. I was rather pleased than otherwise at this catastrophe; for I
had in those days a strange delight in rewriting my productions: it was,
perhaps, a more sensible practice than to print them. Accordingly, I
rewrote and enlarged "Bressant" in Dresden (whither I returned with my
family in 1872); but--immorality aside--I think the first version was the
best of the three. On my way to Germany I passed through London, and there
made the acquaintance of Henry S. King, the publisher, a charming but
imprudent man, for he paid me one hundred pounds for the English copyright
of my novel: and the moderate edition he printed is, I believe, still
unexhausted. The book was received in a kindly manner by the press; but
both in this country and in England some surprise and indignation were
expressed that the son of his father should presume to be a novelist. This
sentiment, whatever its bearing upon me, has undoubtedly been of service
to my critics: it gives them something to write about. A disquisition upon
the mantle of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and an analysis of the differences and
similarities between him and his successor, generally fill so much of a
notice as to enable the reviewer to dismiss the book itself very briefly.
I often used to wish, when, years afterwards, I was myself a reviewer for
the London _Spectator_, that I could light upon some son of his father who
might similarly lighten my labors. Meanwhile, I was agreeably astonished
at what I chose to consider the success of "Bressant," and set to work to
surpass it in another romance, called (for some reason I have forgotten)
"Idolatry." This unknown book was actually rewritten, in whole or in part,
no less than seven times. _Non sum qualis eram_. For seven or eight years
past I have seldom rewritten one of the many pages which circumstances
have compelled me to inflict upon the world. But the discipline of
"Idolatry" probably taught me how to clothe an idea in words.

By the time "Idolatry" was published, the year 1874 had come, and I was
living in London. From my note-books and recollections I compiled a series
of papers on life in Dresden, under the general title of "Saxon Studies."
Alexander Strahan, then editor of the _Contemporary Review_, printed them
in that periodical as fast as I wrote them, and they were reproduced in
certain eclectic magazines in this country,--until I asserted my American
copyright. Their publication in book form was followed by the collapse of
both the English and the American firm engaging in that enterprise. I draw
no deductions from that fact: I simply state it. The circulation of the
"Studies" was naturally small; but one copy fell into the hands of a
Dresden critic, and the manner in which he wrote of it and its author
repaid me for the labor of composition and satisfied me that I had not
done amiss.

After "Saxon Studies" I began another novel, "Garth," instalments of which
appeared from month to month in _Harper's Magazine_. When it had run for a
year or more, with no signs of abatement, the publishers felt obliged to
intimate that unless I put an end to their misery they would. Accordingly,
I promptly gave Garth his quietus. The truth is, I was tired of him
myself. With all his qualities and virtues, he could not help being a
prig. He found some friends, however, and still shows signs of vitality. I
wrote no other novel for nearly two years, but contributed some sketches
of English life to _Appletons' Journal_, and produced a couple of
novelettes,--"Mrs. Gainsborough's Diamonds" and "Archibald Malmaison,"--
which, by reason of their light draught, went rather farther than usual.
Other short tales, which I hardly care to recall, belong to this period. I
had already ceased to take pleasure in writing for its own sake,--partly,
no doubt, because I was obliged to write for the sake of something else.
Only those who have no reverence for literature should venture to meddle
with the making of it,--unless, at all events, they can supply the demands
of the butcher and baker from an independent source.

In 1879, "Sebastian Strome" was published as a serial in _All the Year
Round_. Charley Dickens, the son of the great novelist, and editor of the
magazine, used to say to me while the story was in progress, "Keep that
red-haired girl up to the mark, and the story will do." I took a fancy to
Mary Dene myself. But I uniformly prefer my heroines to my heroes; perhaps
because I invent the former out of whole cloth, whereas the latter are
often formed of shreds and patches of men I have met. And I never raised a
character to the position of hero without recognizing in him, before I had
done with him, an egregious ass. Differ as they may in other respects,
they are all brethren in that; and yet I am by no means disposed to take a
Carlylese view of my actual fellow-creatures.

I did some hard work at this time: I remember once writing for twenty-six
consecutive hours without pausing or rising from my chair; and when,
lately, I re-read the story then produced, it seemed quite as good as the
average of my work in that kind. I hasten to add that it has never been
printed in this country: for that matter, not more than half my short
tales have found an American publisher. "Archibald Malmaison" was offered
seven years ago to all the leading publishers in New York and Boston, and
was promptly refused by all. Since its recent appearance here, however, it
has had a circulation larger perhaps than that of all my other stories
combined. But that is one of the accidents that neither author nor
publisher can foresee. It was the horror of "Archibald Malmaison," not any
literary merit, that gave it vogue,--its horror, its strangeness, and its
brevity.

On Guy Fawkes's day, 1880, I began "Fortune's Fool,"--or "Luck," as it was
first called,--and wrote the first ten of the twelve numbers in three
months. I used to sit down to my table at eight o'clock in the evening and
write till sunrise. But the two remaining instalments were not written and
published until 1883, and this delay and its circumstances spoiled the
book. In the interval between beginning and finishing it another long
novel--"Dust"--was written and published. I returned to America in 1882,
after an absence in Europe far longer than I had anticipated or desired. I
trust I may never leave my native land again for any other on this planet.

"Beatrix Randolph," "Noble Blood," and "Love--or a Name," are the novels
which I have written since my return; and I also published a biography,
"Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife." I cannot conscientiously say that I
have found the literary profession--in and for itself--entirely agreeable.
Almost everything that I have written has been written from necessity; and
there is very little of it that I shall not be glad to see forgotten. The
true rewards of literature, for men of limited calibre, are the incidental
ones,--the valuable friendships and the charming associations which it
brings about. For the sake of these I would willingly endure again many
passages of a life that has not been all roses; not that I would appear to
belittle my own work: it does not need it. But the present generation (in
America at least) does not strike me as containing much literary genius.
The number of undersized persons is large and active, and we hardly
believe in the possibility of heroic stature. I cannot sufficiently admire
the pains we are at to make our work--embodying the aims it does--
immaculate in form. Form without idea is nothing, and we have no ideas. If
one of us were to get an idea, it would create its own form, as easily as
does a flower or a planet. I think we take ourselves too seriously: our
posterity will not be nearly so grave over us. For my part, I do not write
better than I do, because I have no ideas worth better clothes than they
can pick up for themselves. "Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing
with your best pains," is a saying which has injured our literature more
than any other single thing. How many a lumber-closet since the world
began has been filled by the results of this purblind and delusive theory!
But this is not autobiographical,--save that to have written it shows how
little prudence my life has taught me.

       *       *       *       *       *

I remember wondering, in 1871, how anybody could write novels. I had
produced two or three short stories; but to expand such a thing until it
should cover two or three hundred pages seemed an enterprise far beyond my
capacity. Since then, I have accomplished the feat only too often; but I
doubt whether I have a much clearer idea than before of the way it is
done; and I am certain of never having done it twice in the same way. The
manner in which the plant arrives at maturity varies according to the
circumstances in which the seed is planted and cultivated; and the
cultivator, in this instance at least, is content to adapt his action to
whatever conditions happen to exist.

While, therefore, it might be easy to formulate a cut-and-dried method of
procedure, which should be calculated to produce the best results by the
most efficient means, no such formula would truly represent the present
writer's actual practice. If I ever attempted to map out my successive
steps beforehand, I never adhered to the forecast or reached the
anticipated goal. The characters develop unexpected traits, and these
traits become the parents of incidents that had not been contemplated. The
characters themselves, on the other hand, cannot be kept to any
preconceived characteristics; they are, in their turn, modified by the
exigencies of the plot.

In two or three cases I have tried to make portraits of real persons whom
I have known; but these persons have always been more lifeless than the
others, and most lifeless in precisely those features that most nearly
reproduced life. The best results in this direction are realized by those
characters that come to their birth simultaneously with the general scheme
of the proposed events; though I remember that one of the most lifelike of
my personages (Madge, in the novel "Garth") was not even thought of until
the story of which she is the heroine had been for some time under
consideration.

Speaking generally, I should suppose that the best novels are apt to be
those that have been longest in the novelist's mind before being committed
to paper; and the best materials to use, in the way of character and
scenery, are those that were studied not less than seven or eight years
previous to their reproduction. Thereby is attained that quality in a
story known as atmosphere or tone, perhaps the most valuable and telling
quality of all. Occasionally, however, in the rare case of a story that
suddenly seizes upon the writer's imagination and despotically "possesses"
him, the atmosphere is created by the very strength of the "possession."
In the former instance, the writer is thoroughly master of his subject; in
the latter, the subject thoroughly masters him; and both amount
essentially to the same thing, harmony between subject and writer.

With respect to style, there is little to be said. Without a good style,
no writer can do much; but it is impossible really to create a good style.
A writer's style was born at the same time and under the same conditions
that he himself was. The only rule that can be given him is, to say what
he has to say in the clearest and most direct way, using the most fitting
and expressive words. But often, of course, this advice is like that of
the doctor who counsels his patient to free his mind from all care and
worry, to live luxuriously on the fat of the land, and to make a voyage
round the world in a private yacht. The patient has not the means of
following the prescription. A writer may improve a native talent for
style; but the talent itself he must either have by nature, or forever go
without. And the style that rises to the height of genius is like the
Phoenix; there is hardly ever more than one example of it in an age.

Upon the whole, I conceive that the best way of telling how a novel may be
written will be to trace the steps by which some one novel of mine came
into existence, and let the reader draw his own conclusions from the
record. For this purpose I will select one of the longest of my
productions, "Fortune's Fool."

It is so long that, rather than be compelled to read it over again, I
would write another of equal length; though I hasten to add that neither
contingency is in the least probable. In very few men is found the power
of sustained conception necessary to the successful composition of so
prolix a tale; and certainly I have never betrayed the ownership of such a
qualification. The tale, nevertheless, is an irrevocable fact; and my
present business it is to be its biographer.

When, in the winter of 1879, the opportunity came to write it, the central
idea of it had been for over a year cooking in my mind. It was originally
derived from a dream. I saw a man who, upon some occasion, caught a
glimpse of a woman's face. This face was, in his memory, the ideal of
beauty, purity, and goodness. Through many years and vicissitudes he
sought it; it was his religion, a human incarnation of divine qualities.

At certain momentous epochs of his career, he had glimpses of it again;
and the effect was always to turn him away from the wrong path and into
the right. At last, near the end of his life, he has, for the first time,
an opportunity of speaking to this mortal angel and knowing her; and then
he discovers that she is mortal indeed, and chargeable with the worst
frailties of mortality. The moral was that any substitute for a purely
spiritual religion is fatal, and, sooner or later, reveals its rottenness.

This seemed good enough for a beginning; but, when I woke up, I was not
long in perceiving that it would require various modifications before
being suitable for a novel; and the first modifications must be in the way
of rendering the plot plausible. What sort of a man, for example, must the
hero be to fall into and remain in such an error regarding the character
of the heroine? He must, I concluded, be a person of great simplicity and
honesty of character, with a strong tinge of ideality and imagination, and
with little or no education.

These considerations indicated a person destitute of known parentage, and
growing up more or less apart from civilization, but possessing by nature
an artistic or poetic temperament. Fore-glimpses of the further
development of the story led me to make him the child of a wealthy English
nobleman, but born in a remote New England village. His artistic
proclivities must be inherited from his father, who was, therefore,
endowed with a talent for amateur sketching in oils; which talent, again,
led him, during his minority, to travel on the continent for purposes of
artistic study. While in Paris, this man, Floyd Vivian, meets a young
Frenchwoman, whom he secretly marries, and with whom he elopes to America.
Then Vivian receives news of his father's death, compelling him to return
to England; and he leaves his wife behind him.

A child (Jack, the hero of the story) is born during his absence, and the
mother dies. Vivian, now Lord Castleman, finds reason to believe that his
wife is dead, but knows nothing of the boy; and he marries again. The boy,
therefore, is left to grow up in the Maine woods, ignorant of his
parentage, but with one or two chances of finding it out hereafter. So
far, so good.

But now it was necessary to invent a heroine for this hero. In order to
make the construction compact, I made her Jack's cousin, the daughter, of
Lord Vivian's younger brother, who came into being for that purpose. This
brother (Murdock) was a black sheep; and his daughter, Madeleine, was
adopted by Lord Vivian, because I now perceived that Lord Vivian's
conscience was going to trouble him with regard to his dead wife and her
possible child, and that he would make a pilgrimage to New England to
settle his doubts, taking Madeleine with him; intending, if no child by
the first marriage were forthcoming, to make Madeleine his heir; for he
had no issue by his second marriage. This journey would enable Jack and
Madeleine to meet as children. But it was necessary that they should have
no suspicion of their cousinship. Consequently, Lord Vivian, who alone
could acquaint them with this fact, must die in the very act of learning
it himself. And what should be the manner of his death?

At first, I thought he should be murdered by his younger brother; but I
afterwards hit upon another plan, that seemed less hackneyed and provided
more interesting issues. Murdock should arrive at the Maine village at the
same time as Lord Vivian, and upon the same errand, to get hold of Lord
Vivian's son, of whose existence he had heard, and whom he wished to get
out of the way, in order that his own daughter, Madeleine, might inherit
the property. Murdock should find Jack, and Jack, a mere boy, should kill
him, though not, of course, intentionally, or even consciously (for which
purpose the machinery of the Witch's Head was introduced).

With Murdock's death, the papers that he carried, proving Jack's
parentage, should disappear, to be recovered long afterward, when they
were needed. Lord Vivian should quietly expire at the same time, of heart
disease (to which he was forthwith made subject), and Madeleine should be
left temporarily to her own devices. Thus was brought about her meeting
with Jack in the cave. It was their first meeting; and Jack must remember
her face, so as to recognize her when they meet, years later, in England.
But, as it was beyond belief that the girl's face should resemble the
woman's enough to make such a recognition possible, I devised the
miniature portrait of her mother, which Madeleine gave to Jack for a
keepsake, and which was the image of what Madeleine herself should
afterward become.

Something more was needed, however, to complete the situation; and to meet
this exigency, I created M. Jacques Malgré, the grandfather of Jack, who
had followed his daughter to America, in the belief that she had been
seduced by Vivian; who had brought up Jack, hating him for his father's
sake, and loving him for his mother's sake; and who dwelt year after year
in the Maine village, hoping some day to wreak his vengeance upon the
seducer. But when M. Malgré and Vivian at last meet, this revenge is
balked by the removal of its supposed motive; Vivian having actually
married Malgré's daughter, and being prepared to make Jack heir of
Castlemere. Moral: "'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, 'I will repay.'"

The groundwork of the story was now sufficiently denned. Madeleine and
Jack were born and accounted for. They had met and made friends with each
other without either knowing who the other was; they were rival claimants
for the same property, and would hereafter contend for it; still, without
identifying each other as the little boy and girl that had met by chance
in the cave so long ago. In the meanwhile, there might be personal
meetings, in which they should recognize each other as persons though not
by name; and should thus be cementing their friendship as man and woman,
while, as Jack Vivian and Madeleine, they were at open war in the courts
of law.

This arrangement would need careful handling to render it plausible; but
it could be done. I am now of opinion, however, that I should have done
well to have given up the whole fundamental idea of the story, as
suggested by the dream. The dream had done its office when it had provided
me with characters and materials for a more probable and less abstruse and
difficult plot. All further dependence upon it should then have been
relinquished, and the story allowed to work out its own natural and
unforced conclusion. But it is easy to be wise after the event; and the
event, at this time, was still in the future.

As Madeleine was to be the opposite of the sinless, ideal woman that Jack
was to imagine her to be, it was necessary to subject her to some evil
influence; and this influence was embodied in the form of Bryan Sinclair,
who, though an afterthought, came to be the most powerful figure in the
story. But, before he would bring himself to bear upon her, she must have
reached womanhood; and I also perceived that Jack must become a man before
the action of the story, as between him and Madeleine, could continue. An
interval of ten or fifteen years must therefore occur; and this was
arranged by sending Jack into the western wilderness of California, and
fixing the period as just preceding the date of the California gold fever
of '49.

Jack and Bryan were to be rivals for Madeleine; but artistic
considerations seemed to require that they should first meet and become
friends much in the same way that Jack and Madeleine had done. So I sent
Bryan to California, and made him the original discoverer of the precious
metal there; brought him and Jack together; and finally sent them to
England in each other's company. Jack, of course, as yet knows nothing of
his origin, and appears in London society merely as a natural genius and a
sculptor of wild animals.

By this time, I had begun to make Madeleine's acquaintance, and, in
consequence, to doubt the possibility of her becoming wholly evil, even
under the influence of Bryan Sinclair. There would be a constant struggle
between them; she would love him, but would not yield to him, though her
life and happiness would be compromised by his means. He, on the other
hand, would love her, and he would make some effort to be worthy of her;
but his other crimes would weigh him down, until, at the moment when the
battle cost her her life, he should be destroyed by the incarnation of his
own wickedness, in the shape of Tom Berne.

This was not the issue that I had originally designed, and, whether better
or worse than that, did not harmonize with what had gone before. The story
lacked wholeness and continuous vitality. As a work of art, it was a
failure. But I did not realize this fact until it was too late, and
probably should not have known how to mend matters had it been otherwise.
One of the dangers against which a writer has especially to guard is that
of losing his sense of proportion in the conduct of a story. An episode
that has little relative importance may be allowed undue weight, because
it seems interesting intrinsically, or because he has expended special
pains upon it. It is only long afterward, when he has become cool and
impartial, if not indifferent or disgusted, that he can see clearly where
the faults of construction lie.

I need not go further into the details of the story. Enough has been said
to give a clew to what might remain to say. I began to write it in the
winter of 1879-80, in London; and, in order to avoid noise and
interruption, it was my custom to begin writing at eight in the evening,
and continue at work until six or seven o'clock the next morning. In three
months I had written as far as the 393d page, in the American edition. The
remaining seventy pages were not completed, in their published form, until
about three years later, an extraordinary delay, which did not escape
censure at the time, and into the causes of which I will not enter here.

The title of the story also underwent various vicissitudes. The one first
chosen was "Happy Jack"; but that was objected to as suggesting, to an
English ear at least, a species of cheap Jack or rambling peddler. The
next title fixed upon was "Luck"; but before this could be copyrighted,
somebody published a story called "Luck, and What Came of It," and thereby
invalidated my briefer version. For several weeks, I was at a loss what to
call it; but one evening, at a representation of "Romeo and Juliet," I
heard the exclamation of _Romeo_, "Oh, I am fortune's fool!" and
immediately appropriated it to my own needs. It suited the book well
enough, in more ways than one.




CHAPTER II

NOVELS AND AGNOSTICISM.


The novel of our times is susceptible of many definitions. The American
publishers of Railway libraries think that it is forty or fifty double-
column pages of pirated English fiction. Readers of the "New York Ledger"
suppose it to be a romance of angelic virtue at last triumphant over
satanic villany. The aristocracy of culture describe it as a philosophic
analysis of human character and motives, with an agnostic bias on the
analyst's part. Schoolboys are under the impression that it is a tale of
Western chivalry and Indian outrage--price, ten cents. Most of us agree in
the belief that it should contain a brace or two of lovers, a suspense,
and a solution.

To investigate the nature of the novel in the abstract would involve going
back to the very origin of things. It would imply the recognition of a
certain faculty of the mind, known as imagination; and of a certain fact
in history, called art. Art and imagination are correlatives,--one implies
the other. Together, they may be said to constitute the characteristic
badge and vindication of human nature; imagination is the badge, and art
is the vindication. Reason, which gets so much vulgar glorification, is,
after all, a secondary quality. It is posterior to imagination,--it is one
of the means by which imagination seeks to realize its ends. Some animals
reason, or seem to do so: but the most cultivated ape or donkey has not
yet composed a sonnet, or a symphony, or "an arrangement in green and
yellow." Man still retains a few prerogatives, although, like Aesop's
stag, which despised the legs that bore it away from the hounds, and
extolled the antlers that entangled it in the thicket,--so man often
magnifies those elements of his nature that least deserve it.

But, before celebrating art and imagination, we should have a clear idea
what those handsome terms mean. In the broadest sense, imagination is the
cause of the effect we call progress. It marks all forms of human effort
towards a better state of things. It embraces a perception of existing
shortcomings, and an aspiration towards a loftier ideal. It is, in fact, a
truly divine force in man, reminding him of his heavenly origin, and
stimulating him to rise again to the level whence he fell. For it has
glimpses of the divine Image within or behind the material veil; and its
constant impulse is to tear aside the veil and grasp the image. The world,
let us say, is a gross and finite translation of an infinite and perfect
Word; and imagination is the intuition of that perfection, born in the
human heart, and destined forever to draw mankind into closer harmony with
it.

In common speech, however, imagination is deprived of this broader
significance, and is restricted to its relations with art. Art is not
progress, though progress implies art. It differs from progress chiefly in
disclaiming the practical element. You cannot apply a poem, a picture, or
a strain of music, to material necessities; they are not food, clothing,
or shelter. Only after these physical wants are assuaged, does art
supervene. Its sphere is exclusively mental and moral. But this definition
is not adequate; a further distinction is needed. For such things as
mathematics, moral philosophy, and political economy also belong to the
mental sphere, and yet they are not art. But these, though not actually
existing on the plane of material necessities, yet do exist solely in
order to relieve such necessities. Unlike beauty, they are not their own
excuse for being. Their embodiment is utilitarian, that of art is
aesthetic. Political economy, for example, shows me how to buy two drinks
for the same price I used to pay for one; while art inspires me to
transmute a pewter mug into a Cellini goblet. My physical nature, perhaps,
prefers two drinks to one; but, if my taste be educated, and I be not too
thirsty, I would rather drink once from the Cellini goblet than twice from
the mug. Political economy gravitates towards the material level; art
seeks incarnation only in order to stimulate anew the same spiritual
faculties that generated it. Art is the production, by means of
appearances, of the illusion of a loftier reality; and imagination is the
faculty which holds that loftier reality up for imitation.

The disposition of these preliminaries brings us once more in sight of the
goal of our pilgrimage. The novel, despite its name, is no new thing, but
an old friend in a modern dress. Ever since the time of Cadmus,--ever
since language began to express thought as well as emotion,--men have
betrayed the impulse to utter in forms of literary art,--in poetry and
story,--their conceptions of the world around them. According to many
philologists, poetry was the original form of human speech. Be that as it
may, whatever flows into the mind, from the spectacle of nature and of
mankind, that influx the mind tends instinctively to reproduce, in a shape
accordant with its peculiar bias and genius. And those minds in which
imagination is predominant, impart to their reproductions a balance and
beauty which stamp them as art. Art--and literary art especially--is the
only evidence we have that this universal frame of things has relation to
our minds, and is a universe and not a poliverse. Outside revelation, it
is our best assurance of an intelligent purpose in creation.

Novels, then, instead of being (as some persons have supposed) a wilful
and corrupt conspiracy on the part of the evilly disposed, against the
peace and prosperity of the realm, may claim a most ancient and
indefeasible right to existence. They, with their ancestors and near
relatives, constitute Literature,--without which the human race would be
little better than savages. For the effect of pure literature upon a
receptive mind is something more than can be definitely stated. Like
sunshine upon a landscape, it is a kind of miracle. It demands from its
disciple almost as much as it gives him, and is never revealed save to the
disinterested and loving eye. In our best moments, it touches us most
deeply; and when the sentiment of human brotherhood kindles most warmly
within us, we discover in literature an exquisite answering ardor. When
everything that can be, has been said about a true work of art, its finest
charm remains,--the charm derived from a source beyond the conscious reach
even of the artist.

The novel, then, must be pure literature; as much so as the poem. But
poetry--now that the day of the broad Homeric epic is past, or temporarily
eclipsed--appeals to a taste too exclusive and abstracted for the demands
of modern readers. Its most accommodating metre fails to house our endless
variety of mood and movement; it exacts from the student an exaltation
above the customary level of thought and sentiment greater than he can
readily afford. The poet of old used to clothe in the garb of verse his
every observation on life and nature; but to-day he reserves for it only
his most ideal and abstract conceptions. The merit of Cervantes is not so
much that he laughed Spain's chivalry away, as that he heralded the modern
novel of character and manners. It is the latest, most pliable, most
catholic solution of the old problem,--how to unfold man to himself. It
improves on the old methods, while missing little of their excellence. No
one can read a great novel without feeling that, from its outwardly
prosaic pages, strains of genuine poetry have ever and anon reached his
ears. It does not obtrude itself; it is not there for him who has not
skill to listen for it: but for him who has ears, it is like the music of
a bird, denning itself amidst the innumerable murmurs of the forest.

So, the ideal novel, conforming in every part to the behests of the
imagination, should produce, by means of literary art, the illusion of a
loftier reality. This excludes the photographic method of novel-writing.
"That is a false effort in art," says Goethe, towards the close of his
long and splendid career, "which, in giving reality to the appearance,
goes so far as to leave in it nothing but the common, every-day actual."
It is neither the actual, nor Chinese copies of the actual, that we demand
of art. Were art merely the purveyor of such things, she might yield her
crown to the camera and the stenographer; and divine imagination would
degenerate into vulgar inventiveness. Imagination is incompatible with
inventiveness, or imitation. Imitation is death, imagination is life.
Imitation is servitude, imagination is royalty. He who claims the name of
artist must rise to that vision of a loftier reality--a more true because
a more beautiful world--which only imagination can reveal. A truer world,
--for the world of facts is not and cannot be true. It is barren,
incoherent, misleading. But behind every fact there is a truth: and these
truths are enlightening, unifying, creative. Fasten your hold upon them,
and facts will become your servants instead of your tyrants. No charm of
detail will be lost, no homely picturesque circumstance, no touch of human
pathos or humor; but all hardness, rigidity, and finality will disappear,
and your story will be not yours alone, but that of every one who feels
and thinks. Spirit gives universality and meaning; but alas! for this new
gospel of the auctioneer's catalogue, and the crackling of thorns under a
pot. He who deals with facts only, deprives his work of gradation and
distinction. One fact, considered in itself, has no less importance than
any other; a lump of charcoal is as valuable as a diamond. But that is the
philosophy of brute beasts and Digger Indians. A child, digging on the
beach, may shape a heap of sand into a similitude of Vesuvius; but is it
nothing that Vesuvius towers above the clouds, and overwhelms Pompeii?

       *       *       *       *       *

In proceeding from the general to the particular,--to the novel as it
actually exists in England and America,--attention will be confined
strictly to the contemporary outlook. The new generation of novelists (by
which is intended not those merely living in this age, but those who
actively belong to it) differ in at least one fundamental respect from the
later representatives of the generation preceding them. Thackeray and
Dickens did not deliberately concern themselves about a philosophy of
life. With more or less complacency, more or less cynicism, they accepted
the religious and social canons which had grown to be the commonplace of
the first half of this century. They pictured men and women, not as
affected by questions, but as affected by one another. The morality and
immorality of their personages were of the old familiar Church-of-England
sort; there was no speculation as to whether what had been supposed to be
wrong was really right, and _vice versa_. Such speculations, in various
forms and degrees of energy, appear in the world periodically; but the
public conscience during the last thirty or forty years had been gradually
making itself comfortable after the disturbances consequent upon the
French Revolution; the theoretical rights of man had been settled for the
moment; and interest was directed no longer to the assertion and support
of these rights, but to the social condition and character which were
their outcome. Good people were those who climbed through reverses and
sorrows towards the conventional heaven; bad people were those who, in
spite of worldly and temporary successes and triumphs, gravitated towards
the conventional hell. Novels designed on this basis in so far filled the
bill, as the phrase is: their greater or less excellence depended solely
on the veracity with which the aspect, the temperament, and the conduct of
the _dramatis personae_ were reported, and upon the amount of ingenuity
wherewith the web of events and circumstances was woven, and the
conclusion reached. Nothing more was expected, and, in general, little or
nothing more was attempted. Little more, certainly, will be found in the
writings of Thackeray or of Balzac, who, it is commonly admitted, approach
nearest to perfection of any novelists of their time. There was nothing
genuine or commanding in the metaphysical dilettanteism of Bulwer: the
philosophical speculations of Georges Sand are the least permanently
interesting feature of her writings; and the same might in some measure be
affirmed of George Eliot, whose gloomy wisdom finally confesses its
inability to do more than advise us rather to bear those ills we have than
fly to others that we know not of. As to Nathaniel Hawthorne, he cannot
properly be instanced in this connection; for he analyzed chiefly those
parts of human nature which remain substantially unaltered in the face of
whatever changes of opinion, civilization, and religion. The truth that he
brings to light is not the sensational fact of a fashion or a period, but
a verity of the human heart, which may foretell, but can never be affected
by, anything which that heart may conceive. In other words, Hawthorne
belonged neither to this nor to any other generation of writers further
than that his productions may be used as a test of the inner veracity of
all the rest.

But of late years a new order of things has been coming into vogue, and
the new novelists have been among the first to reflect it; and of these
the Americans have shown themselves among the most susceptible. Science,
or the investigation of the phenomena of existence (in opposition to
philosophy, the investigation of the phenomena of being), has proved
nature to be so orderly and self-sufficient, and inquiry as to the origin
of the primordial atom so unproductive and quixotic, as to make it
convenient and indeed reasonable to accept nature as a self-existing fact,
and to let all the rest--if rest there be--go. From this point of view,
God and a future life retire into the background; not as finally
disproved,--because denial, like affirmation, must, in order to be final,
be logically supported; and spirit is, if not illogical, at any rate
outside the domain of logic,--but as being a hopelessly vague and
untrustworthy hypothesis. The Bible is a human book; Christ was a
gentleman, related to the Buddha and Plato families; Joseph was an ill-
used man; death, so far as we have any reason to believe, is annihilation
of personal existence; life is--the predicament of the body previous to
death; morality is the enlightened selfishness of the greatest number;
civilization is the compromises men make with one another in order to get
the most they can out of the world; wisdom is acknowledgment of these
propositions; folly is to hanker after what may lie beyond the sphere of
sense. The supporter of these doctrines by no means permits himself to be
regarded as a rampant and dogmatic atheist; he is simply the modest and
humble doubter of what he cannot prove. He even recognizes the persistence
of the religious instinct in man, and caters to it by a new religion
suited to the times--the Religion of Humanity. Thus he is secure at all
points: for if the religion of the Bible turn out to be true, his
disappointment will be an agreeable one; and if it turns out false, he
will not be disappointed at all. He is an agnostic--a person bound to be
complacent whatever happens. He may indulge a gentle regret, a musing
sadness, a smiling pensiveness; but he will never refuse a comfortable
dinner, and always wear something soft next his skin, nor can he
altogether avoid the consciousness of his intellectual superiority.

Agnosticism, which reaches forward into nihilism on one side, and extends
back into liberal Christianity on the other, marks, at all events, a
definite turning-point from what has been to what is to come. The human
mind, in the course of its long journey, is passing through a dark place,
and is, as it were, whistling to keep up its courage. It is a period of
doubt: what it will result in remains to be seen; but analogy leads us to
infer that this doubt, like all others, will be succeeded by a
comparatively definite belief in something--no matter what. It is a
transient state--the interval between one creed and another. The agnostic
no longer holds to what is behind him, nor knows what lies before, so he
contents himself with feeling the ground beneath his feet. That, at least,
though the heavens fall, is likely to remain; meanwhile, let the heavens
take care of themselves. It may be the part of valor to champion divine
revelation, but the better part of valor is discretion, and if divine
revelation prove true, discretion will be none the worse off. On the other
hand, to champion a myth is to make one's self ridiculous, and of being
ridiculous the agnostic has a consuming fear. From the superhuman
disinterestedness of the theory of the Religion of Humanity, before which
angels might quail, he flinches not, but when it comes to the risk of
being laughed at by certain sagacious persons he confesses that bravery
has its limits. He dares do all that may become an agnostic,--who dares do
more is none.

But, however open to criticism this phase of thought may be, it is a
genuine phase, and the proof is the alarm and the shifts that it has
brought about in the opposite camp. "Established" religion finds the
foundation of her establishment undermined, and, like the lady in Hamlet's
play, she doth protest too much. In another place, all manner of odd
superstitions and quasi-miracles are cropping up and gaining credence, as
if, since the immortality of the soul cannot be proved by logic, it should
be smuggled into belief by fraud and violence--that is, by the testimony
of the bodily senses themselves. Taking a comprehensive view of the whole
field, therefore, it seems to be divided between discreet and supercilious
skepticism on one side, and, on the other, the clamorous jugglery of
charlatanism. The case is not really so bad as that: nihilists are not
discreet and even the Bishop of Rome is not necessarily a charlatan.
Nevertheless, the outlook may fairly be described as confused and the
issue uncertain. And--to come without further preface to the subject of
this paper--it is with this material that the modern novelist, so far as
he is a modern and not a future novelist, or a novelist _temporis acti_,
has to work. Unless a man have the gift to forecast the years, or, at
least, to catch the first ray of the coming light, he can hardly do better
than attend to what is under his nose. He may hesitate to identify himself
with agnosticism, but he can scarcely avoid discussing it, either in
itself or in its effects. He must entertain its problems; and the
personages of his story, if they do not directly advocate or oppose
agnostic views, must show in their lives either confirmation or disproof
of agnostic principles. It is impossible, save at the cost of affectation
or of ignorance, to escape from the spirit of the age. It is in the air we
breathe, and, whether we are fully conscious thereof or not, our lives and
thoughts must needs be tinctured by it.

Now, art is creative; but Mephistopheles, the spirit that denies, is
destructive. A negative attitude of mind is not favorable for the
production of works of art. The best periods of art have also been periods
of spiritual or philosophical convictions. The more a man doubts, the more
he disintegrates and the less he constructs. He has in him no central
initial certainty round which all other matters of knowledge or
investigation may group themselves in symmetrical relation. He may analyze
to his heart's content, but must be wary of organizing. If creation is not
of God, if nature is not the expression of the contact between an infinite
and a finite being, then the universe and everything in it are accidents,
which might have been otherwise or might have not been at all; there is no
design in them nor purpose, no divine and eternal significance. This being
conceded, what meaning would there be in designing works of art? If art
has not its prototype in creation, if all that we see and do is chance,
uninspired by a controlling and forming intelligence behind or within it,
then to construct a work of art would be to make something arbitrary and
grotesque, something unreal and fugitive, something out of accord with the
general sense (or nonsense) of things, something with no further basis or
warrant than is supplied by the maker's idle and irresponsible fancy. But
since no man cares to expend the trained energies of his mind upon the
manufacture of toys, it will come to pass (upon the accidental hypothesis
of creation) that artists will become shy of justifying their own title.
They will adopt the scientific method of merely collecting and describing
phenomena; but the phenomena will no longer be arranged as parts or
developments of a central controlling idea, because such an arrangement
would no longer seem to be founded on the truth: the gratification which
it gives to the mind would be deemed illusory, the result of tradition and
prejudice; or, in other words, what is true being found no longer
consistent with what we have been accustomed to call beauty, the latter
would cease to be an object of desire, though something widely alien to it
might usurp its name. If beauty be devoid of independent right to be, and
definable only as an attribute of truth, then undoubtedly the cynosure to-
day may be the scarecrow of to-morrow, and _vice versâ_, according to our
varying conception of what truth is.

And, as a matter of fact, art already shows the effects of the agnostic
influence. Artists have begun to doubt whether their old conceptions of
beauty be not fanciful and silly. They betray a tendency to eschew the
loftier flights of the imagination, and confine themselves to what they
call facts. Critics deprecate idealism as something fit only for children,
and extol the courage of seeing and representing things as they are.
Sculpture is either a stern student of modern trousers and coat-tails or a
vapid imitator of classic prototypes. Painters try all manner of
experiments, and shrink from painting beneath the surface of their canvas.
Much of recent effort in the different branches of art comes to us in the
form of "studies," but the complete work still delays to be born. We would
not so much mind having our old idols and criterions done away with were
something new and better, or as good, substituted for them. But apparently
nothing definite has yet been decided on. Doubt still reigns, and, once
more, doubt is not creative. One of two things must presently happen. The
time will come when we must stop saying that we do not know whether or not
God, and all that God implies, exists, and affirm definitely and finally
either that he does not exist or that he does. That settled, we shall soon
see what will become of art. If there is a God, he will be understood and
worshipped, not superstitiously and literally as heretofore, but in a new
and enlightened spirit; and an art will arise commensurate with this new
and loftier revelation. If there is no God, it is difficult to see how art
can have the face to show herself any more. There is no place for her in
the Religion of Humanity; to be true and living she can be nothing which
it has thus far entered into the heart of man to call beautiful; and she
could only serve to remind us of certain vague longings and aspirations
now proved to be as false as they were vain. Art is not an orchid: it
cannot grow in the air. Unless its root can be traced as deep down as
Yggdrasil, it will wither and vanish, and be forgotten as it ought to be;
and as for the cowslip by the river's brim, a yellow cowslip it shall be,
and nothing more; and the light that never was on sea or land shall be
permanently extinguished, in the interests of common sense and economy,
and (what is least inviting of all to the unregenerate mind) we shall
speedily get rid of the notion that we have lost anything worth
preserving.

This, however, is only what may be, and our concern at present is with
things as they are. It has been observed that American writers have shown
themselves more susceptible of the new influences than most others, partly
no doubt from a natural sensitiveness of organization, but in some measure
also because there are with us no ruts and fetters of old tradition from
which we must emancipate ourselves before adopting anything new. We have
no past, in the European sense, and so are ready for whatever the present
or the future may have to suggest. Nevertheless, the novelist who, in a
larger degree than any other, seems to be the literary parent of our own
best men of fiction, is himself not an American, nor even an Englishman,
but a Russian--Turguénieff. His series of extraordinary novels, translated
into English and French, is altogether the most important fact in the
literature of fiction of the last twelve years. To read his books you
would scarcely imagine that their author could have had any knowledge of
the work of his predecessors in the same field. Originality is a term
indiscriminately applied, and generally of trifling significance, but so
far as any writer may be original, Turguénieff is so. He is no less
original in the general scheme and treatment of his stories than in their
details. Whatever he produces has the air of being the outcome of his
personal experience and observation. He even describes his characters,
their aspect, features, and ruling traits, in a novel and memorable
manner. He seizes on them from a new point of vantage, and uses scarcely
any of the hackneyed and conventional devices for bringing his portraits
before our minds; yet no writer, not even Carlyle, has been more vivid,
graphic, and illuminating than he. Here are eyes that owe nothing to other
eyes, but examine and record for themselves. Having once taken up a
character he never loses his grasp on it: on the contrary, he masters it
more and more, and only lets go of it when the last recesses of its
organism have been explored. In the quality and conduct of his plots he is
equally unprecedented. His scenes are modern, and embody characteristic
events and problems in the recent history of Russia. There is in their
arrangement no attempt at symmetry, nor poetic justice. Temperament and
circumstances are made to rule, and against their merciless fiat no appeal
is allowed. Evil does evil to the end; weakness never gathers strength;
even goodness never varies from its level: it suffers, but is not
corrupted; it is the goodness of instinct, not of struggle and aspiration;
it happens to belong to this or that person, just as his hair happens to
be black or brown. Everything in the surroundings and the action is to the
last degree matter-of-fact, commonplace, inevitable; there are no
picturesque coincidences, no providential interferences, no desperate
victories over fate; the tale, like the world of the materialist, moves
onward from a predetermined beginning to a helpless and tragic close. And
yet few books have been written of deeper and more permanent fascination
than these. Their grim veracity; the creative sympathy and steady
dispassionateness of their portrayal of mankind; their constancy of
motive, and their sombre earnestness, have been surpassed by none. This
earnestness is worth dwelling upon for a moment. It bears no likeness to
the dogmatism of the bigot or the fanaticism of the enthusiast. It is the
concentration of a broadly gifted masculine mind, devoting its unstinted
energies to depicting certain aspects of society and civilization, which
are powerfully representative of the tendencies of the day. "Here is the
unvarnished fact--give heed to it!" is the unwritten motto. The author
avoids betraying, either explicitly or implicitly, the tendency of his own
sympathies; not because he fears to have them known, but because he holds
it to be his office simply to portray, and to leave judgment thereupon
where, in any case, it must ultimately rest--with the world of his
readers. He tells us what is; it is for us to consider whether it also
must be and shall be. Turguénieff is an artist by nature, yet his books
are not intentionally works of art; they are fragments of history,
differing from real life only in presenting such persons and events as are
commandingly and exhaustively typical, and excluding all others. This
faculty of selection is one of the highest artistic faculties, and it
appears as much in the minor as in the major features of the narrative. It
indicates that Turguénieff might, if he chose, produce a story as
faultlessly symmetrical as was ever framed. Why, then, does he not so
choose? The reason can only be that he deems the truth-seeming of his
narrative would thereby be impaired. "He is only telling a story," the
reader would say, "and he shapes the events and persons so as to fit the
plot." But is this reason reasonable? To those who believe that God has no
hand in the ordering of human affairs, it undoubtedly is reasonable. To
those who believe the contrary, however, it appears as if the story of no
human life or complex of lives could be otherwise than a rounded and
perfect work of art--provided only that the spectator takes note, not
merely of the superficial accidents and appearances, but also of the
underlying divine purpose and significance. The absence of this
recognition in Turguénieff's novels is the explanation of them: holding
the creed their author does, he could not have written them otherwise;
and, on the other hand, had his creed been different, he very likely would
not have written novels at all.

The pioneer, in whatever field of thought or activity, is apt to be also
the most distinguished figure therein. The consciousness of being the
first augments the keenness of his impressions, and a mind that can see
and report in advance of others a new order of things may claim a finer
organization than the ordinary. The vitality of nature animates him who
has insight to discern her at first hand, whereas his followers miss the
freshness of the morning, because, instead of discovering, they must be
content to illustrate and refine. Those of our writers who betray
Turguénieff's influence are possibly his superiors in finish and culture,
but their faculty of convincing and presenting is less. Their interest in
their own work seems less serious than his; they may entertain us more,
but they do not move and magnetize so much. The persons and events of
their stories are conscientiously studied, and are nothing if not natural;
but they lack distinction. In an epitome of life so concise as the longest
novel must needs be, to use any but types is waste of time and space. A
typical character is one who combines the traits or beliefs of a certain
class to which he is affiliated--who is, practically, all of them and
himself besides; and, when we know him, there is nothing left worth
knowing about the others. In Shakespeare's Hamlet and Enobarbus, in
Fielding's Squire Western, in Walter Scott's Edie Ochiltree and Meg
Merrilies, in Balzac's Père Goriot and Madame Marneff, in Thackeray's
Colonel Newcome and Becky Sharp, in Turguénieff's Bazarof and Dimitri
Roudine, we meet persons who exhaust for us the groups to which they
severally belong. Bazarof, the nihilist, for instance, reveals to us the
motives and influences that have made nihilism, so that we feel that
nothing essential on that score remains to be learnt.

The ability to recognize and select types is a test of a novelist's talent
and experience. It implies energy to rise above the blind walls of one's
private circle of acquaintance; the power to perceive what phases of
thought and existence are to be represented as well as who represents
them; the sagacity to analyze the age or the moment and reproduce its
dominant features. The feat is difficult, and, when done, by no means
blows its own trumpet. On the contrary, the reader must open his eyes to
be aware of it. He finds the story clear and easy of comprehension; the
characters come home to him familiarly and remain distinctly in his
memory; he understands something which was, till now, vague to him: but he
is as likely to ascribe this to an exceptional lucidity in his own mental
condition as to any special merit in the author. Indeed, it often happens
that the author who puts out-of-the-way personages into his stories--
characters that represent nothing but themselves, or possibly some
eccentricity of invention on their author's part, will gain the latter a
reputation for cleverness higher than his fellow's who portrays mankind in
its masses as well as in its details. But the finest imagination is not
that which evolves strange images, but that which explains seeming
contradictions, and reveals the unity within the difference and the
harmony beneath the discord.

Were we to compare our fictitious literature, as a whole, with that of
England, the balance must be immeasurably on the English side. Even
confining ourselves to to-day, and to the prospect of to-morrow, it must
be conceded that, in settled method, in guiding tradition, in training and
associations both personal and inherited, the average English novelist is
better circumstanced than the American. Nevertheless, the English novelist
is not at present writing better novels than the American. The reason
seems to be that he uses no material which has not been in use for
hundreds of years; and to say that such material begins to lose its
freshness is not putting the case too strongly. He has not been able to
detach himself from the paralyzing background of English conventionality.
The vein was rich, but it is worn out; and the half-dozen pioneers had all
the luck.

There is no commanding individual imagination in England--nor, to say the
truth, does there seem to be any in America. But we have what they have
not--a national imaginative tendency. There are no fetters upon our fancy;
and, however deeply our real estate may be mortgaged, there is freedom for
our ideas. England has not yet appreciated the true inwardness of a
favorite phrase of ours,--a new deal. And yet she is tired to death of her
own stale stories; and when, by chance, any one of her writers happens to
chirp out a note a shade different from the prevailing key, the whole
nation pounces down upon him, with a shriek of half-incredulous joy, and
buys him up, at the rate of a million copies a year. Our own best writers
are more read in England, or, at any rate, more talked about, than their
native crop; not so much, perhaps, because they are different as because
their difference is felt to be of a significant and typical kind. It has
in it a gleam of the new day. They are realistic; but realism, so far as
it involves a faithful study of nature, is useful. The illusion of a
loftier reality, at which we should aim, must be evolved from adequate
knowledge of reality itself. The spontaneous and assured faith, which is
the mainspring of sane imagination, must be preceded by the doubt and
rejection of what is lifeless and insincere. We desire no resurrection of
the Ann Radclyffe type of romance: but the true alternative to this is not
such a mixture of the police gazette and the medical reporter as Emile
Zola offers us. So far as Zola is conscientious, let him live; but, in so
far as he is revolting, let him die. Many things in the world seem ugly
and purposeless; but to a deeper intelligence than ours, they are a part
of beauty and design. What is ugly and irrelevant, can never enter, as
such, into a work of art; because the artist is bound, by a sacred
obligation, to show us the complete curve only,--never the undeveloped
fragments.

But were the firmament of England still illuminated with her Dickenses,
her Thackerays, and her Brontës, I should still hold our state to be
fuller of promise than hers. It may be admitted that almost everything was
against our producing anything good in literature. Our men, in the first
place, had to write for nothing; because the publisher, who can steal a
readable English novel, will not pay for an American novel, for the mere
patriotic gratification of enabling its American author to write it. In
the second place, they had nothing to write about, for the national life
was too crude and heterogeneous for ordinary artistic purposes. Thirdly,
they had no one to write for: because, although, in one sense, there might
be readers enough, in a higher sense there were scarcely any,--that is to
say, there was no organized critical body of literary opinion, from which
an author could confidently look to receive his just meed of encouragement
and praise. Yet, in spite of all this, and not to mention honored names
that have ceased or are ceasing to cast their living weight into the
scale, we are contributing much that is fresh and original, and something,
it may be, that is of permanent value, to literature. We have accepted the
situation; and, since no straw has been vouchsafed us to make our bricks
with, we are trying manfully to make them without.

It will not be necessary, however, to call the roll of all the able and
popular gentlemen who are contending in the forlorn hope against
disheartening odds; and as for the ladies who have honored our literature
by their contributions, it will perhaps be well to adopt regarding them a
course analogous to that which Napoleon is said to have pursued with the
letters sent to him while in Italy. He left them unread until a certain
time had elapsed, and then found that most of them no longer needed
attention. We are thus brought face to face with the two men with whom
every critic of American novelists has to reckon; who represent what is
carefullest and newest in American fiction; and it remains to inquire how
far their work has been moulded by the skeptical or radical spirit of
which Turguénieff is the chief exemplar.

The author of "Daisy Miller" had been writing for several years before the
bearings of his course could be confidently calculated. Some of his
earlier tales,--as, for example, "The Madonna of the Future,"--while
keeping near reality on one side, are on the other eminently fanciful and
ideal. He seemed to feel the attraction of fairyland, but to lack
resolution to swallow it whole; so, instead of idealizing both persons and
plot, as Hawthorne had ventured to do, he tried to persuade real persons
to work out an ideal destiny. But the tact, delicacy, and reticence with
which these attempts were made did not blind him to the essential
incongruity; either realism or idealism had to go, and step by step he
dismissed the latter, until at length Turguénieff's current caught him. By
this time, however, his culture had become too wide, and his independent
views too confirmed, to admit of his yielding unconditionally to the great
Russian. Especially his critical familiarity with French literature
operated to broaden, if at the same time to render less trenchant, his
method and expression. His characters are drawn with fastidious care, and
closely follow the tones and fashions of real life. Each utterance is so
exactly like what it ought to be that the reader feels the same sort of
pleased surprise as is afforded by a phonograph which repeats, with all
the accidental pauses and inflections, the speech spoken into it. Yet the
words come through a medium; they are not quite spontaneous; these figures
have not the sad, human inevitableness of Turguénieff's people. The reason
seems to be (leaving the difference between the genius of the two writers
out of account) that the American, unlike the Russian, recognizes no
tragic importance in the situation. To the latter, the vision of life is
so ominous that his voice waxes sonorous and terrible; his eyes, made keen
by foreboding, see the leading elements of the conflict, and them only; he
is no idle singer of an empty day, but he speaks because speech springs
out of him. To his mind, the foundations of human welfare are in jeopardy,
and it is full time to decide what means may avert the danger. But the
American does not think any cataclysm is impending, or if any there be,
nobody can help it. The subjects that best repay attention are the minor
ones of civilization, culture, behavior; how to avoid certain vulgarities
and follies, how to inculcate certain principles: and to illustrate these
points heroic types are not needed. In other words, the situation being
unheroic, so must the actors be; for, apart from the inspirations of
circumstances, Napoleon no more than John Smith is recognizable as a hero.

Now, in adopting this view, a writer places himself under several manifest
disadvantages. If you are to be an agnostic, it is better (for novel-
writing purposes) not to be a complacent or resigned one. Otherwise your
characters will find it difficult to show what is in them. A man reveals
and classifies himself in proportion to the severity of the condition or
action required of him, hence the American novelist's people are in
considerable straits to make themselves adequately known to us. They
cannot lay bare their inmost soul over a cup of tea or a picture by Corôt;
so, in order to explain themselves, they must not only submit to
dissection at the author's hands, but must also devote no little time and
ingenuity to dissecting themselves and one another. But dissection is one
thing, and the living word rank from the heart and absolutely reeking of
the human creature that uttered it--the word that Turguénieff's people are
constantly uttering--is another. Moreover, in the dearth of commanding
traits and stirring events, there is a continual temptation to magnify
those which are petty and insignificant. Instead of a telescope to sweep
the heavens, we are furnished with a microscope to detect infusoria. We
want a description of a mountain; and, instead of receiving an outline,
naked and severe, perhaps, but true and impressive, we are introduced to a
tiny field on its immeasurable side, and we go botanizing and insect-
hunting there. This is realism; but it is the realism of texture, not of
form and relation. It encourages our glance to be near-sighted instead of
comprehensive. Above all, there is a misgiving that we do not touch the
writer's true quality, and that these scenes of his, so elaborately and
conscientiously prepared, have cost him much thought and pains, but not
one throb of the heart or throe of the spirit. The experiences that he
depicts have not, one fancies, marked wrinkles on his forehead or turned
his hair gray. There are two kinds of reserve--the reserve which feels
that its message is too mighty for it, and the reserve which feels that it
is too mighty for its message. Our new school of writers is reserved, but
its reserve does not strike one as being of the former kind. It cannot be
said of any one of Mr. James's stories, "This is his best," or "This is
his worst," because no one of them is all one way. They have their phases
of strength and veracity, and, also, phases that are neither veracious nor
strong. The cause may either lie in a lack of experience in a certain
direction on the writer's part; or else in his reluctance to write up to
the experience he has. The experience in question is not of the ways of
the world,--concerning which Mr. James has every sign of being politely
familiar,--nor of men and women in their every-day aspect; still less of
literary ways and means, for of these, in his own line, he is a master.
The experience referred to is experience of passion. If Mr. James be not
incapable of describing passion, at all events he has still to show that
he is capable of it. He has introduced us to many characters that seem to
have in them capacity for the highest passion,--as witness Christina
Light,--and yet he has never allowed them an opportunity to develop it. He
seems to evade the situation; but the evasion is managed with so much
plausibility that, although we may be disappointed, or even irritated, and
feel, more or less vaguely, that we have been unfairly dealt with, we are
unable to show exactly where or how the unfairness comes in. Thus his
novels might be compared to a beautiful face, full of culture and good
breeding, but lacking that fire of the eye and fashion of the lip that
betray a living human soul.

The other one of the two writers whose names are so often mentioned
together, seems to have taken up the subject of our domestic and social
pathology; and the minute care and conscientious veracity which he has
brought to bear upon his work has not been surpassed, even by Shakespeare.
But, if I could venture a criticism upon his productions, it would be to
the effect that there is not enough fiction in them. They are elaborate
and amiable reports of what we see around us. They are not exactly
imaginative,--in the sense in which I have attempted to define the word.
There are two ways of warning a man against unwholesome life--one is, to
show him a picture of disease; the other is, to show him a picture of
health. The former is the negative, the latter the positive treatment.
Both have their merits; but the latter is, perhaps, the better adapted to
novels, the former to essays. A novelist should not only know what he has
got; he should also know what he wants. His mind should have an active, or
theorizing, as well as a passive, or contemplative, side. He should have
energy to discount the people he personally knows; the power to perceive
what phases of thought are to be represented, as well as to describe the
persons who happen to be their least inadequate representatives; the
sagacity to analyze the age or the moment, and to reveal its tendency and
meaning. Mr. Howells has produced a great deal of finely wrought tapestry;
but does not seem, as yet, to have found a hall fit to adorn it with.

And yet Mr. James and Mr. Howells have done more than all the rest of us
to make our literature respectable during the last ten years. If texture
be the object, they have brought texture to a fineness never surpassed
anywhere. They have discovered charm and grace in much that was only blank
before. They have detected and described points of human nature hitherto
unnoticed, which, if not intrinsically important, will one day be made
auxiliary to the production of pictures of broader as well as minuter
veracity than have heretofore been produced. All that seems wanting thus
far is a direction, an aim, a belief. Agnosticism has brought about a
pause for a while, and no doubt a pause is preferable to some kinds of
activity. It may enable us, when the time comes to set forward again, to
do so with better equipment and more intelligent purpose. It will not do
to be always at a prophetic heat of enthusiasm, sympathy, denunciation:
the coolly critical mood is also useful to prune extravagance and promote
a sense of responsibility. The novels of Mr. James and of Mr. Howells have
taught us that men and women are creatures of infinitely complicated
structure, and that even the least of these complications, if it is
portrayed at all, is worth portraying truthfully. But we cannot forget, on
the other hand, that honest emotion and hearty action are necessary to the
wholesomeness of society, because in their absence society is afflicted
with a lamentable sameness and triviality; the old primitive impulses
remain, but the food on which they are compelled to feed is insipid and
unsustaining; our eyes are turned inward instead of outward, and each one
of us becomes himself the Rome towards which all his roads lead. Such
books as these authors have written are not the Great American Novel,
because they take life and humanity not in their loftier, but in their
lesser manifestations. They are the side scenes and the background of a
story that has yet to be written. That story will have the interest not
only of the collision of private passions and efforts, but of the great
ideas and principles which characterize and animate a nation. It will
discriminate between what is accidental and what is permanent, between
what is realistic and what is real, between what is sentimental and what
is sentiment. It will show us not only what we are, but what we are to be;
not only what to avoid, but what to do. It will rest neither in the tragic
gloom of Turguénieff, nor in the critical composure of James, nor in the
gentle deprecation of Howells, but will demonstrate that the weakness of
man is the motive and condition of his strength. It will not shrink from
romance, nor from ideality, nor from artistic completeness, because it
will know at what depths and heights of life these elements are truly
operative. It will be American, not because its scene is laid or its
characters born in the United States, but because its burden will be
reaction against old tyrannies and exposure of new hypocrisies; a
refutation of respectable falsehoods, and a proclamation of
unsophisticated truths. Indeed, let us take heed and diligently improve
our native talent, lest a day come when the Great American Novel make its
appearance, but written in a foreign language, and by some author who--
however purely American at heart--never set foot on the shores of the
Republic.




CHAPTER III.

AMERICANISM IN FICTION.


Contemporary criticism will have it that, in order to create an American
Literature, we must use American materials. The term "Literature" has, no
doubt, come to be employed in a loose sense. The London _Saturday Review_
has (or used to have until lately) a monthly two-column article devoted to
what it called "American Literature," three-fourths of which were devoted
to an examination of volumes of State Histories, Statistical Digests,
Records of the Census, and other such works as were never, before or
since, suspected of being literature; while the remaining fourth mentioned
the titles (occasionally with a line of comment) of whatever productions
were at hand in the way of essays, novels, and poetry. This would seem to
indicate that we may have--nay, are already possessed of--an American
Literature, composed of American materials, provided only that we consent
to adopt the _Saturday Review's_ conception of what literature is.

Many of us believe, however, that the essays, the novels, and the poetry,
as well as the statistical digests, ought to go to the making up of a
national literature. It has been discovered, however, that the existence
of the former does not depend, to the same extent as that of the latter,
upon the employment of exclusively American material. A book about the
census, if it be not American, is nothing; but a poem or a romance, though
written by a native-born American, who, perhaps, has never crossed the
Atlantic, not only may, but frequently does, have nothing in it that can
be called essentially American, except its English and, occasionally, its
ideas. And the question arises whether such productions can justly be held
to form component parts of what shall hereafter be recognized as the
literature of America.

How was it with the makers of English literature? Beginning with Chaucer,
his "Canterbury Pilgrims" is English, both in scene and character; it is
even mentioned of the Abbess that "Frenche of Paris was to her unknowe";
but his "Legende of Goode Women" might, so far as its subject-matter is
concerned, have been written by a French, a Spanish, or an Italian
Chaucer, just as well as by the British Daniel. Spenser's "Faërie Queene"
numbers St. George and King Arthur among its heroes; but its scene is laid
in Faërie Lande, if it be laid anywhere, and it is a barefaced moral
allegory throughout. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, the elimination
of which from English literature would undeniably be a serious loss to it;
yet, of these plays twenty-three have entirely foreign scenes and
characters. Milton, as a political writer, was English; but his "Paradise
Lost and Regained," his "Samson," his "Ode on the Nativity," his "Comus,"
bear no reference to the land of his birth. Dryden's best-known work to-
day is his "Alexander's Feast." Pope has come down to us as the translator
of Homer. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are the great quartet
of English novelists of the last century; but Smollett, in his preface to
"Roderick Random," after an admiring allusion to the "Gil Blas" of Le
Sage, goes on to say: "The following sheets I have modelled on his plan";
and Sterne was always talking and thinking about Cervantes, and comparing
himself to the great Spaniard: "I think there is more laughable humor,
with an equal degree of Cervantic satire, if not more, than in the last,"
he writes of one of his chapters, to "my witty widow, Mrs. F." Many even
of Walter Scott's romances are un-English in their elements; and the fame
of Shelley, Keats, and Byron rests entirely upon their "foreign" work.
Coleridge's poetry and philosophy bear no technical stamp of nationality;
and, to come down to later times, Carlyle was profoundly imbued with
Germanism, while the "Romola" of George Eliot and the "Cloister and the
Hearth" of Charles Reade are by many considered to be the best of their
works. In the above enumeration innumerable instances in point are, of
course, omitted; but enough have been given, perhaps, to show that
imaginative writers have not generally been disowned by their country on
the ground that they have availed themselves, in their writings, of other
scenes and characters than those of their own immediate neighborhoods.

The statistics of the work of the foremost American writers could easily
be shown to be much more strongly imbued with the specific flavor of their
environment. Benjamin Franklin, though he was an author before the United
States existed, was American to the marrow. The "Leather-Stocking Tales"
of Cooper are the American epic. Irving's "Knickerbocker" and his
"Woolfert's Roost" will long outlast his other productions. Poe's most
popular tale, "The Gold-Bug," is American in its scene, and so is "The
Mystery of Marie Roget," in spite of its French nomenclature; and all that
he wrote is strongly tinged with the native hue of his strange genius.
Longfellow's "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" and "Miles Standish," and such
poems as "The Skeleton in Armor" and "The Building of the Ship," crowd out
of sight his graceful translations and adaptations. Emerson is the
veritable American eagle of our literature, so that to be Emersonian is to
be American. Whittier and Holmes have never looked beyond their native
boundaries, and Hawthorne has brought the stern gloom of the Puritan
period and the uneasy theorizings of the present day into harmony with the
universal and permanent elements of human nature. There was certainly
nothing European visible in the crude but vigorous stories of Theodore
Winthrop; and Bret Harte, the most brilliant figure among our later men,
is not only American, but Californian,--as is, likewise, the Poet of the
Sierras. It is not necessary to go any further. Mr. Henry James, having
enjoyed early and singular opportunities of studying the effects of the
recent annual influx of Americans, cultured and otherwise, into England
and the Continent, has very sensibly and effectively, and with exquisite
grace of style and pleasantness of thought, made the phenomenon the theme
of a remarkable series of stories. Hereupon the cry of an "International
School" has been raised, and critics profess to be seriously alarmed lest
we should ignore the signal advantages for _mise-en-scène_ presented by
this Western half of the planet, and should enter into vain and
unpatriotic competition with foreign writers on their own ground. The
truth is, meanwhile, that it would have been a much surer sign of
affectation in us to have abstained from literary comment upon the patent
and notable fact of this international _rapprochement_,--which is just as
characteristic an American trait as the episode of the Argonauts of 1849,
--and we have every reason to be grateful to Mr. Henry James, and to his
school, if he has any, for having rescued us from the opprobrium of so
foolish a piece of know-nothingism. The phase is, of course, merely
temporary; its interest and significance will presently be exhausted; but,
because we are American, are we to import no French cakes and English ale?
As a matter of fact, we are too timid and self-conscious; and these
infirmities imply a much more serious obstacle to the formation of a
characteristic literature than does any amount of gadding abroad.

That must be a very shallow literature which depends for its national
flavor and character upon its topography and its dialect; and the
criticism which can conceive of no deeper Americanism than this is
shallower still. What is an American book? It is a book written by an
American, and by one who writes as an American; that is, unaffectedly. So
an English book is a book written by an unaffected Englishman. What
difference can it make what the subject of the writing is? Mr. Henry James
lately brought out a volume of essays on "French Poets and Novelists." Mr.
E. C. Stedman recently published a series of monographs on "The Victorian
Poets." Are these books French and English, or are they nondescript, or
are they American? Not only are they American, but they are more
essentially American than if they had been disquisitions upon American
literature. And the reason is, of course, that they subject the things of
the old world to the tests of the new, and thereby vindicate and
illustrate the characteristic mission of America to mankind. We are here
to hold up European conventionalisms and prejudices in the light of the
new day, and thus afford everybody the opportunity, never heretofore
enjoyed, of judging them by other standards, and in other surroundings
than those amidst which they came into existence. In the same way,
Emerson's "English Traits" is an American thing, and it gives categorical
reasons why American things should be. And what is an American novel
except a novel treating of persons, places, and ideas from an American
point of view? The point of view is _the_ point, not the thing seen from
it.

But it is said that "the great American novel," in order fully to deserve
its name, ought to have American scenery. Some thousands of years ago, the
Greeks had a novelist--Homer--who evolved the great novel of that epoch;
but the scenery of that novel was Trojan, not Greek. The story is a
criticism, from a Greek standpoint, of foreign affairs, illustrated with
practical examples; and, as regards treatment, quite as much care is
bestowed upon the delineation of Hector, Priam, and Paris, as upon
Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Achilles. The same story, told by a Trojan Homer,
would doubtless have been very different; but it is by no means certain
that it would have been any better told. It embodies, whether symbolically
or literally matters not, the triumph of Greek ideas and civilization.
But, even so, the sympathies of the reader are not always, or perhaps
uniformly, on the conquering side. Homer was doubtless a patriot, but he
shows no signs of having been a bigot. He described that great
international episode with singular impartiality; what chiefly interested
him was the play of human nature. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that
the Greeks were backward in admitting his claims as their national poet;
and we may legitimately conclude that were an American Homer--whether in
prose or poetry--to appear among us, he might pitch his scene where he
liked--in Patagonia, or on the banks of the Zambezi--and we should accept
the situation with perfect equanimity. Only let him be a native of New
York, or Boston, or San Francisco, or Mullenville, and be inspired with
the American idea, and we ask no more. Whatever he writes will belong to
our literature, and add lustre to it.

One hears many complaints about the snobbishness of running after things
European. Go West, young man, these moralists say, or go down Fifth
Avenue, and investigate Chatham Street, and learn that all the elements of
romance, to him who has the seeing eye, lie around your own front doorstep
and back yard. But let not these persons forget that he who fears Europe
is a less respectable snob than he who studies it. Let us welcome Europe
in our books as freely as we do at Castle Garden; we may do so safely. If
our digestion be not strong enough to assimilate her, and work up whatever
is valuable in her into our own bone and sinew, then America is not the
thing we took her for. For what is America? Is it simply a reproduction of
one of these Eastern nationalities, which we are so fond of alluding to as
effete? Surely not. It is a new departure in history; it is a new door
opened to the development of the human race, or, as I should prefer to
say, of humanity. We are misled by the chatter of politicians and the
bombast of Congress. In the course of ages, the time has at last arrived
when man, all over this planet, is entering upon a new career of moral,
intellectual, and political emancipation; and America is the concrete
expression and theatre of that great fact, as all spiritual truths find
their fitting and representative physical incarnation. But what would this
huge western continent be, if America--the real America of the mind--had
no existence? It would be a body without a soul, and would better,
therefore, not be at all. If America is to be a repetition of Europe on a
larger scale, it is not worth the pain of governing it. Europe has shown
what European ideas can accomplish; and whatever fresh thought or impulse
comes to birth in it can be nothing else than an American thought and
impulse, and must sooner or later find its way here, and become
naturalized with its brethren. Buds and blossoms of America are sprouting
forth all over the Old World, and we gather in the fruit. They do not find
themselves at home there, but they know where their home is. The old
country feels them like thorns in her old flesh, and is gladly rid of
them; but such prickings are the only wholesome and hopeful symptoms she
presents; if they ceased to trouble her, she would be dead indeed. She has
an uneasy experience before her, for a time; but the time will come when
she, too, will understand that her ease is her disease, and then Castle
Garden may close its doors, for America will be everywhere.

If, then, America is something vastly more than has hitherto been
understood by the word nation, it is proper that we attach to that other
word, patriotism, a significance broader and loftier than has been
conceived till now. By so much as the idea that we represent is great, by
so much are we, in comparison with it, inevitably chargeable with
littleness and short-comings. For we are of the same flesh and blood as
our neighbors; it is only our opportunities and our responsibilities that
are fairer and weightier than theirs. Circumstances afford every excuse to
them, but none to us. "_E Pluribus Unum_" is a frivolous motto; our true
one should be, "_Noblesse oblige_." But, with a strange perversity, in all
matters of comparison between ourselves and others, we display what we are
pleased to call our patriotism by an absurd touchiness as to points
wherein Europe, with its settled and polished civilization, must needs be
our superior; and are quite indifferent about those things by which our
real strength is constituted. Can we not be content to learn from Europe
the graces, the refinements, the amenities of life, so long as we are able
to teach her life itself? For my part, I never saw in England any
appurtenance of civilization, calculated to add to the convenience and
commodiousness of existence, that did not seem to me to surpass anything
of the kind that we have in this country. Notwithstanding which--and I am
far, indeed, from having any pretensions to asceticism--I would have been
fairly stifled at the idea of having to spend my life there. No American
can live in Europe, unless he means to return home, or unless, at any
rate, he returns here in mind, in hope, in belief. For an American to
accept England, or any other country, as both a mental and physical
finality, would, it seems to me, be tantamount to renouncing his very
life. To enjoy English comforts at the cost of adopting English opinions,
would be about as pleasant as to have the privilege of retaining one's
body on condition of surrendering one's soul, and would, indeed, amount to
just about the same thing.

I fail, therefore, to feel any apprehension as to our literature becoming
Europeanized, because whatever is American in it must lie deeper than
anything European can penetrate. More than that, I believe and hope that
our novelists will deal with Europe a great deal more, and a great deal
more intelligently, than they have done yet. It is a true and healthy
artistic instinct that leads them to do so. Hawthorne--and no American
writer had a better right than he to contradict his own argument--says, in
the preface to the "Marble Faun," in a passage that has been often quoted,
but will bear repetition:--

    "Italy, as the site of a romance, was chiefly valuable to him as <
    affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would
    not be so terribly insisted on as they are, and must needs be, in
    America. No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of
    writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no
    antiquity, n mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything
    but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is
    happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I
    trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled
    themes, either in the annals of our stalwart Republic, or in any
    characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance
    and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them
    grow."

Now, what is to be understood from this passage? It assumes, in the first
place, that a work of art, in order to be effective, must contain profound
contrasts of light and shadow; and then it points out that the shadow, at
least, is found ready to the hand in Europe. There is no hint of patriotic
scruples as to availing one's self of such a "picturesque and gloomy"
background; if it is to be had, then let it be taken; the main object to
be considered is the work of art. Europe, in short, afforded an excellent
quarry, from which, in Hawthorne's opinion, the American novelist might
obtain materials which are conspicuously deficient in his own country, and
which that country is all the better for not possessing. In the "Marble
Faun" the author had conceived a certain idea, and he considered that he
had been not unsuccessful in realizing it. The subject was new, and full
of especial attractions to his genius, and it would manifestly have been
impossible to adapt it to an American setting. There was one drawback
connected with it, and this Hawthorne did not fail to recognize. He
remarks in the preface that he had "lived too long abroad not to be aware
that a foreigner seldom acquires that knowledge of a country at once
flexible and profound, which may justify him in endeavoring to idealize
its traits." But he was careful not to attempt "a portraiture of Italian
manners and character." He made use of the Italian scenery and atmosphere
just so far as was essential to the development of his idea, and
consistent with the extent of his Italian knowledge; and, for the rest,
fell back upon American characters and principles. The result has been
long enough before the world to have met with a proper appreciation. I
have heard regret expressed that the power employed by the author in
working out this story had not been applied to a romance dealing with a
purely American subject. But to analyze this objection is to dispose of
it. A man of genius is not, commonly, enfeebled by his own productions;
and, physical accidents aside, Hawthorne was just as capable of writing
another "Scarlet Letter" after the "Marble Faun" was published, as he had
been before. Meanwhile, few will deny that our literature would be a loser
had the "Marble Faun" never been written.

The drawback above alluded to is, however, not to be underrated. It may
operate in two ways. In the first place, the American's European
observations may be inaccurate. As a child, looking at a sphere, might
suppose it to be a flat disc, shaded at one side and lighted at the other,
so a sightseer in Europe may ascribe to what he beholds qualities and a
character quite at variance with what a more fundamental knowledge would
have enabled him to perceive. In the second place, the stranger in a
strange land, be he as accurate as he may, will always tend to look at
what is around him objectively, instead of allowing it subjectively--or,
as it were, unconsciously--to color his narrative. He will be more apt
directly to describe what he sees, than to convey the feeling or aroma of
it without description. It would doubtless, for instance, be possible for
Mr. Henry James to write an "English" or even a "French" novel without
falling into a single technical error; but it is no less certain that a
native writer, of equal ability, would treat the same subject in a very
different manner. Mr. James's version might contain a great deal more of
definite information; but the native work would insinuate an impression
which both comes from and goes to a greater depth of apprehension.

But, on the other hand, it is not contended that any American should write
an "English" or anything but an "American" novel. The contention is,
simply, that he should not refrain from using foreign material, when it
happens to suit his exigencies, merely because it is foreign. Objective
writing may be quite as good reading as subjective writing, in its proper
place and function. In fiction, no more than elsewhere, may a writer
pretend to be what he is not, or to know what he knows not. When he finds
himself abroad, he must frankly admit his situation; and more will not
then be required of him than he is fairly competent to afford. It will
seldom happen, as Hawthorne intimates, that he can successfully reproduce
the inner workings and philosophy of European social and political customs
and peculiarities; but he can give a picture of the scenery as vivid as
can the aborigine, or more so; he can make an accurate study of personal
native character; and, finally, and most important of all, he can make use
of the conditions of European civilization in events, incidents, and
situations which would be impossible on this side of the water. The
restrictions, the traditions, the law, and the license of those old
countries are full of suggestions to the student of character and
circumstances, and supply him with colors and effects that he would else
search for in vain. For the truth may as well be admitted; we are at a
distinct disadvantage, in America, in respect of the materials of romance.
Not that vigorous, pathetic, striking stories may not be constructed here;
and there is humor enough, the humor of dialect, of incongruity of
character; but, so far as the story depends for its effect, not upon
psychical and personal, but upon physical and general events and
situations, we soon feel the limit of our resources. An analysis of the
human soul, such as may be found in the "House of the Seven Gables," for
instance, is absolute in its interest, apart from outward conditions. But
such an analysis cannot be carried on, so to say, _in vacuo_. You must
have solid ground to stand on; you must have fitting circumstances,
background, and perspective. The ruin of a soul, the tragedy of a heart,
demand, as a necessity of harmony and picturesque effect, a corresponding
and conspiring environment and stage--just as, in music, the air in the
treble is supported and reverberated by the bass accompaniment. The
immediate, contemporary act or predicament loses more than half its
meaning and impressiveness if it be re-echoed from no sounding-board in
the past--its notes, however sweetly and truly touched, fall flatly on the
ear. The deeper we attempt to pitch the key of an American story,
therefore, the more difficulty shall we find in providing a congruous
setting for it; and it is interesting to note how the masters of the craft
have met the difficulty. In the "Seven Gables"--and I take leave to say
that if I draw illustrations from this particular writer, it is for no
other reason than that he presents, more forcibly than most, a method of
dealing with the special problem we are considering--Hawthorne, with the
intuitive skill of genius, evolves a background, and produces a
reverberation, from materials which he may be said to have created almost
as much as discovered. The idea of a house, founded two hundred years ago
upon a crime, remaining ever since in possession of its original owners,
and becoming the theatre, at last, of the judgment upon that crime, is a
thoroughly picturesque idea, but it is thoroughly un-American. Such a
thing might conceivably occur, but nothing in this country could well be
more unlikely. No one before Hawthorne had ever thought of attempting such
a thing; at all events, no one else, before or since, has accomplished it.
The preface to the romance in question reveals the principle upon which
its author worked, and incidentally gives a new definition of the term
"romance,"--a definition of which, thus far, no one but its propounder has
known how to avail himself. It amounts, in fact, to an acknowledgment that
it is impossible to write a "novel" of American life that shall be at once
artistic, realistic, and profound. A novel, he says, aims at a "very
minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and
ordinary course of man's experience." A romance, on the other hand,
"while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and
while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of
the human heart, has fairly a right to present that truth under
circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or
creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium
as to bring out and mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows,
of the picture." This is good advice, no doubt, but not easy to follow. We
can all understand, however, that the difficulties would be greatly
lessened could we but command backgrounds of the European order.
Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, and others have written great
stories, which did not have to be romances, because the literal conditions
of life in England have a picturesqueness and a depth which correspond
well enough with whatever moral and mental scenery we may project upon
them. Hawthorne was forced to use the scenery and capabilities of his
native town of Salem. He saw that he could not present these in a
realistic light, and his artistic instinct showed him that he must modify
or veil the realism of his figures in the same degree and manner as that
of his accessories. No doubt, his peculiar genius and temperament
eminently qualified him to produce this magical change; it was a
remarkable instance of the spontaneous marriage, so to speak, of the means
to the end; and even when, in Italy, he had an opportunity to write a
story which should be accurate in fact, as well as faithful to "the truth
of the human heart," he still preferred a subject which bore to the
Italian environment the same relation that the "House of the Seven Gables"
and the "Scarlet Letter" do to the American one; in other words, the
conception of Donatello is removed as much further than Clifford or Hester
Prynne from literal realism as the inherent romance of the Italian setting
is above that of New England. The whole thing is advanced a step further
towards pure idealism, the relative proportions being maintained.

"The Blithedale Romance" is only another instance in point, and here, as
before, we find the principle admirably stated in the preface. "In the old
countries," says Hawthorne, "a novelist's work is not put exactly side by
side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to everyday
probability, in view of the improved effects he is bound to produce
thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no Faëry Land,
so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, we cannot well tell
the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld
through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This
atmosphere is what the American romancer needs. In its absence, the beings
of his imagination are compelled to show themselves in the same category
as actually living mortals; a necessity that renders the paint and
pasteboard of their composition but too painfully discernible."
Accordingly, Hawthorne selects the Brook Farm episode (or a reflection of
it) as affording his drama "a theatre, a little removed from the highway
of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their
phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison
with the actual events of real lives." In this case, therefore, an
exceptional circumstance is made to answer the same purpose that was
attained by different means in the other romances.

But in what manner have our other writers of fiction treated the
difficulties that were thus dealt with by Hawthorne?--Herman Melville
cannot be instanced here; for his only novel or romance, whichever it be,
was also the most impossible of all his books, and really a terrible
example of the enormities which a man of genius may perpetrate when
working in a direction unsuited to him. I refer, of course, to "Pierre, or
the Ambiguities." Oliver Wendell Holmes's two delightful stories are as
favorable examples of what can be done, in the way of an American novel,
by a wise, witty, and learned gentleman, as we are likely to see.
Nevertheless, one cannot avoid the feeling that they are the work of a man
who has achieved success and found recognition in other ways than by
stories, or even poems and essays. The interest, in either book, centres
round one of those physiological phenomena which impinge so strangely upon
the domain of the soul; for the rest, they are simply accurate and
humorous portraitures of local dialects and peculiarities, and thus afford
little assistance in the search for a universally applicable rule of
guidance. Doctor Holmes, I believe, objects to having the term "medicated"
applied to his tales; but surely the adjective is not reproachful; it
indicates one of the most charming and also, alas! inimitable features of
his work.

Bret Harte is probably as valuable a witness as could be summoned in this
case. His touch is realistic, and yet his imagination is poetic and
romantic. He has discovered something. He has done something both new and
good. Within the space of some fifty pages, he has painted a series of
pictures which will last as long as anything in the fifty thousand pages
of Dickens. Taking "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" as perhaps the most nearly
perfect of the tales, as well as the most truly representative of the
writer's powers, let us try to guess its secret. In the first place, it is
very short,--a single episode, succinctly and eloquently told. The
descriptions of scenery and persons are masterly and memorable. The
characters of these persons, their actions, and the circumstances of their
lives, are as rugged, as grotesque, as terrible, and also as beautiful, as
the scenery. Thus an artistic harmony is established,--the thing which is
lacking in so much of our literature. The story moves swiftly on, through
humor, pathos, and tragedy, to its dramatic close. It is given with
perfect literary taste, and naught in its phases of human nature is either
extenuated or set down in malice. The little narrative can be read in a
few minutes, and can never be forgotten. But it is only an episode; and it
is an episode of an episode,--that of the Californian gold-fever. The
story of the Argonauts is only one story, after all, and these tales of
Harte's are but so many facets of the same gem. They are not, however,
like chapters in a romance; there is no such vital connection between them
as develops a cumulative force. We are no more impressed after reading
half a dozen of them than after the first; they are variations of the same
theme. They discover to us no new truth about human nature; they only show
us certain human beings so placed as to act out their naked selves,--to be
neither influenced nor protected by the rewards and screens of
conventional civilization. The affectation and insincerity of our daily
life make such a spectacle fresh and pleasing to us. But we enjoy it
because of its unexpectedness, its separateness, its unlikeness to the
ordinary course of existence. It is like a huge, strange, gorgeous flower,
an exaggeration and intensification of such flowers as we know; but a
flower without roots, unique, never to be reproduced. It is fitting that
its portrait should be painted; but, once done, it is done with; we cannot
fill our picture-gallery with it. Carlyle wrote the History of the French
Revolution, and Bret Harte has written the History of the Argonauts; but
it is absurd to suppose that a national literature could be founded on
either episode.

But though Mr. Harte has not left his fellow-craftsmen anything to gather
from the lode which he opened and exhausted, we may still learn something
from his method. He took things as he found them, and he found them
disinclined to weave themselves into an elaborate and balanced narrative.
He recognized the deficiency of historical perspective, but he saw that
what was lost in slowly growing, culminating power was gained in vivid,
instant force. The deeds of his character could not be represented as the
final result of long-inherited proclivities; but they could appear between
their motive and their consequence, like the draw--aim--fire! of the
Western desperado,--as short, sharp, and conclusive. In other words, the
conditions of American life, as he saw it, justified a short story, or any
number of them, but not a novel; and the fact that he did afterwards
attempt a novel only served to confirm his original position. I think that
the limitation that he discovered is of much wider application than we are
prone to realize. American life has been, as yet, nothing but a series of
episodes, of experiments. There has been no such thing as a fixed and
settled condition of society, not subject to change itself, and therefore
affording a foundation and contrast to minor or individual vicissitudes.
We cannot write American-grown novels, because a novel is not an episode,
nor an aggregation of episodes; we cannot write romances in the Hawthorne
sense, because, as yet, we do not seem to be clever enough. Several
courses are, however, open to us, and we are pursuing them all. First, we
are writing "short stories," accounts of episodes needing no historical
perspective, and not caring for any; and, so far as one may judge, we
write the best short stories in the world. Secondly, we may spin out our
short stories into long-short stories, just as we may imagine a baby six
feet high; it takes up more room, but is just as much a baby as one of
twelve inches. Thirdly, we may graft our flower of romance on a European
stem, and enjoy ourselves as much as the European novelists do, and with
as clear a conscience. We are stealing that which enriches us and does not
impoverish them. It is silly and childish to make the boundaries of the
America of the mind coincide with those of the United States. We need not
dispute about free trade and protection here; literature is not commerce,
nor is it politics. America is not a petty nationality, like France,
England, and Germany; but whatever in such nationalities tends toward
enlightenment and freedom is American. Let us not, therefore, confirm
ourselves in a false and ignoble conception of our meaning and mission in
the world. Let us not carry into the temple of the Muse the jealousies,
the prejudice, the ignorance, the selfishness of our "Senate" and
"Representatives," strangely so called! Let us not refuse to breathe the
air of Heaven, lest there be something European or Asian in it. If we
cannot have a national literature in the narrow, geographical sense of the
phrase, it is because our inheritance transcends all geographical
definitions. The great American novel may not be written this year, or
even in this century. Meanwhile, let us not fear to ride, and ride to
death, whatever species of Pegasus we can catch. It can do us no harm, and
it may help us to acquire a firmer seat against the time when our own, our
very own winged steed makes his appearance.




CHAPTER IV.

LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN.


Literature is that quality in books which affords delight and nourishment
to the soul. But this is a scientific and skeptical age, insomuch that one
hardly ventures to take for granted that every reader will know what his
soul is. It is not the intellect, though it gives the intellect light; nor
the emotions, though they receive their warmth from it. It is the most
catholic and constant element of human nature, yet it bears no direct part
in the practical affairs of life; it does not struggle, it does not even
suffer; but merely emerges or retires, glows or congeals, according to the
company in which it finds itself. We might say that the soul is a name for
man's innate sympathy with goodness and truth in the abstract; for no man
can have a bad soul, though his heart may be evil, or his mind depraved,
because the soul's access to the mind or heart has been so obstructed as
to leave the moral consciousness cold and dark. The soul, in other words,
is the only conservative and peacemaker; it affords the only unalterable
ground upon which all men can always meet; it unselfishly identifies or
unites us with our fellows, in contradistinction to the selfish intellect,
which individualizes us and sets each man against every other. Doubtless,
then, the soul is an amiable and desirable possession, and it would be a
pity to deprive it of so much encouragement as may be compatible with due
attention to the serious business of life. For there are moments, even in
the most active careers, when it seems agreeable to forget competition,
rivalry, jealousy; when it is a rest to think of one's self as a man
rather than a person;--moments when time and place appear impertinent, and
that most profitable which affords least palpable profit. At such seasons,
a man looks inward, or, as the American poet puts it, he loafs and invites
his soul, and then he is at a disadvantage if his soul, in consequence of
too persistent previous neglect, declines to respond to the invitation,
and remains immured in that secret place which, as years pass by, becomes
less and less accessible to so many of us.

When I say that literature nourishes the soul, I implicitly refuse the
title of literature to anything in books that either directly or
indirectly promotes any worldly or practical use. Of course, what is
literature to one man may be anything but literature to another, or to the
same man under different circumstances; Virgil to the schoolboy, for
instance, is a very different thing from the Virgil of the scholar. But
whatever you read with the design of improving yourself in some
profession, or of acquiring information likely to be of advantage to you
in any pursuit or contingency, or of enabling yourself to hold your own
with other readers, or even of rendering yourself that enviable
nondescript, a person of culture,--whatever, in short, is read with any
assignable purpose whatever, is in so far not literature. The Bible may be
literature to Mr. Matthew Arnold, because he reads it for fun; but to
Luther, Calvin, or the pupils of a Sunday-school, it is essentially
something else. Literature is the written communications of the soul of
mankind with itself; it is liable to appear in the most unexpected places,
and in the oddest company; it vanishes when we would grasp it, and appears
when we look not for it. Chairs of literature are established in the great
universities, and it is literature, no doubt, that the professor
discourses; but it ceases to be literature before it reaches the student's
ear; though, again, when the same students stumble across it in the
recesses of their memory ten or twenty years later, it may have become
literature once more. Finally, literature may, upon occasion, avail a man
more than the most thorough technical information; but it will not be
because it supplements or supplants that information, but because it has
so tempered and exalted his general faculty that whatever he may do is
done more clearly and comprehensively than might otherwise be the case.

Having thus, in some measure, considered what is literature and what the
soul, let us note, further, that the literature proper to manhood is not
proper to childhood, though the reverse is not--or, at least, never ought
to be--true. In childhood, the soul and the mind act in harmony; the mind
has not become preoccupied or sophisticated by so-called useful knowledge;
it responds obediently to the soul's impulses and intuitions. Children
have no morality; they have not yet descended to the level where morality
suggests itself to them. For morality is the outcome of spiritual pride,
the most stubborn and insidious of all sins; the pride which prompts each
of us to declare himself holier than his fellows, and to support that
claim by parading his docility to the Decalogue. Docility to any set of
rules, no matter of how divine authority, so long as it is inspired by
hope of future good or present advantage, is rather worse than useless:
except our righteousness exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees,--that
is, except it be spontaneous righteousness or morality, and, therefore,
not morality, but unconscious goodness,--we shall in no wise have
benefited either ourselves or others. Children, when left to themselves,
artlessly and innocently act out the nature that is common to saint and
sinner alike; they are selfish, angry, and foolish, because their state is
human; and they are loving, truthful, and sincere, because their origin is
divine. All that pleases or agrees with them is good; all that opposes or
offends them is evil, and this, without any reference whatever to the
moral code in vogue among their elders. But, on the other hand, children
cannot be tempted as we are, because they suppose that everything is free
and possible, and because they are as yet uncontaminated by the artificial
cravings which the artificial prohibitions incident to our civilization
create. Life is to them a constantly widening circle of things to be had
and enjoyed; nor does it ever occur to them that their desires can
conflict with those of others, or with the laws of the universe. They
cannot consciously do wrong, nor understand that any one else can do so;
untoward accidents may happen, but inanimate nature is just as liable to
be objectionable in this respect as human beings: the stone that trips
them up, the thorn that scratches them, the snow that makes their flesh
tingle, is an object of their resentment in just the same kind and degree
as are the men and women who thwart or injure them. But of duty--that
dreary device to secure future reward by present suffering; of
conscientiousness--that fear of present good for the sake of future
punishment; of remorse--that disavowal of past pleasure for fear of the
sting in its tail; of ambition--that begrudging of all honorable results
that are not effected by one's self; of these, and all similar politic and
arbitrary masks of self-love and pusillanimity, these poor children know
and suspect nothing. Yet their eyes are much keener than ours, for they
see through the surface of nature and perceive its symbolism; they see the
living reality, of which nature is the veil, and are continually at fault
because this veil is not, after all, the reality,--because it is fixed and
unplastic. The "deep mind of dauntless infancy" is, in fact, the only
revelation we have, except divine revelation itself, of that pure and
natural life of man which we dream of, and liken to heaven; but we,
nevertheless, in our penny-wise, pound-foolish way, insist upon regarding
it as ignorance, and do our best, from the earliest possible moment, to
disenchant and dispel it. We call the outrage education, understanding
thereby the process of exterminating in the child the higher order of
faculties and the intuitions, and substituting for them the external
memory, timidity, self-esteem, and all that armament of petty weapons and
defences which may enable us to get the better of our fellow-creatures in
this world, and receive the reward of our sagacity in the next. The
success of our efforts is pitiably complete; for though the child, if
fairly engaged in single combat, might make a formidable resistance
against the infliction of "lessons," it cannot long withstand our crafty
device of sending it to a place where it sees a score or a hundred of
little victims like itself, all being driven to the same Siberia. The
spirit of emulation is aroused, and lo! away they all scamper, each
straining its utmost to reach the barren goal ahead of all competitors. So
do we make the most ignoble passions of our children our allies in the
unholy task of divesting them of their childhood. And yet, who is not
aware that the best men the world has seen have been those who, throughout
their lives, retained the aroma of childlike simplicity which they brought
with them into existence? Learning--the acquisition of specific facts--is
not wisdom; it is almost incompatible with wisdom; indeed, unless the mind
be powerful enough not only to fuse its facts, but to vaporize them,--to
sublimate them into an impalpable atmosphere,--they will stand in wisdom's
way. Wisdom comes from the pondering and the application to life of
certain truths quite above the sphere of facts, and of infinitely more
moment and less complexity,--truths which are often found to be in
accordance with the spiritual instinct called intuition, which children
possess more fully than grown persons. The wisdom of our children would
often astonish us, if we would only forbear the attempt to make them
knowing, and submissively accept instruction from them. Through all the
imperfection of their inherited infirmity, we shall ever and anon be
conscious of the radiance of a beautiful, unconscious intelligence, worth
more than the smartness of schools and the cleverness of colleges. But no;
we abhor the very notion of it, and generally succeed in extinguishing it
long before the Three R's are done with.

And yet, by wisely directing the child's use of the first of the Three,
much of the ill effects of the trio and their offspring might be
counteracted. If we believed--if the great mass of people known as the
civilized world did actually and livingly believe--that there was really
anything beyond or above the physical order of nature, our children's
literature, wrongly so called, would not be what it is. We believe what we
can see and touch; we teach them to believe the same, and, not satisfied
with that, we sedulously warn them not to believe anything else. The
child, let us suppose, has heard from some unauthorized person that there
are fairies--little magical creatures an inch high, up to all manner of
delightful feats. He comprehends the whole matter at half a word, feels
that he had known it already, and half thinks that he sees one or two on
his way home. He runs up to his mother and tells her about it; and has she
ever seen fairies? Alas! His mother tells him that the existence of such a
being as a fairy is impossible. In old times, when the world was very
ignorant and superstitious, they used to ascribe everything that happened
to supernatural agency; even the trifling daily accidents of one's life,
such as tumbling down stairs, or putting the right shoe on the left foot,
were thought or fancied to be the work of some mysterious power; and since
ignorant people are very apt to imagine they see what they believe
[proceeds this mother] instead of only believing what they see; and since,
furthermore, ignorance disposes to exaggeration and thus to untruth, these
people ended by asserting that they saw fairies. "Now, my child,"
continues the parent, "it would grieve me to see you the victim of such
folly. Do not read fairy stories. They are not true to life; they fill
your mind with idle notions; they cannot form your understanding, or aid
you to do your work in the world. If you should happen to fall in with
such fables, be careful as you read to bear in mind that they are pure
inventions--pretty, sometimes, perhaps, but essentially frivolous, if not
immoral. You have, however, thanks to the enlightened enterprise of
writers and publishers, an endless assortment of juvenile books and
periodicals which combine legitimate amusement with sound and trustworthy
instruction. Here are stories about little children, just like yourself,
who talk and act just as you do, and to whom nothing supernatural or
outlandish ever happens; and whose adventures, when you have read them,
convey to you some salutary moral lesson. What more can you want? Yes,
very likely 'Grimm's Tales' and 'The Arabian Nights' may seem more
attractive; but in this world many harmful things put on an inviting
guise, which deceives the inexperienced eye. May my child remember that
all is not gold that glitters, and desire, not what is diverting merely,
but what is useful and ... and conventional!"

Let us admit that, things being as they are, it is necessary to develop
the practical side of the child's nature, to ground him in moral
principles, and to make him comprehend and fear--nominally God, but
really--society. But why, in addition to doing this, should we strangle
the unpractical side of his nature,--the ideal, imaginative, spiritual
side,--the side which alone can determine his value or worthlessness in
eternity? If our minds were visible as our bodies are, we should behold on
every side of us, and in our own private looking-glasses, such abortions,
cripples, and monstrosities as all the slums of Europe and the East could
not parallel. We pretend to make little men and women out of our children,
and we make little dwarfs and hobgoblins out of them. Moreover, we should
not diminish even the practical efficiency of the coming generation by
rejecting their unpractical side. Whether this boy's worldly destination
be to clean a stable or to represent his country at a foreign court, he
will do his work all the better, instead of worse, for having been allowed
freedom of expansion on the ideal plane. He will do it comprehensively, or
as from above downward, instead of blindly, or as from below upward. To a
certain extent, this position is very generally admitted by instructors
nowadays; but the admission bears little or no fruit. The ideality and
imagination which they have in mind are but a partial and feeble imitation
of what is really signified by those terms. Ideality and imagination are
themselves merely the symptom or expression of the faculty and habit of
spiritual or subjective intuition--a faculty of paramount value in life,
though of late years, in the rush of rational knowledge and discovery, it
has fallen into neglect. But it is by means of this faculty alone that the
great religion of India was constructed--the most elaborate and seductive
of all systems; and although as a faith Buddhism is also the most
treacherous and dangerous attack ever made upon the immortal welfare of
mankind, that circumstance certainly does not discredit or invalidate the
claim to importance of spiritual intuition itself. It may be objected that
spiritual intuition is a vague term. It undoubtedly belongs to an abstruse
region of psychology; but its meaning for our present purpose is simply
the act of testing questions of the moral consciousness by an inward
touchstone of truth, instead of by external experience or information.
That the existence of such a touchstone should be ridiculed by those who
are accustomed to depend for their belief upon palpable or logical
evidence, goes without saying; but, on the other hand, there need be no
collision or argument on the point, since no question with which intuition
is concerned can ever present itself to persons who pin their faith to the
other sort of demonstration. The reverse of this statement is by no means
true; but it would lead us out of our present path to discuss the matter.

Assuming, however, that intuition is possible, it is evident that it
should exist in children in an extremely pure, if not in its most potent
state; and to deny it opportunity of development might fairly be called a
barbarity. It will hardly be disputed that children are an important
element in society. Without them we should lose the memory of our youth,
and all opportunity for the exercise of unselfish and disinterested
affection. Life would become arid and mechanical to a degree now scarcely
conceivable; chastity and all the human virtues would cease to exist;
marriage would be an aimless and absurd transaction; and the brotherhood
of man, even in the nominal sense that it now exists, would speedily be
abjured. Political economy and sociology neglect to make children an
element in their arguments and deductions, and no small part of their
error is attributable to that circumstance. But although children still
are born, and all the world acknowledges their paramount moral and social
value, the general tendency of what we are forced to call education at the
present day is to shorten as much as possible the period of childhood. In
America and Germany especially--but more in America than in Germany--
children are urged and stimulated to "grow up" almost before they have
been short-coated. That conceptions of order and discipline should be
early instilled into them is proper enough; but no other order and
discipline seems to be contemplated by educators than the forcing them to
stand and be stuffed full of indigestible and incongruous knowledge, than
which proceeding nothing more disorderly could be devised. It looks as if
we felt the innocence and naturalness of our children to be a rebuke to
us, and wished to do away with it in short order. There is something in
the New Testament about offending the little ones, and the preferred
alternative thereto; and really we are outraging not only the objective
child, but the subjective one also--that in ourselves, namely, which is
innocent and pure, and without which we had better not be at all. Now I do
not mean to say that the only medicine that can cure this malady is
legitimate children's literature; wise parents are also very useful,
though not perhaps so generally available. My present contention is that
the right sort of literature is an agent of great efficiency, and may be
very easily come by. Children derive more genuine enjoyment and profit
from a good book than most grown people are susceptible of: they see what
is described, and themselves enact and perfect the characters of the story
as it goes along.

Nor is it indispensable that literature of the kind required should
forthwith be produced; a great deal, of admirable quality, is already on
hand. There are a few great poems----Spenser's "Faërie Queene" is one--
which no well regulated child should be without; but poetry in general is
not exactly what we want. Children--healthy children--never have the
poetic genius; but they are born mystics, and they have the sense of
humor. The best way to speak to them is in prose, and the best kind of
prose is the symbolic. The hermetic philosophers of the Middle Ages are
probably the authors of some of the best children's stories extant. In
these tales, disguised beneath what is apparently the simplest and most
artless flow of narrative, profound truths are discussed and explained.
The child reads the narrative, and certainly cannot be accused of
comprehending the hidden philosophical problem; yet that also has its
share in charming him. The reason is partly that true symbolic or
figurative writing is the simplest form known to literature. The simplest,
that is to say, in outward form,--it may be indefinitely abstruse as to
its inward contents. Indeed, the very cause of its formal simplicity is
its interior profundity. The principle of hermetic writing was, as we
know, to disguise philosophical propositions and results under a form of
words which should ostensibly signify some very ordinary and trivial
thing. It was a secret language, in the vocabulary of which material facts
are used to represent spiritual truths. But it differed from ordinary
secret language in this, that not only were the truths represented in the
symbols, but the philosophical development of the truth, in its
ramifications, was completely evolved under the cover of a logically
consistent tale. This, evidently, is a far higher achievement of ingenuity
than merely to string together a series of unrelated parts of speech,
which, on being tested by the "key," shall discover the message or
information really intended. It is, in fact, a practical application of
the philosophical discovery, made by or communicated to the hermetic
philosophers, that every material object in nature answers to or
corresponds with a certain one or group of philosophical truths. Viewed in
this light, the science of symbols or of correspondences ceases to be an
arbitrary device, susceptible of alteration according to fancy, and
avouches itself an essential and consistent relation between the things of
the mind and the things of the senses. There is a complete mental
creation, answering to the material creation, not continuously evolved
from it, but on a different or detached plane. The sun,--to take an
example,--the source of light and heat, and thereby of physical nature, is
in these fables always the symbol of God, of love and wisdom, by which the
spirit of man is created. Light, then, answers to wisdom, and heat to
love. And since all physical substances are the result of the combined
action of light and heat, we may easily perceive how these hermetic sages
were enabled to use every physical object as a cloak of its corresponding
philosophical truth,--with no other liability to error than might result
from the imperfect condition of their knowledge of physical laws.

To return, however, to the children, I need scarcely remark that the cause
of children's taking so kindly to hermetic writing is that it is actually
a living writing; it is alive in precisely the same way that nature, or
man himself, is alive. Matter is dead; life organizes and animates it. And
all writing is essentially dead which is a mere transcript of fact, and is
not inwardly organized and vivified by a spiritual significance. Children
do not know what it is that makes a human being smile, move, and talk; but
they know that such a phenomenon is infinitely more interesting than a
doll; and they prove it by themselves supplying the doll with speech and
motions out of their own minds, so as to make it as much like a real
person as possible. In the same way, they do not perceive the
philosophical truth which is the cause of existence of the hermetic fable;
but they find that fable far more juicy and substantial than the ordinary
narrative of every-day facts, because, however fine the surface of the
latter may be, it has, after all, nothing but its surface to recommend it.
It has no soul; it is not alive; and, though they cannot explain why, they
feel the difference between that thin, fixed grimace and the changing
smile of the living countenance.

It would scarcely be practicable, however, to confine the children's
reading to hermetic literature; for not much of it is extant in its pure
state. But it is hardly too much to say that all fairy stories, and
derivations from these, trace their descent from an hermetic ancestry.
They are often unaware of their genealogy; but the sparks of that primal
vitality are in them. The fairy is itself a symbol for the expression of a
more complex and abstract idea; but, once having come into existence, and
being, not a pure symbol, but a hybrid between the symbol and that for
which it stands, it presently began an independent career of its own. The
mediaeval imagination went to work with it, found it singularly and
delightfully plastic to its touch and requirements, and soon made it the
centre of a new and charming world, in which a whole army of graceful and
romantic fancies, which are always in quest of an arena in which to
disport themselves before the mind, found abundant accommodation and
nourishment. The fairy land of mediaeval Christianity seems to us the most
satisfactory of all fairy lands, probably because it is more in accord
with our genius and prejudices than those of the East; and it fitted in so
aptly with the popular mediaeval ignorance on the subject of natural
phenomena, that it became actually an article of belief with the mass of
men, who trembled at it while they invented it, in the most delicious
imaginable state of enchanted alarm. All this is prime reading for
children; because, though it does not carry an orderly spiritual meaning
within it, it is more spiritual than material, and is constructed entirely
according to the dictates of an exuberant and richly colored, but,
nevertheless, in its own sphere, legitimate imagination. Indeed, fairy
land, though as it were accidentally created, has the same permanent right
to be that Beauty has; it agrees with a genuine aspect of human nature,
albeit one much discountenanced just at present. The sequel to it, in
which romantic human personages are accredited with fairy-like attributes,
as in the "Faërie Queene," already alluded to, is a step in the wrong
direction, but not a step long enough to carry us altogether outside of
the charmed circle. The child's instinct of selection being vast and
cordial,--he will make a grain of true imagination suffuse and glorify a
whole acre of twaddle,---we may with security leave him in that fantastic
society. Moreover, some children being less imaginative than others, and
all children being less imaginative in some moods and conditions than at
other seasons, the elaborate compositions of Tasso, Cervantes, and the
others, though on the boundary line between what is meat for babes and the
other sort of meat, have also their abiding use.

The "Arabian Nights" introduced us to the domain of the Oriental
imagination, and has done more than all the books of travel in the East to
make us acquainted with the Asiatic character and its differences from our
own. From what has already been said on the subject of spiritual intuition
in relation to these races, one is prepared to find that all the Eastern
literature that has any value is hermetic writing, and therefore, in so
far, proper for children. But the incorrigible subtlety of the Oriental
intellect has vitiated much of their symbology, and the sentiment of sheer
wonder is stimulated rather than that of orderly imagination. To read the
"Arabian Nights" or the "Bhagavad-Gita" is a sort of dissipation; upon the
unhackneyed mind of the child it leaves a reactionary sense of depression.
The life which it embodies is distorted, over-colored, and exciting; it
has not the serene and balanced power of the Western productions.
Moreover, these books were not written with the grave philosophic purpose
that animated our own hermetic school; it is rather a sort of jugglery
practised with the subject---an exercise of ingenuity and invention for
their own sake. It indicates a lack of the feeling of responsibility on
the writers' part,--a result, doubtless, of the prevailing fatalism that
underlies all their thought. It is not essentially wholesome, in short;
but it is immeasurably superior to the best of the productions called
forth by our modern notions of what should be given to children to read.

But I can do no more than touch upon this branch of the subject; nor will
it be possible to linger long over the department of our own literature
which came into being with "Robinson Crusoe." No theory as to children's
books would be worth much attention which found itself obliged to exclude
that memorable work. Although it submits in a certain measure to
classification, it is almost _sui generis_; no book of its kind,
approaching it in merit, has ever been written. In what, then, does its
fascination consist? There is certainly nothing hermetic about it; it is
the simplest and most studiously matter-of-fact narrative of events,
comprehensible without the slightest effort, and having no meaning that is
not apparent on the face of it. And yet children, and grown people also,
read it again and again, and cannot find it uninteresting. I think the
phenomenon may largely be due to the nature of the subject, which is
really of primary and universal interest to mankind. It is the story of
the struggle of man with wild and hostile nature,--in the larger sense an
elementary theme,--his shifts, his failures, his perils, his fears, his
hopes, his successes. The character of Robinson is so artfully generalized
or universalized, and sympathy for him is so powerfully aroused and
maintained, that the reader, especially the child reader, inevitably
identifies himself with him, and feels his emotions and struggles as his
own. The ingredient of suspense is never absent from the story, and the
absence of any plot prevents us from perceiving its artificiality. It is,
in fact, a type of the history of the human race, not on the higher plane,
but on the physical one; the history of man's contest with and final
victory over physical nature. The very simplicity and obviousness of the
details give them grandeur and comprehensiveness: no part of man's
character which his contact with nature can affect or develop is left
untried in Robinson. He manifests in little all historical earthly
experiences of the race; such is the scheme of the book; and its
permanence in literature is due to the sobriety and veracity with which
that scheme is carried out. To speak succinctly, it does for the body what
the hermetic and cognate literature does for the soul; and for the healthy
man, the body is not less important than the soul in its own place and
degree. It is not the work of the Creator, but it is contingent upon
creation.

But poor Robinson has been most unfortunate in his progeny, which at this
day overrun the whole earth, and render it a worse wilderness than ever
was the immortal Crusoe Island. Miss Edgeworth, indeed, might fairly pose
as the most persistently malignant of all sources of error in the design
of children's literature; but it is to be feared that it was Defoe who
first made her aware of the availability of her own venom. She foisted her
prim and narrow moral code upon the commonplace adventures of a priggish
little boy and his companions; and straightway the whole dreary and
disastrous army of sectarians and dogmatists took up the cry, and have
been ringing the lugubrious changes on it ever since. There is really no
estimating the mortal wrong that has been done to childhood by Maria
Edgeworth's "Frank" and "The Parent's Assistant"; and, for my part, I
derive a melancholy joy in availing myself of this opportunity to express
my sense of my personal share in the injury. I believe that my affection
for the human race is as genuine as the average; but I am sure it would
have been greater had Miss Edgeworth never been born; and were I to come
across any philosophical system whereby I could persuade myself that she
belonged to some other order of beings than the human, I should be
strongly tempted to embrace that system on that ground alone.

After what has been advanced in the preceding pages, it does not need that
I should state how earnestly I deprecate the kind of literary food which
we are now furnishing to the coming generation in such sinister abundance.
I am sure it is written and published with good and honorable motives; but
at the very best it can only do no harm. Moreover, however well
intentioned, it is bad as literature; it is poorly conceived and written,
and, what is worse, it is saturated with affectation. For an impression
prevails that one needs to talk down to children;--to keep them constantly
reminded that they are innocent, ignorant little things, whose consuming
wish it is to be good and go to Sunday-school, and who will be all
gratitude and docility to whomsoever provides them with the latest fashion
of moral sugarplums; whereas, so far as my experience and information
goes, children are the most formidable literary critics in the world.
Matthew Arnold himself has not so sure an instinct for what is sound and
good in a book as any intelligent little boy or girl of eight years old.
They judge absolutely; they are hampered by no comparisons or relative
considerations. They cannot give chapter and verse for their opinion; but
about the opinion itself there is no doubt. They have no theories; they
judge in a white light. They have no prejudices nor traditions; they come
straight from the simple source of life. But, on the other hand, they are
readily hocussed and made morbid by improper drugs, and presently, no
doubt, lose their appetite for what is wholesome. Now, we cannot hope that
an army of hermetic philosophers or Mother-Gooses will arise at need and
remedy all abuses; but at least we might refrain from moralizing and
instruction, and, if we can do nothing more, confine ourselves to plain
stories of adventure, say, with no ulterior object whatever. There still
remains the genuine literature of the past to draw upon; but let us
beware, as we would of forgery and perjury, of serving it up, as has been
done too often, medicated and modified to suit the foolish dogmatism of
the moment. Hans Christian Andersen was the last writer of children's
stories, properly so called; though, considering how well married to his
muse he was, it is a wonder as well as a calamity that he left no
descendants.




CHAPTER V.

THE MORAL AIM IN FICTION.


The producers of modern fiction, who have acquiesced more or less
completely in the theory of art for art's sake, are not, perhaps, aware
that a large class of persons still exist who hold fiction to be
unjustifiable, save in so far as the author has it at heart not only (or
chiefly) to adorn the tale, but also (and first of all) to point the
moral. The novelist, in other words, should so mould the characters and
shape the plot of his imaginary drama as to vindicate the wisdom and
integrity of the Decalogue: if he fail to do this, or if he do the
opposite of this, he deserves not the countenance of virtuous and God-
fearing persons.

Doubtless it should be evident to every sane and impartial mind, whether
orthodox or agnostic, that an art which runs counter to the designs of God
toward the human race, or to the growth of the sentiment of universal
human brotherhood, must sooner or later topple down from its fantastic and
hollow foundation. "Hitch your wagon to a star," says Emerson; "do not lie
and steal: no god will help." And although, for the sake of his own
private interests of the moment, a man will occasionally violate the moral
law, yet, with mankind at large, the necessity of vindicating the superior
advantages of right over wrong is acknowledged not only in the interests
of civilized society, but because we feel that, however hostile "goodness"
may seem to be to my or your personal and temporary aims, it still remains
the only wholesome and handsome choice for the race at large: and
therefore do we, as a race, refuse to tolerate--on no matter how plausible
an artistic plea--any view of human life which either professes
indifference to this universal sentiment, or perversely challenges it.

The true ground of dispute, then, does not lie here. The art which can
stoop to be "procuress to the lords of hell," is art no longer. But, on
the other hand, it would be difficult to point to any great work of art,
generally acknowledged to be such, which explicitly concerns itself with
the vindication of any specific moral doctrine. The story in which the
virtuous are rewarded for their virtue, and the evil punished for their
wickedness, fails, somehow, to enlist our full sympathy; it falls flatly
on the ear of the mind; it does not stimulate thought. It does not
satisfy; we fancy that something still remains to be said, or, if this be
all, then it was hardly worth saying. The real record of life--its terror,
its beauty, its pathos, its depth--seems to have been missed. We may admit
that the tale is in harmony with what we have been taught ought to happen;
but the lessons of our private experience have not authenticated our moral
formulas; we have seen the evil exalted and the good brought low; and we
inevitably desire that our "fiction" shall tell us, not what ought to
happen, but what, as a matter of fact, does happen. To put this a little
differently: we feel that the God of the orthodox moralist is not the God
of human nature. He is nothing but the moralist himself in a highly
sublimated state, but betraying, in spite of that sublimation, a fatal
savor of human personality. The conviction that any man--George
Washington, let us say--is a morally unexceptionable man, does not in the
least reconcile us to the idea of God being an indefinitely exalted
counterpart of Washington. Such a God would be "most tolerable, and not to
be endured"; and the more exalted he was, the less endurable would he be.
In short, man instinctively refuses to regard the literal inculcation of
the Decalogue as the final word of God to the human race, and much less to
the individuals of that race; and when he finds a story-teller proceeding
upon the contrary assumption, he is apt to put that story-teller down as
either an ass or a humbug.

As for art--if the reader happen to be competent to form an opinion on
that phase of the matter--he will generally find that the art dwindles in
direct proportion as the moralized deity expatiates; in fact, that they
are incompatible. And he will also confess (if he have the courage of his
opinions) that, as between moralized deity and true art, his choice is
heartily and unreservedly for the latter.

I do not apprehend that the above remarks, fairly interpreted, will
encounter serious opposition from either party to the discussion; and yet,
so far as I am aware, neither party has as yet availed himself of the
light which the conclusion throws upon the nature of art itself. It should
be obvious, however, that upon a true definition of art the whole argument
must ultimately hinge: for we can neither deny that art exists, nor affirm
that it can exist inconsistently with a recognition of a divinely
beneficent purpose in creation. It must, therefore, in some way be an
expression or reflection of that purpose. But in what does the purpose in
question essentially consist?

Broadly speaking--for it would be impossible within the present limits to
attempt a full analysis of the subject--it may be considered as a gradual
and progressive Purification, not of this or that particular individual in
contradistinction to his fellows, but of human nature as an entirety. The
evil into which all men are born, and of which the Decalogue, or
conscience, makes us aware, is not an evil voluntarily contracted on our
part, but is inevitable to us as the creation of a truly infinite love and
wisdom. It is, in fact, our characteristic nature as animals: and it is
only because we are not only animal, but also and above all human, that we
are enabled to recognize it as evil instead of good. We absolve the cat,
the dog, the wolf, and the lion from any moral responsibility for their
deeds, because we feel them to be deficient in conscience, which, is our
own divinely bestowed gift and privilege, and which has been defined as
the spirit of God in the created nature, seeking to become the creature's
own spirit. Now, the power to correct this evil does not abide in us as
individuals, nor will a literal adherence to the moral law avail to purify
any mother's son of us. Conscience always says "Do not,"--never "Do"; and
obedience to it neither can give us a personal claim on God's favor nor
was it intended to do so: its true function is to keep us innocent, so
that we may not individually obstruct the accomplishment of the divine
ends toward us as a race. Our nature not being the private possession of
any one of us, but the impersonal substratum of us all, it follows that it
cannot be redeemed piecemeal, but only as a whole; and, manifestly, the
only Being capable of effecting such redemption is not Peter, or Paul, or
George Washington, or any other atomic exponent of that nature, be he who
he may; but He alone whose infinitude is the complement of our finiteness,
and whose gradual descent into human nature (figured in Scripture under
the symbol of the Incarnation) is even now being accomplished--as any one
may perceive who reads aright the progressive enlightenment of conscience
and intellect which history, through many vicissitudes, displays. We find,
therefore, that art is, essentially, the imaginative expression of a
divine life in man. Art depends for its worth and veracity, not upon its
adherence to literal fact, but upon its perception and portrayal of the
underlying truth, of which fact is but the phenomenal and imperfect
shadow. And it can have nothing to do with personal vice or virtue, in the
way either of condemning the one or vindicating the other; it can only
treat them as elements in its picture--as factors in human destiny. For
the notion commonly entertained that the practice of virtue gives us a
claim upon the Divine Exchequer (so to speak), and the habit of acting
virtuously for the sake of maintaining our credit in society, and ensuring
our prosperity in the next world,--in so thinking and acting we
misapprehend the true inwardness of the matter. To cultivate virtue
because its pays, no matter what the sort of coin in which payment is
looked for, is to be the victims of a lamentable delusion. For such virtue
makes each man jealous of his neighbor; whereas the aim of Providence is
to bring about the broadest human fellowship. A man's physical body
separates him from other men; and this fact disposes him to the error that
his nature is also a separate possession, and that he can only be "good"
by denying himself. But the only goodness that is really good is a
spontaneous and impersonal evolution, and this occurs, not where self-
denial has been practised, but only where a man feels himself to be
absolutely on the same level of desert or non-desert as are the mass of
his fellow-creatures. There is no use in obeying the commandments, unless
it be done, not to make one's self more deserving than another of God's
approbation, but out of love for goodness and truth in themselves, apart
from any personal considerations. The difference between true religion and
formal religion is that the first leads us to abandon all personal claims
to salvation, and to care only for the salvation of humanity as a whole;
whereas the latter stimulates is to practise outward self-denial, in order
that our real self may be exalted. Such self-denial results not in
humility, but in spiritual pride.

In no other way than this, it seems to me, can art and morality be brought
into harmony. Art bears witness to the presence in us of something purer
and loftier than anything of which we can be individually conscious. Its
complete expression we call inspiration; and he who is the subject of the
inspiration can account no better than any one else for the result which
art accomplishes through him. The perfect poem is found, not made; the
mind which utters it did not invent it. Art takes all nature and all
knowledge for her province; but she does not leave it as she found it; by
the divine necessity that is upon her, she breathes a soul into her
materials, and organizes chaos into form. But never, under any
circumstances, does she deign to minister to our selfish personal hope or
greed. She shows us how to love our neighbor, never ourselves. Shakspeare,
Homer, Phidias, Raphael, were no Pharisees--at least in so far as they
were artists; nor did any one ever find in their works any countenance for
that inhuman assumption--"I am holier than thou!" In the world's darkest
hours, art has sometimes stood as the sole witness of the nobler life that
was in eclipse. Civilizations arise and vanish; forms of religion hold
sway and are forgotten; learning and science advance and gather strength;
but true art was as great and as beautiful three thousand years ago as it
is to-day. We are prone to confound the man with the artist, and to
suppose that he is artistic by possession and inheritance, instead of
exclusively by dint of what he does. No artist worthy the name ever dreams
of putting himself into his work, but only what is infinitely distinct
from and other than himself. It is not the poet who brings forth the poem,
but the poem that begets the poet; it makes him, educates him, creates in
him the poetic faculty. Those whom we call great men, the heroes of
history, are but the organs of great crises and opportunities: as Emerson
has said, they are the most indebted men. In themselves they are not
great; there is no ratio between their achievements and them. Our judgment
is misled; we do not discriminate between the divine purpose and the human
instrument. When we listen to Napoleon fretting his soul away at Elba, or
to Carlyle wrangling with his wife at Chelsea, we are shocked at the
discrepancy between the lofty public performance and the petty domestic
shortcoming. Yet we do wrong to blame them; the nature of which they are
examples is the same nature that is shared also by the publican and the
sinner.

Instead, therefore, of saying that art should be moral, we should rather
say that all true morality is art--that art is the test of morality. To
attempt to make this heavenly Pegasus draw the sordid plough of our
selfish moralistic prejudices is a grotesque subversion of true order. Why
should the novelist make believe that the wicked are punished and the good
are rewarded in this world? Does he not know, on the contrary, that
whatsoever is basest in our common life tends irresistibly to the highest
places, and that the selfish element in our nature is on the side of
public order? Evil is at present a more efficient instrument of order
(because an interested one) than good; and the novelist who makes this
appear will do a far greater and more lasting benefit to humanity than he
who follows the cut-and-dried artificial programme of bestowing crowns on
the saint and whips of scorpions on the sinner.

As a matter of fact, I repeat, the best influences of the best literature
have never been didactic, and there is no reason to believe they ever will
be. The only semblance of didacticism which can enter into literature is
that which conveys such lessons as may be learned from sea and sky,
mountain and valley, wood and stream, bird and beast; and from the broad
human life of races, nations, and firesides; a lesson that is not obvious
and superficial, but so profoundly hidden in the creative depths as to
emerge only to an apprehension equally profound. For the chatter and
affectation of sense disturb and offend that inward spiritual ear which,
in the silent recesses of meditation, hears the prophetic murmur of the
vast ocean of human nature that flows within us and around us all.




CHAPTER VI.

THE MAKER OF MANY BOOKS.


During the winter of 1879, when I was in London, it was my fortune to
attend, a social meeting of literary men at the rooms of a certain eminent
publisher. The rooms were full of tobacco-smoke and talk, amid which were
discernible, on all sides, the figures and faces of men more or less
renowned in the world of books. Most noticeable among these personages was
a broad-shouldered, sturdy man, of middle height, with a ruddy
countenance, and snow-white tempestuous beard and hair. He wore large,
gold-rimmed spectacles, but his eyes were black and brilliant, and looked
at his interlocutor with a certain genial fury of inspection. He seemed to
be in a state of some excitement; he spoke volubly and almost
boisterously, and his voice was full-toned and powerful, though pleasant
to the ear. He turned himself, as he spoke, with a burly briskness, from
one side to another, addressing himself first to this auditor and then to
that, his words bursting forth from beneath his white moustache with such
an impetus of hearty breath that it seemed as if all opposing arguments
must be blown quite away. Meanwhile he flourished in the air an ebony
walking-stick, with much vigor of gesticulation, and narrowly missing, as
it appeared, the pates of his listeners. He was clad in evening dress,
though the rest of the company was, for the most part, in mufti; and he
was an exceedingly fine-looking old gentleman. At the first glance, you
would have taken him to be some civilized and modernized Squire Western,
nourished with beef and ale, and roughly hewn out of the most robust and
least refined variety of human clay. Looking at him more narrowly,
however, you would have reconsidered this judgment. Though his general
contour and aspect were massive and sturdy, the lines of his features were
delicately cut; his complexion was remarkably pure and fine, and his face
was susceptible of very subtle and sensitive changes of expression. Here
was a man of abundant physical strength and vigor, no doubt, but carrying
within him a nature more than commonly alert and impressible. His
organization, though thoroughly healthy, was both complex and high-
wrought; his character was simple and straightforward to a fault, but he
was abnormally conscientious, and keenly alive to others' opinion
concerning him. It might be thought that he was overburdened with self-
esteem, and unduly opinionated; but, in fact, he was but overanxious to
secure the good-will and agreement of all with whom he came in contact.
There was some peculiarity in him--some element or bias in his composition
that made him different from other men; but, on the other hand, there was
an ardent solicitude to annul or reconcile this difference, and to prove
himself to be, in fact, of absolutely the same cut and quality as all the
rest of the world. Hence he was in a demonstrative, expository, or
argumentative mood; he could not sit quiet in the face of a divergence
between himself and his associates; he was incorrigibly strenuous to
obliterate or harmonize the irreconcilable points between him and others;
and since these points remained irreconcilable, he remained in a constant
state of storm and stress on the subject.

It was impossible to help liking such a man at first sight; and I believe
that no man in London society was more generally liked than Anthony
Trollope. There was something pathetic in his attitude as above indicated;
and a fresh and boyish quality always invested him. His artlessness was
boyish, and so were his acuteness and his transparent but somewhat belated
good-sense. He was one of those rare persons who not only have no
reserves, but who can afford to dispense with them. After he had shown you
all he had in him, you would have seen nothing that was not gentlemanly,
honest, and clean. He was a quick-tempered man, and the ardor and hurry of
his temperament made him seem more so than he really was; but he was never
more angry than he was forgiving and generous. He was hurt by little
things, and little things pleased him; he was suspicious and perverse, but
in a manner that rather endeared him to you than otherwise. Altogether, to
a casual acquaintance, who knew nothing of his personal history, he was
something of a paradox--an entertaining contradiction. The publication of
his autobiography explained many things in his character that were open to
speculation; and, indeed, the book is not only the most interesting and
amusing that its author has ever written, but it places its subject before
the reader more completely and comprehensively than most autobiographies
do. This, however, is due much less to any direct effort or intention on
the writer's part, than to the unconscious self-revelation which meets the
reader on every page. No narrative could be simpler, less artificial; and
yet, everywhere, we read between the lines, and, so to speak, discover
Anthony Trollope in spite of his efforts to discover himself to us.

The truth appears to be that the youthful Trollope, like a more famous
fellow-novelist, began the world with more kicks than half-pence. His
boyhood, he affirms, was as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could
well be, owing to a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on his father's
part, and, on his own, to "an utter lack of juvenile manhood"--whatever
that may be. His father was a lawyer, who frightened away all his clients
by his outrageous temper, and who encountered one mischance after another
until he landed himself and his family in open bankruptcy; from which they
were rescued, partly by death, which carried away four of them (including
the old gentleman), and partly by Mrs. Trollope, who, at fifty years of
age, brought out her famous book on America, and continued to make a fair
income by literature (as she called it) until 1856, when, being seventy-
six years old, and having produced one hundred and fourteen volumes, she
permitted herself to retire. This extraordinary lady, in her youth,
cherished what her son calls "an emotional dislike to tyrants"; but when
her American experience had made her acquainted with some of the seamy
aspects of democracy, and especially after the aristocracy of her own
country had begun to patronize her, she confessed the error of her early
way, "and thought that archduchesses were sweet." But she was certainly a
valiant and indefatigable woman,--"of all the people I have ever known,"
says her son, "the most joyous, or, at any rate, the most capable of joy";
and he adds that her best novels were written in 1834-35, when her husband
and four of her six children were dying upstairs of consumption, and she
had to divide her time between nursing them and writing. Assuredly, no son
of hers need apprehend the reproach--"_Tydides melior matre_"; though
Anthony, and his brother Thomas Adolphus, must, together, have run her
pretty hard. The former remarks, with that terrible complacency in an
awful fact which is one of his most noticeable and astounding traits, that
the three of them "wrote more books than were probably ever before
produced by a single family." The existence of a few more such families
could be consistent only with a generous enlargement of the British
Museum.

The elder Trollope was a scholar, and to make scholars of his sons was one
of his ruling ideas. Poor little Anthony endured no less than twelve
mortal years of schooling--from the time he was seven until he was
nineteen--and declares that, in all that time, he does not remember that
he ever knew a lesson. "I have been flogged," he says, "oftener than any
other human being." Nay, his troubles began before his school-days; for
his father used to make him recite his infantile tasks to him while he was
shaving, and obliged him to sit with his head inclined in such a manner
"that he could pull my hair without stopping his razor or dropping his
shaving-brush." This is a depressing picture; and there are plenty more
like it. Dr. Butler, the master of Harrow, meeting the poor little
draggletail urchin in the yard, desired to know, in awful accents, how so
dirty a boy dared to show himself near the school! "He must have known me,
had he seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of
flogging me constantly. Perhaps," adds his victim, "he did not recognize
me by my face!" But it is comforting to learn, in another place, that
justice overtook the oppressor. "Dr. Butler only lived to be Dean of
Peterborough; but his successor (Dr. Longley) became Archbishop of
Canterbury." There is a great deal of Trollopian morality in the fate of
these two men, the latter of whom "could not have said anything ill-
natured if he had tried."

Black care, however, continued to sit behind the horseman with harrowing
persistence. A certain Dr. Drury (another schoolmaster) punished him on
suspicion of "some nameless horror," of which the unfortunate youngster
happened to be innocent. When, afterward, the latter fact began to be
obvious, "he whispered to me half a word that perhaps he had been wrong.
But, with a boy's stupid slowness, I said nothing, and he had not the
courage to carry reparation farther." The poverty of Anthony's father
deprived the boy of all the external advantages that might have enabled
him to take rank with his fellows: and his native awkwardness and
sensitiveness widened the breach. "I had no friend to whom I could pour
out my sorrows. I was big, awkward and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked
about in a most unattractive manner. Something of the disgrace of my
school-days has clung to me all through life. When I have been claimed as
school-fellow by some of those many hundreds who were with me either at
Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that I had no right to talk of things
from most of which I was kept in estrangement. I was never a coward, but
to make a stand against three hundred tyrants required a moral courage
which I did not possess." Once, however, they pushed him too far, and he
was driven to rebellion. "And then came a great fight--at the end of which
my opponent had to be taken home to be cured." And then he utters the
characteristic wish that some one, of the many who witnessed this combat,
may still be left alive "who will be able to say that, in claiming this
solitary glory of my school-days, I am making no false boast." The lonely,
lugubrious little champion! One would almost have been willing to have
received from him a black eye and a bloody nose, only to comfort his sad
heart. It is delightful to imagine the terrific earnestness of that
solitary victory: and I would like to know what boy it was (if any) who
lent the unpopular warrior a knee and wiped his face.

After he got through his school-days, his family being then abroad, he had
an offer of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment; and he might
have been a major-general or field-marshal at this day had his schooling
made him acquainted with the French and German languages. Being, however,
entirely ignorant of these, he was obliged to study them in order to his
admission; and while he was thus employed, he received news of a vacant
clerkship in the General Post-Office, with the dazzling salary of £90 a
year. Needless to say that he jumped at such an opening, seeing before him
a vision of a splendid civil and social career, at something over twenty
pounds a quarter. But London, even fifty years ago, was a more expensive
place than Anthony imagined. Moreover, the boy was alone in the wilderness
of the city, with no one to advise or guide him. The consequence was that
these latter days of his youth were as bad or worse than the beginning. In
reviewing his plight at this period, he observes: "I had passed my life
where I had seen gay things, but had never enjoyed them. There was no
house in which I could habitually see a lady's face or hear a lady's
voice. At the Post-Office I got credit for nothing, and was reckless. I
hated my work, and, more than all, I hated my idleness. Borrowings of
money, sometimes absolute want, and almost constant misery, followed as a
matter of course. I Had a full conviction that my life was taking me down
to the lowest pits--a feeling that I had been looked upon as an evil, an
encumbrance, a useless thing, a creature of whom those connected with me
had to be ashamed. Even my few friends were half-ashamed of me. I
acknowledge the weakness of a great desire to be loved--a strong wish to
be popular. No one had ever been less so." Under these circumstances, he
remarks that, although, no doubt, if the mind be strong enough, the
temptation will not prevail, yet he is fain to admit that the temptation
prevailed with him. He did not sit at home, after his return from the
office, in the evening, to drink tea and read, but tramped out in the
streets, and tried to see life and be jolly on £90 a year. He borrowed
four pounds of a money-lender, to augment his resources, and found, after
a few years, that he had paid him two hundred pounds for the
accommodation. He met with every variety of absurd and disastrous
adventure. The mother of a young woman with whom he had had an innocent
flirtation in the country appeared one day at his desk in the office, and
called out before all the clerks, "Anthony Trollope, when are you going to
marry my daughter?" On another occasion a sum of money was missing from
the table of the director. Anthony was summoned. The director informed him
of the loss--"and, by G--!" he continued, thundering his fist down on the
table, "no one has been in the room but you and I." "Then, by G--!" cried
Anthony, thundering _his_ fist down upon something, "you have taken it!"
This was very well; but the thing which Anthony had thumped happened to
be, not a table, but a movable desk with an inkstand on it, and the ink
flew up and deluged the face and shirt-front of the enraged director.
Still another adventure was that of the Queen of Saxony and the Half-
Crown; but the reader must investigate these matters for himself.

So far there has been nothing looking toward the novel-writer. But now we
learn that from the age of fifteen to twenty-six Anthony kept a journal,
which, he says, "convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness,
and conceit, but habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught
me how to express myself with facility." In addition to this, and more to
the purpose, he had formed an odd habit. Living, as he was forced to do,
so much to himself, if not by himself, he had to play, not with other
boys, but with himself; and his favorite play was to conceive a tale, or
series of fictitious events, and to carry it on, day after day, for months
together, in his mind. "Nothing impossible was ever introduced, or
violently improbable. I was my own hero, but I never became a king or a
duke, still less an Antinoüs, or six feet high. But I was a very clever
person, and beautiful young women used to be very fond of me. I learned in
this way to live in a world outside the world of my own material life."
This is pointedly, even touchingly, characteristic. Never, to the day of
his death, did Mr. Trollope either see or imagine anything impossible, or
violently improbable, in the world. This mortal plane of things never
dissolved before his gaze and revealed the mysteries of absolute Being;
his heavens were never rolled up as a scroll, and his earth had no bubbles
as the water hath. He took things as he found them; and he never found
them out. But if the light that never was on sea or land does not
illuminate the writings of Mr. Trollope, there is generally plenty of that
other kind of light with which, after all, the average reader is more
familiar, and which not a few, perhaps, prefer to the transcendental
lustre. There is no modern novelist who has more clearly than Trollope
defined to his own apprehension his own literary capabilities and
limitations. He is thoroughly acquainted with both his fortes and his
foibles; and so sound is his good sense, that he is seldom beguiled into
toiling with futile ambition after effects that are beyond him. His proper
domain is a sufficiently wide one; he is inimitably at home here; and when
he invites us there to visit him, we may be sure of getting good and
wholesome entertainment. The writer's familiarity with his characters
communicates itself imperceptibly to the reader; there are no difficult or
awkward introductions; the toning of the picture (to use the painter's
phrase) is unexceptionable; and if it be rather tinted than colored, the
tints are handled in a workmanlike manner. Again, few English novelists
seem to possess so sane a comprehension of the modes of life and thought
of the British aristocracy as Trollope. He has not only made a study of
them from the observer's point of view, but he has reasoned them out
intellectually. The figures are not vividly defined; the realism is
applied to events rather than to personages: we have the scene described
for us but we do not look upon it. We should not recognize his characters
if we saw them; but if we were told who they were, we should know, from
their author's testimony, what were their characteristic traits and how
they would act under given circumstances. The logical sequence of events
is carefully maintained; nothing happens, either for good or for evil,
other than might befall under the dispensations of a Providence no more
unjust, and no more far-sighted, than Trollope himself. There is a good
deal of the _a priori_ principle in his method; he has made up his mind as
to certain fundamental data, and thence develops or explains whatever
complication comes up for settlement. But to range about unhampered by any
theories, concerned only to examine all phenomena, and to report
thereupon, careless of any considerations save those of artistic
propriety, would have been vanity and striving after wind to Trollope, and
derivatively so, doubtless, to his readers.

Considered in the abstract, it is a curious question what makes his novels
interesting. The reader knows, in a sense, just what is in store for him,
--or, rather, what is not. There will be no astonishment, no curdling
horror, no consuming suspense. There may be, perhaps, as many murders,
forgeries, foundlings, abductions, and missing wills, in Trollope's novels
as in any others; but they are not told about in a manner to alarm us; we
accept them philosophically; there are paragraphs in our morning paper
that excite us more. And yet they are narrated with art, and with dramatic
effect. They are interesting, but not uncourteously--not exasperatingly
so; and the strangest part of it is that the introductory and intermediate
passages are no less interesting, under Trollope's treatment, than are the
murders and forgeries. Not only does he never offend the modesty of
nature,--he encourages her to be prudish, and trains her to such evenness
and severity of demeanor that we never know when we have had enough of
her. His touch is eminently civilizing; everything, from the episodes to
the sentences, moves without hitch or creak: we never have to read a
paragraph twice, and we are seldom sorry to have read it once.

Amusingly characteristic of Trollope is his treatment of his villains. His
attitude toward them betrays no personal uncharitableness or animosity,
but the villain has a bad time of it just the same. Trollope places upon
him a large, benevolent, but unyielding forefinger, and says to us:
"Remark, if you please, how this inferior reptile squirms when pressure is
applied to him. I will now augment the pressure. You observe that the
squirmings increase in energy and complexity. Now, if you please, I will
bear down yet a little harder. Do not be alarmed, madam; the reptile
undoubtedly suffers, but the spectacle may do us some good, and you may
trust me not to let him do you any harm. There!--Yes, evisceration by
means of pressure is beyond question painful; but every one must have
observed the benevolence of my forefinger during the operation; and I
fancy even the subject of the experiment (were he in a condition to
express his sentiments) would have admitted as much. Thank you, ladies and
gentlemen. I shall have the pleasure of meeting you again very shortly.
John, another reptile, please!" Upon the whole, it is much to Trollope's
credit that he wrote somewhere about fifty long novels; and to the credit
of the English people that they paid him three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars for these novels--and read them!

But his success as a man of letters was still many years in the future.
After seven years in the London office, he went to Ireland as assistant
surveyor, and thenceforward he began to enjoy his business, and to get on
in it. He was paid sixpence a mile, and he would ride forty miles a day.
He rode to hounds, incidentally, whenever he got a chance, and he kept up
the practice, with enthusiasm, to within a few years of his death. "It
will, I think, be accorded to me," he says, "that I have ridden hard. I
know very little about hunting; I am blind, very heavy, and I am now old;
but I ride with a boy's energy, hating the roads, and despising young men
who ride them; and I feel that life cannot give me anything better than
when I have gone through a long run to the finish, keeping a place, not of
glory, but of credit, among my juniors." Riding, working, having a jolly
time, and gradually increasing his income, he lived until 1842, when he
became engaged; and he was married on June 11, 1844. "I ought to name that
happy day," he declares, "as the commencement of my better life." It was
at about this date, also, that he began and finished, not without delay
and procrastination, his first novel. Curiously enough, he affirms that he
did not doubt his own intellectual sufficiency to write a readable novel:
"What I did doubt was my own industry, and the chances of a market."
Never, surely, was self-distrust more unfounded. As for the first novel,
he sent it to his mother, to dispose of as best she could; and it never
brought him anything, except a perception that it was considered by his
friends to be "an unfortunate aggravation of the family disease." During
the ensuing ten years, this view seemed to be not unreasonable, for, in
all that time, though he worked hard, he earned by literature no more than
£55. But, between 1857 and 1860, he received for various novels, from £100
to £1000 each; and thereafter, £3000 or more was his regular price for a
story in three volumes. As he maintained his connection with the post-
office until 1867, he was in receipt of an income of £4500, "of which I
spent two-thirds and put by one." We should be doing an injustice to Mr.
Trollope to omit these details, which he gives so frankly; for, as he
early informs us, "my first object in taking to literature was to make an
income on which I and those belonging to me might live in comfort." Nor
will he let us forget that novel-writing, to him, was not so much an art,
or even a profession, as a trade, in which all that can be asked of a man
is that he shall be honest and punctual, turning out good average work,
and the more the better. "The great secret consists in"--in what?--why,
"in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labor similar to those
which an artisan or mechanic is forced to obey." There may be, however,
other incidental considerations. "I have ever thought of myself as a
preacher of sermons, and my pulpit as one I could make both salutary and
agreeable to my audience"; and he tells us that he has used some of his
novels for the expression of his political and social convictions. Again--
"The novelist must please, and he must teach; a good novel should be both
realistic and sensational in the highest degree." He says that he sees no
reason why two or three good novels should not be written at the same
time; and that, for his own part, he was accustomed to write two hundred
and fifty words every fifteen minutes, by the watch, during his working
hours. Nor does he mind letting us know that when he sits down to write a
novel, he neither knows nor cares how it is to end. And finally, one is a
little startled to hear him say, epigrammatically, that a writer should
not have to tell a story, but should have a story to tell. Beyond a doubt,
Anthony Trollope is something of a paradox.

The world has long ago passed its judgment on his stories, but it is
interesting, all the same, to note his own opinion of them; and though
never arrogant, he is generally tolerant, if not genial. "A novel should
be a picture of common life, enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos. I
have never fancied myself to be a man of genius," he says; but again, with
strange imperviousness, "A small daily task, if it be daily, will beat the
labors of a spasmodic Hercules." Beat them, how? Why, in quantity. But how
about quality? Is the travail of a work of art the same thing as the
making of a pair of shoes? Emerson tells us that--

  "Ever the words of the gods resound,
    But the porches of man's ear
  Seldom, in this low life's round,
    Are unsealed, that he may hear."

No one disputes, however, that you may hear the tapping of the cobbler's
hammer at any time.

To the view of the present writer, how much good soever Mr. Trollope may
have done as a preacher and moralist, he has done great harm to English
fictitious literature by his novels; and it need only be added, in this
connection, that his methods and results in novel-writing seem best to be
explained by that peculiar mixture of separateness and commonplaceness
which we began by remarking in him. The separateness has given him the
standpoint whence he has been able to observe and describe the
commonplaceness with which (in spite of his separateness) he is in vital
sympathy.

But Trollope the man is the abundant and consoling compensation for
Trollope the novelist; and one wishes that his books might have died, and
he lived on indefinitely. It is charming to read of his life in London
after his success in the _Cornhill Magazine_. "Up to that time I had lived
very little among men. It was a festival to me to dine at the 'Garrick.' I
think I became popular among those with whom I associated. I have ever
wished to be liked by those around me--a wish that during the first half
of my life was never gratified." And, again, in summing up his life, he
says: "I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought to me no sorrow. It has
been the companionship, rather than the habit of smoking that I loved. I
have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the
excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill-effects--to
have the sweet, and to leave the bitter untasted--that has been my study.
I will not say that I have never scorched a finger; but I carry no ugly
wounds."

A man who, at the end of his career, could make such a profession as this
--who felt the need of no further self-vindication than this--such a man,
whatever may have been his accountability to the muse of Fiction, is a
credit to England and to human nature, and deserves to be numbered among
the darlings of mankind. It was an honor to be called his friend; and what
his idea of friendship was, may be learned from the passage in which he
speaks of his friend Millais--with the quotation of which this paper may
fitly be concluded:--

"To see him has always been a pleasure; his voice has always been a sweet
sound in my ears. Behind his back I have never heard him praised without
joining the eulogist; I have never heard a word spoken against him without
opposing the censurer. These words, should he ever see them, will come to
him from the grave, and will tell him of my regard--as one living man
never tells another."




CHAPTER VII.

MR. MALLOCK'S MISSING SCIENCE.


Before criticising Mr. Mallock's little essay, let us summarize its
contents. The author begins with an analysis of the aims, the principles,
and the "pseudo-science" of modern Democracy. Having established the evil
and destructive character of these things, he sets himself to show by
logical argument that the present state of social inequality, which
Democrats wish to disturb, is a natural and wholesome state; that the
continuance of civilization is dependent upon it; and that it could only
be overturned by effecting a radical change--not in human institutions,
but in human character. The desire for inequality is inherent in the human
character; and in order to prove this statement, Mr. Mallock proceeds to
affirm that there is such a thing as a science of human character; that of
this science he is the discoverer; and that the application of this
science to the question at issue will demonstrate the integrity of Mr.
Mallock's views, and the infirmity of all others. In the ensuing chapters
the application is made, and at the end the truth of the proposition is
declared established.

This is the outline; but let us note some of the details. Mr. Mallock
asserts (Chap. I.) that the aim of modern Democracy is to overturn "all
that has hitherto been connected with high-breeding or with personal
culture"; and that "to call the Democrats a set of thieves and
confiscators is merely to apply names to them which they have no wish to
repudiate." He maintains (Chap. II.) that the first and foremost of the
Democratic principles is "that the perfection of society involves social
equality"; and that "the luxury of one man means the deprivation of
another." He credits the Democrats with arguing that "the means of
producing equality are a series of changes in existing institutions"; that
"by changing the institutions of a society we are able to change its
structure"; that "the cause of the distribution of wealth" is "laws and
forms of government"; and that "the wealthy classes, as such, are
connected with wealth in no other way but as the accidental appropriators
of it." In his third chapter he tells us that "the entire theory of modern
Democracy ... depends on the doctrine that the cause of wealth is labor";
that Democrats believe we "may count on a man to labor, just as surely as
we may count on a man to eat"; that "the man who does not labor is
supported by the man who does"; and that the pseudo-science of modern
Democracy "starts with the conception of man as containing in himself a
natural tendency to labor." And here Mr. Mallock's statement of his
opponent's position ends.

In the fourth chapter we are brought within sight of "The Missing
Substitute." "A man's character," we are told, "divides into his desires
on the one hand, and his capacities on the other"; and it is observed that
"various as are men's desires and capacities, yet if talent and ambition
commanded no more than idleness and stupidity, all men practically would
be idle and stupid." "Men's capacities," we are reminded, "are practically
unequal, because they develop their own potential inequalities; they do
this because they desire to place themselves in unequal external
circumstances,--which result the condition of society renders possible."

Coming now to the Science of Human Character itself, we find that it
"asserts a permanent relationship to exist between human character and
social inequality"; and the author then proceeds at some length to show
how near Herbert Spencer, Buckle, and other social and economic
philosophers, came to stumbling over his missing science, and yet avoided
doing so. Nevertheless, argues Mr. Mallock, "if there be such a thing as a
social science, or a science of history, there must be also a science of
biography"; and this science, though it "cannot show us how any special
man will act in the future," yet, if "any special action be given us, it
can show us that it was produced by a special motive; and conversely, that
if the special motive be wanting, the special action is sure to be wanting
also." As an example how to distinguish between those traits of human
character which are available for scientific purposes, and those which are
not, Mr. Mallock instances a mob, which temporarily acts together for some
given purpose: the individual differences of character then "cancel out,"
and only points of agreement are left. Proceeding to the sixth chapter, he
applies himself to setting to rest the scruples of those who find
something cynical in the idea that the desire for Inequality is compatible
with a respectable form of human character. It is true, he says, that man
does not live by bread alone; but he denies that he means to say "that all
human activity is motived by the desire for inequality"; he would assert
that only "of all productive labor, except the lowest." The only actions
independent of the desire for inequality, however, are those performed in
the name of art, science, philanthropy, and religion; and even in these
cases, so far as the actions are not motived by a desire for inequality,
they are not of productive use; and _vice versâ_. In the remaining
chapters, which we must dismiss briefly, we meet with such statements as
"labor has been produced by an artificial creation of want of food, and by
then supplying the want on certain conditions"; that "civilization has
always been begun by an oppressive minority"; that "progress depends on
certain gifted individuals," and therefore social equality would destroy
progress; that inequality influences production by existing as an object
of desire and as a means of pressure; that the evils of poverty are caused
by want, not by inequality; and that, finally, equality is not the goal of
progress, but of retrogression; that inequality is not an accidental evil
of civilization, but the cause of its development; the distance of the
poor from the rich is not the cause of the former's poverty as distinct
from riches, but of their civilized competence as distinct from barbarism;
and that the apparent changes in the direction of equality recorded in
history, have been, in reality, none other than "a more efficient
arrangement of inequalities."

       *       *       *       *       *

Now, let us inquire what all this ingenious prattle about Inequality and
the Science of Human Character amounts to. What does Mr. Mallock expect?
His book has been out six months, and still Democracy exists. But does any
such Democracy as he combats exist, or could it conceivably exist? Have
his investigations of the human character failed to inform him that one of
the strongest natural instincts of man's nature is immovably opposed to
anything like an equal distribution of existing wealth?--because whoever
owns anything, if it be only a coat, wishes to keep it; and that wish
makes him aware that his fellow-man will wish to keep, and will keep at
all hazards, whatever things belong to him. What Democrats really desire
is to enable all men to have an equal chance to obtain wealth, instead of
being, as is largely the case now, hampered and kept down by all manner of
legal and arbitrary restrictions. As for the "desire for Inequality," it
seems to exist chiefly in Mr. Mallock's imagination. Who does desire it?
Does the man who "strikes" for higher wages desire it? Let us see. A
strike, to be successful, must be not an individual act, but the act of a
large body of men, all demanding the same thing--an increase in wages. If
they gain their end, no difference has taken place in their mutual
position; and their position in regard to their employers is altered only
in that an approach has been made toward greater equality with the latter.
And so in other departments of human effort: the aim, which the man who
wishes to better his position sets before himself, is not to rise head and
shoulders above his equals, but to equal his superiors. And as to the
Socialist schemes for the reorganization of society, they imply, at most,
a wish to see all men start fair in the race of life, the only advantages
allowed being not those of rank or station, but solely of innate capacity.
And the reason the Socialist desires this is, because he believes, rightly
or wrongly, that many inefficient men are, at present, only artificially
protected from betraying their inefficiency; and that many efficient men
are only artificially prevented from showing their efficiency; and that
the fair start he proposes would not result in keeping all men on a dead
level, but would simply put those in command who had a genuine right to be
there.

       *       *       *       *       *

But this is taxing Mr. Mallock too seriously: he has not written in
earnest. But, as his uncle, Mr. Froude, said, when reading "The New
Republic,"--"The rogue is clever!" He has read a good deal, he has an
active mind, a smooth redundancy of expression, a talent for caricature, a
fondness for epigram and paradox, a useful shallowness, and an amusing
impudence. He has no practical knowledge of mankind, no experience of
life, no commanding point of view, and no depth of insight. He has no
conception of the meaning and quality of the problems with whose exterior
aspects he so prettily trifles. He has constructed a Science of Human
Character without for one moment being aware that, for instance, human
character and human nature are two distinct things; and that, furthermore,
the one is everything that the other is not. As little is he conscious of
the significance of the words "society" and "civilization"; nor can he
explain whether, or why, either of them is desirable or undesirable, good
or bad. He has never done, and (judging from his published works) we do
not believe him capable of doing, any analytical or constructive thinking;
at most, as in the present volume, he turns a few familiar objects upside
down, and airily invites his audience to believe that he has thereby
earned the name of Discoverer, if not of Creator.




CHAPTER VIII.

THEODORE WINTHROP'S WRITINGS.


On an accessible book-shelf in my library, stand side by side four volumes
whose contents I once knew by heart, and which, after the lapse of twenty
years, are yet tolerably distinct in my memory. These are stoutly bound in
purple muslin, with a stamp, of Persian design apparently, on the centre
of each cover. They are stained and worn, and the backs have faded to a
brownish hue, from exposure to the light, and a leaf in one of the volumes
has been torn across; but the paper and the sewing and the clear bold type
are still as serviceable as ever. The books seem to have been made to
last,--to stand a great deal of reading. Contrasted with the aesthetically
designed covers one sees nowadays, they would be considered inexcusably
ugly, and the least popular novelist of our time would protest against
having his lucubrations presented to the public in such plain attire.
Nevertheless, on turning to the title-pages, you may see imprinted, on the
first, "Fourteenth Edition"; on the second, "Twelfth Edition"; and on the
others, indications somewhat less magnificent, but still evidence of very
exceptional circulation. The date they bear is that of the first years of
our civil war; and the first published of them is prefaced by a
biographical memoir of the author, written by his friend George William
Curtis. This memoir was originally printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_, two
or three months after the death of its subject, Theodore Winthrop.

For these books,--three novels, and one volume of records of travel,--came
from his hand, though they did not see the light until after he had passed
beyond the sphere of authors and publishers. At that time, the country was
in an exalted and heroic mood, and the men who went to fight its battles
were regarded with a personal affection by no means restricted to their
personal acquaintances. Their names were on all lips, and those of them
who fell were mourned by multitudes instead of by individuals. Winthrop's
historic name, and the influential position of some of his nearest
friends, would have sufficed to bring into unusual prominence his brief
career and his fate as a soldier, even had his intrinsic qualities and
character been less honorable and winning than they were. But he was a
type of a young American such as America is proud to own. He was high-
minded, refined, gifted, handsome. I recollect a portrait of him published
soon after his death,--a photograph, I think, from a crayon drawing; an
eloquent, sensitive, rather melancholy, but manly and courageous face,
with grave eyes, the mouth veiled by a long moustache. It was the kind of
countenance one would wish our young heroes to have. When, after the
catastrophe at Great Bethel, it became known that Winthrop had left
writings behind him, it would have been strange indeed had not every one
felt a desire to read them.

Moreover, he had already begun to be known as a writer. It was during
1860, I believe, that a story of his, in two instalments, entitled "Love
on Skates," appeared in the "Atlantic." It was a brilliant and graphic
celebration of the art of skating, engrafted on a love-tale as full of
romance and movement as could be desired. Admirably told it was, as I
recollect it; crisp with the healthy vigor of American wintry atmosphere,
with bright touches of humor, and, here and there, passages of sentiment,
half tender, half playful. It was something new in our literature, and
gave promise of valuable work to come. But the writer was not destined to
fulfil the promise. In the next year, from the camp of his regiment, he
wrote one or two admirable descriptive sketches, touching upon the
characteristic points of the campaigning life which had just begun; but,
before the last of these had become familiar to the "Atlantic's" readers,
it was known that it would be the last. Theodore Winthrop had been killed.

He was only in his thirty-third year. He was born in New Haven, and had
entered Yale College with the class of '48. The Delta Kappa Epsilon
Fraternity was, I believe, founded in the year of his admission, and he
must, therefore, have been among its earliest members. He was
distinguished as a scholar, and the traces of his classic and
philosophical acquirements are everywhere visible in his books. During the
five or six years following his graduation, he travelled abroad, and in
the South and West; a wild frontier life had great attractions for him, as
he who reads "John Brent" and "The Canoe and the Saddle" need not be told.
He tried his hand at various things, but could settle himself to no
profession,--an inability which would have excited no remark in England,
which has had time to recognize the value of men of leisure, as such; but
which seems to have perplexed some of his friends in this country. Be that
as it may, no one had reason to complain of lack of energy and promptness
on his part when patriotism revealed a path to Winthrop. He knew that the
time for him had come; but he had also known that the world is not yet so
large that all men, at all times, can lay their hands upon the work that
is suitable for them to do.

Let us, however, return to the novels. They appear to have been written
about 1856 and 1857, when their author was twenty-eight or nine years old.
Of the order in which they were composed I have no record; but, judging
from internal evidence, I should say that "Edwin Brothertoft" came first,
then "Cecil Dreeme," and then "John Brent." The style, and the quality of
thought, in the latter is more mature than in the others, and its tone is
more fresh and wholesome. In the order of publication, "Cecil Dreeme" was
first, and seems also to have been most widely read; then "John Brent,"
and then "Edwin Brothertoft," the scene of which was laid in the last
century. I remember seeing, at the house of James T. Fields, their
publisher, the manuscripts of these books, carefully bound and preserved.
They were written on large ruled letter-paper, and the handwriting was
very large, and had a considerable slope. There were scarcely any
corrections or erasures; but it is possible that Winthrop made clean
copies of his stories after composing them. Much of the dialogue,
especially, bears evidence of having been revised, and of the author's
having perhaps sacrificed ease and naturalness, here and there, to the
craving for conciseness which has been one of the chief stumbling-blocks
in the way of our young writers. He wished to avoid heaviness and
"padding," and went to the other extreme. He wanted to cut loose from the
old, stale traditions of composition, and to produce something which
should be new, not only in character and significance, but in manner of
presentation. He had the ambition of the young Hafiz, who professed a
longing to "tear down this tiresome old sky." But the old sky has good
reasons for being what and where it is, and young radicals finally come to
perceive that, regarded from the proper point of view, and in the right
spirit, it is not so tiresome after all. Divine Revelation itself can be
expressed in very moderate and commonplace language; and if one's thoughts
are worth thinking, they are worth clothing in adequate and serene attire.

But "culture," and literature with it, have made such surprising advances
of late, that we are apt to forget how really primitive and unenlightened
the generation was in which Winthrop wrote. Imagine a time when Mr. Henry
James, Jr., and Mr. W. D. Howells had not been heard of; when Bret Harte
was still hidden below the horizon of the far West; when no one suspected
that a poet named Aldrich would ever write a story called "Marjorie Daw";
when, in England, "Adam Bede" and his successors were unborn;--a time of
antiquity so remote, in short, that the mere possibility of a discussion
upon the relative merit of the ideal and the realistic methods of fiction
was undreamt of! What had an unfortunate novelist of those days to fall
back upon? Unless he wished to expatriate himself, and follow submissively
in the well worn steps of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, the only
models he could look to were Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Foe, James
Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Elsie Venner" had scarcely made
its appearance at that date. Irving and Cooper were, on the other hand,
somewhat antiquated. Poe and Hawthorne were men of very peculiar genius,
and, however deep the impression they have produced on our literature,
they have never had, because they never can have, imitators. As for the
author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," she was a woman in the first place, and, in
the second place, she sufficiently filled the field she had selected. A
would-be novelist, therefore, possessed of ambition, and conscious of not
being his own father or grandfather, saw an untrodden space before him,
into which he must plunge without support and without guide. No wonder if,
at the outset, he was a trifle awkward and ill-at-ease, and, like a raw
recruit under fire, appeared affected from the very desire he felt to look
unconcerned. It is much to his credit that he essayed the venture at all;
and it is plain to be seen that, with each forward step he took, his self-
possession and simplicity increased. If time had been given him, there is
no reason to doubt that he might have been standing at the head of our
champions of fiction to-day.

But time was not given him, and his work, like all other work, if it is to
be judged at all, must be judged on its merits. He excelled most in
passages descriptive of action; and the more vigorous and momentous the
action, the better, invariably, was the description; he rose to the
occasion, and was not defeated by it. Partly for this reason, "Cecil
Dreeme," the most popular of his books, seems to me the least meritorious
of them all. The story has little movement; it stagnates round Chrysalis
College. The love intrigue is morbid and unwholesome, and the characters
(which are seldom Winthrop's strong point) are more than usually
artificial and unnatural. The _dramatis personae_ are, indeed, little more
than moral or immoral principles incarnate. There is no growth in them, no
human variableness or complexity; it is "Every Man in his Humor" over
again, with the humor left out. Densdeth is an impossible rascal; Churm, a
scarcely more possible Rhadamanthine saint. Cecil Dreeme herself never
fully recovers from the ambiguity forced upon her by her masculine attire;
and Emma Denman could never have been both what we are told she was, and
what she is described as being. As for Robert Byng, the supposed narrator
of the tale, his name seems to have been given him in order wantonly to
increase the confusion caused by the contradictory traits with which he is
accredited. The whole atmosphere of the story is unreal, fantastic,
obscure. An attempt is made to endow our poor, raw New York with something
of the stormy and ominous mystery of the immemorial cities of Europe. The
best feature of the book (morbidness aside) is the construction of the
plot, which shows ingenuity and an artistic perception of the value of
mystery and moral compensation. It recalls, in some respects, the design
of Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance,"--that is, had the latter never been
written, the former would probably have been written differently. In spite
of its faults, it is an interesting book, and, to the critical eye, there
are in almost every chapter signs that indicate the possession of no
ordinary gifts on the author's part. But it may be doubted whether the
special circumstances under which it was published had not something to do
with its wide popularity. I imagine "John Brent" to have been really much
more popular, in the better sense; it was read and liked by a higher class
of readers. It is young ladies and school-girls who swell the numbers of
an "edition," and hence the difficulty in arguing from this as to the
literary merit of the book itself.

"Edwin Brothertoft," though somewhat disjointed in construction, and jerky
in style, is yet a picturesque and striking story; and the gallop of the
hero across country and through the night to rescue from the burning house
the woman who had been false to him, is vigorously described, and gives us
some foretaste of the thrill of suspense and excitement we feel in reading
the story of the famous "Gallop of three" in "John Brent." The writer's
acquaintance with the history of the period is adequate, and a romantic
and chivalrous tone is preserved throughout the volume. It is worth noting
that, in all three of Winthrop's novels, a horse bears a part in the
crisis of the tale. In "Cecil Dreeme" it is Churm's pair of trotters that
convey the party of rescuers to the private Insane Asylum in which
Densdeth had confined the heroine. In "Edwin Brothertoft," it is one of
Edwin's renowned breed of white horses that carries him through almost
insuperable obstacles to his goal. In "John Brent," the black stallion,
Don Fulano, who is throughout the chief figure in the book, reaches his
apogee in the tremendous race across the plains and down the rocky gorge
of the mountains, to where the abductors of the heroine are just about to
pitch their camp at the end of their day's journey. The motive is fine and
artistic, and, in each of the books, these incidents are as good as, or
better then, anything else in the narrative.

"John Brent" is, in fact, full enough of merit to more than redeem its
defects. The self-consciousness of the writer is less noticeable than in
the other works, and the effort to be epigrammatic, short, sharp, and
"telling" in style, is considerably modified. The interest is lively,
continuous, and cumulative; and there is just enough tragedy in the story
to make the happy ending all the happier. It was a novel and adventurous
idea to make a horse the hero of a tale, and the manner in which the idea
is carried out more than justifies the hazard. Winthrop, as we know, was
an ideal horseman, and knows what he is writing about. He contrives to
realize Don Fulano for us, in spite of the almost supernatural powers and
intelligence that he ascribes to the gallant animal. One is willing to
stretch a point of probability when such a dashing and inspiring end is in
view. In the present day we are getting a little tired of being brought to
account, at every turn, by Old Prob., who tyrannizes over literature quite
as much as over the weather. Theodore Winthrop's inspiration, in this
instance at least, was strong and genuine enough to enable him to feel
what he was telling as the truth, and therefore it produces an effect of
truth upon the reader. How distinctly every incident of that ride remains
stamped on the memory, even after so long an interval as has elapsed since
it was written! And I recollect that one of the youthful devourers of this
book, who was of an artistic turn, was moved to paint three little water-
color pictures of the Gallop; the first showing the three horses,--the
White, the Gray, and the Black, scouring across the prairie, towards the
barrier of mountains behind which the sun was setting; the second
depicting Don Fulano, with Dick Wade and John Brent on his back, plunging
down the gorge upon the abductors, one of whom had just pulled the trigger
of his rifle; while the third gives the scene in which the heroic horse
receives his death-wound in carrying the fugitive across the creek away
from his pursuers. At this distance of time, I am unable to bear any
testimony as to the technical value of the little pictures; I am inclined
to fancy that they would have to be taken _cum grano amoris_, as they
certainly were executed _con amore_. But, however that may be, the
instance (which was doubtless only one of many analogous to it) shows that
Winthrop possessed the faculty of stimulating and electrifying the
imagination of his readers, which all our recent improvements in the art
and artifice of composition have not made too common, and for which, if
for nothing else, we might well feel indebted to him.




CHAPTER IX.

EMERSON AS AN AMERICAN.


It is not with Americans as with other peoples. Our position is more vague
and difficult, because it is not primarily related to the senses. I can
easily find out where England or Prussia is, and recognize an Englishman
or German when we meet; but we Americans are not, to the same extent as
these, limited by geographical and physical boundaries. The origin of
America was not like that of the European nations; the latter were born
after the flesh, but we after the spirit. It is of the first consequence
to them that their frontiers should be defended, and their nationality
kept distinct. But, though I esteem highly all our innumerable square
miles of East and West, North and South, and our Pacific and Atlantic
coasts, I cannot help deeming them quite a secondary consideration. If
America is not a great deal more than these United States, then the United
States are no better than a penal colony. It is convenient, no doubt, for
a great idea to find a great embodiment--a suitable incarnation and stage;
but the idea does not depend upon these things. It is an accidental--or, I
would rather say, a Providential--matter that the Puritans came to New
England, or that Columbus discovered the continent in time for them; but
it has always happened that when a soul is born it finds a body ready
fitted to it. The body, however, is an instrument merely; it enables the
spirit to take hold of its mortal life, just as the hilt enables us to
grasp the sword. If the Puritans had not come to New England, still the
spirit that animated them would have lived, and made itself a place
somehow. And, in fact, how many Puritans, for how many ages previous, had
been trying to find standing-room in the world, and failed! They called
themselves by many names; their voices were heard in many countries; the
time had not yet come for them to be born--to touch their earthly
inheritance; but, meantime, the latent impetus was accumulating, and the
Mayflower was driven across the Atlantic by it at last. Nor is this all--
the Mayflower is sailing still between the old world and the new. Every
day it brings new settlers, if not to our material harbors--to our Boston
Bay, our Castle Garden, our Golden Gate--at any rate, to our mental ports
and wharves. We cannot take up a European newspaper without finding an
American idea in it. It is said that a great many of our countrymen take
the steamer to England every summer. But they come back again; and they
bring with them many who come to stay. I do not refer specially to the
occupants of the steerage--the literal emigrants. One cannot say much
about them--they may be Americans or not, as it turns out. But England and
the continent are full of Americans who were born there, and many of whom
will die there. Sometimes they are better Americans than the New Yorker or
the Bostonian who lives in Beacon Street or the Bowery and votes in the
elections. They may be born and reside where they please, but they belong
to us, and, in the better sense, they are among us. Broadway and
Washington Street, Vermont and Colorado extend all over Europe. Russia is
covered with them; she tries to shove them away to Siberia, but in vain.
We call mountains and prairies solid facts; but the geography of the mind
is infinitely more stubborn. I dare say there are a great many oblique-
eyed, pig-tailed New Englanders in the Celestial Empire. They may never
have visited these shores, or even heard of them; but what of that? They
think our thought--they have apprehended our idea, and, by and by, they or
their heirs will cause it to prevail.

It is useless for us to hide our heads in the grass and refuse to rise to
the height of our occasion. We are here as the realization of a truth--the
fulfilment of a prophecy; we must attest a new departure in the moral and
intellectual development of the human race; for whichever of us does not,
must suffer annihilation. If I deny my birthright as an American, I shall
disappear and not be missed, for an American will take my place. It is not
altogether a luxurious position to find yourself in. You cannot sit still
and hold your hands. All manner of hard and unpleasant things are expected
of you, which you neglect at your peril. It is like the old fable of the
mermaid. She loved a mortal youth, and, in order that she might win his
affection, she prayed that she might have the limbs and feet of a human
maiden. Her prayer was answered, and she met her prince; but every step
she took was as if she trod on razors. It is a fine thing to sit in your
chair and reflect on being an American; but when you have to rise up and
do an American's duty before the world--how sharp the razors are!

Of course, we do not always endure the test; the flesh and blood on this
side of the planet is not, so far as I have observed, of a quality
essentially different from that on the other. Possibly our population is
too many for us. Out of fifty million people it would be strange if here
and there one appeared who was not at all points a hero. Indeed, I am
sometimes tempted to think that that little band of original Mayflower
Pilgrims has not greatly multiplied since their disembarkation. However it
may be with their bodily offspring, their spiritual progeny are not
invariably found in the chair of the Governor or on the floor of the
Senate. What are these Irish fellow-creatures doing here? Well, Bridget
serves us in the kitchen; but Patrick is more helpful yet; he goes to the
legislature, and is the servant of the people at large. It is very
obliging of him; but turn and turn about is fair play; and it would be no
more than justice were we, once in a while, to take off our coat and serve
Patrick in the same way.

When we get into a tight place we are apt to try to slip out of it under
some plea of a European precedent. But it used to be supposed that it was
precisely European precedents that we came over here to avoid. I am not
profoundly versed in political economy, nor is this the time or place to
discuss its principles; but, as regards protection, for example, I can
conceive that there may be arguments against it as well as for it. Emerson
used to say that the way to conquer the foreign artisan was not to kill
him but to beat his work. He also pointed out that the money we made out
of the European wars, at the beginning of this century, had the result of
bringing the impoverished population of those countries down upon us in
the shape of emigrants. They shared our crops and went on the poor-rates,
and so we did not gain so much after all. One cannot help wishing that
America would assume the loftiest possible ground in her political and
commercial relations. With all due respect to the sagacity and ability of
our ruling demagogues, I should not wish them to be quoted as typical
Americans. The domination of such persons has an effect which is by no
means measurable by their personal acts. What they can do is of
infinitesimal importance. But the mischief is that they incline every one
of us to believe, as Emerson puts it, in two gods. They make the morality
of Wall Street and the White House seem to be a different thing from that
of our parlors and nurseries. "He may be a little shady on 'change," we
say, "but he is a capital fellow when you know him." But if he is a
capital fellow when I know him, then I shall never find much fault with
his professional operations, and shall end, perhaps, by allowing him to
make some investments for me. Why should not I be a capital fellow too--
and a fellow of capital, to boot! I can endure public opprobrium with
tolerable equanimity so long as it remains public. It is the private cold
looks that trouble me.

In short, we may speak of America in two senses--either meaning the
America that actually meets us at the street corners and in the
newspapers, or the ideal America--America as it ought to be. They are not
the same thing; and, at present, there seems to be a good deal more of the
former than of the latter. And yet, there is a connection between them;
the latter has made the former possible. We sometimes see a great crowd
drawn together by proclamation, for some noble purpose--to decide upon a
righteous war, or to pass a just decree. But the people on the outskirts
of the crowd, finding themselves unable to hear the orators, and their
time hanging idle on their hands, take to throwing stones, knocking off
hats, or, perhaps, picking pockets. They may have come to the meeting with
as patriotic or virtuous intentions as the promoters themselves; nay,
under more favorable circumstances, they might themselves have become
promoters. Virtue and patriotism are not private property; at certain
times any one may possess them. And, on the other hand, we have seen
examples enough, of late, of persons of the highest respectability and
trust turning out, all at once, to be very sorry scoundrels. A man changes
according to the person with whom he converses; and though the outlook is
rather sordid to-day, we have not forgotten that during the Civil War the
air seemed full of heroism. So that these two Americas--the real and the
ideal--far apart though they may be in one sense, may, in another sense,
be as near together as our right hand to our left. In a greater or less
degree, they exist side by side in each one of us. But civil wars do not
come every day; nor can we wish them to, even to show us once more that we
are worthy of our destiny. We must find some less expensive and quieter
method of reminding ourselves of that. And of such methods, none, perhaps,
is better than to review the lives of Americans who were truly great; to
ask what their country meant to them; what they wished her to become; what
virtues and what vices they detected in her. Passion may be generous, but
passion cannot last; and when it is over, we are cold and indifferent
again. But reason and example reach us when we are calm and passive; and
what they inculcate is more likely to abide. At least, it will be only
evil passion that can cast it out.

I have said that many a true American is doubtless born, and lives,
abroad; but that does not prevent Emerson from having been born here. So
far as the outward accidents of generation and descent go, he could not
have been more American than he was. Of course, one prefers that it should
be so. A rare gem should be fitly set. A noble poem should be printed with
the fairest type of the Riverside Press, and upon fine paper with wide
margins. It helps us to believe in ourselves to be told that Emerson's
ancestry was not only Puritan, but clerical; that the central and vital
thread of the idea that created us, ran through his heart. The nation, and
even New England, Massachusetts, Boston, have many traits that are not
found in him; but there is nothing in him that is not a refinement, a
sublimation and concentration of what is good in them; and the selection
and grouping of the elements are such that he is a typical figure. Indeed,
he is all type; which is the same as saying that there is nobody like him.
And, mentally, he produces the impression of being all force; in his
writings, his mind seems to have acted immediately, without natural
impediment or friction; as if a machine should be run that was not
hindered by the contact of its parts. As he was physically lean and narrow
of figure, and his face nothing but so many features welded together, so
there was no adipose tissue in his thought. It is pure, clear, and
accurate, and has the fault of dryness; but often moves in forms of
exquisite beauty. It is not adhesive; it sticks to nothing, nor anything
to it; after ranging through all the various philosophies of the world, it
comes out as clean and characteristic as ever. It has numberless
affinities, but no adhesion; it does not even adhere to itself. There are
many separate statements in any one of his essays which present no logical
continuity; but although this fact has caused great anxiety to many
disciples of Emerson, it never troubled him. It was the inevitable result
of his method of thought. Wandering at will in the flower-garden of
religious and moral philosophy, it was his part to pluck such blossoms as
he saw were beautiful; not to find out their botanical interconnection. He
would afterward arrange them, for art or harmony's sake, according to
their color or their fragrance; but it was not his affair to go any
farther in their classification.

This intuitive method of his, however little it may satisfy those who wish
to have all their thinking done for them, who desire not only to have
given to them all the cities of the earth, but also to have straight roads
built for them from one to the other, carries with it its own
justification. "There is but one reason," is Emerson's saying; and again
and again does he prove without proving it. We confess, over and over,
that the truth which he asserts is indeed a truth. Even his own variations
from the truth, when he is betrayed into them, serve to confirm the rule.
For these are seldom or never intuitions at first hand--pure intuitions;
but, as it were, intuitions from previous intuitions--deductions. The form
of statement is the same, but the source is different; they are from
Emerson, instead of from the Absolute; tinted, not colorless. They show a
mental bias, very slight, but redeeming him back to humanity. We love him
the more for them, because they indicate that for him, too, there was a
choice of ways, and that he must struggle and watch to choose the right.

We are so much wedded to systems, and so accustomed to connect a system
with a man, that the absence of system, either explicit or implicit, in
Emerson, strikes us as a defect. And yet truth has no system, nor the
human mind. This philosopher maintains one, that another thesis. Both are
true essentially, and yet there seems a contradiction between them. We
cannot bear to be illogical, and so we enlist some under this banner, some
under that. By so doing we sacrifice to consistency at least the half of
truth. Thence we come to examine our intuitions, and ask them, not whether
they are true in themselves, but what are their tendencies. If it turn out
that they will lead us to stultify some past conclusion to which we stand
committed, we drop them like hot coals. To Emerson, this behavior appeared
the nakedest personal vanity. Recognizing that he was finite, he could not
desire to be consistent. If he saw to-day that one thing was true, and to-
morrow that its opposite was true, was it for him to elect which of the
two truths should have his preference? No; to reject either would be to
reject all; it belonged to God alone to reconcile these contradictious.
Between infinite and finite can be no ratio; and the consistency of the
Creator implies the inconsistency of the creature.

Emerson's Americanism, therefore, was Americanism in its last and purest
analysis, which is giving him high praise, and to America great hope. But
I do not mean to pay him, who was so full of modesty and humility, the
ungrateful compliment of holding him up as the permanent American ideal.
It is his tendencies, his quality, that are valuable, and only in a minor,
incipient degree his actual results. All human results must be strictly
limited, and according to the epoch and outlook. Emerson does not solve
for all time the problem of the universe; he solves nothing; but he does
what is far more useful--he gives a direction and an impetus to lofty
human endeavor. He does not anticipate the lessons and the discipline of
the ages, but he shows us how to deal with circumstances in such a manner
as to secure the good instead of the evil influence. New conditions, fresh
discoveries, unexpected horizons opening before us, will, no doubt, soon
carry us beyond the scope of Emerson's surmise; but we shall not so easily
improve upon his aim and attitude. In the spaces beyond the stars there
may be marvels such as it has not entered into the mind of man to
conceive; but there, as here, the right way to look will still be upward,
and the right aspiration be still toward humbleness and charity. I have
just spoken of Emerson's absence of system; but his writings have
nevertheless a singular coherence, by virtue of the single-hearted motive
that has inspired them. Many will, doubtless, have noticed, as I have
done, how the whole of Emerson illustrates every aspect of him.

Whether your discourse be of his religion, of his ethics, of his relation
to society, or what not, the picture that you draw will have gained color
and form from every page that he has written. He does not lie in strata;
all that he is permeates all that he has done. His books cannot be
indexed, unless you would refer every subject to each paragraph. And so he
cannot treat, no matter what subject, without incorporating in his
statement the germs at least of all that he has thought and believed. In
this respect he is like light--the presence of the general at the
particular. And, to confess the truth, I find myself somewhat loath to
diffract this pure ray to the arbitrary end of my special topic. Why
should I speak of him as an American? That is not his definition. He was
an American because he was himself. America, however, gives less
limitation than any other nationality to a generous and serene
personality.

I am sometimes disposed to think that Emerson's "English Traits" reveal
his American traits more than anything else he has written. We are
described by our own criticisms of others, and especially by our
criticisms of another nation; the exceptions we take are the mould of our
own figures. So we have valuable glimpses of Emerson's contours throughout
this volume. And it is in all respects a fortunate work; as remarkable a
one almost for him to write as a volume of his essays for any one else.
Comparatively to his other books, it is as flesh and blood to spirit;
Emersonian flesh and blood, it is true, and semi-translucent; but still it
completes the man for us: he would have remained too problematical without
it. Those who have never personally known him may finish and solidify
their impressions of him here. He likes England and the English, too; and
that sympathy is beyond our expectation of the mind that evolved "Nature"
and "The Over-Soul." The grasp of his hand, I remember, was firm and
stout, and we perceive those qualities in the descriptions and cordiality
of "English Traits." Then, it is an objective book; the eye looks outward,
not inward; these pages afford a basis not elsewhere obtainable of
comparing his general human faculty with that of other men. Here he
descends from the airy heights he treads so easily and, standing foot to
foot with his peers, measures himself against them. He intends only to
report their stature, and to leave himself out of the story; but their
answers to his questions show what the questions were, and what the
questioner. And we cannot help suspecting, though he did not, that the
Englishmen were not a little put to it to keep pace with their clear-
faced, penetrating, attentive visitor.

He has never said of his own countrymen the comfortable things that he
tells of the English; but we need not grumble at that. The father who is
severe with his own children will freely admire those of others, for whom
he is not responsible. Emerson is stern toward what we are, and arduous
indeed in his estimate of what we ought to be. He intimates that we are
not quite worthy of our continent; that we have not as yet lived up to our
blue china. "In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not."
And he adds that even our more presentable public acts are due to a money-
making spirit: "The benefaction derived in Illinois and the great West
from railroads is inestimable, and vastly exceeding any intentional
philanthropy on record." He does not think very respectfully of the
designs or the doings of the people who went to California in 1849, though
he admits that "California gets civilized in this immoral way," and is
fain to suppose that, "as there is use in the world for poisons, so the
world cannot move without rogues," and that, in respect of America, "the
huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests
the strength of the constitution." He ridicules our unsuspecting
provincialism: "Have you seen the dozen great men of New York and Boston?
Then you may as well die!" He does not spare our tendency to spread-
eagleism and declamation, and having quoted a shrewd foreigner as saying
of Americans that, "Whatever they say has a little the air of a speech,"
he proceeds to speculate whether "the American forest has refreshed some
weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out?" He finds the foible
especially of American youth to be--pretension; and remarks, suggestively,
that we talk much about the key of the age, but "the key to all ages is
imbecility!" He cannot reconcile himself to the mania for going abroad.
"There is a restlessness in our people that argues want of character....
Can we never extract this tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our
countrymen?" He finds, however, this involuntary compensation in the
practice--that, practically "we go to Europe to be Americanized," and has
faith that "one day we shall cast out the passion for Europe by the
passion for America." As to our political doings, he can never regard them
with complacency. "Politics is an afterword," he declares--"a poor
patching. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education." He
sympathizes with Lovelace's theory as to iron bars and stone walls, and
holds that freedom and slavery are inward, not outward conditions. Slavery
is not in circumstance, but in feeling; you cannot eradicate the irons by
external restrictions; and the truest way to emancipate the slave would be
to educate him to a comprehension of his inviolable dignity and freedom as
a human being. Amelioration of outward circumstances will be the effect,
but can never be the means of mental and moral improvement. "Nothing is
more disgusting," he affirms, generalizing the theme, "than the crowing
about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for
freedom of some paper preamble like a 'Declaration of Independence' or the
statute right to vote." But, "Our America has a bad name for
superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and
buffoons, but perceivers of the terrors of life, and have nerved
themselves to face it." He will not be deceived by the clamor of blatant
reformers. "If an angry bigot assumes the bountiful cause of abolition,
and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say
to him: 'Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and
modest; have that grace, and never varnish your hard, uncharitable
ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles
off!'"

He does not shrink from questioning the validity of some of our pet
institutions, as, for instance, universal suffrage. He reminds us that in
old Egypt the vote of a prophet was reckoned equal to one hundred hands,
and records his opinion that it was much underestimated. "Shall we, then,"
he asks, "judge a country by the majority or by the minority? By the
minority, surely! 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by
square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the
time." The majority are unripe, and do not yet know their own opinion. He
would not, however, counsel an organic alteration in this respect,
believing that, with the progress of enlightenment, such coarse
constructions of human rights will adjust themselves. He concedes the
sagacity of the Fultons and Watts of politics, who, noticing that the
opinion of the million was the terror of the world, grouped it on a level,
instead of piling it into a mountain, and so contrived to make of this
terror the most harmless and energetic form of a State. But, again, he
would not have us regard the State as a finality, or as relieving any man
of his individual responsibility for his actions and purposes. We are to
confide in God--and not in our money, and in the State because it is guard
of it. The Union itself has no basis but the good pleasure of the majority
to be united. The wise and just men impart strength to the State, not
receive it; and, if all went down, they and their like would soon combine
in a new and better constitution. Yet he will not have us forget that only
by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing so weak as an egotist. We are
mighty only as vehicles of a truth before which State and individual are
alike ephemeral. In this sense we, like other nations, shall have our
kings and nobles--the leading and inspiration of the best; and he who
would become a member of that nobility must obey his heart.

Government, he observes, has been a fossil--it should be a plant; statute
law should express, not impede, the mind of mankind. In tracing the course
of human political institutions, he finds feudalism succeeding monarchy,
and this again followed by trade, the good and evil of which is that it
would put everything in the market, talent, beauty, virtue, and man
himself. By this means it has done its work; it has faults and will end as
the others. Its aristocracy need not be feared, for it can have no
permanence, it is not entailed. In the time to come, he hopes to see us
less anxious to be governed, in the technical sense; each man shall govern
himself in the interests of all; government without any governor will be,
for the first time, adamantine. Is not every man sometimes a radical in
politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they
are most luxurious; conservatism stands on man's limitations, reform on
his infinitude. The age of the quadruped is to go out; the age of the
brain and the heart is to come in. We are too pettifogging and imitative
in our legislative conceptions; the Legislature of this country should
become more catholic and cosmopolitan than any other. Let us be brave and
strong enough to trust in humanity; strong natures are inevitable
patriots. The time, the age, what is that, but a few prominent persons and
a few active persons who epitomize the times? There is a bribe possible
for any finite will; but the pure sympathy with universal ends is an
infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent. The world wants saviors and
religions; society is servile from want of will; but there is a Destiny by
which the human race is guided, the race never dying, the individual never
spared; its law is, you shall have everything as a member, nothing to
yourself. Referring to the communities of various kinds, which were so
much in vogue some years ago, he holds such to be valuable, not for what
they have done, but for the indication they give of the revolution that is
on the way. They place great faith in mutual support, but it is only as a
man puts off from himself all external support and stands alone, that he
is strong and will prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. A
man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain.
He must not shun whatever comes to him in the way of duty; the only path
of escape is--performance. He must rely on Providence, but not in a timid
or ecclesiastical spirit; it is no use to dress up that terrific
benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.
We shall come out well, whatever personal or political disasters may
intervene. For here in America is the home of man. After deducting our
pitiful politics--shall John or Jonathan sit in the chair and hold the
purse?--and making due allowance for our frivolities and insanities, there
still remains an organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses its
balance, redresses itself presently, and which offers to the human mind
opportunities not known elsewhere.

Whenever he touches upon the fundamental elements of social and rational
life, it is always to enlarge and illuminate our conception of them. We
are not wont to question the propriety of the sentiment of patriotism, for
instance. We are to swear by our own _lares_ and _penates_, and stand up
for the American eagle, right or wrong. But Emerson instantly goes beneath
this interpretation and exposes its crudity. The true sense of patriotism,
according to him, is almost the reverse of its popular sense. He has no
sympathy with that boyish egotism, hoarse with cheering for our side, for
our State, for our town; the right patriotism consists in the delight
which springs from contributing our peculiar and legitimate advantages to
the benefit of humanity. Every foot of soil has its proper quality; the
grape on two sides of the fence has new flavors; and so every acre on the
globe, every family of men, every point of climate, has its distinguishing
virtues. This being admitted, however, Emerson will yield in patriotism to
no one; his only concern is that the advantages we contribute shall be the
most instead of the least possible. "This country," he says, "does not lie
here in the sun causeless, and though it may not be easy to define its
influence, men feel already its emancipating quality in the careless self-
reliance of the manners, in the freedom of thought, in the direct roads by
which grievances are reached and redressed, and even in the reckless and
sinister politics, not less than in purer expressions. Bad as it is, this
freedom leads onward and upward to a Columbia of thought and art, which is
the last and endless end of Columbus's adventure." Nor is this poet of
virtue and philosophy ever more truly patriotic, from his spiritual
standpoint, than when he throws scorn and indignation upon his country's
sins and frailties. "But who is he that prates of the culture of mankind,
of better arts and life? Go, blind worm, go--behold the famous States
harrying Mexico with rifle and with knife! Or who, with accent bolder,
dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer? I found by thee, O rushing
Contoocook! and in thy valleys, Agiochook! the jackals of the negro-
holder.... What boots thy zeal, O glowing friend, that would indignant
rend the northland from the South? Wherefore? To what good end? Boston Bay
and Bunker Hill would serve things still--things are of the snake. The
horseman serves the horse, the neat-herd serves the neat, the merchant
serves the purse, the eater serves his meat; 'tis the day of the chattel,
web to weave, and corn to grind; things are in the saddle, and ride
mankind!"

But I must not begin to quote Emerson's poetry; only it is worth noting
that he, whose verse is uniformly so abstractly and intellectually
beautiful, kindles to passion whenever his theme is of America. The
loftiest patriotism never found more ardent and eloquent expression than
in the hymn sung at the completion of the Concord monument, on the 19th of
April, 1836. There is no rancor in it; no taunt of triumph; "the foe long
since in silence slept"; but throughout there resounds a note of pure and
deep rejoicing at the victory of justice over oppression, which Concord
fight so aptly symbolized. In "Hamatreya" and "The Earth Song," another
chord is struck, of calm, laconic irony. Shall we too, he asks, we Yankee
farmers, descendants of the men who gave up all for freedom, go back to
the creed outworn of medieval feudalism and aristocracy, and say, of the
land that yields us its produce, "'Tis mine, my children's, and my
name's"? Earth laughs in flowers at our boyish boastfulness, and asks "How
am I theirs if they cannot hold me, but I hold them?" "When I heard 'The
Earth Song,' I was no longer brave; my avarice cooled, like lust in the
child of the grave" Or read "Monadnoc," and mark the insight and the power
with which the significance and worth of the great facts of nature are
interpreted and stated. "Complement of human kind, having us at vantage
still, our sumptuous indigence, oh, barren mound, thy plenties fill! We
fool and prate; thou art silent and sedate. To myriad kinds and times one
sense the constant mountain doth dispense; shedding on all its snows and
leaves, one joy it joys, one grief it grieves. Thou seest, oh, watchman
tall, our towns and races grow and fall, and imagest the stable good for
which we all our lifetime grope; and though the substance us elude, we in
thee the shadow find." ... "Thou dost supply the shortness of our days,
and promise, on thy Founder's truth, long morrow to this mortal youth!" I
have ignored the versified form in these extracts, in order to bring them
into more direct contrast with the writer's prose, and show that the
poetry is inherent. No other poet, with whom I am acquainted, has caused
the very spirit of a land, the mother of men, to express itself so
adequately as Emerson has done in these pieces. Whitman falls short of
them, it seems to me, though his effort is greater.

Emerson is continually urging us to give heed to this grand voice of hills
and streams, and to mould ourselves upon its suggestions. The difficulty
and the anomaly are that we are not native; that England is our mother,
quite as much as Monadnoc; that we are heirs of memories and traditions
reaching far beyond the times and the confines of the Republic. We cannot
assume the splendid childlikeness of the great primitive races, and
exhibit the hairy strength and unconscious genius that the poet longs to
find in us. He remarks somewhere that the culminating period of good in
nature and the world is in just that moment of transition, when the
swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency
or acidity is got out by ethics and humanity.

It was at such a period that Greece attained her apogee; but our
experience, it seems to me, must needs be different. Our story is not of
birth, but of regeneration, a far more subtle and less obvious
transaction. The Homeric California of which Bret Harte is the reporter
does not seem to me in the closest sense American. It is a comparatively
superficial matter--this savage freedom and raw poetry; it belongs to all
pioneering life, where every man must stand for himself, and Judge Lynch
strings up the defaulter to the nearest tree. But we are only incidentally
pioneers in this sense; and the characteristics thus impressed upon us
will leave no traces in the completed American. "A sturdy lad from New
Hampshire or Vermont," says Emerson, "who in turn tries all the
professions--who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches,
edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in
successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet--is worth a
hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no
shame in not studying a 'profession,' for he does not postpone his life,
but lives already." That is stirringly said: but, as a matter of fact,
most of the Americans whom we recognize as great did not have such a
history; nor, if they had it, would they be on that account more American.
On the other hand, the careers of men like Jim Fiske and Commodore
Vanderbilt might serve very well as illustrations of the above sketch. If
we must wait for our character until our geographical advantages and the
absence of social distinctions manufacture it for us, we are likely to
remain a long while in suspense. When our foreign visitors begin to evince
a more poignant interest in Concord and Fifth Avenue than in the
Mississippi and the Yellowstone, it may be an indication to us that we are
assuming our proper position relative to our physical environment. "The
_land_," says Emerson, "is a sanative and Americanizing influence which
promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come." Well, when we are
virtuous, we may, perhaps, spare our own blushes by allowing our
topography, symbolically, to celebrate us, and when our admirers would
worship the purity of our intentions, refer them to Walden Pond; or to
Mount Shasta, when they would expatiate upon our lofty generosity. It is,
perhaps, true, meanwhile, that the chances of a man's leading a decent
life are greater in a palace than in a pigsty.

But this is holding our author too strictly to the letter of his message.
And, at any rate, the Americanism of Emerson is better than anything that
he has said in vindication of it. He is the champion of this commonwealth;
he is our future, living in our present, and showing the world, by
anticipation, as it were, what sort of excellence we are capable of
attaining. A nation that has produced Emerson, and can recognize in him
bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh--and, still more, spirit of her
spirit--that nation may look toward the coming age with security. But he
has done more than thus to prophesy of his country; he is electric and
stimulates us to fulfil our destiny. To use a phrase of his own, we
"cannot hear of personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance,
without fresh resolution." Emerson, helps us most in provoking us to help
ourselves. The pleasantest revenge is that which we can sometimes take
upon our great men in quoting of themselves what they have said of others.

It is easy to be so revenged upon Emerson, because he, more than most
persons of such eminence, has been generous and cordial in his
appreciation of all human worth. "If there should appear in the company,"
he observes, "some gentle soul who knows little of persons and parties, of
Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these particulars,
and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player,
bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any
conditions of country, or time, or human body, that man liberates me....
I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods."
Who can state the mission and effect of Emerson more tersely and aptly
than those words do it?

But, once more, he does not desire eulogiums, and it seems half ungenerous
to force them upon him now that he can no longer defend himself. I prefer
to conclude by repeating a passage characteristic of him both as a man and
as an American, and which, perhaps, conveys a sounder and healthier
criticism, both for us and for him, than any mere abject and nerveless
admiration; for great men are great only in so far as they liberate us,
and we undo their work in courting their tyranny. The passage runs thus:--

"Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the
least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I
pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No
facts to me are sacred; none are profane. I simply experiment--an endless
seeker, with no Past at my back!"




CHAPTER X.

MODERN MAGIC.


Human nature enjoys nothing better than to wonder--to be mystified; and it
thanks and remembers those who have the skill to gratify this craving. The
magicians of old knew that truth and conducted themselves accordingly. But
our modern wonder-workers fail of their due influence, because, not
content to perform their marvels, they go on to explain them. Merlin and
Roger Bacon were greater public benefactors than Morse and Edison. Man is
--and he always has been and will be--something else besides a pure
intelligence: and science, in order to become really popular, must
contrive to touch man somewhere else besides on the purely intellectual
side: it must remember that man is all heart, all hope, all fear, and all
foolishness, quite as much as he is all brains. Otherwise, science can
never expect to take the place of superstition, much less of religion, in
mankind's affection. In order to be a really successful man of science, it
is first of all indispensable to make one's self master of everything in
nature and in human nature that science is not.

What must one do, in short, in order to become a magician? I use the term,
here, in its weightiest sense. How to make myself visible and invisible at
will? How to present myself in two or more places at once? How answer your
question before you ask it, and describe to you your most secret thoughts
and actions? How shall I call spirits from the vasty deep, and make you
see and hear and feel them? How paralyze your strength with a look, heal
your wound with a touch, or cause your bullet to rebound harmless from my
unprotected flesh? How shall I walk on the air, sink through the earth,
pass through stone walls, or walk, dry-shod, on the floor of the ocean?
How shall I visit the other side of the moon, jump through the ring of
Saturn, and gather sunflowers in Sirius? There are persons now living who
profess to do no less remarkable feats, and to regard them as incidental
merely to achievements far more important. A school of hierophants or
adepts is said to exist in Tibet, who, as a matter of daily routine, quite
transcend everything that we have been accustomed to consider natural
possibility. What is the course of study, what are the ways and means
whereby such persons accomplish such results?

The conventional attitude towards such matters is, of course, that of
unconditional scepticism. But it is pleasant, occasionally, to take an
airing beyond the bounds of incredulity. For my own part, it is true, I
must confess my inability to believe in anything positively supernatural.
The supernatural and the illusory are to my mind convertible terms: they
cannot really exist or take place. Let us be sure, however, that we are
agreed as to what supernatural means. If a magician, before my eyes,
transformed an old man into a little girl, I should call that
supernatural; and nothing should convince me that my senses had not been
grossly deceived. But were the magician to leave the room by passing
through the solid wall, or "go out" like an exploding soap-bubble,--I
might think what I please, but I should not venture to dogmatically
pronounce the thing supernatural; because the phenomenon known as "matter"
is scientifically unknown, and therefore no one can tell what
modifications it may not be susceptible of:--no one, that is to say,
except the person who, like the magician of our illustration, professes to
possess, and (for aught I can affirm to the contrary) may actually possess
a knowledge unshared by the bulk of mankind. The transformation of an old
man into a little girl, on the other hand, would be a transaction
involving the immaterial soul as well as the material body; and if I do
not know that that cannot take place, I am forever incapable of knowing
anything. These are extreme examples, but they serve to emphasize an
important distinction.

The whole domain of magic, in short, occupies that anomalous neutral
ground that intervenes between the facts of our senses and the truths of
our intuitions. Fact and truth are not convertible terms; they abide in
two distinct planes, like thought and speech, or soul and body; one may
imply or involve the other, but can never demonstrate it. Experience and
intuition together comprehend the entire realm of actual and conceivable
knowledge. Whatever contradicts both experience and intuition may,
therefore, be pronounced illusion. But this neutral ground is the home of
phenomena which intuition does not deny, and which experience has not
confirmed. It is still a wide zone, though not so wide as it was a hundred
years ago, or fifty, or even ten. It narrows every day, as science, or the
classification of experience, expands. Are we, then, to look for a time
when the zone shall have dwindled to a mathematical line, and magic
confess itself to have been nothing but the science of an advanced school
of investigators? Will the human intellect acquire a power before which
all mysteries shall become transparent? Let us dwell upon this question a
little longer.

A mystery that is a mystery can never, humanly speaking, become anything
else. Instances of such mysteries can readily be adduced. The universe
itself is built upon them and is the greatest of them. They lie before the
threshold and at the basis of all existence. For example:--here is a lump
of compact, whitish, cheese-like substance, about as much as would go into
a thimble. From this I profess to be able to produce a gigantic, intricate
structure, sixty feet in height and diameter, hard, solid, and enduring,
which shall furthermore possess the power of extending and multiplying
itself until it covers the whole earth, and even all the earths in the
universe, if it could reach them. Is such a profession as this credible?
It is entirely credible, as soon as I paraphrase it by saying that I
propose to plant an acorn. And yet all magic has no mystery which is so
wonderful as this universal mystery of growth: and the only reason we are
not lost in amazement at it is that it goes quietly on all the time, and
perfects itself under uniform conditions. But let me eliminate from the
phenomenon the one element of time--which is logically the least essential
factor in the product, unreal and arbitrary, based on the revolution of
the earth, and conceivably variable to any extent--grant me this, and the
world would come to see me do the miracle. But, with time or without it,
the mystery is just as mysterious.

Natural mysteries, then,--the mysteries of life, death, creation, growth,
--do not fall under our present consideration: they are beyond the
legitimate domain of magic: and no intellectual development to which we
may hereafter attain will bring us a step nearer their solution. But with
the problems proper to magic, the case is different. Magic is
distinctively not Divine, but human: a finite conundrum, not an Infinite
enigma. If there has ever been a magician since the world began, then all
mankind may become magicians, if they will give the necessary time and
trouble. And yet, magic is not simply an advanced region of the path which
science is pursuing. Science is concerned with results,--with material
phenomena; whereas magic is, primarily, the study of causes, or of
spiritual phenomena; or, to use another definition,--of phenomena which
the senses perceive, not in themselves, but only in their results. So long
as we restrict ourselves to results, our activity is confined to analysis;
but when we begin to investigate causes, we are on the road not only to
comprehend results, but (within limits) to modify or produce them.

Science, however, blocks our advance in this direction by denying, or at
least refusing to admit, the existence of the spiritual world, or world of
causes: because, being spiritual, it is not sensible, or cognizable in
sense. Science admits only material causes, or the changes wrought in
matter by itself. If we ask what is the cause of a material cause, we are
answered that it is a supposed entity called Force, concerning which there
is nothing further to be known.

At this point, then, argument (on the material plane) comes to an end, and
speculation or assumption begins. Science answers its own questions, but
neither can nor will answer any others. And upon what pretence do we ask
any others? We ask them upon two grounds. The first is that some people,--
we might even say, most people,--would be glad to believe in supersensuous
existence, and are always on the alert to examine any plausible hypothesis
pointing in that direction: and secondly, there exists a vast amount of
testimony (we need not call it evidence) tending to show that the
supersensuous world has been discovered, and that it endows its
discoverers with sundry notable advantages. Of course, we are not obliged
to credit this testimony, unless we want to: and--for some reason, never
fully explained--a great many people who accept natural mysteries quite
amiably become indignant when requested to examine mysteries of a much
milder order. But it is not my intention to discuss the limits of the
probable; but to swallow as much as possible first, and endeavor to
account for it afterwards.

There is, as every reader knows, a class of phenomena--such as hypnotism,
trance, animal magnetism, and so forth--the occurrence of which science
has conceded, though failing as yet to offer any intelligent explanation
of them. It is suggested that they are peculiar states of the brain and
nerve-centres, physical in their nature and origin, though evading our
present physical tests. Be that as it may, they afford a capital
introduction to the study of magic; if, indeed, they, and a few allied
phenomena, do not comprise the germs of the whole matter. Apropos of this
subject, a society has lately been organized in London, with branches on
the Continent and in this country, composed of scientific men, Fellows of
the Royal Society, members of Parliament, professors, and literary men,
calling themselves the "Psychical Research Society," and making it their
business to test and investigate these very marvels, under the most
stringent scientific conditions. But the capacity to be deceived of the
bodily senses is almost unlimited; in fact, we know that they are
incapable of telling us the ultimate truth on any subject; and we are able
to get along with them only because we have found their misinformation to
be sufficiently uniform for most practical purposes. But once admit that
the origin of these phenomena is not on the physical plane, and then, if
we are to give any weight at all to them, it can be only from a spiritual
standpoint. In other words, unless we can approach such questions by an _a
priori_ route, we might as well let them alone. We can reason from spirit
to body--from mind to matter--but we can never reverse that process, and
from matter evolve mind. The reason is that matter is not found to contain
mind, but is only acted upon by it, as inferior by superior; and we cannot
get out of the bag more than has been put into it. The acorn (to use our
former figure) can never explain the oak; but the oak readily accounts for
the acorn. It may be doubted, therefore, whether the Psychical Research
Society can succeed in doing more than to give a respectable endorsement
to a perplexing possibility,--so long as they adhere to the inductive
method. Should they, however, abandon the inductive method for the
deductive, they will forfeit the allegiance of all consistently scientific
minds; and they may, perhaps, make some curious contributions to
philosophy. At present, they appear to be astride the fence between
philosophy and science, as if they hoped in some way to make the former
satisfy the latter's demands. But the difference between the evidence that
demonstrates a fact and the evidence that confirms a truth is, once more,
a difference less of degree than of kind. We can never obtain sensible
verification of a proposition that transcends sense. We must accept it
without material proof, or not at all. We may believe, for instance, that
Creation is the work of an intelligent Divine Being; or we may disbelieve
it; but we can never prove it. If we do believe it, innumerable
confirmations of it meet us at every turn: but no such confirmations, and
no multiplication of them, can persuade a disbeliever. For belief is ever
incommunicable from without; it can be generated only from within. The
term "belief" cannot be applied to our recognition of a physical fact: we
do not believe in that--we are only sensible of it.

In this connection, a few words will be in order concerning what is called
Spiritism,--a subject which has of late years been exciting a good deal of
remark. Its disciples claim for it the dignity of a new and positive
revelation,--a revelation to sense of spiritual being. Now, the entire
universe may be described as a revelation to sense of spiritual being--for
those who happen to believe _a priori_, or from spontaneous inward
conviction, in spiritual being. We may believe a man's body, for example,
to be the effect of which his soul is the cause; but no one can reach that
conviction by the most refined dissection of the bodily tissues. How,
then, does the spiritists' Positive Revelation help the matter? Their
answer is that the physical universe is a permanent and orderly phenomenon
which (setting aside the problem of its First Cause) fully accounts for
itself; whereas the phenomena of Spiritism, such as rapping, table-
tipping, materializing, and so forth, are, if not supernatural, at any
rate extra-natural. They occur in consequence of a conscious effort to
bring them about; they cease when that effort is discontinued; they abound
in indications of being produced by independent intelligencies; they are
inexplicable upon any recognized theory of physics; and, therefore, there
is nothing for it but to regard them as spiritual. And what then? Then, of
course, there must be spirits, and a life after the death of the body; and
the great question of Immortality is answered in the affirmative!

Let us, for the sake of argument, concede that the manifestations upon
which the Spiritists found their claims are genuine: that they are or can
be produced without fraud; and let us then enquire in what respect our
means for the conversion of the sceptic are improved. In the first place
we find that all the manifestations--be their cause what it may--can occur
only on the physical plane. However much the origin of the phenomena may
perplex us, the phenomena themselves must be purely material, in so far as
they are perceptible at all. "Raps" are audible according to the same laws
of vibration as other sounds: the tilting table is simply a material body
displaced by an adequate agency; the materialized hand or face is nothing
but physical substance assuming form. Plainly, therefore, we have as much
right to ascribe a spiritual source to such phenomena as we have to
ascribe a spiritual source to the ordinary phenomena of nature, such as a
tree or a man's body,--just as much right--and no more! Consequently, we
are no nearer converting our sceptic than we were at the outset. He admits
the physical manifestation: there is no intrinsic novelty about that: but
when we proceed to argue that the manifestations are wrought by spirits,
he points out to us that this is sheer assumption on our part. "I have not
seen a spirit," he says: "I have not heard one; I have not felt one; nor
is it possible that my bodily senses should perceive anything that is not
at least as physical as they are. I have witnessed certain transactions
effected by means unknown to me--possibly by the action of a natural law
not yet fully expounded by science. If there was anything spiritual in the
affair, it has not been manifest to my apprehension: and I must decline to
lend my countenance to any such pretensions."

That would be the reply of the sceptic who was equal to the emergency. But
let us suppose that he is not equal to it: that he is a weak-kneed,
impressionable person, with a tendency to jump at conclusions; and that he
is scared or mystified into believing that "spirits" may be at the bottom
of it. What, then, will be the character of the faith which the Positive
Revelation has furnished him? He has discovered that existence continues,
in some fashion, after the death of the body. He has learned that there
may be such a thing as--not immortality exactly, but--postmortem
consciousness. He has been saddled with the conviction that the other
world is full of restless ghosts, who come shuddering back from their cold
emptiness, and try to warm themselves in the borrowed flesh and blood, and
with the purblind selfishness and curiosity of us who still remain here.
"Have faith: be not impatient: the conditions are unfavorable: but we are
working for you!"--such is the constant burden of the communications. But,
if there be a God, why must our relations with him be complicated by the
interference of such forlorn prevaricators and amateur Paracletes as
these? we do not wish to be "worked for,"--to be carried heavenward on
some one else's shoulders: but to climb thither by God's help and our own
will, or to stay where we are. Moreover, by what touchstone shall we test
the veracity of the self-appointed purveyors of this Positive Revelation?
Are we to believe what they say, because they have lost their bodies? If
life teaches us anything, it is that God does above all things respect the
spiritual freedom of his creatures. He does not terrify and bully us into
acknowledging Him by ghostly juggleries in darkened rooms, and by vapid
exhibitions addressed to our outward senses. He approaches each man in the
innermost sacred audience-chamber of his heart, and there shows him good
and evil, truth and falsehood, and bids him choose. And that choice, if
made aright, becomes a genuine and undying belief, because it was made in
freedom, unbiassed by external threats and cajoleries.

Such belief is, itself, immortality,--something as distinct from post-
mortem consciousness as wisdom is distinct from mere animal intelligence.
On the whole, therefore, there seems to be little real worth in Spiritism,
even accepting it at its own valuation. The nourishment it yields the soul
is too meagre; and--save on that one bare point of life beyond the grave,
which might just as easily prove an infinite curse as an infinite
blessing--it affords no trustworthy news whatever.

But these objections do not apply to magic proper. Magic seems to consist
mainly in the control which mind may exceptionally exercise over matter.
In hypnotism, the subject abjectly believes and obeys the operator. If he
be told that he cannot step across a chalk mark on the floor, he cannot
step across it. He dissolves in tears or explodes with laughter, according
as the operator tells him he has cause for merriment or tears: and if he
be assured that the water he drinks is Madeira wine or Java coffee, he has
no misgiving that such is not the case.

To say that this state of things is brought about by the exercise of the
operator's will, is not to explain the phenomenon, but to put it in
different terms. What is the will, and how does it produce such a result?
Here is a man who believes, at the word of command, that the thing which
all the rest of the world calls a chair is a horse. How is such
misapprehension on his part possible? our senses are our sole means of
knowing external objects: and this man's senses seem to confirm--at least
they by no means correct--his persuasion that a given object is something
very different. Could we solve this puzzle, we should have done something
towards gaining an insight into the philosophy of magic.

We observe, in the first place, that the _rationale_ of hypnotism, and of
trance in general, is distinct from that of memory and of imagination, and
even from that of dreams. It resembles these only in so far as it involves
a quasi-perception of something not actually present or existent. But
memory and imagination never mislead us into mistaking their suggestions
for realities: while in dreams, the dreamer's fancy alone is active; the
bodily faculties are not in action. In trance, however, the subject may
appear to be, to all intents and purposes, awake. Yet this state, unlike
the others, is abnormal. The brain seems to be in a passive, or, at any
rate, in a detached condition; it cannot carry out or originate ideas, nor
can it examine an idea as to its truth or falsehood. Furthermore, it
cannot receive or interpret the reports of its own bodily senses. In
short, its relations with the external world are suspended: and since the
body is a part of the external world, the brain can no longer control the
body's movements.

Bodily movements are, however, to some extent, automatic. Given a certain
stimulus in the brain or nerve-centres, and certain corresponding muscular
contractions follow: and this whether or not the stimulus be applied in a
normal manner. Although, therefore, the entranced brain cannot
spontaneously control the body, yet if we can apply an independent
stimulus to it, the body will make a fitting and apparently intelligent
response. The reader has doubtless seen those ingenious pieces of
mechanism which are set in motion by dropping into an orifice a coin or
pellet. Now, could we drop into the passive brain of an entranced person
the idea that a chair is a horse, for instance,--the person would give
every sensible indication of having adopted that figment as a fact.

But how (since he can no longer communicate with the world by means of his
senses) is this idea to be insinuated? The man is magnetized--that is to
say, insulated; how can we have intercourse with him?

Experiments show that this can be effected only through the magnetizer.
Asleep towards the rest of the world, towards him the entranced person is
awake. Not awake, however, as to the bodily senses; neither the magnetizer
nor any one else can approach by that route. It is true that, if the
magnetizer speaks to him, he knows what is said: but he does not hear
physically; because he perceives the unspoken thought just as readily. But
since whatever does not belong to his body must belong to his soul (or
mind, if that term be preferable), it follows that the magnetizer must
communicate with the magnetized on the mental or spiritual plane; that is,
immediately, or without the intervention of the body.

Let us review the position we have reached:--We have an entranced or
magnetized person,--a person whose mind, or spirit, has, by a certain
process, been so far withdrawn from conscious communion with his own
bodily senses as to disable him from receiving through them any tidings
from the external world. He is not, however, wholly withdrawn from his
body, for, in that case, the body would be dead; whereas, in fact, its
organic or animal life continues almost unimpaired. He is therefore
neither out of the body nor in it, but in an anomalous region midway
between the two,--a state in which he can receive no sensuous impressions
from the physical world, nor be put in conscious communication with the
spiritual world through any channel--save one.

This one exception is, as we have seen, the person who magnetized him. The
magnetizer is, then, the one and only medium through which the person
magnetized can obtain impressions: and these impressions are conveyed
directly from the mind, or spirit, of the magnetizer to that of the
magnetized. Let us note, further, that the former is not, like the latter,
in a semi-disembodied state, but is in the normal exercise of his bodily
functions and faculties. He possesses, consequently, his normal ability to
originate ideas and to impart them: and whatever ideas he chooses to
impart to the magnetized person, the latter is fain passively and
implicitly to accept. And having so received them, they descend naturally
into the automatic mechanism of the body, and are by it mechanically
interpreted or enacted.

So far, the theory is good: but something seems amiss in the working. We
find that a certain process frequently issues in a certain effect: but we
do not yet know why this should be the case. Some fundamental link is
wanting; and this link is manifestly a knowledge of the true relations
between mind and matter: of the laws to which the mental or spiritual
world is subject: of what nature itself is: and of what Creation means.
Let us cast a glance at these fundamental subjects; for they are the key
without which the secrets of magic must remain locked and hidden.

In common speech we call the realm of the material universe, Creation; but
philosophy denies its claim to that title. Man alone is Creation:
everything else is appearance. The universe appears, because man exists:
he implies the universe, but is not implied by it. We may assist our
metaphysics, here, by a physical illustration. Take a glass prism and hold
in the sunlight before a white surface. Let the prism represent man: the
sun, man's Creator: and the seven-hued ray cast by the prism, nature, or
the material universe. Now, if we remove the light, the ray vanishes: it
vanishes, also, if we take away the prism: but so long as the sun and the
prism--God and man--remain in their mutual relation, so long must the
rainbow nature appear. Nature, in short, is not God; neither is it man;
but it is the inevitable concomitant or expression of the creative
attitude of God towards man. It is the shadow of the elements of which
humanity or human nature is composed: or, shall we say, it is the
apparition in sense of the spiritual being of mankind,--not, be it
observed, of the being of any individual or of any aggregation of
individuals; but of humanity as a whole. For this reason, also, is nature
orderly, complete, and permanent,--that it is conditioned not upon our
frail and faulty personalities, but upon our impersonal, universal human
nature, in which is transacted the miracle of God's incarnation, and
through which He forever shines.

Besides Creator and creature, nothing else can be; and whatever else seems
to be, must be only a seeming. Nature, therefore, is the shadow of a
shade, but it serves an indispensable use. For since there can be no
direct communication between finite and Infinite--God and man--a medium or
common ground is needed, where they may meet; and nature, the shadow which
the Infinite causes the finite to project, is just that medium. Man,
looking upon this shadow, mistakes it for real substance, serving him for
foothold and background, and assisting him to attain self-consciousness.
God, on the other hand, finds in nature the means of revealing Himself to
His creature without compromising the creature's freedom. Man supposes the
universe to be a physical structure made by God in space and time, and in
some region of which He resides, at a safe distance from us His creatures:
whereas, in truth, God is distant from us only so far as we remove
ourselves from our own inmost intuitions of truth and good.

But what is that substance or quality which underlies and gives
homogeneity to the varying forms of nature, so that they seem to us to own
a common origin?--what is that logical abstraction upon which we have
bestowed the name of matter? scientific analysis finds matter only as
forms, never as itself: until, in despair, it invents an atomic theory,
and lets it go at that. But if, discarding the scientific method, we
question matter from the philosophical standpoint, we shall find it less
obdurate.

Man, considered as a mind or spirit, consists of volition and
intelligence; or, what is the same, of emotion or affection, and of the
thoughts which are created by this affection. Nothing can be affirmed of
man as a spirit which does not fall under one or other of these two parts.
Now, a creature consisting solely of affections and thoughts must, of
course, have something to love and to think about. Man's final destiny is
no doubt to love and consider his Creator; but that can only be after a
reactionary or regenerative process has begun in him. Meanwhile, he must
love and consider the only other available object--that is, himself.
Manifestly, however, in order to bestow this attention upon himself, he
must first be made aware of his own existence. In order to effect this,
something must be added to man as spirit, enabling him to discriminate
between the subject thinking and loving, and the object loved and thought
of. This additional something, again, in order to fulfill its purpose,
must be so devised as not to appear an addition: it must seem even more
truly the man than the man himself. It must, therefore, perfectly
represent or correspond to the spiritual form and constitution; so that
the thoughts and affections of the spirit may enter into it as into their
natural home and continent.

This continent or vehicle of the mind is the human body. The body has two
aspects,--substance and form, answering to the two aspects of the mind,--
affection and thought: and affection finds its incarnation or
correspondence in substance; and thought, in form. The mind, in short,
realizes itself in terms of its reflection in the body, much as the body
realizes itself in terms of its reflection in the looking-glass: but it
does more than this, for it identifies itself with this its image. And how
is this identification made possible?

It is brought about by the deception of sense, which is the medium of
communication between the spiritual and the material man. Until this
miraculous medium is put in action, there can be no conscious relation
between these two planes, admirably as they are adapted to each other.
Sense is spiritual on one side and material on the other: but it is only
on the material side that it gathers its reports: on the spiritual side it
only delivers them. Every one of the five messengers whereby we are
apprised of external existence brings us an earthly message only. And
since these messengers act spontaneously, and since the mind's only other
source of knowledge is intuition, which cannot be sensuously confirmed,--
it is little wonder if man has inclined to the persuasion that what is
highest in him is but an attribute of what is lowest, and that when the
body dies, the soul must follow it into nothingness.

Creative energy, being infinite, passes through the world of causes to the
world of effects--through the spiritual to the physical plane. Matter is
therefore the symbol of the ultimate of creative activity; it is the
negative of God. As God is infinite, matter is finite; as He is life, it
is death; as He is real, it is unreal; as He reveals, matter veils. And as
the relation of God to man's spirit is constant and eternal, so is the
physical quality of matter fixed and permanent. Now, in order to arrive at
a comprehension of what matter is in itself, let us descend from the
general to the specific, and investigate the philosophical elements of a
pebble, for instance. A pebble is two things: it is a mineral: and it is a
particular concrete example of mineral. In its mineral aspect, it is out
of space and time, and is--not a fact, but--a truth; a perception of the
mind. In so far as it is mineral, therefore, it has no relation to sense,
but only to thought: and on the other hand, in so far as it is a
particular concrete pebble, it is cognizable by sense but not by thought;
for what is in sense is out of thought: the one supersedes the other. But
if sense thus absorbs matter, so as to be philosophically
indistinguishable from it, we are constrained to identify matter with our
sensuous perception of it: and if our exemplary pebble had nothing but its
material quality to depend upon, it would cease to exist not only to
thought, but to sense likewise. Its metaphysical aspect, in short, is the
only reality appertaining to it. Matter, then, may be defined as the
impact upon sense of that prismatic ray which we have called nature.

To apply this discussion to the subject in hand: Magic is a sort of parody
of reality. And when we recognize that Creation proceeds from within
outwards, or endogenously; and that matter is not the objective but the
subjective side of the universe, we are in a position to perceive that in
order magically to control matter, we must apply our efforts not to matter
itself, but to our own minds. The natural world affects us from without
inwards: the magical world affects us from within outwards: instead of
objects suggesting ideas, ideas are made to suggest objects. And as, in
the former case, when the object is removed the idea vanishes; so in the
latter case, when the idea is removed, the object vanishes. Both objects
are illusions; but the illusion in the first instance is the normal
illusion of sense, whereas in the second instance it is the abnormal
illusion of mind.

The above argument can at best serve only as a hint to such as incline
seriously to investigate the subject, and perhaps as a touchstone for
testing the validity of a large and noisy mass of pretensions which engage
the student at the outset of his enquiry. Many of these pretensions are
the result of ignorance; many of deliberate intent to deceive; some,
again, of erroneous philosophical theories. The Tibetan adepts seem to
belong either to the second or to the last of these categories,--or,
perhaps, to an impartial mingling of all three. They import a cumbrous
machinery of auras, astral bodies, and elemental spirits; they divide man
into seven principles, nature into seven kingdoms; they regard spirit as a
refined form of matter, and matter as the one absolute fact of the
universe,--the alpha and omega of all things. They deny a supreme Deity,
but hold out hopes of a practical deityship for the majority of the human
race. In short, their philosophy appeals to the most evil instincts of the
soul, and has the air of being ex-post-facto; whenever they run foul of a
prodigy, they invent arbitrarily a fanciful explanation of it. But it will
be found, I think, that the various phases of hypnotism, and a
systematized use of spiritism, will amply account for every miracle they
actually bring to pass.

Upon the whole, a certain vulgarity is inseparable from even the most
respectable forms of magic,--an atmosphere of tinsel, of ostentation, of
big cry and little wool. A child might have told us that matter is not
almighty, that minds are sometimes transparent to one another, that love
and faith can work wonders. And we also know that, in this mortal life,
our means are exquisitely adapted to our ends; and that we can gain no
solid comfort or advantage by striving to elbow our way a few inches
further into the region of the occult and abnormal. Magic, however
specious its achievements, is only a mockery of the Creative power, and
exposes its unlikeness to it. "It is the attribute of natural existence,"
a profound writer has said, "to be a form of use to something higher than
itself, so that whatever does not, either potentially or actually, possess
within it this soul of use, does not honestly belong to nature, but is a
sensational effect produced upon the individual intelligence." [Footnote:
Henry James, in "Society the Redeemed Form of Man."]

No one can overstep the order and modesty of general existence without
bringing himself into perilous proximity to subjects more profound and
sacred than the occasion warrants. Life need not be barren of mystery and
miracle to any one of us; but they shall be such tender mysteries and
instructive miracles as the devotion of motherhood, and the blooming of
spring. We are too close to Infinite love and wisdom to play pranks before
it, and provoke comparison between our paltry juggleries and its
omnipotence and majesty.




CHAPTER XI.

AMERICAN WILD ANIMALS IN ART.


The hunter and the sportsman are two very different persons. The hunter
pursues animals because he loves them and sympathizes with them, and kills
them as the champions of chivalry used to slay one another--courteously,
fairly, and with admiration and respect. To stalk and shoot the elk and
the grizzly bear is to him what wooing and winning a beloved maiden would
be to another man. Far from being the foe or exterminator of the game he
follows, he, more than any one else, is their friend, vindicator, and
confidant. A strange mutual ardor and understanding unites him with his
quarry. He loves the mountain sheep and the antelope, because they can
escape him; the panther and the bear, because they can destroy him. His
relations with them are clean, generous, and manly. And on the other hand,
the wild animals whose wildness can never be tamed, whose inmost principle
of existence it is to be apart and unapproachable,--those creatures who
may be said to cease to be when they cease to be intractable,--seem, after
they have eluded their pursuer to the utmost, or fought him to the death,
to yield themselves to him with a sort of wild contentment--as if they
were glad to admit the sovereignty of man, though death come with the
admission. The hunter, in short, asks for his happiness only to be alone
with what he hunts; the sportsman, after his day's sport, must needs
hasten home to publish the size of the "bag," and to wring from his
fellow-men the glory and applause which he has not the strength and
simplicity to find in the game itself.

But if the true hunter is rare, the union of the hunter and the artist is
rarer still. It demands not only the close familiarity, the loving
observation, and the sympathy, but also the faculty of creation--the eye
which selects what is constructive and beautiful, and passes over what is
superfluous and inharmonious, and the hand skilful to carry out what the
imagination conceives. In the man whose work I am about to consider, these
qualities are developed in a remarkable degree, though it was not until he
was a man grown, and had fought with distinction through the civil war,
that he himself became aware of the artistic power that was in him. The
events of his life, could they be rehearsed here, would form a tale of
adventure and vicissitude more varied and stirring than is often found in
fiction. He has spent by himself days and weeks in the vast solitudes of
our western prairies and southern morasses. He has been the companion of
trappers and frontiersmen, the friend and comrade of Indians, sleeping
side by side with them in their wigwams, running the rapids in their
canoes, and riding with them in the hunt. He has met and overcome the
panther and the grizzly single-handed, and has pursued the flying cimmaron
to the snowy summits of the Rocky Mountains, and brought back its crescent
horns as a trophy. He has fought and slain the gray wolf with no other
weapons than his hands and teeth; and at night he has lain concealed by
lonely tarns, where the wild coyote came to patter and bark and howl at
the midnight moon. His name and achievements are familiar to the dwellers
in those savage regions, whose estimate of a man is based, not upon his
social and financial advantages, but upon what he is and can do. Yet he is
not one who wears his merit outwardly. His appearance, indeed, is
striking; tall and athletic, broad-shouldered and stout-limbed, with the
long, elastic step of the moccasined Indian, and something of the Indian's
reticence and simplicity. But he can with difficulty be brought to allude
to his adventures, and is reserved almost to the point of ingenuity on all
that concerns himself or redounds to his credit. It is only in familiar
converse with friends that the humor, the cultivation, the knowledge, and
the social charm of the man appear, and his marvellous gift of vivid and
picturesque narration discloses itself. But, in addition to all this, or
above it all, he is the only great animal sculptor of his time, the
successor of the French Barye, and (as any one may satisfy himself who
will take the trouble to compare their works) the equal of that famous
artist in scope and treatment of animal subjects, and his superior in
knowledge and in truth and power of conception. It would be a poor
compliment to call Edward Kemeys the American Barye; but Barye is the only
man whose animal sculptures can bear comparison with Mr. Kemeys's.

Of Mr. Kemeys's productions, a few are to be seen at his studio, 133 West
Fifty-third Street, New York city. These are the models, in clay or
plaster, as they came fresh from the artist's hand. From this condition
they can either be enlarged to life or colossal size, for parks or public
buildings, or cast in bronze in their present dimensions for the
enrichment of private houses. Though this collection includes scarce a
tithe of what the artist has produced, it forms a series of groups and
figures which, for truth to nature, artistic excellence, and originality,
are actually unique. So unique are they, indeed, that the uneducated eye
does not at first realize their really immense value. Nothing like this
little sculpture gallery has been seen before, and it is very improbable
that there will ever again be a meeting of conditions and qualities
adequate to reproducing such an exhibition. For we see here not merely,
nor chiefly, the accurate representation of the animal's external aspect,
but--what is vastly more difficult to seize and portray--the essential
animal character or temperament which controls and actuates the animal's
movements and behavior. Each one of Mr. Kemeys's figures gives not only
the form and proportions of the animal, according to the nicest anatomical
studies and measurements, but it is the speaking embodiment of profound
insight into that animal's nature and knowledge of its habits. The
spectator cannot long examine it without feeling that he has learned much
more of its characteristics and genius than if he had been standing in
front of the same animal's cage at the Zoological Gardens; for here is an
artist who understands how to translate pose into meaning, and action into
utterance, and to select those poses and actions which convey the broadest
and most comprehensive idea of the subject's prevailing traits. He not
only knows what posture or movement the anatomical structure of the animal
renders possible, but he knows precisely in what degree such posture or
movement is modified by the animal's physical needs and instincts. In
other words, he always respects the modesty of nature, and never yields to
the temptation to be dramatic and impressive at the expense of truth. Here
is none of Barye's exaggeration, or of Landseer's sentimental effort to
humanize animal nature. Mr. Kemeys has rightly perceived that animal
nature is not a mere contraction of human nature; but that each animal, so
far as it owns any relation to man at all, represents the unimpeded
development of some particular element of man's nature. Accordingly,
animals must be studied and portrayed solely upon their own basis and
within their own limits; and he who approaches them with this
understanding will find, possibly to his surprise, that the theatre thus
afforded is wide and varied enough for the exercise of his best ingenuity
and capacities. At first, no doubt, the simple animal appears too simple
to be made artistically interesting, apart from this or that conventional
or imaginative addition. The lion must be presented, not as he is, but as
vulgar anticipation expects him to be; not with the savageness and terror
which are native to him, but with the savageness and terror which those
who have trembled and fled at the echo of his roar invest him with,--which
are quite another matter. Zoölogical gardens and museums have their uses,
but they cannot introduce us to wild animals as they really are; and the
reports of those who have caught terrified or ignorant glimpses of them in
their native regions will mislead us no less in another direction. Nature
reveals her secrets only to those who have faithfully and rigorously
submitted to the initiation; but to them she shows herself marvellous and
inexhaustible. The "simple animal" avouches his ability to transcend any
imaginative conception of him. The stern economy of his structure and
character, the sureness and sufficiency of his every manifestation, the
instinct and capacity which inform all his proceedings,--these are things
which are concealed from a hasty glance by the very perfection of their
state. Once seen and comprehended, however, they work upon the mind of the
observer with an ever increasing power; they lead him into a new, strange,
and fascinating world, and generously recompense him for any effort he may
have made to penetrate thither. Of that strange and fascinating world Mr.
Kemeys is the true and worthy interpreter, and, so far as appears, the
only one. Through difficulty and discouragement of all kinds, he has kept
to the simple truth, and the truth has rewarded him. He has done a service
of incalculable value to his country, not only in vindicating American
art, but in preserving to us, in a permanent and beautiful form, the vivid
and veracious figures of a wild fauna which, in the inevitable progress of
colonization and civilization, is destined within a few years to vanish
altogether. The American bear and bison, the cimmaron and the elk, the
wolf and the 'coon--where will they be a generation hence? Nowhere, save
in the possession of those persons who have to-day the opportunity and the
intelligence to decorate their rooms and parks with Mr. Kemeys's
inimitable bronzes. The opportunity is great--much greater, I should
think, than the intelligence necessary for availing ourselves of it; and
it is a unique opportunity. In other words, it lies within the power of
every cultivated family in the United States to enrich itself with a work
of art which is entirely American; which, as art, fulfils every
requirement; which is of permanent and increasing interest and value from
an ornamental point of view; and which is embodied in the most enduring of
artistic materials.

The studio in which Mr. Kemeys works--a spacious apartment--is, in
appearance, a cross between a barn-loft and a wigwam. Round the walls are
suspended the hides, the heads, and the horns of the animals which the
hunter has shot; and below are groups, single figures, and busts, modelled
by the artist, in plaster, terracotta, or clay. The colossal design of the
"Still Hunt"--an American panther crouching before its spring--was
modelled here, before being cast in bronze and removed to its present site
in Central Park. It is a monument of which New York and America may be
proud; for no such powerful and veracious conception of a wild animal has
ever before found artistic embodiment. The great cat crouches with head
low, extended throat, and ears erect. The shoulders are drawn far back,
the fore paws huddled beneath the jaws. The long, lithe back rises in an
arch in the middle, sinking thence to the haunches, while the angry tail
makes a strong curve along the ground to the right. The whole figure is
tense and compact with restrained and waiting power; the expression is
stealthy, pitiless, and terrible; it at once fascinates and astounds the
beholder. While Mr. Kemeys was modelling this animal, an incident occurred
which he has told me in something like the following words. The artist
does not encourage the intrusion of idle persons while he is at work,
though no one welcomes intelligent inspection and criticism more cordially
than he. On this occasion he was alone in the studio with his Irish
factotum, Tom, and the outer door, owing to the heat of the weather, had
been left ajar. All of a sudden the artist was aware of the presence of a
stranger in the room. "He was a tall, hulking fellow, shabbily dressed,
like a tramp, and looked as if he might make trouble if he had a mind to.
However, he stood quite still in front of the statue, staring at it, and
not saying anything. So I let him alone for a while; I thought it would be
time enough to attend to him when he began to beg or make a row. But after
some time, as he still hadn't stirred, Tom came to the conclusion that a
hint had better be given him to move on; so he took a broom and began
sweeping the floor, and the dust went all over the fellow; but he didn't
pay the least attention. I began to think there would probably be a fight;
but I thought I'd wait a little longer before doing anything. At last I
said to him, 'Will you move aside, please? You're in my way.' He stepped
over a little to the right, but still didn't open his mouth, and kept his
eyes fixed on the panther. Presently I said to Tom, 'Well, Tom, the cheek
of some people passes belief!' Tom replied with more clouds of dust; but
the stranger never made a sign. At last I got tired, so I stepped up to
the fellow and said to him: 'Look here, my friend, when I asked you to
move aside, I meant you should move the other side of the door.' He roused
up then, and gave himself a shake, and took a last look at the panther,
and said he, 'That's all right, boss; I know all about the door; but--what
a spring she's going to make!' Then," added Kemeys, self-reproachfully, "I
could have wept!"

But although this superb figure no longer dominates the studio, there is
no lack of models as valuable and as interesting, though not of heroic
size. Most interesting of all to the general observer are, perhaps, the
two figures of the grizzly bear. These were designed from a grizzly which
Mr. Kemeys fought and killed in the autumn of 1881 in the Rocky Mountains,
and the mounted head of which grins upon the wall overhead, a grisly
trophy indeed. The impression of enormous strength, massive yet elastic,
ponderous yet alert, impregnable for defence as irresistible in attack; a
strength which knows no obstacles, and which never meets its match,--this
impression is as fully conveyed in these figures, which are not over a
foot in height, as if the animal were before us in its natural size. You
see the vast limbs, crooked with power, bound about with huge ropes and
plates of muscle, and clothed in shaggy depths of fur; the vast breadth of
the head, with its thick, low ears, dull, small eyes, and long up-curving
snout; the roll and lunge of the gait, like the motion of a vessel
plunging forward before the wind; the rounded immensity of the trunk, and
the huge bluntness of the posteriors; and all these features are combined
with such masterly unity of conception and plastic vigor, that the
diminutive model insensibly grows mighty beneath your gaze, until you
realize the monster as if he stood stupendous and grim before you. In the
first of the figures the bear has paused in his great stride to paw over
and snuff at the horned head of a mountain sheep, half buried in the soil.
The action of the right arm and shoulder, and the burly slouch of the
arrested stride, are of themselves worth a gallery of pseudo-classic
Venuses and Roman senators. The other bear is lolling back on his
haunches, with all four paws in the air, munching some grapes from a vine
which he has torn from its support. The contrast between the savage
character of the beast and his absurdly peaceful employment gives a touch
of terrific comedy to this design. After studying these figures, one
cannot help thinking what a noble embellishment either of them would be,
put in bronze, of colossal size, in the public grounds of one of our great
Western cities. And inasmuch as the rich citizens of the West not only
know what a grizzly bear is, but are more fearless and independent, and
therefore often more correct in their artistic opinion than the somewhat
sophisticated critics of the East, there is some cause for hoping that
this thing may be brought to pass.

Beside the grizzly stands the mountain sheep, or cimmaron, the most
difficult to capture of all four-footed animals, whose gigantic curved
horns are the best trophy of skill and enterprise that a hunter can bring
home with him. The sculptor has here caught him in one of his most
characteristic attitudes--just alighted from some dizzy leap on the
headlong slope of a rocky mountainside. On such a spot nothing but the
cimmaron could retain its footing; yet there he stands, firm and secure as
the rock itself, his fore feet planted close together, the fore legs rigid
and straight as the shaft of a lance, while the hind legs pose easily in
attendance upon them. "The cimmaron always strikes plumb-centre, and he
never makes a mistake," is Mr. Kemeys's laconic comment; and we can
recognize the truth of the observation in this image. Perfectly at home
and comfortable on its almost impossible perch, the cimmaron curves its
great neck and turns its head upward, gazing aloft toward the height
whence it has descended. "It's the golden eagle he hears," says the
sculptor; "they give him warning of danger." It is a magnificent animal, a
model of tireless vigor in all its parts; a creature made to hurl itself
head-foremost down appalling gulfs of space, and poise itself at the
bottom as jauntily as if gravitation were but a bugbear of timid
imaginations. I find myself unconsciously speaking about these plaster
models as if they were the living animals which they represent; but the
more one studies Mr. Kemeys's works, the more instinct with redundant and
breathing life do they appear.

It would be impossible even to catalogue the contents of this studio, the
greater part of which is as well worth describing as those examples which
have already been touched upon; nor could a more graphic pen than mine
convey an adequate impression of their excellence. But there is here a
figure of the 'coon, which, as it is the only one ever modelled, ought not
to be passed over in silence. In appearance this animal is a curious
medley of the fox, the wolf, and the bear, besides I-know-not-what (as the
lady in "Punch" would say) that belongs to none of those beasts. As may be
imagined, therefore, its right portrayal involves peculiar difficulties,
and Mr. Kemeys's genius is nowhere better shown than in the manner in
which these have been surmounted. Compact, plump, and active in figure,
quick and subtle in its movements, the 'coon crouches in a flattened
position along the limb of a tree, its broad, shallow head and pointed
snout a little lifted, as it gazes alertly outward and downward. It
sustains itself by the clutch of its slender-clawed toes on the branch,
the fore legs being spread apart, while the left hind leg is withdrawn
inward, and enters smoothly into the contour of the furred side; the
bushy, fox-like tail, ringed with dark and light bands, curving to the
left. Thus posed and modelled in high relief on a tile-shaped plaque, Mr.
Kemeys's coon forms a most desirable ornament for some wise man's
sideboard or mantle-piece, where it may one day be pointed out as the only
surviving representative of its species.

The two most elaborate groups here have already attained some measure of
publicity; the "Bison and Wolves" having been exhibited in the Paris Salon
in 1878, and the "Deer and Panther" having been purchased in bronze by Mr.
Winans during the sculptor's sojourn in England. Each group represents one
of those deadly combats between wild beasts which are among the most
terrific and at the same time most natural incidents of animal existence;
and they are of especial interest as showing the artist's power of
concentrated and graphic composition. A complicated story is told in both
these instances with a masterly economy of material and balance of
proportion; so that the spectator's eye takes in the whole subject at a
glance, and yet finds inexhaustible interest in the examination of
details, all of which contribute to the central effect without distracting
the attention. A companion piece to the "Deer and Panther" shows the same
animals as they have fallen, locked together in death after the combat is
over. In the former group, the panther, in springing upon the deer, had
impaled its neck on the deer's right antler, and had then swung round
under the latter's body, burying the claws of its right fore foot in the
ruminant's throat. In order truthfully to represent the second stage of
the encounter, therefore, it was necessary not merely to model a second
group, but to retain the elements and construction of the first group
under totally changed conditions. This is a feat of such peculiar
difficulty that I think few artists in any branch of art would venture to
attempt it; nevertheless, Mr. Kemeys has accomplished it; and the more the
two groups are studied in connection with each other, the more complete
will his success be found to have been. The man who can do this may surely
be admitted a master, whose works are open only to affirmative criticism.
For his works the most trying of all tests is their comparison with one
another; and the result of such comparison is not merely to confirm their
merit, but to illustrate and enhance it.

For my own part, my introduction to Mr. Kemeys's studio was the opening to
me of a new world, where it has been my good fortune to spend many days of
delightful and enlightening study. How far the subject of this writing may
have been already familiar to the readers of it, I have no means of
knowing; but I conceive it to be no less than my duty, as a countryman of
Mr. Kemeys's and a lover of all that is true and original in art, to pay
the tribute of my appreciation to what he has done. There is no danger of
his getting more recognition than he deserves, and he is not one whom
recognition can injure. He reverences his art too highly to magnify his
own exposition of it; and when he reads what I have set down here, he will
smile and shake his head, and mutter that I have divined the perfect idea
in the imperfect embodiment. Unless I greatly err, however, no one but
himself is competent to take that exception. The genuine artist is never
satisfied with his work; he perceives where it falls short of his
conception. But to others it will not be incomplete; for the achievements
of real art are always invested with an atmosphere and aroma--a spiritual
quality perhaps--proceeding from the artist's mind and affecting that of
the beholder. And thus it happens that the story or the poem, the picture
or the sculpture, receives even in its material form that last indefinable
grace, that magic light that never was on sea or land, which no pen or
brush or graving-tool has skill to seize. Matter can never rise to the
height of spirit; but spirit informs it when it has done its best, and
ennobles it with the charm that the artist sought and the world desired.

*** Since the above was written, Mr. Kemeys has removed his studio to
Perth Amboy, N. J.





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