CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 1292.C3E5 
 
 Emerson, and other essays, by John Jay Cha 
 
 3 1924 014 312 502 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014312502 
 
EMERSON 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
EMERSON 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1898 
 
Copyright, 1898, 
 By Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 
 iHtttberisitB ?3w8s: 
 JoHK Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 Emerson 3 
 
 Walt Whitman m 
 
 A Study of Romeo 131 
 
 Michael Angelo's Sonnets 153 
 
 The Fourth Canto of the Inferno . . 173 
 
 Robert Browning 185 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson 217 
 
EMERSON 
 
EMERSON 
 
 " Leave this hypocritical prating about the 
 masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, 
 pernicious in their demands and influence, and 
 need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. 
 I wish not to concede anything to them, but 
 to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and 
 draw individuals out of them. The worst of 
 charity is that the lives you are asked to pre- 
 serve are not worth preserving. Masses ! 
 The calamity is the masses. I do not wish 
 any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, 
 sweet, accomplished women only, and no 
 shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking 
 million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If 
 government knew how, I should like to see 
 it check, not multiply the population. 
 When it reaches its true law of action, every 
 man that is born will be hailed as essential. 
 Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us 
 have the considerate vote of single men spoken 
 on their honor and their conscience." 
 3 
 
EMERSON 
 
 This extract front The Conduct of Life 
 gives fairly enough the leading thought of 
 Emerson's life. The unending warfare be- 
 tween the individual and society shows us in 
 each generation a poet or two, a dramatist or 
 a musician who exalts and deifies the individual, 
 and leads us back again to the only object 
 which is really worthy of enthusiasm or which 
 can permanently excite it, — the character of a 
 man. It is surprising to find this identity of 
 content in all great deliverances. The only 
 thing we really admire is personal liberty. 
 Those who fought for it and those who en- 
 joyed it are our heroes. 
 
 But the hero may enslave his race by bring- 
 ing in a system of tyranny ; the battle-cry of 
 freedom may become a dogma which crushes 
 the soul ; one good custom may corrupt the 
 world. And so the inspiration of one age 
 becomes the damnation of the next. This 
 crystallizing of life into death has occurred so 
 often that it may almost be regarded as one 
 of the laws of progress. 
 
 Emerson represents a protest against the 
 tyranny of democracy. He is the most 
 recent example of elemental hero-worship. 
 His opinions are absolutely unqualified ex- 
 cept by his temperament. He expresses 
 a form of belief in the importance of the 
 4 
 
EMERSON 
 
 individual which is independent of any per- 
 sonal relations he has with the world. It 
 is as if a man had been withdrawn from the 
 earth and dedicated to condensing and em- 
 bodying this eternal idea — the value of the 
 individual soul — so vividly, so vitally, that 
 his words could not die, yet in such illusive 
 and abstract forms that by no chance and by 
 no power could his creed be used for pur- 
 poses of tyranny. Dogma cannot be ex- 
 tracted from it. Schools cannot be built on 
 it. It either lives as the spirit lives, or else it 
 evaporates and leaves nothing. Emerson was 
 so afraid of the letter that killeth that he would 
 hardly trust his words to print. He was as- 
 sured there was no such thing as literal truth, 
 but only literal falsehood. He therefore re- 
 sorted to metaphors which could by no chance 
 be taken literally. And he has probably 
 succeeded in leaving a body of work which 
 cannot be made to operate to any other end 
 than that for which he designed it. If this be 
 true, he has accomplished the inconceivable 
 feat of eluding misconception. If it be true, 
 he stands alone in the history of teachers ; he 
 has circumvented fate, he has left an unmixed 
 blessing behind him. 
 
 The signs of those times which brought 
 forth Emerson are not wholly undecipherable. 
 5 
 
EMERSON 
 
 They are the same times which gave rise to 
 every character of significance during the 
 period before the war. Emerson is indeed 
 the easiest to understand of all the men of his 
 time, because his life is freest from the tangles 
 and qualifications of circumstance. He is a 
 sheer and pure type and creature of destiny, 
 and the unconsciousness that marks his devel- 
 opment allies him to the deepest phenomena. 
 It is convenient, in describing him, to use 
 language which implies consciousness on his 
 part, but he himself had no purpose, no theory 
 of himself; he was a product. 
 
 The years between 1820 and 1830 were the 
 most pitiable through which this country has 
 ever passed. The conscience of the North 
 was pledged to the Missouri Compromise, and 
 that Compromise neither slumbered nor slept. 
 In New England, where the old theocratical 
 oligarchy of the colonies had survived the 
 Revolution and kept under its own water- 
 locks the new flood of trade, the conserva- 
 tism of politics reinforced the conservatism 
 of religion ; and as if these two inquisitions 
 were not enough to stifle the soul of man, 
 the conservatism of business self-interest 
 was superimposed. The history of the con- 
 flicts which followed has been written by the 
 radicals, who negligently charge up to self- 
 6 
 
EMERSON 
 
 interest all the resistance which establishments 
 offer to change. But it was not solely self- 
 interest, it was consci,ence that backed the 
 Missouri Compromise, nowhere else, naturally, 
 so strongly as in New England. It was con- 
 science that made cowards of us all. The 
 white-lipped generation of Edward Everett 
 were victims, one might even say martyrs, to 
 conscience. They suffered the most terrible 
 martyrdom that can fall to man, a martyrdom 
 which injured their immortal volition and 
 dried up the springs of life. If it were not 
 that our poets have too seldom deigned to dip 
 into real life, I do not know what more awful 
 subject for a poem could have been found than 
 that of the New England judge enforcing the 
 fugitive slave law. For lack of such a poem 
 the heroism of these men has been forgotten, 
 the losing heroism of conservatism. It was 
 this spiritual power of a committed conscience 
 which met the new forces as they arose, and it 
 deserves a better name than these new forces 
 afterward gave it. In 1830 the social fruits 
 of these heavy conditions could be seen in the 
 life of the people. Free speech was lost. 
 
 " I know no country," says Tocqueville, 
 
 who was here in 1831, "in which there is 
 
 so little independence of mind and freedom 
 
 of discussion as in America." Tocqueville 
 
 7 
 
EMERSON 
 
 recurs to the point again and again. He can- 
 not disguise his surprise at it, and it tinged 
 his whole philosophy and his book. The 
 timidity of the Americans of this era was a 
 thing which intelligent foreigners could not 
 understand. Miss Martineau wrote in her 
 Autobiography: "It was not till months 
 afterwards that I was told that there were two 
 reasons why I was not invited there [Chelsea] 
 as elsewhere. One reason was that I had 
 avowed, in reply to urgent questions, that I 
 was disappointed in an oration of Mr. 
 Everett's ; and another was that I had pub- 
 licly condemned the institution of slavery. I 
 hope the Boston people have outgrown the 
 childishness of sulking at opinions not in 
 either case volunteered, but obtained by pres- 
 sure. But really, the subservience to opinion 
 at that time seemed a sort of mania." 
 
 The mania was by no means confined to 
 Boston, but qualified this period of our history 
 throughout the Northern States. There was 
 no literature. " If great writers have not at 
 present existed in America, the reason is very 
 simply given in the fact that there can be no 
 literary genius without freedom of opinion, 
 and freedom of opinion does not exist in 
 America," wrote Tocqueville. There were 
 no amusements, neither music nor sport 
 8 
 
EMERSON 
 
 nor pastime, indoors or out of doors. The 
 whole life of the community was a life of the 
 intelligence, and upon the intelligence lay the 
 weight of intellectual tyranny. The pressure 
 kept on increasing, and the suppressed forces 
 kept on increasing, till at last, as if to show 
 what gigantic power was needed to keep con- 
 servatism dominant, the Merchant Province 
 put forward Daniel Webster. 
 
 The worst period of panic seems to have 
 preceded the anti-slavery agitations of 1831, 
 because these agitations soon demonstrated 
 that the sky did not fall nor the earth yawn 
 and swallow Massachusetts because of Mr. 
 Garrison's opinions, as most people had sin- 
 cerely believed would be the case. Some 
 semblance of free speech was therefore grad- 
 ually regained. 
 
 Let us remember the world upon which the 
 young Emerson's eyes opened. The South 
 was a plantation. The North crooked the 
 hinges of the knee where thrift might follow 
 fawning. It was the era of Martin Chuzzlewit, 
 a malicious caricature, — founded on fact. 
 This time of humiliation, when there was no 
 free speech, no literature, little manliness, no 
 reality, no simplicity, no accomplishment, 
 was the era of American brag. We flattered 
 the foreigner and we boasted of ourselves. 
 9 
 
EMERSON 
 
 We were over-sensitive, insolent, and cring- 
 ing. As late as 1845, G. P. Putnam, a most 
 sensible and modest man, published a book 
 to show what the country had done in the 
 field of culture. The book is a monument 
 of the age. With all its good sense and good 
 humor, it justifies foreign contempt because 
 it is explanatory. Underneath everything 
 lay a feeling of unrest, an instinct, — "this 
 country cannot permanently endure half slave 
 and half free," — which was the truth, but 
 which could not be uttered. 
 
 So long as there is any subject which men 
 may not freely discuss, they are timid upon 
 all subjects. They wear an iron crown and 
 talk in whispers. Such social conditions 
 crush and maim the individual, and through- 
 out New England, as throughout the whole 
 North, the individual was crushed and 
 maimed. 
 
 The generous youths who came to man- 
 hood between 1820 and 183O, while this 
 deadly era was maturing, seem to have under- 
 gone a revulsion against the world almost 
 before touching it ; at least two of them 
 suffered, revolted, and condemned, while still 
 boys sitting on benches in school, and came 
 forth advancing upon this old society like 
 gladiators. The activity of William Lloyd 
 10 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Garrison, the man of action, preceded by- 
 several years that of Emerson, who is his 
 prophet. Both of them were parts of one 
 revolution. One of Emerson's articles of 
 faith was that a man's thoughts spring from 
 his actions rather than his actions from his 
 thoughts, and possibly the same thing holds 
 good for society at large. Perhaps all truths, 
 whether moral or economic, must be worked 
 out in real life before they are discovered by 
 the student, and it was therefore necessary 
 that Garrison should be evolved earlier than 
 Emerson. 
 
 The silent years of early manhood, during 
 which Emerson passed through the Divinity 
 School and to his ministry, known by few, 
 understood by none, least of all by himself, 
 were years in which the revolting spirit of an 
 archangel thought out his creed. He came 
 forth perfect, with that serenity of which we 
 have scarce another example in history, — 
 that union of the man himself, his beliefs, and 
 his vehicle of expression that makes men 
 great because it makes them comprehensible. 
 The philosophy into which he had already 
 transmuted all his earlier theology at the 
 time we first meet him consisted of a very 
 simple drawing together of a few ideas, all of 
 which had long been familiar to the world. 
 
EMERSON 
 
 It is the wonderful use he made of these ideas, 
 the closeness with which they fitted his soul, 
 the tact with which he took what he needed, 
 like a bird building its nest, that make the 
 originality, the man. 
 
 The conclusion of Berkeley, that the ex- 
 ternal world is known to us only through our 
 impressions, and that therefore, for aught we 
 know, the whole universe exists only in our 
 own consciousness, cannot be disproved. It 
 is so simple a conception that a child may 
 understand it; and it has probably been 
 passed before the attention of every thinking 
 man since Plato's time. The notion is in it- 
 self a mere philosophical catch or crux to 
 which there is no answer. It may be true. 
 The mystics made this doctrine useful. They 
 were not content to doubt the independent 
 existence of the external world. They ima- 
 gined that this external world, the earth, the 
 planets, the phenomena of nature, bore some 
 relation to the emotions and destiny of the 
 soul. The soul and the cosmos were some- 
 how related, and related so intimately that the 
 cosmos might be regarded as a sort of pro- 
 jection or diagram of the soul. 
 
 Plato was the first man who perceived that 
 this idea could be made to provide the philos- 
 opher with a vehicle of expression more 
 
EMERSON 
 
 powerful than any other. If a man will once 
 plant himself firmly on the proposition that 
 he is the universe, that every emotion or 
 expression of his mind is correlated in some 
 way to phenomena in the external world, and 
 that he shall say how correlated, he is in a 
 position where the power of speech is at a 
 maximum. His figures of speech, his tropes, 
 his witticisms, take rank with the law of grav- 
 ity and the precession of the equinoxes. 
 Philosophical exaltation of the individual can- 
 not go beyond this point. It is the climax. 
 
 This is the school of thought to which 
 Emerson belonged. The sun and moon, the 
 planets, are mere symbols. They signify 
 whatever the poet chooses. The planets for 
 the most part stay in conjunction just long 
 enough to flash his thought through their 
 symbolism, and no permanent relation is 
 established between the soul and the zodiac. 
 There is, however, one link of correlation be- 
 tween the external and internal worlds which 
 Emerson considered established, and in which 
 he believed almost literally, namely, the moral 
 law. This idea he drew from Kant through 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth, and it is so famil- 
 iar to us all that it hardly needs stating. The 
 fancy that the good, the true, the beautiful, — 
 all things of which we instinctively approve, 
 13 
 
EMERSON 
 
 — are somehow connected together and are 
 really one thing; that our appreciation of 
 them is in its essence the recognition of a 
 law ; that this law, in fact all law and the very 
 idea of law, is a mere subjective experience ; 
 and that hence any external sequence which 
 we coordinate and name, like the law of grav- 
 ity, is really intimately connected with our 
 moral nature, — this fancy has probably some 
 basis of truth. Emerson adopted it as a 
 corner-stone of his thought. 
 
 Such are the ideas at the basis of Emerson's 
 philosophy, and it is fair to speak of them in 
 this place because they antedate everything 
 else which we know of him. They had been 
 for years in his mind before he spoke at all. 
 It was in the armor of this invulnerable ideal- 
 ism and with weapons like shafts of hght that 
 he came forth to fight. 
 
 In 1836, at the age of thirty-three, Emerson 
 published the little pamphlet called Nature, 
 which was an attempt to state his creed. Al- 
 though still young, he was not without ex- 
 perience of life. He had been assistant 
 minister to the Rev. Dr. Ware from 1829 
 to 1832, when he resigned his ministry on 
 account of his views regarding the Lord's 
 Supper. He had married and lost his first 
 wife in the same interval. He had been 
 14 
 
EMERSON 
 
 abroad and had visited Carlyle in 1833. He 
 had returned and settled in Concord, and had 
 taken up the profession of lecturing, upon 
 which he in part supported himself ever after. 
 It is unnecessary to review these early lec- 
 tures. " Large portions of them," says Mr. 
 Cabot, his biographer, "appeared afterwards in 
 the Essays, especially those of the first series." 
 Suffice it that through them Emerson had 
 become so well known that although Nature 
 was published anonymously, he was recog- 
 nized as the author. Many people had heard 
 of him at the time he resigned his charge, 
 and the story went abroad that the young 
 minister of the Second Church had gone 
 mad. The lectures had not discredited the 
 story, and Nature seemed to corroborate it. 
 Such was the impression which the book 
 made upon Boston in 1 836. As we read it 
 to-day, we are struck by its extraordinary 
 beauty of language. It is a supersensuous, 
 lyrical, and sincere rhapsody, written evi- 
 dently by a man of genius. It reveals a 
 nature compelling respect, — a Shelley, and 
 yet a sort of Yankee Shelley, who is mad only 
 when the wind is nor'-nor'west ; a mature 
 nature which must have been nourished for 
 years upon its own thoughts, to speak this 
 new language so eloquently, to stand so 
 IS 
 
EMERSON 
 
 calmly on its feet. The deliverance of his 
 thought is so perfect that this work adapts 
 itself to our mood and has the quality of 
 poetry. This fluency Emerson soon lost; it 
 is the quality missing in his poetry. It is the 
 efflorescence of youth. 
 
 " In good health, the air is a cordial of 
 incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, 
 in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded 
 sky, without having in my thoughts any occur- 
 rence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed 
 a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink 
 of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off 
 his years, as the snake his slough, and at what 
 period soever of life is always a child. In 
 the woods is perpetual youth. Within these 
 plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity 
 reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the 
 guest sees not how he should tire of them in 
 a thousand years. ... It is the uniform 
 effect of culture on the human mind, not to 
 shake our faith in the stability of particular 
 phenomena, as heat, water, azote; but to 
 lead us to regard nature as phenomenon, 
 not a substance ; to attribute necessary exist- 
 ence to spirit ; to esteem nature as an accident 
 and an effect." 
 
 Perhaps these quotations from the pam- 
 phlet called Nature are enough to show the 
 i6 
 
EMERSON 
 
 clouds of speculation in which Emerson had 
 been walking. With what lightning they 
 were charged was soon seen. 
 
 In 1837 he was asked to deliver the Phi 
 Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge. This was 
 the opportunity for which he had been wait- 
 ing. The mystic and eccentric young poet- 
 preacher now speaks his mind, and he turns 
 out to be a man exclusively interested in real 
 life. This recluse, too tender for contact with 
 the rough facts of the world, whose con- 
 science has retired him to rural Concord, 
 pours out a vial of wrath. This cub puts 
 forth the paw of a full-grown lion. 
 
 Emerson has left behind him nothing 
 stronger than this address, The American 
 Scholar. It was the first application of his 
 views to the events of his day, written and 
 delivered in the heat of early manhood while 
 his extraordinary powers were at their height. 
 It moves with a logical progression of which 
 he soon lost the habit. The subject of it, 
 the scholar's relation to the world, was the 
 passion of his life. The body of his belief is 
 to be found in this address, and in any ade- 
 quate account of him the whole address ought 
 to be given. 
 
 " Thus far," he said, " our holiday has been 
 simply a friendly sign of the survival of the 
 2 17 
 
EMERSON 
 
 love of letters amongst a people too busy to 
 give to letters any more. As such it is pre- 
 cious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. 
 Perhaps the time is already come when it 
 ought to be, and will be, something else; 
 when the sluggard intellect of this continent 
 will look from under its iron lids and fill the 
 postponed expectation of the world with some- 
 thing better than the exertions of mechanical 
 skill. . . . The theory of books is noble. 
 The scholar of the first age received into him 
 the world around ; brooded thereon ; gave it 
 the new arrangement of his own mind, and 
 uttered it again. It came into him life; it 
 went out from him truth. . . . Yet hence 
 arises a grave mischief The sacredness which 
 attaches to the act of creation, the act of 
 thought, is transferred to the record. The 
 poet chanting was felt to be a divine man: 
 henceforth the chant is divine, also. The 
 writer was a just and wise spirit: hence- 
 forward it is settled the book is perfect ; as 
 love of the hero corrupts into worship of his 
 statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious : 
 the guide is a tyrant. . . . Books are the 
 best of things, well used; abused, among 
 the worst. What is the right use? What 
 is the one end which all means go to effect? 
 They are for nothing but to inspire. . . , 
 i8 
 
EMERSON 
 
 The one thing in the world, of value, is the act- 
 ive soul. This every man is entitled to ; this 
 every man contains within him, although in 
 almost all men obstructed, and as yet unborn. 
 The soul active sees absolute truth and utters 
 truth, or creates. In this action it is genius ; 
 not the privilege of here and there a favor- 
 ite, but the sound estate of every man. . . . 
 Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of 
 genius by over-influence. The literature of 
 every nation bears me witness. The English 
 dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for 
 two hundred years. . . . These being his 
 functions, it becomes him to feel all con- 
 fidence in himself, and to defer never to the 
 popular cry. He, and he only, knows the 
 world. The world of any moment is the 
 merest appearance. Some great decorum, 
 some fetish of a government, some ephem- 
 eral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by 
 half mankind and cried down by the other 
 half, as if all depended on this particular 
 up or down. The odds are that the whole 
 question is not worth the poorest thought 
 which the scholar has lost in listening to the 
 controversy. Let him not quit his belief that 
 a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient 
 and honorable of the earth affirm it to be 
 the crack of doom." 
 
 19 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Dr. Holmes called this speech of Emerson's 
 our " intellectual Declaration of Independ- 
 ence," and indeed it was. "The Phi Beta 
 Kappa speech," says Mr. Lowell, "was an 
 event without any former parallel in our liter- 
 ary annals, — a scene always to be treasured 
 in the memory for its picturesqueness and 
 its inspiration. What crowded and breathless 
 aisles, what windows clustering with eager 
 heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what 
 grim silence of foregone dissent ! " 
 
 The authorities of the Divinity School can 
 hardly have been very careful readers of 
 Nature and The American Scholar, or they 
 would not have invited Emerson, in 1838, to 
 deliver the address to the graduating class. 
 This was Emerson's second opportunity to 
 apply his beliefs directly to society. A few 
 lines out of the famous address are enough 
 to show that he saw in the church of his day 
 signs of the same decadence that he saw in 
 the letters : " The prayers and even the dog- 
 mas of our church are like the zodiac of 
 Denderah and the astronomical monuments 
 of the Hindoos, wholly insulated from any- 
 thing now extant in the life and business of 
 the people. They mark the height to which 
 the waters once rose. ... It is the office of 
 a true teacher to show us that God is, not 
 
EMERSON 
 
 was ; that he speaketh, not spake. The true 
 Christianity — a faith Hke Christ's in the in- 
 finitude of man — is lost. None believeth in 
 the soul of man, but only in some man or 
 person old and departed. Ah me ! no man 
 goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this 
 saint or that poet, avoiding the God who 
 seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; 
 they love to be blind in public. They think 
 society wiser than their soul, and know not 
 that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than 
 the whole world." 
 
 It is almost misleading to speak of the lofty 
 utterances of these early addresses as attacks 
 upon society, but their reception explains 
 them. The element of absolute courage is 
 the same in all natures. Emerson himself 
 was not unconscious of what function he was 
 performing. 
 
 The " storm in- our wash-bowl " which fol- 
 lowed this Divinity School address, the letters 
 of remonstrance from friends, the advertise- 
 ments by the Divinity School of "no com- 
 plicity," must have been cheering to Emerson. 
 His unseen yet dominating ambition is shown 
 throughout the address, and in this note in 
 his diary of the following year : — 
 
 "August 31. Yesterday at the Phi Beta 
 Kappa anniversary. Steady, steady. I am 
 21 
 
EMERSON 
 
 convinced that if a man will be a true scholar 
 he shall have perfect freedom. The young 
 people and the mature hint at odium and the 
 aversion of forces to be presently encountered 
 in society. I say No ; I fear it not." 
 
 The lectures and addresses which form the 
 latter half of the first volume in the collected 
 edition show the early Emerson in the ripe- 
 ness of his powers. These writings have a 
 lyrical sweep and a beauty which the later 
 works often lack. Passages in them remind 
 us of Hamlet: — 
 
 " How silent, how spacious, what room for 
 all, yet without space to insert an atom ; — 
 in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in 
 balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes 
 forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a 
 strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and 
 boundless. It will not be dissected, nor un- 
 ravelled, nor shown. . . . The great Pan of 
 old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to 
 signify the beautiful variety of things and the 
 firmament, his coat of stars, — was but the 
 representative of thee, O rich and various 
 man ! thou palace of sight and sound, carry- 
 ing in thy senses the morning and the night 
 and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, 
 the geometry of the City of God; in thy 
 heart, the bower of love and the realms of 
 
 22 
 
EMERSON 
 
 right and wrong. . . . Every star in heaven 
 is discontent and insatiable. Gravitation and 
 chemistry cannot content them. Ever they 
 woo and court the eye of the beholder. 
 Every man who comes into the world they 
 seek to fascinate and possess, to pass into his 
 mind, for they desire to republish themselves 
 in a more delicate world than that they oc- 
 cupy. . . . So it is with all immaterial objects. 
 These beautiful basilisks set their brute glori- 
 ous eyes on the eye of every child, and, if 
 they can, cause their nature to pass through 
 his wondering eyes into him, and so all things 
 are mixed." 
 
 Emerson is never far from his main 
 thought: — 
 
 " The universe does not attract us till it is 
 housed in an individual." " A man, a personal 
 ascendency, is the only great phenomenon." 
 
 " I cannot find language of sufficient energy 
 to convey my sense of the sacredness of 
 private integrity." 
 
 On the other hand, he is never far from his 
 great fear : " But Truth is such a fly-away, 
 such a sly-boots, so untransportable and un- 
 barrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to 
 catch as light." " Let him beware of propos- 
 ing to himself any end. ... I say to you 
 plainly, there is no end so sacred or so large 
 23 
 
EMERSON 
 
 that if pursued for itself will not become car- 
 rion and an offence to the nostril." 
 
 There can be nothing finer than Emerson's 
 knowledge of the world, his sympathy with 
 young men and with the practical difficulties 
 of applying his teachings. We can see in his 
 early lectures before students and mechanics 
 how much he had learned about the structure 
 of society from his own short contact with the 
 organized church. 
 
 " Each finds a tender and very intelligent 
 conscience a disqualification for success. 
 Each requires of the practitioner a certain 
 shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness 
 and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a 
 sequestration from the sentiments of generos- 
 ity and love, a compromise of private opinion 
 and lofty integrity. . . . The fact that a new 
 thought and hope have dawned in your breast, 
 should apprise you that in the same hour a 
 new light broke in upon a thousand private 
 hearts. . . . And further I will not dissemble 
 my hope that each person whom I address has 
 felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, 
 timidity, and limitations, and to be in his place 
 a free and helpful man, a reformer, a bene- 
 factor, not content to slip along through the 
 world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his 
 nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as 
 24 
 
EMERSON 
 
 he can, but a brave and upright man who 
 must find or cut a straight road to every- 
 thing excellent in the earth, and not only 
 go honorably himself, but make it easier for 
 all who follow him to go in honor and with 
 benefit. . . ." 
 
 Beneath all lay a greater matter, — Emer- 
 son's grasp of the forms and conditions of 
 progress, his reach of intellect, which could 
 afford fair play to every one. 
 
 His lecture on The Conservative is not a 
 puzzling jeu it esprit, like Bishop Blougram's 
 Apology, but an honest attempt to set up the 
 opposing chessmen of conservatism and reform 
 so as to represent real life. Hardly can such 
 a brilliant statement of the case be found else- 
 where in literature. It is not necessary to 
 quote here the reformer's side of the question, 
 for Emerson's whole life was devoted to it. 
 The conservatives' attitude he gives with such 
 accuracy and such justice that the very bank- 
 ers of State Street seem to be speaking : — 
 
 " The order of things is as good as the 
 character of the population permits. Con- 
 sider it as the work of a great and beneficent 
 and progressive necessity, which, from the 
 first pulsation in the first animal life up to the 
 present high culture of the best nations, has 
 advanced thus far. . . . 
 
 25 
 
EMERSON 
 
 " The conservative party in the universe 
 concedes that the radical would talk suffi- 
 ciently to the purpose if we were still in the 
 garden of Eden ; he legislates for man as he 
 ought to be; his theory is right, but he 
 makes no allowance for friction, and this 
 omission makes his whole doctrine false. 
 The idealist retorts that the conservative falls 
 into a far more noxious error in the other 
 extreme. The conservative assumes sickness 
 as a necessity, and his social frame is a hos- 
 pital, his total legislation is for the present 
 distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, 
 with bib and pap-spoon, swallowing pills and 
 herb tea. Sickness gets organized as well as 
 health, the vice as well as the virtue." 
 
 It is unnecessary to go, one by one, through 
 the familiar essays and lectures which Emer- 
 son published between 1838 and 1875. They 
 are in everybody's hands and in everybody's 
 thoughts. In 1840 he wrote in his diary: 
 " In all my lectures I have taught one doc- 
 trine, namely, the infinitude of the private 
 man. This the people accept readily enough, 
 and even with commendation, as long as I 
 call the lecture Art or Politics, or Literature 
 or the Household ; but the moment I call it 
 Religion they are shocked, though it be only 
 the application of the same truth which they 
 26 
 
EMERSON 
 
 receive elsewhere to a new class of facts." 
 To the platform he returned, and left it only 
 once or twice during the remainder of his 
 life. 
 
 His writings vary in coherence. In his 
 early occasional pieces, like the Phi Beta 
 Kappa address, coherence is at a maximum. 
 They were written for a purpose, and were 
 perhaps struck off all at once. But he earned 
 his living by lecturing, and a lecturer is 
 always recasting his work and using it in dif- 
 ferent forms. A lecturer has no prejudice 
 against repetition. It is noticeable that in 
 some of Emerson's important lectures the 
 logical scheme is more perfect than in his 
 essays. The truth seems to be that in the 
 process of working up and perfecting his 
 writings, in revising and filing his sentences, 
 the logical scheme became more and more 
 obliterated. Another circumstance helped 
 make his style fragmentary. He was by 
 nature a man of inspirations and exalted 
 moods. He was subject to ecstasies, during 
 which his mind worked with phenomenal 
 brilliancy. Throughout his works and in his 
 diary we find constant reference to these 
 moods, and to his own inability to control or 
 recover them. "But what we want is con- 
 secutiveness. 'T is with us a flash of light, 
 27 
 
EMERSON 
 
 then a long darkness, then a flash again. Ah ! 
 could we turn these fugitive sparkles into an 
 astronomy of Copernican worlds ! " 
 
 In order to take advantage of these periods 
 of divination, he used to write dowii the 
 thoughts that came to him at such times. 
 From boyhood onward he kept journals and 
 commonplace books, and in the course of his 
 reading and meditation he collected innumer- 
 able notes and quotations which he indexed 
 for ready use. In these mines he " quarried," 
 as Mr. Cabot says, for his lectures and essays. 
 When he needed a lecture he went to the 
 repository, threw together what seemed to 
 have a bearing on some subject, and gave it a 
 title. If any other man should adopt this 
 method of composition, the result would be in- 
 comprehensible chaos; because most men 
 have many interests, many moods, many and 
 conflicting ideas. But with Emerson it was 
 otherwise. There was only one thought 
 which could set him aflame, and that was the 
 thought of the unfathomed might of man. 
 This thought was his religion, his politics, his 
 ethics, his philosophy. One moment of in- 
 spiration was in him own brother to the next 
 moment of inspiration, although they might 
 be separated by six weeks. When he came 
 to put together his star-born ideas, they fitted 
 28 
 
EMERSON 
 
 well, no matter in what order he placed them, 
 because they were all part of the same idea. 
 
 His works are all one single attack on the 
 vice of the age, moral cowardice. He assails 
 it not by railings and scorn, but by positive 
 and stimulating suggestion. The imagination 
 of the reader is touched by every device which 
 can awake the admiration for heroism, the 
 consciousness of moral courage. Wit, quo- 
 tation, anecdote, eloquence, exhortation, rhet- 
 oric, sarcasm, and very rarely denunciation, 
 are launched at the reader, till he feels little 
 lambent flames beginning to kindle in him. 
 He is perhaps unable to see the exact logical 
 connection between two paragraphs of an 
 essay, yet he feels they are germane. He 
 takes up Emerson tired and apathetic, but 
 presently he feels himself growing heady and 
 truculent, strengthened in his most inward 
 vitality, surprised to find himself again master 
 in his own house. 
 
 The difference between Emerson and the 
 other moralists is that all these stimulating 
 pictures and suggestions are not given by him 
 in illustration of a general proposition. They 
 have never been through the mill of general- 
 ization in his own mind. He himself could 
 not have told you their logical bearing on 
 one another. They have all the vividness of 
 29 
 
EMERSON 
 
 disconnected fragments of life, and yet they 
 all throw light on one another, like the facets 
 of a jewel. But whatever cause it was that 
 led him to adopt his method of writing, it is 
 certain that he succeeded in delivering him- 
 self of his thought with an initial velocity and 
 carrying power such as few men ever attained. 
 He has the force at his command of the 
 thrower of the discus. 
 
 His style is American, and beats with the 
 pulse of the climate. He is the only writer 
 we have had who writes as he speaks, who 
 makes no literary parade, has no pretensions 
 of any sort. He is the only writer we have 
 had who has wholly subdued his vehicle to 
 his temperament. It is impossible to name 
 his style without naming his character : they 
 are one thing. 
 
 Both in language and in elocution Emerson 
 was a practised and consummate artist, who 
 knew how both to command his effects and to 
 conceal his means. The casual, practical, 
 disarming directness with which he writes 
 puts any honest man at his mercy. What 
 difference does it make whether a man who 
 can talk like this is following an argument or 
 not ? You cannot always see Emerson 
 clearly; he is hidden by a high wall; but 
 you always know exactly on what spot he is 
 3° 
 
EMERSON 
 
 standing. You judge it by the flight of the 
 objects he throws over the wall, — a bootjack, 
 an apple, a crown, a razor, a volume of verse. 
 With one or other of these missiles, all de- 
 livered with a very tolerable aim, he is pretty 
 sure to hit you. These catchwords stick in 
 the mind. People are not in general influ- 
 enced by long books or discourses, but by 
 odd fragments of observation which they 
 overhear, sentences or head-lines which they 
 read while turning over a book at random or 
 while waiting for dinner to be announced. 
 These are the oracles and orphic words that 
 get lodged in the mind and bend a man's 
 most stubborn will. Emerson called them 
 the Police of the Universe. His works are a 
 treasury of such things. They sparkle in the 
 mine, or you may carry them ofl" in your 
 pocket. They get driven into your mind like 
 nails, and on them catch and hang your own 
 experiences, till what was once his thought 
 has become your character. 
 
 " God offers to every mind its choice be- 
 tween truth and repose. Take which you 
 please; you can never have both." "Dis- 
 content is want of self-reliance ; it is infirmity 
 of will." " It is impossible for a man to be 
 cheated by any one but himself." 
 
 The orchestration with which Emerson in- 
 31 
 
EMERSON 
 
 troduces and sustains these notes from the 
 spheres is as remarkable as the winged things 
 themselves. Open his works at a hazard. 
 You hear a man talking. 
 
 " A garden is like those pernicious machin- 
 eries we read of every month in the news- 
 papers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his 
 hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his 
 whole body to irresistible destruction. In an 
 evil hour he pulled down his wall and added 
 a field to his homestead. No land is bad, but 
 land is worse. If a man own land, the land 
 owns him. Now let him leave home if he 
 dare. Every tree and graft, every hill of 
 melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he 
 has done and all he means to do, stand in his 
 way like duns, when he would go out of his 
 gate." 
 
 Your attention is arrested by the reality of 
 this gentleman in his garden, by the first-hand 
 quality of his mind. It matters not on what 
 subject he talks. While you are musing, 
 still pleased and patronizing, he has picked 
 up the bow of Ulysses, bent it with the 
 ease of Ulysses, and sent a shaft clear through 
 the twelve axes, nor missed one of them. 
 But this, it seems, was mere byplay and 
 marksmanship; for before you have done 
 wondering, Ulysses rises to his feet in anger, 
 32 
 
EMERSON 
 
 and pours flight after flight, arrow after arrow, 
 from the great bow. The shafts sing and 
 strike, the suitors fall in heaps. The brow of 
 Ulysses shines with unearthly splendor. The 
 air is filled with lightning. After a little, 
 without shock or transition, without apparent 
 change of tone, Mr. Emerson is offering you 
 a biscuit before you leave, and bidding you 
 mind the last step at the garden end. If the 
 man who can do these things be not an artist, 
 then must we have a new vocabulary and re- 
 name the professions. 
 
 There is, in all this effectiveness of Emer- 
 son, no pose, no literary art; nothing that 
 corresponds even remotely to the pretended 
 modesty and ignorance with which Socrates 
 lays pitfalls for our admiration in Plato's 
 dialogues. 
 
 It was the platform which determined Em- 
 erson's style. He was not a writer, but a 
 speaker. On the platform his manner of 
 speech was a living part of his words. The 
 pauses and hesitation, the abstraction, the 
 searching, the balancing, the turning forward 
 and back of the leaves of his lecture, and then 
 the discovery, the illumination, the gleam of 
 lightning which you saw before your eyes de- 
 scend into a man of genius, — all this was 
 Emerson. He invented this style of speak- 
 3 33 
 
EMERSON 
 
 ing, and made it express the supersensuous, 
 the incommunicable. Lowell wrote, while 
 still under the spell of the magician : " Em- 
 erson's oration was more disjointed than 
 usual, even with him. It began nowhere, and 
 ended everj^where, and yet, as always with 
 that divine man, it left you feeling that some- 
 thing beautiful had passed that way, some- 
 thing more beautiful than anything else, like 
 the rising and setting of stars. Every pos- 
 sible criticism might have been made on it 
 but one, — that it was not noble. There was 
 a tone in it that awakened all elevating asso- 
 ciations. He boggled, he lost his place, he 
 had to put on his glasses ; but it was as if a 
 creature from some fairer world had lost his 
 way in our fogs, and it was our fault, not his. 
 It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as 
 stars are made of, and you could n't help feel- 
 ing that, if you waited awhile, all that was 
 nebulous would be whirled into planets, and 
 would assume the mathematical gravity of 
 system. All through it I felt something in 
 me that cried, ' Ha ! ha ! ' to the sound of the 
 trumpets." 
 
 It is nothing for any man sitting in his chair 
 to be overcome with the sense of the immedi- 
 acy of life, to feel the spur of courage, the 
 victory of good over evil, the value, now 
 34 
 
EMERSON 
 
 and forever, of all great-hearted endeavor. 
 Such moments come to us all. But for a man 
 to sit in his chair and write what shall call up 
 these forces in the bosoms of others — that is 
 desert, that is greatness. To do this was the 
 gift of Emerson. The whole earth is enriched 
 by every moment of converse with him. The 
 shows and shams of life become transparent, 
 the lost kingdoms are brought back, the shut- 
 ters of the spirit are opened, and provinces 
 and realms of our own existence lie gleaming 
 before us. 
 
 It has been necessary to reduce the living 
 soul of Emerson to mere dead attributes like 
 " moral courage " in order that "we might talk 
 about him at all. His effectiveness comes 
 from his character ; not from his philosophy, 
 nor from his rhetoric nor his wit, nor from 
 any of the accidents of his education. He 
 might never have heard of Berkeley or Plato. 
 A slightly different education might have led 
 him to throw his teaching into the form of 
 historical essays or of stump speeches. He 
 might, perhaps, have been bred a stone- 
 mason, and have done his work in the world 
 by travelling with a panorama. But he would 
 always have been Emerson. His weight and 
 his power would always have been the 
 same. It is solely as character that he 
 3S 
 
EMERSON 
 
 is important. He discovered nothing; he 
 bears no relation whatever to the history of 
 philosophy. We must regard him and deal 
 with him simply as a man. 
 
 Strangely enough, the world has always 
 insisted upon accepting him as a thinker: 
 and hence a great coil of misunderstanding. 
 As a thinker, Emerson is difficult to classify. 
 Before you begin to assign him a place, you 
 must clear the ground by a disquisition as to 
 what is meant by " a thinker," and how 
 Emerson differs from other thinkers. As a 
 man, Emerson is as plain as Ben Franklin. 
 
 People have accused him of inconsistency; 
 they say that he teaches one thing one day, 
 and another the next day. But from the point 
 of view of Emerson there is no such thing as 
 inconsistency. Every man is each day a new 
 man. Let him be to-day what he is to-day. 
 It is immaterial and waste of time to consider 
 what he once was or what he may be. 
 
 His picturesque speech dehghts in fact and 
 anecdote, and a public which is used to treat- 
 ises and deduction cares always to be told 
 the moral. It wants everything reduced to 
 a generalization. All generalizations are 
 partial truths, but we are used to them, and 
 we ourselves mentally make the proper allow- 
 ance. Emerson's method is, not to give a 
 36 
 
EMERSON 
 
 generalization and trust to our making the 
 allowance, but to give two conflicting state- 
 ments and leave the balance of truth to be 
 struck in our own minds on the facts. There 
 is no inconsistency in this. It is a vivid and 
 very legitimate method of procedure. But 
 he is much more than a theorist: he is a 
 practitioner. He does not merely state a 
 theory of agitation : he proceeds to agitate. 
 " Do not," he says, " 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 
 false or true. I unsettle all things. No facts 
 are to me sacred, none are profane. I simply 
 experiment, an endless seeker with no past at 
 my back." He was not engaged in teaching 
 many things, but one thing, — Courage. 
 Sometimes he inspires it by pointing to great 
 characters, — Fox, Milton, Alcibiades ; some- 
 times he inspires it by bidding us beware of 
 imitating such men, and, in the ardor of his 
 rhetoric, even seems to regard them as hin- 
 drances and dangers to our development. 
 There is no inconsistency here. Emerson 
 might logically have gone one step further and 
 raised inconsistency into a jewel. For what 
 is so useful, so educational, so inspiring, to a 
 timid and conservative man, as to do some- 
 thing inconsistent and regrettable? It lends 
 37 
 
EMERSON 
 
 character to him at once. He breathes freer 
 and is stronger for the experience. 
 
 Emerson is no cosmopolitan. He is a 
 patriot. He is not like Goethe, whose sym- 
 pathies did not run on national lines. Emer- 
 son has America in his mind's eye all the 
 time. There is to be a new religion, and it is 
 to come from America ; a new and better type 
 of man, and he is to be an American. He 
 not only cared little or nothing for Europe, 
 but he cared not much for the world at large. 
 His thought was for the future of this country. 
 You cannot get into any chamber in his mind 
 which is below this chamber of patriotism. 
 He loves the valor of Alexander, and the 
 grace of the Oxford athlete; but he loves 
 them not for themselves. He has a use for 
 them. They are grist to his mill and powder 
 to his gun. His admiration of them he sub- 
 ordinates to his main purpose, — they are his 
 blackboard and diagrams. His patriotism is 
 the backbone of his significance. He came to 
 his countrymen at a time when they lacked, 
 not thoughts, but manliness. The needs of 
 his own particular public are always before 
 him. 
 
 " It is odd that our people should have, not 
 water on the brain, but a little gas there. A 
 shrewd foreigner said of the Americans that 
 38 
 
EMERSON 
 
 • whatever they say has a little the air of a 
 speech.' " 
 
 " I shall not need to go into an enumera- 
 tion of our national defects and vices which 
 require this Order of Censors in the State. . . . 
 The timidity of our public opinion is our dis- 
 ease, or, shall I say, the publicness of opinion, 
 the absence of private opinion." 
 
 " Our measure of success is the moderation 
 and low level of an individual's judgment. 
 Dr. Channing's piety and wisdom had such 
 weight in Boston that the popular idea of 
 religion was whatever this eminent divine 
 held." 
 
 " Let us affront and reprimand the smooth 
 mediocrity, the squahd contentment of the 
 times." 
 
 The politicians he scores constantly. 
 
 " Who that sees the meanness of our politics 
 but congratulates Washington that he is 
 long already wrapped in his shroud and forever 
 safe." The following is his description of the 
 social world of his day : " If any man consider 
 the present aspects of what is called by dis- 
 tinction society, he will see the need of these 
 ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to 
 be drawn out, and we are become timorous, 
 desponding whimperers." 
 
 It is the same wherever we open his books. 
 
EMERSON 
 
 He must spur on, feed up, bring forward the 
 dormant character of his countrymen. When 
 he goes to England, he sees in English life 
 nothing except those elements which are de- 
 ficient in American life. If you wish a cata- 
 logue of what America has not, read English 
 Traits. Emerson's patriotism had the effect 
 of expanding his philosophy. To-day we 
 know the value of physique, for science has 
 taught it, but it was hardly discovered in his 
 day, and his philosophy affords no basis for 
 it. Emerson in this matter transcends his 
 philosophy. When in England, he was 
 fairly made drunk with the physical life he 
 found there. He is like Caspar Hauser gaz- 
 ing for the first time on green fields. English 
 Traits is the ruddiest book he ever wrote. It 
 is a hymn to force, honesty, and physical 
 well-being, and ends with the dominant note 
 of his belief: " By this general activity and by 
 this sacredness of individuals, they [the Eng- 
 lish] have in seven hundred years evolved the 
 principles of freedom. It is the land of 
 patriots, martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the 
 ocean out of which it emerged should wash 
 it away, it will be remembered as an island 
 famous for immortal laws, for the announce- 
 ments of original right which make the stone 
 tables of liberty." He had found in England 
 40 
 
EMERSON 
 
 free speech, personal courage, and reverence 
 for the individual. 
 
 No convulsion could shake Emerson or 
 make his view unsteady even for an instant. 
 What no one else saw, he saw, and he saw 
 nothing else. Not a boy in the land wel- 
 comed the outbreak of the war so fiercely as 
 did this shy village philosopher, then at the 
 age of fifty-eight. He saw that war was the 
 cure for cowardice, moral as well as physical. 
 It was not the cause of the slave that moved 
 him ; it was not the cause of the Union for 
 which he cared a farthing. It was something 
 deeper than either of these things for which 
 he had been battling all his life. It was the 
 cause of character against convention. What- 
 ever else the war might bring, it was sure to 
 bring in character, to leave behind it a file of 
 heroes; if not heroes, then villains, but in 
 any case strong men. On the 9th of April, 
 1 861, three days before Fort Sumter was 
 bombarded, he had spoken with equanimity 
 of " the downfall of our character-destroying 
 civilization. . . . We find that civilization 
 crowed too soon, that our triumphs were 
 treacheries ; we had opened the wrong door 
 and let the enemy into the castle." 
 
 "Ah," he said, when the firing began, 
 " sometimes gunpowder smells good." Soon 
 41 
 
EMERSON 
 
 after the attack on Sumter he said in a public 
 address, " We have been very homeless for 
 some years past, say since 1850; but now we 
 have a country again. . . . The war was an 
 eye-opener, and showed men of all parties 
 and opinions the value of those primary 
 forces that lie beneath all political action." 
 And it was almost a personal pledge when 
 he said at the Harvard Commemoration in 
 1865, "We shall not again disparage Amer- 
 ica, now that we have seen what men it will 
 bear." 
 
 The place which Emerson forever occupies 
 as a great critic is defined by the same sharp 
 outlines that mark his work, in whatever light 
 and from whatever side we approach it. A 
 critic in the modern sense he was not, for his 
 point of view is fixed, and he reviews the 
 world like a search-light placed on the top of 
 a tall tower. He lived too early and at too 
 great a distance from the forum of European 
 thought to absorb the ideas of evolution and 
 give place to them in his philosophy. Evolu- 
 tion does not graft well upon the Platonic 
 Idealism, nor are physiology and the kindred 
 sciences sympathetic. Nothing aroused Em- 
 erson's indignation more than the attempts of 
 the medical faculty and of phrenologists to 
 classify, and therefore limit individuals. " The 
 43 ^ 
 
EMERSON 
 
 grossest ignorance does not disgust me like 
 this ignorant knowingness." 
 
 We miss in Emerson the underlying con- 
 ception of growth, of development, so charac- 
 teristic of the thought of our own day, and 
 which, for instance, is found everywhere 
 latent in Browning's poetry. Browning re- 
 gards character as the result of experience 
 and as an ever changing growth. To Emer- 
 son, character is rather an entity complete 
 and eternal from the beginning. He is prob- 
 ably the last great writer to look at life from 
 a stationary standpoint. There is a certain 
 lack of the historic sense in all he has written. 
 The ethical assumption that all men are 
 exactly alike permeates his work. In his 
 mind, Socrates, Marco Polo, and General 
 Jackson stand surrounded by the same atmos- 
 phere, or rather stand as mere naked charac- 
 ters surrounded by no atmosphere at all. He 
 is probably the last great writer who will fling 
 about classic anecdotes as if they were club 
 gossip. In the discussion of morals, this 
 assumption does little harm. The stories and 
 proverbs which illustrate the thought of the 
 moralist generally concern only those simple 
 relations of life which are common to all 
 ages. There is charm in this familiar dealing 
 with antiquity. The classics are thus domes- 
 43 
 
EMERSON 
 
 ticated and made real to us. What matter if 
 iEsop appear a little too much like an Ameri- 
 can citizen, so long as his points tell ? 
 
 It is in Emerson's treatment of the fine arts 
 that we begin to notice his want of historic 
 sense. Art endeavors to express subtle and 
 ever changing feelings by means of conven- 
 tions which are as protean as the forms of a 
 cloud ; and the man who in speaking on the 
 plastic arts makes the assumption that all 
 men are alike will reveal before he has uttered 
 three sentences that he does not know what 
 art is, that he has never experienced any form 
 of sensation from it. Emerson lived in a 
 time and clime where there was no plastic art, 
 and he was obliged to arrive at his ideas 
 about art by means of a highly complex pro- 
 cess of reasoning. He dwelt constantly in a 
 spiritual place which was the very focus of 
 high moral fervor. This was his enthusiasm, 
 this was his revelation, and from it he reasoned 
 out the probable meaning of the fine arts. 
 " This," thought Emerson, his eye rolling in 
 a fine frenzy of moral feeling, " this must be 
 what Apelles experienced, this fervor is the 
 passion of Bramante. I understand the Par- 
 thenon." And so he projected his feelings 
 about morality into the field of the plastic arts. 
 He deals very freely and rather indiscrimi- 
 44 
 
EMERSON 
 
 nately with the names of artists, — Phidias, 
 Raphael, Salvator Rosa, — and he speaks 
 always in such a way that it is impossible to 
 connect what he says with any impression we 
 have ever received from the works of those 
 masters. 
 
 In fact, Emerson has never in his life felt 
 the normal appeal of any painting, or any 
 sculpture, or any architecture, or any music. 
 These things, of which he does not know the 
 meaning in real life, he yet uses, and uses 
 constantly, as symbols to convey ethical 
 truths. The result is that his books are full 
 of blind places, like the notes which will not 
 strike on a sick piano. 
 
 It is interesting to find that the one art of 
 which Emerson did have a direct understand- 
 ing, the art of poetry, gave him some insight 
 into the relation of the artist to his vehicle. 
 In his essay on Shakespeare there is a full 
 recognition of the debt of Shakespeare to his 
 times. This essay is filled with the historic 
 sense. We ought not to accuse Emerson 
 because he lacked appreciation of the fine 
 arts, but rather admire the truly Goethean 
 spirit in which he insisted upon the reality of 
 arts of which he had no understanding. This 
 is the same spirit which led him to insist 
 on the value of the Eastern poets. Perhaps 
 45 
 
EMERSON 
 
 there exist a few scholars who can tell us how 
 far Emerson understood or misunderstood 
 Saadi and Firdusi and the Koran. But we 
 need not be disturbed for his learning. It is 
 enough that he makes us recognize that these 
 men were men too, and that their writings 
 mean something not unknowable to us. The 
 East added nothing to Emerson, but gave 
 him a few trappings of speech. The whole of 
 his mysticism is to be found in Nature, writ- 
 ten before he knew the sages of the Orient, 
 and it is not improbable that there is some 
 real connection between his own mysticism 
 and the mysticism of the Eastern poets. 
 
 Emerson's criticism on men and books is 
 like the test of a great chemist who seeks one 
 or two elements. He burns a bit of the stuff 
 in his incandescent light, shows the lines of it 
 in his spectrum, and there an end. 
 
 It was a thought of genius that led him 
 to write Representative Men. The scheme 
 of this book gave play to every illumination 
 of his mind, and it pinned him down to the 
 objective, to the field of vision under his 
 microscope. The table of contents of Repre- 
 sentative Men is the dial of his education. It 
 is as follows : Uses of Great Men ; Plato, or 
 The Philosopher; Plato, New Readings; 
 Swedenborg, or The Mystic; Montaigne, 
 46 
 
EMERSON 
 
 or The Sceptic; Shakespeare, or The Poet; 
 Napoleon, or The Man of the World ; Goethe, 
 or The Writer. The predominance of the 
 writers over all other types of men is not cited 
 to show Emerson's interest in The Writer, for 
 we know his interest centred in the practical 
 man, — even his ideal scholar is a practical 
 man, — but to show the sources of his illus- 
 tration. Emerson's library was the old-fash- 
 ioned gentleman's library. His mines of 
 thought were the world's classics. This is 
 one reason why he so quickly gained an in- 
 ternational currency. His very subjects in 
 Representative Men are of universal interest, 
 and he is limited only by certain inevitable 
 local conditions. Representative Men is 
 thought by many persons to be his best 
 book. It is certainly filled with the strokes 
 of a master. There exists no more profound 
 criticism than Emerson's analysis of Goethe 
 and of Napoleon, by both of whom he was 
 at once fascinated and repelled. 
 
 47 
 
EMERSON 
 
 II 
 
 The attitude of Emerson's mind toward re- 
 formers results so logically from his philos- 
 ophy that it is easily understood. He saw 
 in them people who sought something as a 
 panacea or as an end in itself. To speak 
 strictly and not irreverently, he had his own 
 panacea, — the development of each individ- 
 ual; and he was impatient of any other. 
 He did not believe in association. The very 
 idea of it involved a surrender by the individ- 
 ual of some portion of his identity, and of 
 course all the reformers worked through their 
 associations. With their general aims he 
 sympathized. "These reforms," he wrote, 
 " are our contemporaries ; they are ourselves, 
 our own light and sight and conscience ; they 
 only name the relation which subsists between 
 us and the vicious institutions which they go 
 to rectify." But with the methods of the re- 
 formers he had no sympathy : " He who aims 
 at progress should aim at an infinite, not at 
 a special benefit. The reforms whose fame 
 now fills the land with temperance, anti- 
 slavery, non-resistance, no-government, equal 
 48 
 
EMERSON 
 
 labor, fair and generous as each appears, are 
 poor bitter things when prosecuted for them- 
 selves as an end." Again : " The young men 
 who have been vexing society for these last 
 years with regenerative methods seem to have 
 made this mistake : they all exaggerated some 
 special means, and all failed to see that the 
 reform of reforms must be accomplished 
 without means." 
 
 Emerson did not at first discriminate be- 
 tween the movement of the Abolitionists and 
 the hundred and one other reform movements 
 of the period ; and in this lack of discrimi- 
 nation lies a point of extraordinary interest. 
 The Abolitionists, as it afterwards turned out, 
 had in fact got hold of the issue which was to 
 control the fortunes of the republic for thirty 
 years. The difference between them and the 
 other reformers was this : that the Abolition- 
 ists were men set in motion by the primary 
 and unreasoning passion of pity. Theory 
 played small part in the movement. It grew 
 by the excitement which exhibitions of cruelty 
 will arouse in the minds of sensitive people. 
 
 It is not to be denied that the social con- 
 ditions in Boston in 1 83 1 foreboded an 
 outbreak in some form. If the abolition 
 excitement had not drafted off the rising 
 forces, there might have been a Merry Mount, 
 4 49 
 
EMERSON 
 
 an epidemic of crime or insanity, or a mob of 
 some sort. The abolition movement afforded 
 the purest form of an indulgence in human 
 feeling that was ever offered to men. It was 
 intoxicating. It made the agitators perfectly 
 happy. They sang at their work and bubbled 
 over with exhilaration. They were the only 
 people in the United States, at this time, who 
 were enjoying an exalted, glorifying, practical 
 activity. 
 
 But Emerson at first lacked the touchstone, 
 whether of intellect or of heart, to see the 
 difference between this particular movement 
 and the other movements then in progress. 
 Indeed, in so far as he sees any difference 
 between the Abolitionists and the rest, it is 
 that the Abolitionists were more objectionable 
 and distasteful to him. " Those," he said, 
 " who are urging with most ardor what are 
 called the greatest benefits to mankind are 
 narrow, conceited, self-pleasing men, and 
 affect us as the insane do." And again : " By 
 the side of these men [the idealists] the hot 
 agitators have a certain cheap and ridiculous 
 air ; they even look smaller than others. Of 
 the two, I own I like the speculators the best. 
 They have some piety which looks with faith 
 to a fair future unprofaned by rash and un- 
 equal attempts to realize it." He was drawn 
 SO 
 
EMERSON 
 
 into the abolition cause by having the truth 
 brought home to him that these people were 
 fighting for the Moral Law. He was slow in 
 seeing this, because in their methods they 
 represented everything he most condemned. 
 As soon, however, as he was convinced, he 
 was ready to lecture for them and to give 
 them the weight of his approval. In 1844 
 he was already practically an Abolitionist, 
 and his feelings upon the matter deepened 
 steadily in intensity ever after. 
 
 The most interesting page of Emerson's 
 published journal is the following, written at 
 some time previous to 1 844 ; the exact date 
 is not given. A like page, whether written 
 or unwritten, may be read into the private 
 annals of every man who lived before the 
 war. Emerson has, with unconscious mas- 
 tery, photographed the half-spectre that 
 stalked in the minds of all. He wrote : " I 
 had occasion to say the other day to Eliza- 
 beth Hoar that I like best the strong and 
 worthy persons, like her father, who support 
 the social order without hesitation or misgiv- 
 ing. I like these; they never incommode 
 us by exciting grief, pity, or perturbation of 
 any sort. But the professed philanthropists, 
 it is strange and horrible to say, are an alto- 
 gether odious set of people, whom one would 
 51 
 
EMERSON 
 
 shun as the worst of bores and canters. But 
 my conscience, my unhappy conscience re- 
 spects that hapless class who see the faults 
 and stains of our social order, and who pray 
 and strive incessantly to right the wrong ; this 
 annoying class of men and women, though 
 they commonly find the work altogether be- 
 yond their faculty, and their results are, for 
 the present, distressing. They are partial, 
 and apt to magnify their own. Yes, and the 
 prostrate penitent, also, — he is not compre- 
 hensive, he is not philosophical in those tears 
 and groans. Yet I feel that under him and 
 his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth 
 and the sea and all that in them is, and the 
 axis around which the universe revolves 
 passes through his body where he stands." 
 
 It was the defection of Daniel Webster that 
 completed the conversion of Emerson and 
 turned him from an adherent into a propa- 
 gandist of abolition. Not pity for the slave, 
 but indignation at the violation of the Moral 
 Law by Daniel Webster, was at the bottom 
 of Emerson's anger. His abolitionism was 
 secondary to his main mission, his main en- 
 thusiasm. It is for this reason that he stands 
 on a plane of intellect where he might, under 
 other circumstances, have met and defeated 
 Webster. After the 7th of March, 1850, he 
 52 
 
EMERSON 
 
 recognized in Webster the embodiment of all 
 that he hated. In his attacks on Webster, 
 Emerson trembles to his inmost fibre with 
 antagonism. He is savage, destructive, 
 personal, bent on death. 
 
 This exhibition of Emerson as a fighting 
 animal is magnificent, and explains his life. 
 There is no other instance of his ferocity. 
 No other nature but Webster's ever so moved 
 him; but it was time to be moved, and 
 Webster was a man of his size. Had these 
 two great men of New England been matched 
 in training as they were matched in en- 
 dowment, and had they then faced each 
 other in debate, they would not have been 
 found to differ so greatly in power. Their 
 natures were electrically repellent, but from 
 which did the greater force radiate? Their 
 education differed so radically that it is im- 
 possible to compare them, but if you trans- 
 late the Phi Beta Kappa address into politics, 
 you have something stronger than Webster, 
 — something that recalls Chatham ; and 
 Emerson would have had this advantage, — 
 that he was not afraid. As it was, he left his 
 library and took the stump. Mr. Cabot has 
 given us extracts from his speeches : — 
 
 " The tameness is indeed complete ; all are 
 involved in one hot haste of terror, — presi- 
 53 
 
EMERSON 
 
 dents of colleges and professors, saints and 
 brokers, lawyers and manufacturers; not a 
 liberal recollection, not so much as a snatch 
 of an old song for freedom, dares intrude on 
 their passive obedience. . . . Mr. Webster, 
 perhaps, is only following the laws of his 
 blood and constitution. I suppose his 
 pledges were not quite natural to him. He 
 is a man who lives by his memory; a man 
 of the past, not a man of faith and of hope. 
 All the drops of his blood have eyes that 
 look downward, and his finely developed 
 understanding only works truly and with all 
 its force when it stands for animal good ; that 
 is, for property. He looks at the Union as 
 an estate, a large farm, and is excellent in the 
 completeness of his defence of it so far. 
 What he finds already written he will defend. 
 Lucky that so much had got well written 
 when he came, for he has no faith in the 
 power of self-government. Not the smallest 
 municipal provision, if it were new, would 
 receive his sanction. In Massachusetts, in 
 1776, he would, beyond all question, have 
 been a refugee. He praises Adams and Jef- 
 ferson, but it is a past Adams and Jefferson. 
 A present Adams or Jefferson he would de- 
 nounce. . . . But one thing appears certain 
 to me : that the Union is at an end as soon as 
 54 
 
EMERSON 
 
 an immoral law is enacted. He who writes a 
 crime into the statute book digs under the 
 foundations of the Capitol. . . . The words 
 of John Randolph, wiser than he knew, have 
 been ringing ominously in all echoes for 
 thirty years : ' We do not govern the people 
 of the North by our black slaves, but by their 
 own white slaves.' . . . They come down 
 now like the cry of fate, in the moment when 
 they are fulfilled." 
 
 The exasperation of Emerson did not sub- 
 side, but went on increasing during the next 
 four years, and on March 7, 1854, he read his 
 lecture on the Fugitive Slave Law at the New 
 York Tabernacle : " I have lived all my life 
 without suffering any inconvenience from 
 American Slavery. I never saw it ; I never 
 heard the whip ; I never felt the check on my 
 free speech and action, until the other day, 
 when Mr. Webster, by his personal influence, 
 brought the Fugitive Slave Law on the coun- 
 try. I say Mr. Webster, for though the bill 
 was not his, it is yet notorious that he was the 
 life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had. 
 It cost him his life, and under the shadow of 
 his great name inferior men sheltered them- 
 selves, threw their ballots for it, and made 
 the law. . . . Nobody doubts that Daniel 
 Webster could make a good speech. No- 
 SS 
 
EMERSON 
 
 body doubts that there were good and plau- 
 sible things to be said on the part of the 
 South. But this is not a question of ingenu- 
 ity, not a question of syllogisms, but of sides. 
 How came he there? . . . But the question 
 which history will ask is broader. In the 
 final hour when he was forced by the per- 
 emptory necessity of the closing armies to 
 take a side, — did he take the part of great 
 principles, the side of humanity and justice, 
 or the side of abuse, and oppression and 
 chaos? . . . He did as immoral men usually 
 do, — made very low bows to the Christian 
 Church and went through all the Sunday 
 decorums, but when allusion was made to the 
 question of duty and the sanctions of moral- 
 ity, he very frankly said, at Albany, ' Some 
 higher law, something existing somewhere be- 
 tween here and the heaven — I do not know 
 where.' And if the reporters say true, this 
 wretched atheism found some laughter in the 
 company." 
 
 It was too late for Emerson to shine as a 
 political debater. On May 14, 1857, Longfel- 
 low wrote in his diary, " It is rather painful to 
 see Emerson in the arena of politics, hissed and 
 hooted at by young law students." Emerson 
 records a similar experience at a later date : 
 ' " If I were dumb, yet would I have gone and 
 S6 
 
EMERSON 
 
 mowed and muttered or made signs. The 
 mob roared whenever I attempted to speak, 
 and after several beginnings I withdrew." 
 There is nothing "painful" here: it is the 
 sublime exhibition of a great soul in bondage 
 to circumstance. 
 
 The thing to be noted is that this is the 
 same man, in the same state of excitement 
 about the same idea, who years before spoke 
 out in The American Scholar, in the Essays, 
 and in the Lectures. 
 
 What was it that had aroused in Emerson 
 such Promethean antagonism in 1837 but 
 those same forces which in 1850 came to 
 their culmination and assumed visible shape 
 in the person of Daniel Webster? The formal 
 victory of Webster drew Emerson into the 
 arena, and made a dramatic episode in his 
 life. But his battle with those forces had 
 begun thirteen years earlier, when he threw 
 down the gauntlet to them in his Phi Beta 
 Kappa oration. Emerson by his writings did 
 more than any other man to rescue the youth 
 of the next generation and fit them for the 
 fierce times to follow. It will not be denied 
 that he sent ten thousand sons to the war. 
 
 In speaking of Emerson's attitude toward 
 the anti-slavery cause, it has been possible to 
 dispense with any survey of that movement, 
 57 
 
EMERSON 
 
 because the movement was simple and speci- 
 fic and is well remembered. But when we 
 come to analyze the relations he bore to some 
 of the local agitations of his day, it becomes 
 necessary to weave in with the matter a dis- 
 cussion of certain tendencies deeply imbedded 
 in the life of his times, and of which he him- 
 self was in a sense an outcome. In speaking 
 of the Transcendentalists, who were essentially 
 the children of the Puritans, we must begin with 
 some study of the chief traits of Puritanism. 
 
 What parts the factors of climate, circum- 
 stance, and religion have respectively played 
 in the development of the New England char- 
 acter no analysis can determine. We may 
 trace the imaginary influence of a harsh creed 
 in the lines of the face. We may sometimes 
 follow from generation to generation the 
 course of a truth which at first sustained the 
 spirit of "man, till we see it petrify into a 
 dogma which now kills the spirits of men. 
 Conscience may destroy the character. The 
 tragedy of the New England judge enforcing 
 the Fugitive Slave Law was no new spectacle 
 in New England. A dogmatic crucifixion of 
 the natural instincts had been in progress 
 there for two hundred years. Emerson, who 
 is more free from dogma than any other 
 teacher that can be named, yet comes very 
 58 
 
EMERSON 
 
 near being dogmatic in his reiteration of the 
 Moral Law. 
 
 Whatever volume of Emerson we take up, 
 the Moral Law holds the same place in his 
 thoughts. It is the one statable revelation of 
 truth which he is ready to stake his all upon. 
 " The illusion that strikes me as the master- 
 piece in that ring of illusions which our life is, 
 is the timidity with which we assert our moral 
 sentiment. We are made of it, the world is 
 built by it, things endure as they share it ; all 
 beauty, all health, all intelligence exist by it ; 
 yet we shrink to speak of it or range ourselves 
 by its side. Nay, we presume strength of him 
 or them who deny it. Cities go against it, the 
 college goes against it, the courts snatch any 
 precedent at any vicious form of law to rule 
 it out; legislatures listen with appetite to 
 declamations against it and vote it down." 
 
 With this very beautiful and striking pas- 
 sage no one will quarrel, nor will any one 
 misunderstand it. 
 
 The following passage has the same sort 
 of poetical truth. "Things are saturated 
 with the moral law. There is no escape from 
 it. Violets and grass preach it; rain and 
 snow, wind and tides, every change, every 
 cause in Nature is nothing but a disguised 
 missionary." . . . 
 
 59 
 
EMERSON 
 
 But Emerson is not satisfied with metaphor. 
 " We affirm that in all men is this majestic 
 perception and command ; that it is the pres- 
 ence of the eternal in each perishing man ; that 
 it distances and degrades all statements of 
 whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and 
 confused stammerings before its silent revela- 
 tion. They report the truth. It is the truth." 
 In this last extract we have Emerson actually- 
 affirming that his dogma of the Moral Law 
 is Absolute Truth. He thinks it not merely 
 a form of truth, like the old theologies, but 
 very distinguishable from all other forms in 
 the past. 
 
 Curiously enough, his statement of the law 
 grows dogmatic and incisive in proportion as 
 he approaches the borderland between his 
 law and the natural instincts : " The last rev- 
 elation of intellect and of sentiment is that in a 
 manner it severs the man from all other men ; 
 makes known to him that the spiritual powers 
 are sufficient to him if no other being existed; 
 that he is to deal absolutely in the world, as 
 if he alone were a system and a state, and 
 though all should perish could make all 
 anew." Here we have the dogma applied, 
 and we see in it only a new form of old Cal- 
 vinism as cruel as Calvinism, and not much 
 different from its original. The italics are not 
 60 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Emerson's, but are inserted to bring out an 
 idea which is everywhere prevalent in his 
 teaching. 
 
 In this final form, the Moral Law, by insist- 
 ing that sheer conscience can slake the thirst 
 that rises in the soul, is convicted of false- 
 hood; and this heartless falsehood is the 
 same falsehood that has been put into the 
 porridge of every Puritan child for six genera- 
 tions. A grown man can digest doctrine and 
 sleep at night. But a young person of high 
 purpose and strong will, who takes such a lie 
 as this half-truth and feeds on it as on the 
 bread of life, will suffer. It will injure the 
 action of his heart. Truly the fathers have 
 eaten sour grapes, therefore the children's 
 teeth are set on edge. 
 
 To understand the civilization of cities, we 
 must look at the rural population from which 
 they draw their life. We have recently had 
 our attention called to the last remnants of 
 that village life so reverently gathered up by 
 Miss Wilkins, and of which Miss Emily Dick- 
 inson was the last authentic voice. The spirit 
 of this age has examined with an almost patho- 
 logical interest this rescued society. We must 
 go to it if we would understand Emerson, who 
 is the blossoming of its culture. We must 
 6i 
 
EMERSON 
 
 study it if we would arrive at any intelligent 
 and general view of that miscellaneous crop 
 of individuals who have been called the Tran- 
 scendentalists. 
 
 Between 1830 and 1840 there were already 
 signs in Nev/ England that the nutritive and 
 reproductive forces of society were not quite 
 wholesome, not exactly well adjusted. Self- 
 repression was the religion which had been 
 inherited. " Distrust Nature " was the motto 
 written upon the front of" the temple. What 
 would have happened to that society if left to 
 itself for another hundred years no man can 
 guess. It was rescued by the two great re- 
 generators of mankind, new land and war. 
 The dispersion came, as Emerson said of the 
 barbarian conquests of Rome, not a day too 
 soon. It happened that the country at large 
 stood in need of New England as much as 
 New England stood in need of the country. 
 This congested virtue, in order to be saved, 
 must be scattered. This ferment, in order to 
 be kept wholesome, must be used as leaven 
 to leaven the whole lump. " As you know," 
 says Emerson in his Eulogy on Boston, 
 " New England supplies annually a large de- 
 tachment of preachers and schoolmasters and 
 private tutors to the interior of the South and 
 West. . . . We are willing to see our sons 
 62 
 
EMERSON 
 
 emigrate, as to see our hives swarm. That 
 is what they were made to do, and what the 
 land wants and invites." 
 
 For purposes of yeast, there was never such 
 leaven as the Puritan stock. How little the 
 natural force of the race had really abated 
 became apparent when it was placed under 
 healthy conditions, given land to till, foes to 
 fight, the chance to renew its youth like the 
 eagle. But during this period the relief had 
 not yet come. The terrible pressure of Puri- 
 tanism and conservatism in New England 
 was causing a revolt not only of the Aboli- 
 tionists, but of another class of people of a 
 type not so virile as they. The times have 
 been smartly described by Lowell in his essay 
 on Thoreau : — 
 
 " Every possible form of intellectual and 
 physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. 
 Bran had its prophets. . . . Everybody had 
 a Mission (with a capital M) to attend to 
 everybody else's business. No brain but had 
 its private maggot, which must have found 
 pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a 
 few impecunious zealots abjured the use of 
 money (unless earned by other people), pro- 
 fessing to live on the internal revenues of the 
 spirit. Some had an assurance of instant 
 millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should 
 63 
 
EMERSON 
 
 be substituted for buttons. Communities 
 were established where everything was to be 
 common but common sense. . . . Conven- 
 tions were held for every hitherto inconceiv- 
 able purpose." 
 
 Whatever may be said of the Transcenden- 
 talists, it must not be forgotten that they 
 represented an elevation of feeling, which 
 through them qualified the next generation, 
 and can be traced in the life of New England 
 to-day. The strong intrinsic character lodged 
 in these recusants was later made manifest ; 
 for many of them became the best citizens of 
 the commonwealth, — statesmen, merchants, 
 soldiers, men and women of affairs. They 
 retained their idealism while becoming prac- 
 tical men. There is hardly an example of 
 what we should have thought would be com- 
 mon in their later lives, namely, a reaction 
 from so much ideal effort, and a plunge into 
 cynicism and malice, scoundrelism and the 
 flesh-pots. In their early life they resembled 
 the Abolitionists in their devotion to an idea ; 
 but with the Transcendentalists self-culture 
 and the aesthetic and sentimental education 
 took the place of more public aims. They 
 seem also to have been persons of greater 
 social refinement than the Abolitionists. 
 
 The Transcendentalists were sure of only 
 64 
 
EMERSON 
 
 one thing, — that society as constituted was 
 all wrong. In this their main belief they 
 were right. They were men and women 
 whose fundamental need was activity, contact 
 with real life, and the opportunity for social 
 expansion ; and they keenly felt the chill and 
 fictitious character of the reigning conven- 
 tionalities. The rigidity of behavior which 
 at this time characterized the Bostonians 
 seemed sometimes ludicrous and sometimes 
 disagreeable to the foreign visitor. There 
 was great gravity, together with a certain 
 pomp and dumbness, and these things were 
 supposed to be natural to the inhabitants and 
 to give them joy. People are apt to forget 
 that such masks are never worn with ease. 
 They result from the appHcation of an inflex- 
 ible will, and always inflict discomfort. The 
 Transcendentalists found themselves all but 
 stifled in a society as artificial in its decorum 
 as the court of France during the last years 
 of Louis XIV. 
 
 Emerson was in no way responsible for the 
 movement, although he got the credit of hav- 
 ing evoked it by his teaching. He was elder 
 brother to it, and was generated by its pa- 
 rental forces ; but even if Emerson had never 
 lived, the Transcendentalists would have ap- 
 peared. He was their victim rather than their 
 S 65 
 
EMERSON 
 
 cause. He was always tolerant of them and 
 sometimes amused at them, and disposed to 
 treat them lightly. It is impossible to analyze 
 their case with more astuteness than he did 
 in an editorial letter in The Dial. The letter 
 is cold, but is a masterpiece of good sense. 
 He had, he says, received fifteen letters on the 
 Prospects of Culture. "Excellent reasons 
 have been shown us why the writers, obviously 
 persons of sincerity and elegance, should be 
 dissatisfied with the life they lead, and with 
 their company. . . . They want a friend to 
 whom they can speak and from whom they 
 may hear now and then a reasonable word." 
 After discussing one or two of their proposals, 
 — one of which was that the tiresome " uncles 
 and aunts " of the enthusiasts should be placed 
 by themselves in one delightful village, the 
 dough, as Emerson says, be placed in one 
 pan and the leaven in another, — he con- 
 tinues : " But it would be unjust not to remind 
 our younger friends that whilst this aspiration 
 has always made its mark in the lives of men 
 of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not 
 remain a detached object, but is satisfied along 
 with the satisfaction of other aims." Young 
 Americans " are educated above the work of 
 their times and country, and disdain it. Many 
 of the more acute minds pass into a lofty 
 66 
 
EMERSON 
 
 criticism . . . which only embitters their sen- 
 sibility to the evil, and widens the feeling of 
 hostility between them and the citizens at 
 large. . . . We should not know where to find 
 in Hterature any record of so much unbalanced 
 intellectuality, such undeniable apprehension 
 without talent, so much power without equal 
 applicability, as our young men pretend to. 
 . . . The balance of mind and body will re- 
 dress itself fast enough. Superficialness is the 
 real distemper. ... It is certain that specu- 
 lation is no succedaneum for life." He then 
 turns to find the cure for these distempers in the 
 farm lands of Illinois, at that time already be- 
 ing fenced in " almost like New England itself," 
 and closes with a suggestion that so long as 
 there is a woodpile in the yard, and the 
 " wrongs of the Indian, of the Negro, of the 
 emigrant, remain unmitigated," relief might 
 be found even nearer home. 
 
 In his lecture on the Transcendentalists he 
 says : " . . . But their solitary and fastidious 
 manners not only withdraw them from the 
 conversation, but from the labors of the 
 world : they are not good citizens, not good 
 members of society; unwillingly they bear 
 their part of the public and private burdens ; 
 they do not willingly share in the public 
 charities, in the public religious rites, in the 
 67 
 
EMERSON 
 
 enterprises of education, of missions foreign 
 and domestic, in the abolition of the slave- 
 trade, or in the temperance society. They 
 do not even like to vote." A less sympathetic 
 observer, Harriet Martineau, wrote of them : 
 " While Margaret Fuller and her adult pupils 
 sat ' gorgeously dressed,' talking about Mars 
 and Venus, Plato and Goethe, and fancying 
 themselves the elect of the earth in intellect 
 and refinement, the liberties of the republic 
 were running out as fast as they could go at a 
 breach which another sort of elect persons 
 were devoting themselves to repair ; and my 
 complaint against the • gorgeous ' pedants 
 was that they regarded their preservers as 
 hewers of wood and drawers of water, and 
 their work as a less vital one than the pedan- 
 tic orations which were spoiling a set of well- 
 meaning women in a pitiable way." Harriet 
 Martineau, whose whole work was practical, 
 and who wrote her journal in 1855 and 
 in the light of history, was hardly able to 
 do justice to these unpractical but sincere 
 spirits. 
 
 Emerson was divided from the Transcen- 
 dentahsts by his common sense. His shrewd 
 business intellect made short work of their 
 schemes. Each one of their social projects 
 contained some covert economic weakness, 
 68 
 
EMERSON 
 
 which always turned out to lie in an attack 
 upon the integrity of the individual, and which 
 Emerson of all men could be counted on to 
 detect. He was divided from them also by 
 the fact that he was a man of genius, who had 
 sought out and fought out his means of ex- 
 pression. He was a great artist, and as such 
 he was a complete being. No one could give 
 to him nor take from him. His yearnings 
 found fruition in expression. He was sure of 
 his place and of his use in this world. But 
 the Transcendentalists were neither geniuses 
 nor artists nor complete beings. Nor had 
 they found their places or uses as yet. They 
 were men and women seeking light. They 
 walked in dry places, seeking rest and finding 
 none. The Transcendentalists are not col- 
 lectively important because their Sturm und 
 Drangvi3.s intellectual and bloodless. Though 
 Emerson admonish and Harriet Martineau 
 condemn, yet from the memorials that sur- 
 vive, one is more impressed with the suffer- 
 ings than with the ludicrousness of these 
 persons. There is something distressing 
 about their letters, their talk, their memoirs, 
 their interminable diaries. They worry and 
 contort and introspect. They rave and 
 dream. They peep and theorize. They cut 
 open the bellows of life to see where the wind 
 69 
 
EMERSON 
 
 comes from. Margaret Fuller analyzes Em- 
 erson, and Emerson Margaret Fuller. It is 
 not a wholesome ebullition of vitality. It is a 
 nightmare, in which the emotions, the terror, 
 the agony, the rapture, are all unreal, and 
 have no vital content, no consequence in the 
 world outside. It is positively wonderful 
 that so much excitement and so much suffer- 
 ing should have left behind nothing in the 
 field of art which is valuable. All that intel- 
 ligence could do toward solving problems for 
 his friends Emerson did. But there are situ- 
 ations in life in which the intelligence is help- 
 less, and in which something else, something 
 perhaps possessed by a ploughboy, is more 
 divine than Plato. 
 
 If it were not pathetic, there would be 
 something cruel — indeed there is something 
 cruel — in Emerson's incapacity to deal with 
 Margaret Fuller. He wrote to her on October 
 24, 1840: "My dear Margaret, I have your 
 frank and noble and affecting letter, and yet I 
 think I could wish it unwritten. I ought 
 never to have suffered you to lead me into 
 any conversation or writing on our relation, a 
 topic from which with all persons my Genius 
 warns me away." 
 
 The letter proceeds with unimpeachable 
 emptiness and integrity in the same strain. 
 70 
 
EMERSON 
 
 In 1 841 he writes in his diary : " Strange, 
 cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversation 
 with Margaret, whom I always admire, most 
 revere when I nearest see, and sometimes 
 love; yet whom I freeze and who freezes 
 me to silence when we promise to come 
 nearest." 
 
 Human sentiment was known to Emerson 
 mainly in the form of pain. His nature 
 shunned it ; he cast it off as quickly as pos- 
 sible. There is a word or two in the essay on 
 Love which seems to show that the inner and 
 diaphanous core of this seraph had once, but 
 not for long, been shot with blood : he recalls 
 only the pain of it. His relations with Mar- 
 garet Fuller seem never normal, though they 
 lasted for years. This brilliant woman was in 
 distress. She was asking for bread, and he 
 was giving her a stone, and neither of them 
 was conscious of what was passing. This is 
 pitiful. It makes us clutch about us to catch 
 hold, if we somehow may, of the hand of a 
 man. 
 
 There was manliness in Horace Greeley, 
 under whom Miss Fuller worked on the New 
 York Tribune not many years afterward. She 
 wrote : " Mr. Greeley I like, — nay, more, 
 love. He is in his habit a plebeian, in his 
 heart a nobleman. His abilities in his own 
 71 
 
EMERSON 
 
 way are great. He believes in mine to a sur- 
 prising degree. We are true friends." 
 
 This anaemic incompleteness of Emerson's 
 character can be traced to the philosophy of 
 his race; at least it can be followed in that 
 philosophy. There is an implication of 
 a fundamental falsehood in every bit of 
 Transcendentalism, including Emerson. That 
 falsehood consists in the theory of the self- 
 sufficiency of each individual, men and women 
 alike. Margaret Fuller is a good example of 
 the effect of this philosophy, because her 
 history afterward showed that she was con- 
 stituted like other human beings, was depend- 
 ent upon human relationship, and was not 
 only a very noble, but also a very womanly 
 creature. Her marriage, her Italian life, and 
 her tragic death light up with the splendor of 
 reality the earlier and unhappy period of her 
 life. This woman had been driven into her 
 vagaries by the lack of something which she 
 did not know existed, and which she sought 
 blindly in metaphysics. Harriet Martineau 
 writes of her : " It is the most grievous loss I 
 have almost ever known in private history, the 
 deferring of Margaret Fuller's married life so 
 long. That noble last period of her life is 
 happily on record as well as the earlier." 
 The hardy Englishwoman has here laid a kind 
 72 
 
EMERSON 
 
 human hand on the weakness of New England, 
 and seems to be unconscious that she is 
 making a revelation as to the whole Tran- 
 scendental movement. But the point is this : 
 there was no one within reach of Margaret 
 Fuller, in her early days, who knew what was 
 her need. One offered her Kant, one Comte, 
 one Fourier, one Swedenborg, one the Moral 
 Law. You cannot feed the heart on these 
 things. 
 
 Yet there is a bright side to this New Eng- 
 land spirit, which seems, if we look only to 
 the graver emotions, so dry, dismal, and de- 
 ficient. A bright and cheery courage appears 
 in certain natures of which the sun has made 
 conquest, that almost reconciles us to all loss, 
 so splendid is the outcome. The practical, 
 dominant, insuppressible active temperaments 
 who have a word for every emergency, and 
 who carry the controlled force of ten men at 
 their disposal, are the fruits of this same spirit. 
 Emerson knew not tears, but he and the 
 hundred other beaming and competent char- 
 acters which New England has produced 
 make us almost envy their state. They give 
 us again the old Stoics at their best. 
 
 Very closely connected with this subject — 
 the crisp and cheery New England tempera- 
 ment — lies another which any discussion of 
 73 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Emerson must bringup, — namely, Asceticism. 
 It is probable that in dealing with Emerson's 
 feelings about the plastic arts we have to do 
 with what is really the inside, or metaphysical 
 side, of the same phenomena which present 
 themselves on the outside, or physical side, in 
 the shape of asceticism. 
 
 Emerson's natural asceticism is revealed to 
 us in almost every form in which history can 
 record a man. It is in his philosophy, in his 
 style, in his conduct, and in his appearance. 
 It was, however, not in his voice. Mr. Cabot, 
 with that reverence for which every one must 
 feel personally grateful to him, has preserved 
 a description of Emerson by the New York 
 journalist, N. P. Willis : " It is a voice with 
 shoulders in it, which he has not; with lungs 
 in it far larger than his; with a walk which 
 the public never see ; with a fist in it which 
 his own hand never gave him the model for ; 
 and with a gentleman in it which his parochial 
 and ' bare-necessaries-of-life ' sort of exterior 
 gives no other betrayal of. We can imagine 
 nothing in nature (which seems too to have a 
 type for everything) like the want of corre- 
 spondence between the Emerson that goes in 
 at the eye and the Emerson that goes in at 
 the ear. A heavy and vase-like blossom of a 
 magnolia, with fragrance enough to perfume 
 74 
 
EMERSON 
 
 a whole wilderness, which should be lifted by 
 a whirlwind and dropped into a branch of 
 aspen, would not seem more as if it could 
 never have grown there than Emerson's voice 
 seems inspired and foreign to his visible and 
 natural body." Emerson's ever exquisite 
 and wonderful good taste seems closely con- 
 nected with this asceticism, and it is probable 
 that his taste influenced his views and conduct 
 to some small extent. 
 
 The anti-slavery people were not always 
 refined. They were constantly doing things 
 which were tactically very effective, but were 
 not calculated to attract the over-sensitive. 
 Garrison's rampant and impersonal egotism 
 was good politics, but bad taste. Wendell 
 Phillips did not hesitate upon occasion to 
 deal in personalities of an exasperating kind. 
 One sees a certain shrinking in Emerson from 
 ^he taste of the Abolitionists. It was ' not 
 merely their doctrines or their methods which 
 offended him. He at one time refused to 
 give Wendell Phillips his hand because of 
 Phillips's treatment of his friend. Judge Hoar. 
 One hardly knows whether to be pleased at 
 Emerson for showing a human weakness, or 
 annoyed at him for not being more of a man. 
 The anecdote is valuable in both lights. It is 
 like a tiny speck on the crystal of his character 
 75 
 
EMERSON 
 
 which shows us the exact location of the orb, 
 and it is the best illustration of the feeling of 
 the times which has come down to us. 
 
 If by " asceticism " we mean an experiment 
 in starving the senses, there is little harm in 
 it. Nature will soon reassert her dominion, 
 and very likely our perceptions will be sharp- 
 ened by the trial. But " natural asceticism " 
 is a thing hardly to be distinguished from 
 functional weakness. What is natural asceti- 
 cism but a lack of vigor ? Does it not tend 
 to close the avenues between the soul and the 
 universe? " Is it not so much death? " The 
 accounts of Emerson show him to have been 
 a man in whom there was almost a hiatus 
 between the senses and the most inward spirit 
 of life. The lower register of sensations and 
 emotions which domesticate a man into fel- 
 lowship with common life was weak. Genial 
 familiarity was to him impossible; laughter 
 was almost a pain. " It is not the sea and 
 poverty and pursuit that separate us. Here 
 is Alcott by my door, — yet is the union more 
 profound ? No ! the sea, vocation, poverty, 
 are seeming fences, but man is insular and 
 cannot be touched. Every man is an infi- 
 nitely repellent orb, and holds his individual 
 being on that condition. . . . Most of the 
 persons whom I see in my own house I see 
 76 
 
EMERSON 
 
 across a gulf; I cannot go to them nor they 
 come to me." 
 
 This aloofness of Emerson must be remem- 
 bered only as blended with his benignity. 
 " His friends were all that knew him," and, as 
 Dr. Holmes said, " his smile was the well- 
 remembered line of Terence written out in 
 living features." Emerson's journals show 
 the difficulty of his intercourse even with him- 
 self. He could not reach himself at will, nor 
 could another reach him. The sensuous and 
 ready contact with nature which more carnal 
 people enjoy was unknown" to him. He had 
 eyes for the New England landscape, but for 
 no other scenery. If there is one supreme 
 sensation reserved for man, it is the vision of 
 Venice seen from the water. This sight 
 greeted Emerson at the age of thirty. The 
 famous city, as he approached it by boat, 
 " looked for some time like nothing but New 
 York. It is a great oddity, a city for beavers, 
 but to my thought a most disagreeable resi- 
 dence. You feel always in prison and soli- 
 tary. It is as if you were always at sea. I 
 soon had enough of it." 
 
 Emerson's contempt for travel and for the 
 
 "rococo toy," Italy, is too well known to 
 
 need citation. It proceeds from the same 
 
 deficiency of sensation. His eyes saw noth- 
 
 77 
 
EMERSON 
 
 ing; his ears heard nothing. He believed 
 that men travelled for distraction and to kill 
 time. The most vulgar plutocrat could not 
 be blinder to beauty nor bring home less from 
 Athens than this cultivated saint. Everything 
 in the world which must be felt with a glow 
 in the breast, in order to be understood, was 
 to him dead-letter. Art was a name to him ; 
 music was a name to him ; love was a name 
 to him. His essay on Love is a nice compila- 
 tion of compliments and elegant phrases end- 
 ing up with some icy morality. It seems 
 very well fitted for a gift-book or an old-fash- 
 ioned lady's annual. 
 
 " The lovers delight in endearments, in 
 avowals of love, in comparisons of their re- 
 gards. . . . The soul which is in the soul of 
 each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects 
 incongruities, defects, and disproportion in 
 the behavior of the other. Hence arise 
 surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that 
 which drew them to each other was signs of 
 loveliness, signs of virtue ; and these virtues 
 are there, however eclipsed. They appear 
 and reappear and continue to attract; but 
 the regard changes, quits the sign and at- 
 taches to the substance. This repairs the 
 wounded affection. Meantime, as Hfe wears 
 on, it proves a game of permutation and com- 
 78 
 
EMERSON 
 
 bination of all possible positions of the par- 
 ties, to employ all the resources of each, and 
 acquaint each with the weakness of the 
 other. ... At last they discover that all 
 which at first drew them together — those 
 once sacred features, that magical play of 
 charms — was deciduous, had a prospective 
 end like the scaffolding by which the house 
 was built, and the purification of the intellect 
 and the heart from year to year is the real 
 marriage, foreseen and prepared from the 
 first, and wholly above their conscious- 
 ness. . . . Thus are we put in training for a 
 love which knows not sex nor person nor 
 partiality, but which seeks wisdom and virtue 
 everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue 
 and wisdom. . . . There are moments when 
 the affections rule and absorb the man, and 
 make his happiness dependent on a person or 
 persons. But in health the mind is presently 
 seen again," etc. 
 
 All this is not love, but the merest literary 
 coquetry. Love is different from this. Lady 
 Burton, when a very young girl, and six 
 years before her engagement, met Burton at 
 Boulogne. They met in the street, but did 
 not speak. A few days later they were for- 
 mally introduced at a dance. Of this she 
 writes: "That was a night of nights. He 
 79 
 
EMERSON 
 
 waltzed with me once, and spoke to me 
 several times. I kept the sash where he put 
 his arm around me and my gloves, and never 
 wore them again." 
 
 A glance at what Emerson says about 
 marriage shows that he suspected that institu- 
 tion. He can hardly speak of it without 
 some sort of caveat or precaution. " Though 
 the stuff of tragedy and of romances is in a 
 moral union of two superior persons whose 
 confidence in each other for long years, out 
 of sight and in sight, and against all appear- 
 ances, is at last justified by victorious proof 
 of probity to gods and men, causing joyful 
 emotions, tears, and glory, — though there be 
 for heroes this moral union, yet they too are 
 as far as ever from an intellectual union, and 
 the moral is for low and external purposes, 
 like the corporation of a ship's company or 
 of a fire club." In speaking of modern 
 novels, he says : " There is no new element, 
 no power, no furtherance. 'T is only confec- 
 tionery, not the raising of new corn. Great 
 is the poverty of their inventions. She was 
 beautiful, and he fell in love. . . . Happy 
 will that house be in which the relations are 
 formed by character; after the highest and 
 not after the lowest; the house in which 
 character marries and not confusion and a 
 80 
 
EMERSON 
 
 miscellany of unavowable motives. ... To 
 each occurs soon after puberty, some event, 
 or society or way of living, which becomes 
 the crisis of life and the chief fact in their 
 history. In women it is love and marriage 
 (which is more reasonable), and yet it is 
 pitiful to date and measure all the facts and 
 sequel of an unfolding life from such a youth- 
 ful and generally inconsiderate period as the 
 age of courtship and marriage. . . . Women 
 more than all are the element and kingdom 
 of illusion. Being fascinated they fascinate. 
 They see through Claude Lorraines. And 
 how dare any one, if he could, pluck away 
 the coulisses, stage effects and ceremonies by 
 which they live ? Too pathetic, too pitiable, 
 is the region of affection, apd its atmosphere 
 always liable to mirage." 
 
 We are all so concerned that a man who 
 writes about love shall tell the truth that if he 
 chance to start from premises which are false 
 or mistaken, his conclusions will appear not 
 merely false, but offensive. It makes no 
 matter how exalted the personal character of 
 the writer may be. Neither sanctity nor 
 intellect nor moral enthusiasm, though they 
 be intensified to the point of incandescence, 
 can make up for a want of nature. 
 
 This perpetual splitting up of love into two 
 6 8i 
 
EMERSON 
 
 species, one of which is condemned, but 
 admitted to be useful — is it not degrading? 
 There is in Emerson's theory of the relation 
 between the sexes neither good sense, nor 
 manly feeling, nor sound psychology. It is 
 founded on none of these things. It is a pure 
 piece of dogmatism, and reminds us that he 
 was bred to the priesthood. We are not to 
 imagine that there was in this doctrine any- 
 thing peculiar to Emerson. But we are sur- 
 prised to find the pessimism inherent in the 
 doctrine overcome Emerson, to whom pessi- 
 mism is foreign. Both doctrine and pessimism 
 are a part of the Puritanism of the times. 
 They show a society in which the intellect 
 had long been used to analyze the affections, 
 in which the head had become dislocated 
 from the body. To this disintegration of the 
 simple passion of love may be traced the lack 
 of maternal tenderness characteristic of the 
 New England nature. The relation between 
 the blood and the brain was not quite normal 
 in this civilization, nor in Emerson, who is 
 its most remarkable representative. 
 
 If we take two steps backward from the 
 canvas of this mortal life and glance at it im- 
 partially, we shall see that these matters of 
 love and marriage pass like a pivot through 
 the lives of almost every individual, and are, 
 
 82 
 
EMERSON 
 
 sociologically speaking, the primum mobile of 
 the world. The books of any philosopher 
 who slurs them or distorts them will hold up 
 a false mirror to life. If an inhabitant of 
 another planet should visit the earth, he would 
 receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human 
 life by attending an Italian opera than he 
 would by reading Emerson's volumes. He 
 would learn from the Italian opera that there 
 were two sexes ; and this, after all, is proba- 
 bly the fact with which the education of such 
 a stranger ought to begin. 
 
 In a review of Emerson's personal charac- 
 ter and opinions, we are thus led to see that 
 his philosophy, which finds no room for the 
 emotions, is a faithful exponent of his own 
 and of the New England temperament, which 
 distrusts and dreads the emotions. Regarded 
 as a sole guide to life for a young person of 
 strong conscience and undeveloped affections, 
 his works might conceivably be even harmful 
 because of their unexampled power of purely 
 intellectual stimulation. 
 
 Emerson's poetry has given rise to much 
 heart-burning and disagreement. Some peo- 
 ple do not like it. They fail to find the fire 
 in the ice. On the other hand, his poems 
 appeal not only to a large number of pro- 
 83 
 
EMERSON 
 
 fessed lovers of poetry, but also to a class of 
 readers who find in Emerson an element for 
 which they search the rest of poesy in vain. 
 
 It is the irony of fate that his admirers 
 should be more than usually sensitive about 
 his fame. This prophet who desired not to 
 have followers, lest he too should become a 
 cult and a convention, and whose main thesis 
 throughout life was that piety is a crime, has 
 been calmly canonized and embalmed in am- 
 ber by the very forces he braved. He is 
 become a tradition and a sacred relic. You 
 must speak of him under your breath, and 
 you may not laugh near his shrine. 
 
 Emerson's passion for nature was not like 
 the passion of Keats or of Burns, of Coleridge 
 or of Robert Browning ; compared with these 
 men he is cold. His temperature is below 
 blood-heat, and his volume of poems stands 
 on the shelf of English poets like the icy fish 
 which in Caliban upon Setebos is described as 
 finding himself thrust into the warm ooze of 
 an ocean not his own. 
 
 But Emerson is a poet, nevertheless, a very 
 extraordinary and rare man of genius, whose 
 verses carry a world of their own within them. 
 They are overshadowed by the greatness of 
 his prose, but they are authentic. He is the 
 chief poet of that school of which Emily 
 84 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Dickinson is a minor poet. His poetry is a 
 successful spiritual deliverance of great inter- 
 est. His worship of the New England land- 
 scape amounts to a religion. His poems do 
 that most wonderful thing, make us feel that 
 we are alone in the fields and with the trees, — 
 not English fields nor French lanes, but New 
 England meadows and uplands. There is no 
 human creature in sight, not even Emerson 
 is there, but the wind and the flowers, the 
 wild birds, the fences, the transparent atmos- 
 phere, the breath of nature. There is a deep 
 and true relation between the intellectual and 
 almost dry brilliancy of Emerson's feelings 
 and the landscape itself. Here is no de- 
 fective English poet, no Shelley without the 
 charm, but an American poet, a New England 
 poet with two hundred years of New England 
 culture and New England landscape in 
 him. 
 
 People are forever speculating upon what 
 will last, what posterity will approve, and 
 some people beheve that Emerson's poetry 
 will outlive his prose. The question is idle. 
 The poems are alive now, and they may or 
 may not survive the race whose spirit they 
 embody ; but one thing is plain : they have 
 qualities which have preserved poetry in the 
 past. They are utterly indigenous and sin- 
 85 
 
EMERSON 
 
 cere. They are short. They represent a 
 civilization and a climate. 
 
 His verse divides itself into several classes. 
 We have the single lyrics, written somewhat 
 in the style of the later seventeenth century. 
 Of these The Humble Bee is the most ex- 
 quisite, and although its tone and imagery 
 can be traced to various well-known and 
 dainty bits of poetry, it is by no means an 
 imitation, but a masterpiece of fine taste. 
 The Rhodora and Terminus and perhaps a 
 few others belong to that class of poetry 
 which, like Abou Ben Adhem, is poetry be- 
 cause it is the perfection of statement. The 
 Boston Hymn, the Concord Ode, and the 
 other occasional pieces fall in another class, 
 and do not seem to be important. The first 
 two lines of the Ode, 
 
 " O tenderly the haughty day 
 Fills his blue urn with fire." 
 
 are for their extraordinary beauty worthy of 
 some mythical Greek, some Simonides, some 
 Sappho, but the rest of the lines are com- 
 monplace. Throughout his poems there are 
 good bits, happy and golden lines, snatches 
 of grace. He himself knew the quality of his 
 poetry, and wrote of it, 
 
 " All were sifted through and through. 
 Five lines lasted sound and true." 
 86 
 
EMERSON 
 
 He is never merely conventional, and his po- 
 etry, like his prose, is homespun and sound. 
 But his ear was defective: his rhymes are 
 crude, and his verse is often lame and un- 
 musical, a fault which can be countervailed 
 by nothing but force, and force he lacks. To 
 say that his ear was defective is hardly strong 
 enough. Passages are not uncommon which 
 hurt the reader and unfit him to proceed ; as, 
 for example : — 
 
 " Thorough a thousand voices 
 Spoke the universal dame : 
 ' Who telleth one of my meanings 
 Is master of all I am.' " 
 
 He himself has very well described the im- 
 pression his verse is apt to make on a new 
 reader when he says, — ; 
 
 " Poetry must not freeze, but flow." 
 
 The lovers of Emerson's poems freely ac- 
 knowledge all these defects, but find in them 
 another element, very subtle and rare, very 
 refined and elusive, if not altogether unique. 
 This is the mystical element or strain which 
 qualifies many of his poems, and to which 
 some of them are wholly devoted. 
 
 There has been so much discussion as to 
 Emerson's relation to the mystics that it is 
 well here to turn aside for a moment and 
 87 
 
EMERSON 
 
 consider the matter by itself. The elusive- 
 ness of " mysticism " arises out of the fact 
 that it is not a creed, but a state of mind. It is 
 formulated into no dogmas, but, in so far as it 
 is communicable, it is conveyed, or sought to 
 be conveyed, by symbols. These symbols to 
 a sceptical or an unsympathetic person will 
 say nothing, but the presumption among 
 those who are inclined towards the cult is 
 that if these symbols convey anything at all, 
 that thing is mysticism. The mystics are 
 right. The familiar phrases, terms, and sym- 
 bols of mysticism are not meaningless, and a 
 glance at them shows that they do tend 
 to express and evoke a somewhat definite 
 psychic condition. 
 
 There is a certain mood of mind experi- 
 enced by most of us in which we feel the 
 mystery of existence ; in which our conscious- 
 ness seems to become suddenly separated 
 from our thoughts, and we find ourselves 
 asking, " Who am I ? What are these 
 thoughts ? " The mood is very apt to over- 
 take us while engaged in the commonest acts. 
 In health it is always momentary, and seems 
 to coincide with the instant of the transition 
 and shift of our attention from one thing to 
 another. It is probably connected with the 
 transfer of energy from one set of faculties to 
 88 
 
EMERSON 
 
 another set, which occurs, for instance, on 
 our waking from sleep, on our hearing a bell 
 at night, on our observing any common ob- 
 ject, a chair or a pitcher, at a time when our 
 mind is or has just been thoroughly pre- 
 occupied with something else. This dis- 
 placement of the attention occurs in its most 
 notable form when we walk from the study 
 into the open fields. Nature then attacks us 
 on all sides at once, overwhelms, drowns, and 
 destroys our old thoughts, stimulates vaguely 
 and all at once a thousand new ideas, dissi- 
 pates all focus of thought and dissolves our 
 attention. If we happen to be mentally fa- 
 tigued, and we take a walk in the country, 
 a sense of immense relief, of rest and joy, 
 which nothing else on earth can give, accom- 
 panies this distraction of the mind from its 
 problems. The reaction fills us with a sense 
 of mystery and expansion. It brings us to 
 the threshold of those spiritual experiences 
 which are the obscure core and reality of our 
 existence, ever alive within us, but generally 
 veiled and sub-conscious. It brings us, as it 
 were, into the ante-chamber of art, poetry, 
 and music. The condition is one of excita- 
 tion and receptiveness, where art may speak 
 and we shall understand. On the other hand, 
 the condition shows a certain dethronement 
 89 
 
EMERSON 
 
 of the will and attention which may ally it to 
 the hypnotic state. 
 
 Certain kinds of poetry imitate this method of 
 nature by calling on us with a thousand voices 
 at once. Poetry deals often with vague or con- 
 tradictory statements, with a jumble of images, 
 a throng of impressions. But in true poetry 
 the psychology of real life is closely followed. 
 The mysticism is momentary. We are not kept 
 suspended in a limbo, " trembling like a guilty 
 thing surprised," but are ushered into another 
 world of thought and feeling. On the other 
 hand, a mere statement of inconceivable things 
 is the redu-ctio ad absurdum of poetry, because 
 such a statement puzzles the mind, scatters 
 the attention, and does to a certain extent 
 superinduce the " blank misgivings " of mys- 
 ticism. It does this, however, without going 
 further and filling the mind with new life. If 
 I bid a man follow my reasoning closely, and 
 then say, " I am the slayer and the slain, I am 
 the doubter and the doubt," I puzzle his mind, 
 and may succeed in reawakening in him the 
 sense he has often had come over him that we 
 are ignorant of our own destinies and cannot 
 grasp the meaning of life. If I do this, noth- 
 ing can be a more legitimate opening for a 
 poem, for it is an opening of the reader's 
 mind. Emerson, like many other highly or- 
 90 
 
EMERSON 
 
 ganized persons, was acquainted with the 
 mystic mood. It was not momentary with 
 him. It haunted him, and he seems to have 
 believed that the whole of poetry and religion 
 was contained in the mood. And no one can 
 gainsay that this mental condition is intimately 
 connected with our highest feelings and leads 
 directly into them. 
 
 The fault with Emerson is that he stops in 
 the ante-chamber of poetry. He is content 
 if he has brought us to the hypnotic point. 
 His prologue and overture are excellent, but 
 where is the argument ? Where is the sub- 
 stantial artistic content that shall feed our 
 souls ? 
 
 The Sphinx is a fair example of an Emerson 
 poem. The opening verses are musical, 
 though they are handicapped by a reminis- 
 cence of the German way of writing. In the 
 succeeding verses we are lapped into a charm- 
 ing reverie, and then at the end suddenly 
 jolted by the question, "What is it all 
 about ? " In this poem we see expanded 
 into four or five pages of verse an experience 
 which in real life endures an eighth of a sec- 
 ond, and when we come to the end of the 
 mood we are at the end of the poem. 
 
 There is no question that the power to 
 throw your sitter into a receptive mood by a 
 91 
 
EMERSON 
 
 pass or two which shall give you his virgin 
 attention is necessary to any artist. Nobody 
 has the knack of this more strongly than 
 Emerson in his prose writings. By a phrase 
 or a common remark he creates an ideal at- 
 mosphere in which his thought has the direct- 
 ness of great poetry. But he cannot do it 
 in verse. He seeks in his verse to do the 
 very thing which he avoids doing in his prose : 
 follow a logical method. He seems to know 
 too much what he is about, and to be content 
 with doing too little. His mystical poems, 
 from the point of view of such criticism as 
 this, are all alike in that they all seek to do 
 the same thing. Nor does he always succeed. 
 How does he sometimes fail in verse to say 
 what he conveys with such everlasting happi- 
 ness in prose ! 
 
 " I am owner of the sphere. 
 Of the seven stars and the solar year, 
 Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain, 
 Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain." 
 
 In these lines we have the same thought 
 which appears a few pages later in prose: 
 "All that Shakespeare says of the king, 
 yonder slip of a boy that reads in the 
 corner feels to be true of himself"- He has 
 failed in the verse because he has thrown a 
 mystical gloss over a thought which was 
 92 
 
EMERSON 
 
 stronger in its simplicity; because in the 
 verse he states an abstraction instead of giving 
 an instance. The same failure follows him 
 sometimes in prose when he is too conscious 
 of his machinery. 
 
 Emerson knew that the sense of mystery 
 accompanies the shift of an absorbed attention 
 to some object which brings the mind back to 
 the present. " There are times when the 
 cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, a 
 boy's willow whistle, or a farmer planting in 
 his field is more suggestive to the mind than 
 the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican would be 
 in another hour. In like mood; an old verse, 
 or certain words, gleam with rare significance." 
 At the close of his essay on History he is 
 trying to make us feel that all history, in so 
 far as we can know it, is within ourselves, and 
 is in a certain sense autobiography. He is 
 speaking of the Romans, and he suddenly 
 pretends to see a lizard on the wall, and 
 proceeds to wonder what the lizard has to do 
 with the Romans. For this he has been quite 
 properly laughed at by Dr. Holmes, because 
 he has resorted to an artifice and has failed to 
 create an illusion. Indeed, Dr. Holmes is 
 somewhere so irreverent as to remark that a 
 gill of alcohol will bring on a psychical state 
 very similar to that suggested by Emerson ; 
 93 
 
EMERSON 
 
 and Dr. Holmes is accurately happy in his 
 jest, because alcohol does dislocate the atten- 
 tion in a thoroughly mystical manner. 
 
 There is throughout Emerson's poetry, as 
 throughout all of the New England poetry, 
 too much thought, too much argument. 
 Some of his verse gives the reader a very 
 curious and subtle impression that the lines 
 are a translation. This is because he is 
 closely following a thesis. Indeed, the lines 
 are a translation. They were thought first, 
 and poetry afterwards. Read off his poetry, 
 and you see through the scheme of it at once. 
 Read his prose, and you will be put to it to 
 make out the connection of ideas. The 
 reason is that in the poetry the sequence is 
 intellectual, in the prose the sequence is emo- 
 tional. It is no mere epigram to say that his 
 poetry is governed by the ordinary laws of 
 prose writing, and his prose by the laws of 
 poetry. 
 
 The lines entitled Days have a dramatic 
 vigor, a mystery, and a music all their own : — 
 
 " Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 
 Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 
 And marching single in an endless file, 
 Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
 To each they offer gifts after his will. 
 Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. 
 94 
 
EMERSON 
 
 I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 
 Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 
 Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 
 Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 
 Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn." 
 
 The prose version of these lines, which in 
 this case is inferior, is to be found in Works and 
 Days : " He only is rich who owns the day. . . . 
 They come and go like muffled and veiled 
 figures, sent from a distant friendly party ; but 
 they say nothing, and if we do not use the 
 gifts they bring, they carry them as silently 
 away." 
 
 That Emerson had within him the soul of 
 a poet no one will question, but his poems 
 are expressed in prose forms. There are 
 passages in his early addresses which can be 
 matched in English only by bits from Sir 
 Thomas Browne or Milton, or from the great 
 poets. Heine might have written the follow- 
 ing parable into verse, but it could not have 
 been finer. It comes from the very bottom 
 of Emerson's nature. It is his uttermost. 
 Infancy and manhood and old age, the first 
 and the last of him, speak in it. 
 
 " Every god is there sitting in his sphere. 
 The young mortal enters the hall of the firma- 
 ment ; there is he alone with them alone, they 
 pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and 
 95 
 
EMERSON 
 
 beckoning him up to their thrones. On the 
 instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of 
 illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd 
 which sways this way and that, and whose 
 movements and doings he must obey; he 
 fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. 
 The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now 
 furiously commanding this thing to be done, 
 now that. What is he that he should resist 
 their will, and think or act for himself? Every 
 moment new changes and new showers of 
 deceptions to baffle and distract him. And 
 when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears 
 and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods 
 still sitting around him on their thrones, — 
 they alone with him alone." 
 
 With the war closes the colonial period of 
 our history, and with the end of the war 
 begins our national life. Before that time it 
 was not possible for any man to speak for the 
 nation, however much he might long to, for 
 there was no nation ; there were only discord- 
 ant provinces held together by the exercise 
 on the part of each of a strong and conscien- 
 tious will. It is too much to expect that 
 national character shall be expressed before 
 it is developed, or that the arts shall flourish 
 during a period when everybody is preoccu- 
 96 
 
EMERSON 
 
 pied with the fear of revolution. The provin- 
 cial note which runs through all our literature 
 down to the war resulted in one sense from 
 our dependence upon Europe. " All Ameri- 
 can manners, language, and writings," says 
 Emerson, " are derivative. We do not write 
 from facts, but we wish to state the facts after 
 the English manner. It is the tax we pay for 
 the splendid inheritance of English Litera- 
 ture." But in a deeper sense this very 
 dependence upon Europe was due to our dis- 
 union among ourselves. The equivocal and 
 unhappy self-assertive patriotism to which we 
 were consigned by fate, and which made us 
 perceive and resent the condescension of 
 foreigners, was the logical outcome of our 
 political situation. 
 
 The literature of the Northern States before 
 the war, although full of talent, lacks body, 
 lacks courage. It has not a full national tone. 
 The South is not in it. New England's share 
 in this literature is so large that small injustice 
 will be done if we give her credit for all of it. 
 She was the Academy of the land, and her 
 scholars were our authors. The country at 
 large has sometimes been annoyed at the self- 
 consciousness of New England, at the atmos- 
 phere of clique, of mutual admiration, of 
 isolation, in which all her scholars, except 
 7 97 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Emerson, have lived, and which notably en- 
 veloped the last little distinguished group of 
 them. The circumstances which led to the 
 isolation of Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow, and 
 the Saturday Club fraternity are instructive. 
 The ravages of the war carried off the poets, 
 scholars, and philosophers of the generatio»i 
 which immediately followed these men, and 
 by destroying their natural successors left 
 them standing magnified beyond their natural 
 size, like a grove of trees left by a fire. The 
 war did more than kill off a generation of 
 scholars who would have succeeded these 
 older scholars. It emptied the universities 
 by calling all the survivors into the field of 
 practical life; and after the war ensued a 
 period during which all the learning of the 
 land was lodged in the heads of these older 
 worthies who had made their mark long be- 
 fore. A certain complacency which piqued 
 the country at large was seen in these men. 
 An ante-bellum colonial posing, inevitable in 
 their own day, survived with them. When 
 Jared Sparks put Washington in the proper 
 attitude for greatness by correcting his spell- 
 ing. Sparks was in cue with the times. It was 
 thought that a great man must have his hat 
 handed to him by his biographer, and be 
 ushered on with decency toward posterity. 
 98 
 
EMERSON 
 
 In the lives and letters of some of our re- 
 cent public men there has been a reminis- 
 cence of this posing, which we condemn as 
 absurd because we forget it is merely archaic. 
 Provincial manners are always a Uttle formal, 
 and the pomposity of the colonial governor 
 was never quite worked out of our literary 
 men. 
 
 Let us not disparage the past. We are all 
 grateful for the New England culture, and 
 especially for the little group of men in Cam- 
 bridge and Boston who did their best accord- 
 ing to the light of their day. Their purpose 
 and taste did all that high ideals and good 
 taste can do, and no more eminent literati 
 have lived during this century. They gave 
 the country songs, narrative poems, odes, 
 epigrams, essays, novels. They chose their 
 models well, and drew their materials from 
 decent and likely sources. They lived stain- 
 less lives, and died in their professors' chairs 
 honored by all men. For achievements of 
 this sort we need hardly use as strong lan- 
 guage as Emerson does in describing con- 
 temporary literature : " It exhibits a vast 
 carcass of tradition every year with as much 
 solemnity as a new revelation." 
 
 The mass and volume of literature must al- 
 ways be traditional, and the secondary writers 
 99 
 
EMERSON 
 
 of the world do nevertheless perform a func- 
 tion of infinite consequence in the spread of 
 thought. A very large amount of first-hand 
 thinking is not comprehensible to the average 
 man until it has been distilled and is fifty 
 years old. The men who welcome new learn- 
 ing as it arrives are the picked men, the 
 minor poets of the next age. To their own 
 times these secondary men often seem great 
 because they are recognized and understood 
 at once. We know the disadvantage under 
 which these Humanists of ours worked. The 
 shadow of the time in which they wrote hangs 
 over us still. The conservatism and timidity 
 of our politics and of our literature to-day are 
 due in part to that fearful pressure which for 
 sixty years was never lifted from the souls of 
 Americans. That conservatism and timidity 
 may be seen in all our past. They are in 
 the rhetoric of Webster and in the style of 
 Hawthorne. They killed Poe. They created 
 Bryant. 
 
 Since the close of our most blessed war, 
 we have been left to face the problems 
 of democracy, unhampered by the terrible 
 complications of sectional strife. It has 
 happened, however, that some of the ten- 
 dencies of our commercial civilization go 
 toward strengthening and riveting upon us 
 
EMERSON 
 
 the very traits encouraged by provincial 
 disunion. Wendell Phillips, with a cool 
 grasp of understanding for which he is not 
 generally given credit, states the case as 
 follows : — 
 
 "The general judgment is that the freest 
 possible government produces the freest pos- 
 sible men and women, the most individual, 
 the least servile to the judgment of others. 
 But a moment's reflection will show any man 
 that this is an unreasonable expectation, and 
 that, on the contrary, entire equality and free- 
 dom in political forms almost invariably tend 
 to make the individual subside into the mass 
 and lose his identity in the general whole. 
 Suppose we stood in England to-night. There 
 is the nobility, and here is the church. There 
 is the trading class, and here is the literary. 
 A broad gulf separates the four; and pro- 
 vided a member of either can conciliate his 
 own section, he can aiford in a very large 
 measure to despise the opinions of the other 
 three. He has to some extent a refuge and a 
 breakwater against the tyranny of what we 
 call public opinion. But in a country like 
 ours, of absolute democratic equality, public 
 opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omni- 
 present. There is no refuge from its tyranny, 
 there is no hiding from its reach; and the 
 
EMERSON 
 
 result is that if you take the old Greek lantern 
 and go about to seek among a hundred, you 
 will find not one single American who has 
 not, or who does not fancy at least that he 
 has, something to gain or lose in his ambition, 
 his social life, or his business, from the good 
 opinion and the votes of those around him. 
 And the consequence is that instead of being 
 a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly blurt- 
 ing out his own convictions, as a nation, com- 
 pared to other nations, we are a mass of 
 cowards. More than all other people, we are 
 afraid of each other." 
 
 If we take a bird's-eye view of our history, 
 we shall find that this constant element of 
 democratic pressure has always been so 
 strong a factor in moulding the character of 
 our citizens, that there is less difference than 
 we could wish to see between the types of 
 citizenship produced before the war and after 
 the war. 
 
 Charles Follen, that excellent and worthy 
 German who came to this country while still 
 a young man and who lived in the midst of 
 the social and intellectual life of Boston, felt 
 the want of intellectual freedom in the people 
 about him. If one were obliged to describe 
 the America of to-day in a single sentence, 
 one could hardly do it better than by a sen- 
 
EMERSON 
 
 tence from a letter of FoUen to Harriet Mar- 
 tineau written in 1837, after the appearance 
 of one of her books : " You have pointed 
 out the two most striking national charac- 
 teristics, ' Deficiency of individual moral in- 
 dependence and extraordinary mutual respect 
 and kindness.' " 
 
 Much of what Emerson wrote about the 
 United States in 1850 is true of the United 
 States to-day. It would be hard to find a 
 civilized people who are more timid, more 
 cowed in spirit, more illiberal, than we. It 
 is easy to-day for the educated man who 
 has read Bryce and Tocqueville to account 
 for the mediocrity of American literature. 
 The merit of Emerson was that he felt the 
 atmospheric pressure without knowing its 
 reason. He felt he was a cabined, cribbed, 
 confined creature, although every man about 
 him was celebrating Liberty and Democracy, 
 and every day was Fourth of July. He taxes 
 language to its limits in order to express his 
 revolt. He says that no man should write 
 except what he has discovered in the process 
 of satisfying his own curiosity, and that every 
 man will write well in proportion as he has 
 contempt for the public. 
 
 Emerson seems really to have believed that 
 if any man would only resolutely be himself, 
 103 
 
EMERSON 
 
 he would turn out to be as great as Shake- 
 speare. He will not have it that anything of 
 value can be monopolized. His review of the 
 world, whether under the title of Manners, 
 Self-Reliance, Fate, Experience, or what-not, 
 leads him to the same thought. His conclu- 
 sion is always the finding of eloquence, 
 courage, art, intellect, in the breast of the 
 humblest reader. He knows that we are full 
 of genius and surrounded by genius, and that 
 we have only to throw something off, not to 
 acquire any new thing, in order to be bards, 
 prophets, Napoleons, and Goethes. This 
 belief is the secret of his stimulating power. 
 It is this which gives his writings a radiance 
 like that which shone from his personality. 
 
 The deep truth shadowed forth by Emerson 
 when he said that " all the American geniuses 
 lacked nerve and dagger " was illustrated by 
 our best scholar. Lowell had the soul of the 
 Yankee, but in his habits of writing he con- 
 tinued English tradition. His literary essays 
 are full of charm. The Commemoration Ode 
 is the high-water mark of the attempt to do 
 the impossible. It is a fine thing, but it is 
 imitative and secondary. It has paid the in- 
 heritance tax. Twice, however, at a crisis of 
 pressure, Lowell assumed his real self under 
 the guise of a pseudonym ; and with his 
 104 
 
EMERSON 
 
 own hand he rescued a language, a type, a 
 whole era of civilization from oblivion. Here 
 gleams the dagger and here is Lowell re- 
 vealed. His limitations as a poet, his too 
 much wit, his too much morality, his mixture 
 of shrewdness and religion, are seen to be the 
 very elements of power. The novelty of the 
 Biglow Papers is as wonderful as their world- 
 old naturalness. They take rank with great- 
 ness, and they were the strongest political 
 tracts of their time. They imitate nothing; 
 they are real. 
 
 Emerson himself was the only man of his 
 times who consistently and utterly expressed 
 himself, never measuring himself for a moment 
 with the ideals of others, never troubling him- 
 self for a moment with what literature was or 
 how literature should be created. The other 
 men of his epoch, and among whom he lived, 
 believed that literature was a very desirable 
 article, a thing you could create if you were 
 only smart enough. But Emerson had no 
 literary ambition. He cared nothing for 
 belles-lettres. The consequence is that he 
 stands above his age like a colossus. While 
 he lived his figure could \>e seen from Europe 
 towering like Atlas over the culture of the 
 United States. 
 
 Great men are not always like wax which 
 
EMERSON 
 
 their age imprints. They are often the mere 
 negation and opposite of their age. They 
 give it the lie. They become by revolt the 
 very essence of all the age is not, and that 
 part of the spirit which is suppressed in ten 
 thousand breasts gets lodged, isolated, and 
 breaks into utterance in one. Through 
 Emerson spoke the fractional spirits of a 
 multitude. He had not time, he had not 
 energy left over to understand himself; he 
 was a mouthpiece. 
 
 If a soul be taken and crushed by democ- 
 racy till it utter a cry, that cry will be Emer- 
 son. The region of thought he lived in, the 
 figures of speech he uses, are of an intellectual 
 plane so high that the circumstances which 
 produced them may be forgotten ; they are 
 indifferent. The Constitution, Slavery, the 
 War itself, are seen as mere circumstances. 
 They did not confuse him while he lived; 
 they are not necessary to support his work 
 now that it is finished. Hence comes it that 
 Emerson is one of the world's voices. He 
 was heard afar off. His foreign influence 
 might deserve a chapter by itself. Conser- 
 vatism is not confined to this country. It is 
 the very basis of all government. The bolts 
 Emerson forged, his thought, his wit, his per- 
 ception, are not provincial. They were found 
 1 06 
 
EMERSON 
 
 to carry inspiration to England and Germany. 
 Many of the important men of the last half- 
 century owe him a debt It is not yet possi- 
 ble to give any account of his influence 
 abroad, because the memoirs which will show 
 it are only beginning to be published. We 
 shall have them in due time; for Emerson 
 was an outcome of the world's progress. 
 His appearance marks the turning-point in 
 the history of that enthusiasm for pure 
 democracy which has tinged the political 
 thought of the world for the past one hun- 
 dred and fifty years. The youths of England 
 and Germany may have been surprised at 
 hearing- from America a piercing voice of 
 protest against the very influences which were 
 crushing them at home. They could not 
 realize that the chief difference between 
 Europe and America is a difference in the 
 rate of speed with which revolutions in 
 thought are worked out. 
 
 While the radicals of Europe were revolt- 
 ing in 1848 against the abuses of a tyranny 
 whose roots were in feudalism, Emerson, the 
 great radical of America, the arch-radical of 
 the world, was revolting against the evils 
 whose roots were in universal suffrage. By 
 showing the identity in essence of all tyranny, 
 and by bringing back the attention of politi- 
 107 
 
EMERSON 
 
 cal thinkers to its starting-point, the value of 
 human character, he has advanced the politi- 
 cal thought of the world by one step. He 
 has pointed out for us in this country to 
 what end our efforts must be bent. 
 
 io8 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 It would be an ill turn for an essay-writer 
 to destroy Walt Whitman, — for he was dis- 
 covered by the essayists, and but for them 
 his notoriety would have been postponed 
 for fifty years. He is the mare's nest of 
 " American Literature, " and scarce a contrib- 
 utor to The Saturday Review but has at 
 one time or another raised a flag over him. 
 
 The history of these chronic discoveries of 
 Whitman as a poet, as a force, as a some- 
 thing or a somebody, would write up into 
 the best possible monograph on the incom- 
 petency of the Anglo-Saxon in matters of 
 criticism. 
 
 English literature is the literature of 
 genius, and the Englishman is the great 
 creator. His work outshines the genius of 
 Greece. His wealth outvalues the combined 
 wealth of all modern Europe. The English 
 mind is the only unconscious mind the world 
 has ever seen. And for this reason the 
 English mind is incapable of criticism. 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 There has never been an English critic of 
 the first rank, hardly a critic of any rank; 
 and the critical work of England consists 
 either of an academical bandying of a few 
 old canons and shibboleths out of Horace or 
 Aristotle, or else of the merest impression- 
 ism, and wordy struggle to convey the sen- 
 timent awakened by the thing studied. 
 
 Now, true criticism means an attempt to 
 find out what something is, not for the pur- 
 pose of judging it, or of imitating it, nor for 
 the purpose of illustrating something else, 
 nor for any other ulterior purpose whatever. 
 
 The so-called canons of criticism are of 
 about as much service to a student of liter- 
 ature as the Nicene Creed and the Lord's 
 Prayer are to the student of church history. 
 They are a part of his subject, of course, 
 but if he insists upon using them as a tape 
 measure and a divining-rod he will produce 
 a judgment of no possible value to any one, 
 and interesting only as a record of a most 
 complex state of mind. 
 
 The educated gentlemen of England have 
 surveyed literature with these time-honored 
 old instruments, and hordes of them long 
 ago rushed to America with their theodolites 
 and their quadrants in their hands. They 
 sized us up and they sized us down, and 
 
 112 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 they never could find greatness in literature 
 among us till Walt Whitman appeared and 
 satisfied the astrologers. 
 
 Here was a comet, a man of the people, 
 a new man, who spoke no known language, 
 who was very uncouth and insulting, who 
 proclaimed himself a "barbaric yawp," and 
 who corresponded to the English imagination 
 with the unpleasant and rampant wildness 
 of everything in America, — with Mormon- , 
 ism and car factories, steamboat explosions, 
 strikes, repudiation, and whiskey; whose 
 form violated every one of their minor 
 canons as America violated every one of 
 their social ideas. 
 
 Then, too. Whitman arose out of the war, 
 as Shakespeare arose out of the destruction 
 of the Armada, as the Greek poets arose out 
 of the repulse of the Persians. It was impos- 
 sible, it was unprecedented, that a national 
 revulsion should not produce national poetry 
 — and lo ! here was Whitman. 
 
 It may safely be said that the discovery 
 of Whitman as a poet caused many a hard- 
 thinking Oxford man to sleep quietly at 
 night. America was solved. 
 
 The Englishman travels, but he travels 
 after his mind has been burnished by the 
 university, and at an age when the best he 
 8 113 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 can do in the line of thought is to make an 
 intelligent manipulation of the few notions 
 he leaves home with. He departs an edu- 
 cated gentleman, taking with him his port- 
 manteau and his ideas. He returns a travelled 
 gentleman, bringing with him his ideas and 
 his portmanteau. He would as soon think 
 of getting his coats from Kansas as his 
 thoughts from travel. And therefore every 
 impression of America which the travelling 
 Englishman experienced confirmed his theory 
 of Whitman. Even Rudyard Kipling, who 
 does not in any sense fall under the above 
 description, has enough Anglo-Saxon blood 
 in him to see in this country only the ful- 
 filment of the fantastic notions of his child- 
 hood. 
 
 But imagine an Oxford man who had eyes 
 in his head, and who should come to this 
 country, never having heard of Whitman. 
 He would see an industrious and narrow- 
 minded population, commonplace and monot- 
 onous, so uniform that one man can hardly 
 be distinguished from another, law-abiding, 
 timid, and traditional; a community where 
 the individual is suppressed by law, custom, 
 and instinct, and in which, by consequence, 
 there are few or no great men, even count- 
 ing those men thrust by necessary operation 
 114 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 of the laws of trade into commercial prom- 
 inence, and who claim scientific rather than 
 personal notice. 
 
 The culture of this people, its archi- 
 tecture, letters, drama, etc., he would find 
 were, of necessity, drawn fronl European 
 models; and in its poetry, so far as poetry 
 existed, he would recognize a somewhat 
 feeble imitation of English poetry. The 
 newspaper verses very fairly represent the 
 average talent for poetry and average appre- 
 ciation of it, and the newspaper verse of the 
 United States is precisely what one would 
 expect from a decorous and unimaginative 
 population, — intelligent, conservative, and 
 uninspired. 
 
 Above the newspaper versifiers float the 
 minor poets, and above these soar the greater 
 poets; and the characteristics of the whole 
 hierarchy are the same as those of the hum- 
 blest acolyte, — intelligence, conservatism, 
 conventional morality. 
 
 Above the atmosphere they live in, above 
 the heads of all the American poets, and 
 between them and the sky, float the Consti- 
 tution of the United States and the tradi- 
 tions and forms of English literature. 
 
 This whole culture is secondary and ter- 
 tiary, and it truly represents the respect- 
 "S 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 able mediocrity from which it emanates. 
 Whittier and Longfellow have been much 
 read in their day, — read by mill-hands and 
 clerks and school-teachers, by lawyers and 
 doctors and divines, by the reading classes of 
 the republic, whose ideals they truly spoke 
 for, whose yearnings and spiritual life they 
 truly expressed. 
 
 Now, the Oxford traveller would not have 
 found Whitman at all. He would never have 
 met a man who had heard of him, nor seen a 
 man like him. 
 
 The traveller, as he opened his Saturday 
 Review upon his return to London, and 
 read the current essay on Whitman, would 
 have been faced by a problem fit to puzzle 
 Montesquieu, a problem to floor Goethe. 
 
 And yet Whitman is representative. He 
 is a real product, he has a real and most 
 interesting place in the history of literature, 
 and he speaks for a class and type of human 
 nature whose interest is more than local, 
 whose prevalence is admitted, — a type which 
 is one of the products of the civilization of 
 the century, perhaps of all centuries, and 
 which has a positively planetary significance. 
 
 There are, in every country, individuals 
 who, after a sincere attempt to take a place 
 in organized society, revolt from the drudgery 
 ii6 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 of it, content themselves with the simplest 
 satisfactions of the grossest need of nature, 
 so far as subsistence is concerned, and re- 
 discover the infinite pleasures of life in the 
 open air. 
 
 If the roadside, the sky, the distant town, 
 the soft buffeting of the winds of heaven, 
 are a joy to the aesthetic part of man, 
 the freedom from all responsibility and ac- 
 countability is Nirvana to his moral nature. 
 A man who has once tasted these two joys 
 together, the joy of being in the open air and 
 the joy of being disreputable and unashamed, 
 has touched an experience which the most 
 close-knit and determined nature might well 
 dread. Life has no terrors for such a man. 
 Society has no hold on him. The trifling 
 inconveniences of the mode of life are as 
 nothing compared with its satisfactions. 
 The worm that never dies is dead in him. 
 The great mystery of consciousness and of 
 effort is quietly dissolved into the vacant 
 happiness of sensation, — not base sensation, 
 but the sensation of the dawn and the sun- 
 set, of the mart and the theatre, and the 
 stars, the panorama of the universe. 
 
 To the moral man, to the philosopher or 
 the business man, to any one who is a cog 
 in the wheel of some republic, all these 
 117 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 things exist for the sake of something else. 
 He must explain or make use of them, or 
 define his relation to them. He spends the 
 whole agony of his existence in an endeavor 
 to docket them and deal with them. Ham- 
 pered as he is by all that has been said and 
 done before, he yet feels himself driven on 
 to summarize, and wreak himself upon the 
 impossible task of grasping this cosmos 
 with his mind, of holding it in his hand, 
 of subordinating it to his purpose. 
 
 The tramp is freed from all this. By an 
 act as simple as death, he has put off effort 
 and lives in peace. 
 
 It is no wonder that every country in 
 Europe shows myriads of these men, as it 
 shows myriads of suicides annually. It is 
 no wonder, though the sociologists have been 
 late in noting it, that specimens of the type 
 are strikingly identical in feature in every 
 country of the globe. 
 
 The habits, the physique, the tone of 
 mind, even the sign-language and some of 
 the catch-words, of tramps are the same 
 everywhere. The men are not natally out- 
 casts. They have always tried civilized life. 
 Their early training, at least their early atti- 
 tude of mind towards life, has generally been 
 respectable. That they should be criminally 
 ii8 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 inclined goes without saying, because their 
 minds have been freed from the sanctions 
 which enforce law. But their general inno- 
 cence is, under the circumstances, very re- 
 markable, and distinguishes them from the 
 criminal classes. 
 
 When we see one of these men sitting on 
 a gate, or sauntering down a city street, how 
 often have we wondered how life appeared 
 to him; what solace and what problems it 
 presented. How often have we longed to 
 know the history of such a soul, told, not 
 by the police-blotter, but by the poet or 
 novelist in the heart of the man! 
 
 Walt Whitman has given utterance to 
 the soul of the tramp. A man of genius 
 has passed sincerely and normally through 
 this entire experience, himself unconscious 
 of what he was, and has left a record of 
 it to enlighten and bewilder the literary 
 world. 
 
 In Whitman's works the elemental parts 
 of a man's mind and the fragments of imper- 
 fect education may be seen merging together, 
 floating and sinking in a sea of insensate 
 egotism and rhapsody, repellent, divine, dis- 
 gusting, extraordinary. 
 
 Our inability to place the man intellec- 
 tually, and find a type and reason for his 
 119 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 intellectual state, comes from this : that the 
 revolt he represents is not an intellectual 
 revolt. Ideas are not at the bottom of it. 
 It is a revolt from drudgery. It is the 
 revolt of laziness. 
 
 There is no intellectual coherence in his 
 talk, but merely pathological coherence. 
 Can the insulting jumble of ignorance and 
 effrontery, of scientific phrase and French 
 paraphrase, of slang and inspired adjective, 
 which he puts forward with the pretence 
 that it represents thought, be regarded, from 
 any possible point of view, as a philosophy, 
 or a system, or a belief ? Is it individualism 
 of any statable kind .' Do the thoughts and 
 phrases which float about in it have a mean- 
 ing which bears any relation to the meaning 
 they bear in the language of thinkers ? Cer- 
 tainly not. Does all the patriotic talk, the 
 talk about the United States and its future, 
 have any significance as patriotism ? Does 
 it poetically represent the state of feeling of 
 any class of American citizens towards their 
 country? Or would you find the nearest 
 equivalent to this emotion in the breast of 
 the educated tramp of France, or Germany, 
 or England.' The speech of Whitman is 
 English, and his metaphors and catch-words 
 are apparently American, but the emotional 
 
 120 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 content is cosmic. He put off patriotism 
 when he took to the road. 
 
 The attraction exercised by his writings 
 is due to their flashes of reality. Of course 
 the man was a poseur, a most horrid mounte- 
 ^lank and ego-maniac. His tawdry scraps 
 of misused idea, of literary smartness, of 
 dog-eared and greasy reminiscence, repel us. 
 The world of men remained for him as his 
 audience, and he did to civilized society the 
 continuous compliment of an insane self- 
 consciousness in its presence. 
 
 Perhaps this egotism and posturing is the 
 revenge of a stilled conscience, and we ought 
 to read in it the inversion of the social 
 instincts. Perhaps all tramps are poseurs. 
 But there is this to be said for Whitman, 
 that whether or not his posing was an acci- 
 dent of a personal nature, or an organic re- 
 sult of his life, he was himself an authentic 
 creature. He did not sit in a study and 
 throw off his saga of balderdash, but he lived 
 a life, and it is by his authenticity, and not 
 by his poses, that he has survived. 
 
 The descriptions of nature, the visual 
 observation of life, are first-hand and won- 
 derful. It was no false light that led the 
 Oxonians to call some of his phrases Homeric. 
 The pundits were right in their curiosity over 
 
 131 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 him ; they went astray only in their attempt 
 at classification. 
 
 It is a pity that truth and beauty turn to 
 cant on the second delivery, for it makes 
 poetry, as a profession, impossible. The 
 lyric poets have always spent most of their 
 time in trying to write lyric poetry, and the 
 very attempt disqualifies them. 
 
 A poet who discovers his mission is already 
 half done for; and even Wordsworth, great 
 genius though he was, succeeded in half 
 drowning his talents in his parochial 
 theories, in his own self^consciousness and 
 self-conceit. 
 
 Walt Whitman thought he had a mission. 
 He was a professional poet. He had pur- 
 poses and theories about poefery which he 
 started out to enforce and illustrate. He is 
 as didactic as Wordsworth, and is thinking 
 of himself the whole time. He belonged, 
 moreover, to that class of professionals who 
 are always particularly self-centred, auto- 
 cratic, vain, and florid, — the class of quacks. 
 There are, throughout society, men, and they 
 are generally men of unusual natural powers, 
 who, after gaining a little unassimilated 
 education, launch out for themselves and 
 set up as authorities on their own account. 
 They are, perhaps, the successors of the old 
 
 122 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 astrologers, in that what they seek to estab- 
 lish is some personal professorship or pre- 
 dominance. The old occultism and mystery 
 was resorted to as the most obvious device 
 for increasing the personal importance of 
 the magician; and the chief difference to- 
 day between a regular physician and a quack 
 is, that the quack pretends to know it all. 
 
 Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were 
 men of phenomenal capacity, who actually 
 invented a religion and created a community 
 by the apparent establishment of supernatu- 
 ral and occult powers. The phrenologists, 
 the venders of patent medicine, the Chris- 
 tian Scientists, the single-taxers, and all 
 who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make 
 the same majestic and pontifical appeal to 
 human nature. It is this mystical power, 
 this religious element, which floats them, 
 sells the drugs, cures the sick, and packs 
 the meetings. 
 
 By temperament and education Walt Whit- 
 man was fitted to be a prophet of this kind. 
 He became a quack poet, and hampered his 
 talents by the imposition of a monstrous 
 parade of rattletrap theories and professions. 
 If he had not been endowed with a perfectly 
 marvellous capacity, a wealth of nature be- 
 yond the reach and plumb of his rodomon- 
 123 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 tade, he would have been ruined from the 
 start. As it is, he has filled his work with 
 grimace and vulgarity. He writes a few 
 lines of epic directness and cyclopean vigor 
 and naturalness, and then obtrudes himself 
 and his mission. 
 
 He has the bad taste bred in the bone of 
 all missionaries and palmists, the sign- 
 manual of a true quack. This bad taste is 
 nothing more than the offensive intrusion of 
 himself and his mission into the matter in 
 hand. As for his real merits and his true 
 mission, too much can hardly be said in his 
 favor. The field of his experience was nar- 
 row, and not in the least intellectual. It 
 was narrow because of his isolation from 
 human life. A poet like Browning, or 
 Heine, or Alfred de Musset deals constantly 
 with the problems and struggles that arise 
 in civilized life out of the close relation- 
 ships, the ties, the duties and desires of the 
 human heart. He explains life on its social 
 side. He gives us some more or less cohe- 
 rent view of an infinitely complicated matter. 
 He is a guide-book or a note-book, a highly 
 trained and intelligent companion. 
 
 Walt Whitman has no interest in any of 
 these things. He was fortunately so very 
 ignorant and untrained that his mind was 
 124 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 utterly incoherent and unintellectual. His 
 mind seems to be submerged and to have 
 become almost a part of his body. The utter 
 lack of concentration which resulted from 
 living his whole life in the open air has left 
 him spontaneous and unaccountable. And 
 the great value of his work is, that it rep- 
 resents the spontaneous and unaccountable 
 functioning of the mind and body in health. 
 
 It is doubtful whether a man ever enjoyed 
 life more intensely than Walt Whitman, or 
 expressed the physical joy of mere living 
 more completely. He is robust, all tingling 
 with health and the sensations of health. 
 All that is best in his poetry is the expres- 
 sion of bodily well-being. 
 
 A man who leaves his office and gets into 
 a canoe on a Canadian river, sure of ten 
 days' release from the cares of business and 
 housekeeping, has a thrill of joy such as 
 Walt Whitman has here and there thrown 
 into his poetry. One might say that to have 
 done this is the greatest accomplishment in 
 literature. Walt Whitman, in some of his 
 lines, breaks the frame of poetry and gives 
 us life in the throb. 
 
 It is the throb of the whole physical sys- 
 tem of a man who breathes the open air and 
 feels the sky over him. " When lilacs last 
 "5 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 in the dooryard bloomed " is a great lyric. 
 Here is a whole poem without a trace of 
 self-consciousness. It is little more than 
 a description of nature. The allusions to 
 Lincoln and to the funeral are but a word 
 or two — merest suggestions of the tragedy. 
 But grief, overwhelming grief, is in every 
 line of it, the grief which has been trans- 
 muted into this sensitiveness to the land- 
 scape, to the song of the thrush, to the 
 lilac's bloom, and the sunset. 
 
 Here is truth to life of the kind to be 
 found in King Lear or Guy Mannering, in 
 .(Eschylus or Burns. 
 
 Walt Whitman himself could not have told 
 you why the poem was good. Had he had 
 any intimation of the true reason, he would 
 have spoiled the poem. The recurrence and 
 antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought 
 of death, the beauty of nature, are in a bal- 
 ance and dream of natural symmetry such as 
 no cunning could come at, no conscious art 
 could do other than spoil. 
 
 It is ungrateful to note Whitman's limita- 
 tions, his lack of human passion, the false- 
 ness of many of his notions about the 
 American people. The man knew the world 
 merely as an observer, he was never a living 
 part of it, and no mere observer can under- 
 126 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 stand the life about him. Even his work 
 during the war was mainly the work of an 
 observer, and his poems and notes upon the 
 period are picturesque. As to his talk about 
 comrades and Manhattanese car-drivers, and 
 brass-founders displaying their brawny arms 
 round each other's brawny necks, all this 
 gush and sentiment in Whitman's poetry is 
 false to life. It has a lyrical value, as rep- 
 resenting Whitman's personal feelings, but 
 no one else in the country was ever found 
 who felt or acted like this. 
 
 In fact, in all that concerns the human 
 relations Walt Whitman is as unreal as, let 
 us say, William Morris, and the American 
 mechanic would probably prefer Sigurd the 
 Volsung, and understand it better than 
 Whitman's poetry. 
 
 This falseness to the sentiment of the 
 American is interwoven with such won- 
 derful descriptions of American sights and 
 scenery, of ferryboats, thoroughfares, cata- 
 racts, and machine-shops that it is not 
 strange the foreigners should have accepted 
 the gospel. 
 
 On the whole. Whitman, though he solves 
 none of the problems of life and throws no 
 light on American civilization, is a delight- 
 ful appearance, and a strange creature to 
 127 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 come out of our beehive. This man com- 
 mitted every unpardonable sin against our 
 conventions, and his whole life was an out- 
 rage. He was neither chaste, nor industri- 
 ous, nor religious. He patiently lived upon 
 cold pie and tramped the earth in triumph. 
 
 He did really live the life he liked to live, 
 in defiance of all men, and this is a great 
 desert, a most stirring merit. And he gave, 
 in his writings, a true picture of himself and 
 of that life, — a picture which the world had 
 never seen before, and which it is probable 
 the world will not soon cease to wonder at. 
 
 128 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 The plays of Shakespeare marshal them- 
 selves in the beyond. They stand in a place 
 outside of our deduction. Their cosmos is 
 greater than our philosophy. They are like 
 the forces of nature and the operations of 
 life in the vivid world about us. We may 
 measure our intellectual growth by the new 
 horizons we see opening within them. So 
 long as they continue to live and change, to 
 expand and deepen, to be filled with new 
 harmony and new suggestion, we may rest 
 content; we are still growing. At the mo- 
 ment we think we have comprehended them, 
 at the moment we see them as stationary 
 things, we may be sure something is wrong; 
 we are beginning to petrify. Our fresh 
 interest in life has been arrested. There 
 is, therefore, danger in an attempt to "size 
 up " Shakespeare. We cannot help setting 
 down as a coxcomb any man who has done 
 .it to his own satisfaction. He has pigeon- 
 holed himself. He will not get lost. If 
 131 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 you want him, you can lay your hand on 
 him. He has written an autobiography. 
 He has " sized up " himself. 
 
 In writing about Shakespeare, it is excus- 
 able to put off the armor of criticism, and 
 speak in a fragmentary and inconclusive 
 manner, lest by giving way to conviction, 
 by encouraging ourselves into positive be- 
 liefs, we hasten the inevitable and grow old 
 before our time. 
 
 Perhaps some such apology is needed to 
 introduce the observations on the character 
 of Romeo which are here thrown together, 
 and the remarks about the play itself, the 
 acting, and the text. 
 
 It is believed by some scholars that in the 
 second quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet, 
 published in 1599, Shakespeare's revising 
 hand can be seen, and that the differences 
 between the first and second editions show 
 the amendments, additions, and corrections 
 with which Shakespeare saw fit to embellish 
 his work in preparing it for the press. If 
 this were actually the case; if we could lay 
 the two texts on the table before us, con- 
 vinced that one of them was Shakespeare's 
 draft or acting copy, and the other Shake- 
 speare's finished work; and if, by comparing 
 132 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 the two, we could enter into the workshop 
 and forge of his mind, — it would seem as if 
 we had at last found an avenue of approach 
 towards this great personality, this intellect 
 the most powerful that has ever illumined 
 human life. No other literary inquiry could 
 compare in interest with such a study as 
 this; for the relation which Shakespeare 
 himself bore to the plays he created is one 
 of the mysteries and blank places in his- 
 tory, a gap that staggers the mind and which 
 imagination cannot overleap. 
 
 The student who examines both texts will 
 be apt to conclude that the second is by no 
 means a revised edition of the first, but that 
 (according to another theory) the first is a 
 pirated edition of the play, stolen by the 
 printer, and probably obtained by means of 
 a reporter who took down the lines as they 
 were spoken on the stage. The stage direc- 
 tions in the first edition are not properly the 
 stage directions of a dramatist as to what 
 should be done on the stage, but seem rather 
 the records of an eye-witness as to what he 
 saw happen on the stage. The mistakes of 
 the reporter (or the perversions of the actors) 
 as seen in the first edition generally injure 
 the play ; and it was from this circumstance 
 — the frequency of blotches in the first edi- 
 133 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 tion — that the idea gained currency that the 
 second edition was an example of Shake- 
 speare's never-failing tact in bettering his 
 own lines. 
 
 Perhaps, after all, it would little advance 
 our understanding of the plays, or solve the 
 essential puzzle, — that they actually had an 
 author, — if we could follow every stroke of 
 his revising pen. We should observe, no 
 doubt, refinement of characterization, changes 
 of stage effect, the addition of flourishes and 
 beauties ; but their origin and true meaning, 
 the secret of their life, would be as safe as 
 it is at present, as securely lost in the midst 
 of all this demonstration as the manuscripts 
 themselves were in the destruction of the 
 Globe Theatre. 
 
 If we must then abandon the hope of see- 
 ing Shakespeare in his workshop, we may, 
 nevertheless, obtain from the pirated text 
 some notion of the manner in which Shake- 
 speare was staged in his own day, and of how 
 he fared at the hands of the early actors. 
 Romeo and Juliet is an exceptionally diffi- 
 cult play to act, and the difficulties seem to 
 have been about the same in Shakespeare's 
 time as they are to-day. They are, in fact, 
 inherent in the structure of the work itself. 
 
 As artists advance in life, they develop, 
 134 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 by growing familiar with the conditions of 
 their art, the power of concealing its limita- 
 tions, — a faculty in which even the greatest 
 artists are often deficient in their early years. 
 There is an anecdote of Schumann which 
 somewhat crudely illustrates this. It is said 
 that in one of his early symphonies he intro- 
 duced a passage leading up to a climax, at 
 which the horns were to take up the aria 
 in triumph. At the rehearsal, when the 
 moment came for the horns to trumpet forth 
 their message of victory, there was heard a 
 sort of smothered braying which made every- 
 body laugh. The composer had arranged his 
 climax so that it fell upon a note which the 
 horns could not sound except with closed 
 stops. The passage had to be rewritten. 
 The young painter is frequently found strug- 
 gling with subjects, with effects of light, 
 which are almost impossible to render, and 
 which perhaps an older man would not at- 
 tempt. It is not surprising to find among 
 the early works of Shakespeare that some of 
 the characters, however true to life, — nay, 
 because true to life, — are almost impossible 
 to be represented on the stage. Certainly 
 Romeo presents us with a character of the 
 kind. 
 
 Shakespeare's knowledge of human nature 
 135 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 seems to have antedated his knowledge of 
 the stage. In imagining the character of 
 Romeo, a character to fit the plot of the old 
 story, he took little thought for his actors. 
 In conjuring up the probabilities which would 
 lead a man into such a course of conduct as 
 Romeo's, Shakespeare had in his mind the 
 probabilities and facts in real life rather than 
 the probabilities demanded by the stage. 
 
 Romeo must be a man almost wholly made 
 up of emotion, a creature very young, a lyric 
 poet in the intensity of his sensations, a 
 child in his helplessness beneath the ever- 
 varying currents and whirlpools of his feel- 
 ing. He lives in a walking and frenzied 
 dream, comes in contact with real life only 
 to injure himself and others, and finally 
 drives with the collected energy of his being 
 into voluntary shipwreck upon the rocks of 
 the world. 
 
 This man must fall in love at first sight. 
 He must marry clandestinely. He must be 
 banished for having taken part in a street 
 fight, and must return to slay himself upon 
 the tomb of his beloved. 
 
 Shakespeare, with his passion for realism, 
 
 devotes several scenes at the opening of the 
 
 play to the explanation of Romeo's state of 
 
 mind. He will give us a rationalistic ac- 
 
 136 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 count of love at first sight by bringing on 
 this young poet in a blind chaos of emotion 
 owing to his rejection by a woman not other- 
 wise connected with the story. It is per- 
 fectly true that this is the best and perhaps 
 the only explanation of love at first sight. 
 The effect upon Romeo's very boyish, unreal, 
 and almost unpleasant lovesickness of the 
 rejection (for which we must always respect 
 Rosaline) is to throw him, and all the un- 
 stable elements of which he is made, into a 
 giddy whirl, which, after a day or two, it 
 will require only the glance of a pair of eyes 
 to precipitate into the very elixir of true 
 love. 
 
 All this is true, but no audience cares 
 about the episode or requires the explana- 
 tion. Indeed, it jars upon the sentimental 
 notion of many persons to this day, and in 
 many stage versions it is avoided. 
 
 These preparatory scenes bring out in a 
 most subtle way the egoism at the basis of 
 Romeo's character, — the same lyrical egoism 
 that is in all his language and in all his 
 conduct. When we first see Romeo, he is 
 already in an uneasy dream. He is wander- 
 ing, aloof from his friends and absorbed in 
 himself. On meeting Juliet he passes from 
 his first dream into a second dream. On 
 137 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 learning of the death of Juliet he passes into 
 still a third and quite different dream, — or 
 stage of dream, — a stage in which action is 
 necessary, and in which he displays the cal- 
 culating intellect of a maniac. The mental 
 abstraction of Romeo continues even after 
 he has met Juliet. In Capulet's garden, 
 despite the directness of Juliet, he is still 
 in his reveries. The sacred wonder of the 
 hour turns all his thoughts, not into love, 
 but into poetry. Juliet's anxieties are prac- 
 tical. She asks him about his safety, how 
 he came there, how he expects to escape. 
 He answers in madrigals. His musings are 
 almost impersonal. The power of the moon- 
 light is over him, and the power of the scene, 
 of which Juliet is only a part. 
 
 " With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls ; 
 For stony limits cannot hold love out, 
 And what love can do that dares love attempt; 
 Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me. 
 
 Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear 
 
 That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops — 
 
 It is my soul that calls upon my name : 
 
 How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night. 
 
 Like softest music to attending ears." 
 
 These reflections are almost " asides. " They 
 
 ought hardly to be spoken aloud. They 
 
 138 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 denote that Romeo is still in his trance. 
 They have, however, another and unfortu- 
 nate influence: they retard the action of 
 the play. As we read the play to our- 
 selves, this accompaniment of lyrical feel- 
 ing on Romeo's part does not interfere 
 with our enjoyment. It seems to accentu- 
 ate the more direct and human strain of 
 Juliet's love. 
 
 But on the stage the actor who plays 
 Romeo requires the very highest powers. 
 While speaking at a distance from Juliet, 
 and in a constrained position, he must by 
 his voice and gestures convey these subtlest 
 shades of feeling, throw these garlands of 
 verse into his talk without interrupting its 
 naturalness, give all the "asides" in such a 
 manner that the audience feels they are in 
 place, even as the reader does. It is no 
 wonder that the r61e of Romeo is one of 
 the most difficult in all Shakespeare. 'The 
 demands made upon the stage are almost 
 more than the stage can meet. The truth to 
 nature is of a kind that the stage is almost 
 powerless to render. 
 
 The character of Romeo cannot hope to 
 be popular. Such pure passion, such un- 
 reasonable giving way, is not easily forgiven 
 in a man. He must roll on the floor and 
 139 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 blubber and kick. There is no getting away 
 from this. He is not Romeo unless he cries 
 like a baby or a Greek hero. This is the 
 penalty for being a lyric poet. Had he 
 used his mind more upon the problems of 
 his love, and less upon its celebration in 
 petalled phrases, his mind would not have 
 deserted him so lamentably in the hour of 
 his need. In fact, throughout the play, 
 Romeo, by the exigencies of the plot, is in 
 fair danger of becoming contemptible. For 
 one instant only does he rise into respecta- 
 bility, — at the moment of his quarrel with 
 Tybalt. At this crisis he is stung into life 
 by the death of Mercutio, and acts like a 
 man. The ranting manner in which it is 
 customary to give Romeo's words in this 
 passage of the play shows how far most actors 
 are from understanding the true purport of 
 the lines; how far from realizing that these 
 few lines are the only opportunity the actor 
 has of establishing the character of Romeo 
 as a gentleman, a man of sense and courage, 
 a formidable fellow, not unfit to be the hero 
 of a play : — 
 
 " Alive, in triumph ! and Mercutio slain ! 
 Away to heaven, respective lenity, 
 And fire-ey'd fury be my conduct now ! 
 Now, Tybalt, take the ' villain ' back again 
 140 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 That late thou gav'st me ; — for Mercutio's soul 
 Is but a little way above our heads, 
 Staying for thine to keep him company : 
 Either thou, or I, or both, must go with him." 
 
 The first three lines are spoken by Romeo 
 to himself. They are a reflection, not a 
 declamation, — a reflection upon which he 
 instantly acts. He assumes the calmness 
 of a man of his rank who is about to fight. 
 More than this, Romeo, the man of words 
 and moods, when once roused, as we shall 
 see later, in a worser cause, — when once 
 pledged to action, — Romeo shines with a 
 sort of fatalistic spiritual power. He is 
 now visibly dedicated to this quarrel. We 
 feel sure that he will ,kill Tybalt in the en- 
 counter. The appeal to the supernatural is 
 in his very gesture. The audience — nay, 
 Tybalt himself — gazes with awe on this 
 sudden apparition of Romeo as a man of 
 action. 
 
 This highly satisfactory conduct is soon 
 swept away by his behavior on hearing the 
 news of his banishment. The boy seems to 
 be without much stamina, after all. He is 
 a pitiable object, and does not deserve the 
 love of fair lady. 
 
 At Mantua the tide of his feelings has 
 turned again, and by one of those natural 
 141 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 reactions which he himself takes note of he 
 wakes up unaccountably happy, "and all this 
 day an unaccustora'd spirit lifts him above 
 the ground with cheerful thoughts." It is 
 the lightning before the thunderbolt. 
 
 " Her body sleeps to Capel's monument, 
 And her immortal part with angels lives. 
 I saw her laid low in her kindred's vault, 
 And presently took post to tell it you." 
 
 Balthasar makes no attempt to break the 
 news gently. The blow descends on Romeo 
 when he least expects it. He is not spared. 
 The conduct of Romeo on hearing of Juliet's 
 death is so close to nature as to be nature 
 itself, yet it happens to be conduct almost 
 impossible to be given on the stage. He 
 does nothing. He is stunned. He collapses. 
 For fully five minutes he does not speak, 
 and yet in these five minutes he must show 
 to the audience that his nature has been 
 shaken to its foundations. The delirium of 
 miraculously beautiful poetry is broken. 
 His words are gone. His emotion is para- 
 lyzed, but his mind is alert. He seems sud- 
 denly to be grown up, — a man, and not a 
 boy, — and a man of action. " Is it even 
 so ? " is all he says. He orders post-horses, 
 ink and paper, in a few rapid sentences ; it 
 142 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 is evident that before speaking at all he has 
 determined what he will do, and from now 
 on to the end of the play Romeo is diflFerent 
 from his old self, for a new Romeo has ap- 
 peared. He is in a state of intense and 
 calm exultation. All his fluctuating emo- 
 tions have been stilled or stunned. He 
 gives his orders in staccato. We feel that 
 he knows what he is going to do, and will 
 certainly accomplish it. Meanwhile his 
 mind is dominant. It is preternaturally ac- 
 tive. His "asides," which before were lyr- 
 ical, now become the comments of an acute 
 intellect. His vivid and microscopic recol- 
 lection of the apothecary shop, his philo- 
 sophical bantering with the apothecary, his 
 sudden violence to Balthasar at the entrance 
 to the tomb, and his as sudden friendliness, 
 his words and conflict with Paris, whom he 
 kills incidentally, absent-mindedly, and, as 
 it were, with his left hand, without malice 
 and without remorse, — all these things show 
 an intellect working at high pressure, while 
 the spirit of the man is absorbed in another 
 and more important matter. 
 
 There is a certain state of mind in which 
 
 the will to do is so soon followed by the act 
 
 itself that one may say the act is automatic. 
 
 The thought has already begun to be exe- 
 
 143 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 cuted even while it is being formed. This 
 occurs especially where the intent is to do 
 some horrid deed which requires preparation, 
 firmness of purpose, ingenuity, and, above 
 all, external calmness. 
 
 " Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
 And the first motion, all the interim is 
 Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : 
 The genius and the mortal instruments 
 Are then in council ; and the state of man, 
 Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
 The nature of an insurrection." 
 
 This is the phase through which Romeo is 
 passing on the way from Mantua to Verona. 
 His own words give us a picture of him 
 during that ride: — 
 
 " What said my man when my betossed soul 
 Did not attend him as we rode ? " 
 
 He has come like an arrow, his mind closed 
 to the external world, himself in the blind 
 clutch of his own deadly purpose, driving on 
 towards its fulfilment. Only at the end, 
 when he stands before the bier of Juliet, 
 sure of his will, beyond the reach of hin- 
 drance, alone for the first time, — only then 
 is his spirit released in floods of eloquence; 
 then does his triumphant purpose break into 
 speech, and his words soar up like the flames 
 144 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 of a great bonfire of precious incense stream- 
 ing upward in exultation and in happiness. 
 
 The whole course of these last scenes of 
 Romeo's life, which are scarcely longer than 
 this description of them, is in the highest 
 degree naturalistic; but the scenes are in 
 the nature of things so difficult to present 
 on the stage as to be fairly impossible. The 
 very long, the very minute description of 
 the apothecary's shop, given by a man whose 
 heart has stopped beating, but whose mind 
 is at work more actively and more accurately 
 than it has ever worked before, is a thing 
 highly sane as to its words. It must be done 
 quietly, rapidly, and yet the impression must 
 be created, which is created upon Balthasar, 
 that Romeo is not in his right mind. A 
 friend seeing him would cross the street to 
 ask what was the matter. 
 
 The whole character of Romeo, from the 
 beginning, has been imagined with reference 
 to this self-destroying consummation. From 
 his first speech we might have suspected that 
 something destructive would come out of this 
 man. 
 
 There is a type of highly organized being, 
 not well fitted for this world, whose practi- 
 cal activities are drowned in a sea of feeling. 
 Egoists by their constitution, they become 
 10 145 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 dangerous beings when vexed, cornered, or 
 thwarted by society. Their fine energies 
 have had no training in the painful con- 
 structive processes of civilization. Their 
 first instincts, when goaded into activity, 
 are instincts of destruction. They know no 
 compromise. If they are not to have all, 
 then no one shall possess anything. Romeo 
 is not suffering in this final scene. He is 
 experiencing the greatest pleasure of his life. 
 He glories in his deed. It satisfies his soul. 
 It gives him supreme spiritual activity. The 
 deed brings widespread desolation, but to this 
 he is indifferent, for it means the destruction 
 of the prison against which his desires have 
 always beaten their wings, the destruction of 
 a material and social universe from which he 
 has always longed to be free. 
 
 " O, here 
 Will I set up my everlasting rest, 
 And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars 
 From this world-wearied flesh." 
 
 How much of all this psychology may we 
 suppose was rendered apparent to the motley 
 collection of excitable people who flocked to 
 see the play — which appears to have been a 
 popular one — in the years 1591-97? Prob- 
 ably as much as may be gathered by an audi- 
 146 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 ence to-day from a tolerable representation 
 of the piece. The subtler truths of Shake- 
 speare have always been lost upon the stage. 
 In turning over the first quarto of Romeo 
 and Juliet, we may see that many such mat- 
 ters were pruned ruggedly off by the actors. 
 The early audiences, like the popular audi- 
 ences of to-day, doubtless regarded action 
 as the first merit of a play, and the stage 
 managers must have understood this. It is 
 noticeable that, in the authentic text, the 
 street fight with which this play opens is a 
 carefuUy-worked-up scene, which comes to 
 a climax in the entry of the prince. The 
 reporter gives a few words only to a descrip- 
 tion of the scene. No doubt, in Shake- 
 speare's time, the characters spoke very rapidly 
 or all at once. It is impossible that the 
 longer plays, like King Lear, should have 
 been finished in an evening, unless the 
 scenes moved with a hurry of life very 
 different from the declamatory leisure with 
 which our actors move from scene to scene. 
 To make plain the course of the story was 
 evidently the chief aim of the stage man- 
 agers. The choruses are finger-posts. It is 
 true that the choruses in Shakespeare are 
 generally so overloaded with curious orna- 
 ment as to be incomprehensible except as 
 147 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 explanations of things already understood. 
 The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a riddle 
 to which the play is the answer. One might 
 at first suppose that the need of such finger- 
 posts betrayed a dull audience, but no dull 
 person was ever enlightened by Shakespeare's 
 •choruses. They play variations on the theme. 
 They instruct only the instructed. 
 
 If interest in the course of the story be the 
 first excitement to the theatre-goer, interest 
 in seeing a picture of contemporary manners 
 is probably the second. Our chief loss in 
 reading Shakespeare is the loss of the society 
 he depicts, and which we know only through 
 him. In every line and scene there must 
 be meanings which have vanished forever 
 with the conditions on which they comment. 
 A character on the stage has need, at the 
 feeblest, of only just so much vitality as will 
 remind us of something we know in real life. 
 The types of Shakespeare which have been 
 found substantial enough to survive the loss 
 of their originals must have had an interest 
 for the first audiences, both in nature and in 
 intensity, very different from their interest to 
 us. The high life depicted by Shakespeare 
 has disappeared. No one of us has ever 
 known a Mercutio. Fortunately, the types 
 of society seem to change less in the lower 
 148 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 orders than in the upper classes. England 
 swarms with old women like Juliet's nurse; 
 and as to these characters in Shakespeare 
 whose originals still survive, and as to them 
 only, we may feel that we are near the 
 Elizabethans. 
 
 We should undoubtedly suffer some disen- 
 chantment by coming in contact with these 
 coarse and violent people. How much do 
 the pictures of contemporary England given 
 us by the novelists stand in need of correc- 
 tion by a visit to the land ! How different 
 is the thing from the abstract ! Or, to put 
 the same thought in a more obvious light, 
 how fantastic are the ideas of the Germans 
 about Shakespeare! How Germanized does 
 he come forth from their libraries and from 
 their green-rooms ! 
 
 We in America, with our formal manners, 
 our bloodless complexions, our perpetual 
 decorum and self-suppression, are about as 
 puch in sympathy with the real element of 
 Shakespeare's plays as a Baptist parson is 
 with a fox-hunt. Our blood is stirred by 
 the narration, but our constitution could 
 never stand the reality. As we read we 
 translate all things into the dialect of our 
 province; or if we must mouth, let us say 
 that we translate the dialect of the English 
 149 
 
A STUDY OF ROMEO 
 
 province into the language of our empire; 
 but we still translate. Mercutio, on inspec- 
 tion, would turn out to be not a gentleman, 
 — and indeed he is not; Juliet, to be a most 
 extraordinary young person ; Tybalt, a brute 
 and ruffian, a type from the plantation ; and 
 the only man with whom we should feel at 
 all at ease would be the County Paris, in 
 whom we should all recognize a perfectly 
 bred man. " What a man ! " we should cry. 
 " Why, he 's a man of wax ! " 
 
 IS" 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 Michael Angelo is revealed by his son- 
 nets. He wears the triple crown of painter, 
 poet, and sculptor, and his genius was wor- 
 shipped with a kind of awe even while he 
 lived, yet we know the man best through 
 these little pieces of himself which he broke 
 off and gave to his friends. The fragments 
 vibrated with the life of the man, and 
 were recognized as wonderful things. Even 
 in his lifetime they were treasured and col- 
 lected in manuscript, and at a later day they 
 were seized upon by the world at large. 
 
 The first published edition of the son- 
 nets was prepared for the press many 
 years after the death of the author by his 
 grandnephew, who edited them to suit the 
 taste of the seventeenth century. The ex- 
 tent and atrocity of his emendations can be 
 realized by a comparison of texts. But the 
 sonnets survived the improvements, and even 
 made headway under them; and when, in 
 1863, Guasti gave the original readings to 
 IS3 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 the public, the world was prepared for them. 
 The bibliography of editions and transla- 
 tions which Guasti gives is enough to show 
 the popularity of the sonnets, their universal 
 character, their international currency. 
 
 There are upward of one hundred sonnets 
 in every stage of perfection, and they have 
 given rise not only to a literature of transla- 
 tions, but to a literature of comment. Some 
 years ago Mrs. Ednah Cheney published a 
 selection of the sonnets, giving the Italian 
 text, together with English translations by 
 various hands. This little volume has earned 
 the gratitude of many to whom it made known 
 the sonnets. The Italians themselves have 
 gone on printing the corrupt text in con- 
 tempt of Guasti 's labors. But it has not 
 been left to the Italians to protect the treas- 
 ures of their land. The barbarians have 
 been the devoutest worshippers at all times. 
 The last tribute has come from Mr. John 
 Addington Symonds, who has done the son- 
 nets into the English of the pre-Raphaelites, 
 and done them, on the whole, amazingly 
 well. His translations of the more graceful 
 sonnets are facile, apt, and charming, and rise 
 at times into beauty. He has, however, in- 
 sisted on polishing the rugged ones. More- 
 over, being deficient in reverence, Mr. 
 IS4 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 Symonds fails to convey reverence. Never- 
 theless, to have boldly planned and carried 
 out the task of translating them all was an 
 undertaking of so much courage, and has 
 been done with so much success, that every 
 rival must give in his admiration. 
 
 The poems are exceedingly various, some 
 being rough and some elegant, some obvious 
 and some obscure, some humorous, some 
 religious. Yet they have this in common, 
 that each seems to be the bearer of some 
 deep harmony, whose vibrations we feel and 
 whose truth we recognize. From the very 
 beginning they seem to have had a provoca- 
 tive and stimulating effect upon others ; ever 
 since they were written, cultivated people 
 have been writing essays about them. One 
 of them has been the subject of repeated aca- 
 demical disquisition. They absorb and reflect 
 the spirit of the times; they appeal to and 
 express the individual ; they have done this 
 through three centuries and throughout who 
 shall say how many different educational 
 conditions. Place them in what light you 
 will, they gleam with new meanings. This 
 is their quality. It is hard to say whence 
 the vitality comes. They have often a bril- 
 liancy that springs from the juxtaposition 
 of two thoughts, — a brilliancy like that pro- 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 duced by unblended colors roughly but well 
 laid on. They have, as it were, an organic 
 force which nothing can render. The best 
 of them have the reflective power which gives 
 back light from the mind of the reader. The 
 profounder ones appear to change and glow 
 under contemplation ; they re-echo syllables 
 from forgotten voices ; they suggest unfathom- 
 able depths of meaning. These sonnets are 
 protean in character ; they represent different 
 things to different people, — religion to one, 
 love to another, philosophy to a third. 
 
 It is easy to guess what must be the fate 
 of such poems in translation. The transla- 
 tor inevitably puts more of himself than of 
 Michael Angelo into his version. Even the 
 first Italian editor could not let them alone. 
 He felt he must dose them with elegance. 
 This itching to amend the sonnets results 
 largely from the obscurity of the text. A 
 translator is required to be, above all things, 
 comprehensible, and, therefore, he must 
 interpret, he must paraphrase. He is not 
 at liberty to retain the equivocal sugges- 
 tiveness of the original. The language of g, 
 translation must be chastened, or, at least, 
 grammatical, and Michael Angelo 's verse is 
 very often neither the one nor the other. 
 
 The selections which follow are not given 
 156 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 as representative of the different styles in 
 the original. They have been chosen from 
 among those sonnets which seemed most 
 capable of being rendered into English. 
 
 The essential nature of the sonnet is re- 
 plete with difficulty, and special embarrass- 
 ments are encountered in the Italian sonnet. 
 The Italian sonnet is, both in its form and 
 spirit, a thing so foreign to the English idea 
 of what poetry should be, that no cultivation 
 can ever domesticate it into the tongue. The 
 seeds of flowers from the Alps may be 
 planted in our gardens, but a new kind of 
 flower will come up; and this is what has 
 happeined over and over again to the skilled 
 gardeners of English literature in their 
 struggles with the Italian sonnet. In Italy, 
 for six hundred years, the sonnet has been 
 the authorized form for a disconnected re- 
 mark of any kind. Its chief aim is not so 
 much to express a feeling as an idea — a 
 witticism — a conceit — a shrewd saying — a 
 clever analogy — a graceful simile — a beau- 
 tiful thought. Moreover, it is not primarily 
 intended for the public; it has a social rather 
 than a literary function. 
 
 The English with their lyrical genius have 
 impressed the form, as they have impressed 
 every other form, into lyrical service, and 
 IS7 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 with some success, it must be admitted. But 
 the Italian sonnet is not lyrical. It is con- 
 versational and intellectual, and many things 
 which English instinct declares poetry ought 
 not to be. We feel throughout the poetry 
 of the Latin races a certain domination of 
 the intelligence which is foreign to our own 
 poetry. But in the sonnet form at least we 
 may sympathize with this domination. Let 
 us read the Italian sonnets, then, as if they 
 were prose ; let us seek first the thought and 
 hold to that, and leave the eloquence to take 
 care of itself. It is the thought, after all, 
 which Michael Angel© himself cared about. 
 He is willing to sacrifice elegance, to trun- 
 cate words, to wreck rhyme, prosody, and 
 grammar, if he can only hurl through the 
 verse these thoughts which were his con- 
 victions. 
 
 The platonic ideas about life and love 
 and art, which lie at the bottom of most of 
 these sonnets, are familiar to us all. They 
 have been the reigning commonplace ideas 
 of educated people for the last two thousand 
 years. But in these sonnets they are touched 
 with new power; they become exalted into 
 mystical importance. We feel almost as if 
 it were Plato himself that is talking, and the 
 interest is not lessened when we remember 
 158 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 that it is Michael Angelo. It is necessary 
 to touch on this element in the sonnets, for 
 it exists in them; and because while some 
 will feel chiefly the fiery soul of the man, 
 others will be most struck by his great 
 speculative intellect. 
 
 It is certain that the sonnets date from 
 various times in Michael Angelo' s life; and, 
 except in a few cases, it must be left to the 
 instinct of the reader to place them. Those 
 which were called forth by the poet's friend- 
 ship for Vittoria Colonna were undoubtedly 
 written towards the close of his life. While 
 he seems to have known Vittoria Colonna 
 and to have been greatly attached to her for 
 many years, it is certain that in his old age 
 he fell in love with her. The library of 
 romance that has been written about this 
 attachment has added nothing to Condivi's 
 simple words : — 
 
 " He greatly loved the Marchesana of 
 Pescara, with whose divine spirit he fell in 
 love, and was in return passionately beloved 
 of her; and he still keeps many of her let- 
 ters, which are full of most honest and ten- 
 derest love, such as used to issue from a 
 heart like hers ; and he himself had written 
 her many and many a sonnet full of wit and 
 tenderness. She often left Viterbo and other 
 159 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 places, where she had gone for pleasure, and 
 to pass the summer, and came to Rome for 
 no other reason than to see Michael Angelo. 
 And in return he bore her so much love 
 that I remember hearing him say that he 
 regretted nothing except that when he went 
 to see her on her death-bed he had not kissed 
 her brow and her cheek as he had kissed her 
 hand. He was many times overwhelmed at 
 the thought of her death, and used to be as 
 one out of his mind." 
 
 It seems, from reading the sonnets, that 
 some of those which are addressed to women 
 must belong to a period anterior to his friend- 
 ship with Vittoria. This appears from the 
 internal evidence of style and feeling, as 
 well as by references in the later sonnets. 
 
 One other fact must be mentioned, — both 
 Vittoria and Michael Angelo belonged to, 
 or at least sympathized with, the Piagnoni, 
 and were in a sense disciples of Savonarola. 
 Now, it is this religious element which makes 
 Michael Angelo seem to step out of his 
 country and out of his century and across 
 time and space into our own. This reli- 
 gious feeling is of a kind perfectly familiar 
 to us; indeed, of a kind inborn and native 
 to us. Whether we be reading the English 
 prayer-book or listening to the old German 
 1 60 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 Passion Music, there is a certain note of the 
 spirit which, when we hear it, we perfectly 
 recognize as a part of ourselves. What we 
 recognize is, in fact, the Protestantism which 
 swept over Europe during the century of 
 Michael Angelo's existence; which con- 
 quered Teutonic Europe, and was conquered, 
 but not extinguished, in Latin Europe ; and 
 a part of which survives in ourselves. If 
 one wishes to feel the power of Savonarola, 
 one may do so in these sonnets. We had 
 connected Michael Angelo with the Renais- 
 sance, but we are here face to face with the 
 Reformation. We cannot help being a little 
 surprised at this. We cannot help being 
 surprised at finding how well we know this 
 man. 
 
 Few of us are familiar enough with the 
 language of the plastic arts to have seen 
 without prompting this same modern ele- 
 ment in Michael Angelo's painting and 
 sculpture. We might, perhaps, have recog- 
 nized it in the Pieta in St. Peter's. We 
 may safely say, however, that it exists in all 
 his works. It is in the Medicean statues; 
 it is in the Julian marbles; it is in the 
 Sistine ceiling. What is there in these 
 figures that they leave us so awestruck, that 
 they seem so like the sound of trumpets 
 II i6i 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 blowing from a spiritual world? The in- 
 telligence that could call them forth, the 
 craft that could draw them, have long since 
 perished. But the meaning survives the 
 craft. The lost arts retain their power over 
 us. We understand but vaguely, yet we are 
 thrilled. We cannot decipher the signs, yet 
 we subscribe to their import. The world 
 from which Michael Angelo's figures speak 
 is our own world, after all. That is the 
 reason they are so potent, so intimate, so 
 inimitably significant. We may be sure 
 that the affinity which we feel with Michael 
 Angelo, and do not feel with any other artist 
 of that age, springs from experiences and 
 beliefs in him which are similar to our 
 own. 
 
 His work speaks to the moral sense more 
 directly and more powerfully than that of 
 any one, — so directly and so powerfully, 
 indeed, that we whose physical senses are 
 dull, and whose moral sense is acute, are 
 moved by Michael Angelo, although the rest 
 of the cinque cento culture remain a closed 
 book to us. 
 
 It is difficult, this conjuring with the un- 
 recoverable past, so rashly done by us all. 
 Yet we must use what light we have. Re- 
 membering, then, that painting is not the 
 162 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 reigning mode of expression in recent times, 
 and that in dealing with it we are dealing 
 with a vehicle of expression with which we 
 are not spontaneously familiar, we may yet 
 draw conclusions which are not fantastic, if 
 we base them upon the identity of one man's 
 nature some part of which we are sure we 
 understand. We may throw a bridge from 
 the ground in the sonnets, upon which we 
 are sure we stand firmly, to the ground in 
 the frescos, which, by reason of our own 
 ignorance, is less certain ground to us, and 
 we may walk from one side to the other amid 
 the elemental forces of this same man's 
 mind. 
 
 XXXVIII 
 
 Give me again, ye fountains and ye streams, 
 That flood of life, not yours, that swells your front 
 Beyond the natural fulness of your wont. 
 
 I gave, and I take back as it beseems. 
 
 And thou dense choking atmosphere on high 
 Disperse thy fog of sighs — for it is mine, 
 And make the glory of the sun to shine 
 
 Again on my dim eyes. — O, Earth and Sky 
 
 Give me again the footsteps I have trod. 
 Let the paths grow where I walked them bare, 
 The echoes where I waked them with my prayer 
 
 Be deaf — and let those eyes — those eyes, O God, 
 
 Give me the light I lent them. — That some soul 
 
 May take my love. Thou hadst no need of it. 
 163 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 This rough and exceedingly obscure son- 
 net, in which strong feeling has condensed 
 and distorted the language, seems to have 
 been written by a man who has been in love 
 and has been repulsed. The shock has re- 
 stored him to a momentary realization of the 
 whole experience. He looks at the land- 
 scape, and lo ! the beauty has dropped out of 
 it. The stream has lost its power, and the 
 meadow its meaning. Summer has stopped. 
 His next thought is: "But it is I who had 
 lent the landscape this beauty. That land- 
 scape was myself, my dower, my glory, my 
 birthright, " and so he breaks out with " Give 
 me back the light I threw upon you," and so 
 on till the bitter word flung to the woman in 
 the last line. The same clearness of thought 
 and obscurity of expression and the same pas- 
 sion is to be found in the famous sonnet — 
 " Non ha V ottimo artista alcun concetto, " — 
 where he blames himself for not being able to 
 obtain her good-will — as a bad sculptor who 
 cannot hew out the beauty from the rock, al- 
 though he feels it to be there ; and in that 
 heart-breaking one where he says that people 
 may only draw from life what they give to 
 it, and says no good can come to a man who, 
 looking on such great beauty, feels such pain. 
 
 It is not profitable, nor is it necessary for 
 164 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 the comprehension of the poems, to decide 
 to whom or at what period each one was 
 written. There is dispute about some of 
 them as to whether they were addressed to 
 men or women. There is question as to 
 others whether they are prayers addressed 
 to Christ or love poems addressed to Vittoria. 
 In this latter case, perhaps, Michael Angelo 
 did not himself know which they were. 
 
 Vittoria used to instruct him in religion, 
 and he seems to have felt for her a love so 
 deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touch- 
 ing that the words are alive in which he 
 mentions her. 
 
 "I wished," he writes beneath a sonnet 
 which he sent her, evidently in return for 
 some of her own religious poems, " I wished, 
 before taking the things that you had many 
 times deigned to give me, in order that I 
 might receive them the less unworthily, to 
 make something for you from my own hand. 
 But then, remembering and knowing that the 
 grace of God may not be bought, and that 
 to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, I 
 confess my fault, and willingly receive the 
 said things, and when they shall arrive, not 
 because they are in my house, but I myself 
 as being in a house of theirs, shall deem 
 myself in Paradise." 
 
 165 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 We must not forget that at this time 
 Michael Angelo was an old man, that he 
 carried about with him a freshness and vigor 
 of feeling that most people lose with their 
 youth. A reservoir of emotion broke loose 
 within him at a time when it caused his 
 hale old frame suffering to undergo it, and 
 reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope 
 with it. A mystery play was enacted in 
 him, — each sonnet is a scene. There is the 
 whole of a man in each of many of these 
 sonnets. They do not seem so much like 
 poems as like microcosms. They are ele- 
 mentally complete. The soul of man could 
 be evolved again from them if the formula 
 
 were lost. 
 
 XL 
 
 I know not if it be the longed for light 
 Of its creator which the soul perceives, 
 Or if in people's memory there lives 
 
 A touch of early grace that keeps them bright 
 
 Or else ambition, — or some dream whose might 
 Brings to the eyes the hope the heart conceives 
 And leaves a burning feeling when it leaves — 
 
 That tears are welling in me as I write. 
 
 The things I feel, the things I follow and the things 
 I seek — are not in me, — I hardly know the place 
 To find them. It is others make them mine. 
 It happens when I see thee — and it brings 
 Sweet pain — a yes, — a no, — sorrow and grace 
 Surely it must have been those eyes of thine. 
 i66 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 There are others which give a most touch- 
 ing picture of extreme piety in extreme old 
 age. And there are still others which are 
 both love poems and religious poems at the 
 same time. 
 
 LV 
 
 Thou knowest that I know that thou dost know 
 How, to enjoy thee, I did come more near. 
 Thou knowest, I know thou knowest — I am here. 
 
 Would we had given our greetings long ago. 
 
 If true the hope thou hast to me revealed, 
 If true the plighting of a sacred troth, 
 Let the wall fall that stands between us both, 
 
 For griefs are doubled when they are concealed. 
 
 If, loved one, — if I only loved in thee 
 What thou thyself dost love, — 't is to this end 
 The spirit with his beloved is allied. 
 
 The things thy face inspires and teaches me 
 Mortality doth little comprehend. 
 Before we understand we must have died. 
 
 LI 
 
 Give me the time when loose the reins I flung 
 
 Upon the neck of galloping desire. 
 Give me the angel face that now among 
 
 The angels, — tempers Heaven with its fire. 
 Give the quick step that now is grown so old. 
 
 The ready tears — the blaze at thy behest. 
 If thou dost seek indeed, O Love ! to hold 
 
 Again thy reign of terror in my breast. 
 If it be true that thou dost only live 
 
 Upon the sweet and bitter pains of man 
 167 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 Surely a weak old man small food can give 
 
 Whose years strike deeper than thine arrows can. 
 Upon life's farthest limit I have stood — 
 What folly to make fire of burnt wood. 
 
 The occasion of the following was prob- 
 ably some more than wonted favor shown to 
 him by Vittoria. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 Great joy no less than grief doth murder men. 
 The thief, even at the gallows, may be killed 
 If, while through every vein with fear he 's chilled, 
 
 Sudden reprieve do set him free again. 
 
 Thus hath this bounty from you in my pain 
 Through all my griefs and sufferings fiercely thrilled, 
 Coming from a breast with sovereign mercy filled. 
 
 And more than weeping, cleft my heart in twain. 
 
 Good news, like bad, may bring the taker death. 
 The heart is rent as with the sharpest knife, 
 Be it pressure or expansion cause the rift. 
 Let thy great beauty which God cherisheth 
 Limit my joy if it desire my life — 
 The unworthy dies beneath so great a gift. 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 The heart is not the life of love like mine. 
 The love I love thee with has none of it. 
 For hearts to sin and mortal thought incline 
 And for love's habitation are unfit. 
 God, when our souls were parted from Him, made 
 Of me an eye — of thee, splendor and light. 
 i68 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 Even in the parts of thee which are to fade 
 
 Thou hast the glory ; I have only sight. 
 
 Fire from its heat you may not analyze, 
 
 Nor worship from eternal beauty take, 
 
 Which deifies the lover as he bows. 
 
 Thou hast that Paradise all within thine eyes 
 
 Where first I loved thee. 'T is for that love's sake 
 
 My soul 's on fire with thine, beneath thy brows. 
 
 The German musicians of the seventeenth 
 century used to write voluntaries for the 
 organ, using the shorthand of the older nota- 
 tion ; they jotted down the formulas of the 
 successive harmonies expressed in terms of 
 the chords merely. The transitions and the 
 musical explanation were left to the indi- 
 vidual performer. And Michael Angelo has 
 left behind him, as it were, the poetical 
 equivalents of such shorthand musical for- 
 mulas. The harmonies are wonderful. The 
 successions show a great grasp of compre- 
 hension, but you cannot play them without 
 filling them out. 
 
 "Is that music, after all," one may ask, 
 "which leaves so much to the performer, 
 and is that poetry, after all, which leaves so 
 much to the reader ? " It seems you must be 
 a Kapellmeister or a student, or dilettante 
 of some sort, before you can transpose and 
 illustrate these hieroglyphics. There is some 
 truth in this criticism, and the modesty of 
 169 
 
MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS 
 
 purpose in the poems is the only answer to 
 it. They claim no comment. Comment 
 claims them. Call them not poetry if you 
 will. They are a window which looks in 
 upon the most extraordinary nature of modern 
 times, — a nature whose susceptibility to 
 impressions of form through the eye allies 
 it to classical times; a nature which on the 
 emotional side belongs to our own day. 
 
 Is it a wonder that this man was venerated 
 with an almost superstitious regard in Italy, 
 and in the sixteenth century.' His creations 
 were touched with a superhuman beauty 
 which his contemporaries felt, yet charged 
 with a profoundly human meaning which 
 they could not fathom. No one epoch has 
 held the key to him. There lives not a man 
 and there never has lived a man who could 
 say, "I fully understand Michael Angelo's 
 works." It will be said that the same is 
 true of all the very greatest artists, and so it 
 is in a measure. But as to the others, that 
 truth comes as an afterthought and an admis- 
 sion. As to Michael Angelo, it is primary 
 and overwhelming impression. " We are not 
 sure that we comprehend him,'' say the cen- 
 turies as they pass, " but of this we are sure : 
 Sintil ne maggior uom non nacque mai. " 
 
 170 
 
THE FOURTH CANTO OF 
 THE INFERNO 
 
THE FOURTH CANTO OF 
 THE INFERNO 
 
 There are many great works of fiction where 
 the interest lies in the situation and develop- 
 ment of the characters or in the wrought-up 
 climax of the action, and where it is necessary 
 to read the whole work before one can feel 
 the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's 
 poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held 
 together only by the slender thread of the 
 itinerary. The scenes vary in length from a 
 line or two to a page or two ; and the power 
 of them comes, one may say, not at all from 
 their connection with each other, but entirely 
 from the language in which they are given. 
 
 A work of this kind is hard to translate 
 because verbal felicities, to use a mild term, 
 are untranslatable. What English words can 
 render the mystery of that unknown voice 
 that calls out of the deep, — 
 
 " Onorate '1 altissimo poeta, 
 Torna sua ombra che era dipartita " ? 
 
 The cry breaks upon the night, full of awful 
 greeting, proclamation, prophecy, and leaves 
 173 
 
FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 
 
 the reader standing next to Virgil, afraid now 
 to lift up his eyes to the poet. Awe breathes 
 in the cadence of the words themselves. And 
 so with many of the most splendid lines in 
 Dante, the meaning inheres in the very Italian 
 words. They alone shine with the idea. 
 They alone satisfy the spiritual vision. 
 
 Of all the greatest poets, Dante is most 
 foreign to the genius of the English race. 
 From the point of view of English-speaking 
 people, he is lacking in humor. It might 
 seem at first blush as if the argument of his 
 poem were a sufficient warrant for serious- 
 ness ; but his seriousness is of a nature strange 
 to northern nations. There is in it a gaunt 
 and sallow earnestness which appears to us 
 inhuman. 
 
 In the treatment of the supernatural the 
 Teutonic nations have generally preserved a 
 touch of humor. This is so intrinsically true 
 to the Teutonic way of feeling that the humor 
 seems to go with and to heighten the terror of 
 the supernatural. When Hamlet, in the scene 
 on the midnight terrace, addresses the ghost 
 as " old mole," " old truepenny," etc., we 
 may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excite- 
 ment and apprehension. Perhaps the expla- 
 nation of this mixture of humor and terror, 
 is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its 
 174 
 
FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 
 
 foundations by the immediate presence of the 
 supernatural, — palsied, as it were, with fear, — 
 there comes to its rescufe, and as an antidote 
 to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of 
 levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind 
 opposes it with the homely and the familiar. 
 The northern nations were too much afraid of 
 ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of 
 one made a man afraid he should lose his 
 wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus it 
 has come about that in the sincerest terror of 
 the north there is a touch of grotesque humor ; 
 and this touch we miss in Dante. The hundred 
 cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single 
 scene of comedy. The strain of exalted 
 tragedy is maintained throughout. His jests 
 and wit are not of the laughing kind. Some- 
 times they are grim and terrible, sometimes 
 playful, but always serious and full of meaning. 
 This lack of humor becomes very palpable 
 in a translation, where it is not disguised by 
 the transcendent beauty of Dante's style. 
 
 There is another difficulty peculiar to the 
 translating of Dante into English. English is 
 essentially a diffiise and prodigal language. 
 The great English writers have written with a 
 free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. Shake- 
 speare, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Scott, 
 Robert Browning, all the typical writers of 
 175 
 
FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 
 
 English, have been many-worded. They have 
 been men who said everything that came into 
 their heads, and trusted to their genius to 
 make their writings readable. The eighteenth 
 century in England, with all its striving after 
 classical precision, has left behind it no great 
 laconic English classic who stands in the first 
 rank. Our own Emerson is concise enough, 
 but he is disconnected and prophetic. Dante 
 is not only concise, but logical, deductive, 
 prone to ratiocination. He set down nothing 
 that he had not thought of a thousand times, 
 and conned over, arranged, and digested. We 
 have in English no prototype for such con- 
 densation. There is no native work in the 
 language written in anything which approaches 
 the style of Dante. 
 
 My heavy sleep a sullen thunder broke, 
 So that I shook myself, springing upright. 
 Like one awakened by a sudden stroke, 
 And gazed with fixed eyes and new-rested sight 
 Slowly about me, — awful privilege, — 
 To know the place that held me, if I might. 
 In truth I found myself upon the edge 
 That girds the valley of the dreadful pit, 
 Circling the infinite wailing with its ledge. 
 Dark, deep, and cloudy, to the depths of it 
 Eye could not probe, and though I bent mine low, 
 It helped my vain conjecture not a whit. 
 " Let us go down to the blind world below," 
 Began the poet, with a face like death, 
 176 
 
FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 
 
 " I shall go first, thou second." " Say not so," 
 Cried I when I again could find my breath, 
 For I had seen the whiteness of his face, 
 " How shall I come if thee it frighteneth ? " 
 And he replied : " The anguish of the place 
 And those that dwell there thus hath painted me 
 With pity, not with fear. But come apace ; 
 The spur of the journey pricks us." Thus did he 
 Enter himseU, and take me in with him. 
 Into the first great circle's mystery 
 That winds the deep abyss about the brim. 
 
 Here there came borne upon the winds to us, 
 Not cries, but sighs that filled the concave dim, 
 And kept the eternal breezes tremulous. 
 The cause is grief, but grief unlinked to pain, 
 That makes the unnumbered peoples suffer thus. 
 I saw great crowds of children, women, men. 
 Wheeling below. " Thou dost not seek to know 
 What spirits are these thou seest? " Thus again 
 My master spoke. " But ere we further go. 
 Thou must be sure that these feel not the weight 
 Of sin. They well deserved, — and yet not so. — 
 They had not baptism, which is the gate 
 Of Faith, — thou boldest. If they lived before 
 The days of Christ, though sinless, in that state 
 God they might never worthily adore. 
 And I myself am such an one as these. 
 For this shortcoming — on no other score — 
 We are lost, and most of all our torment is 
 That lost to hope we live in strong desire." 
 Grief seized my heart to hear these words of his, 
 Because most splendid souls and hearts of fire 
 I recognized, hung in that Limbo there. 
 12 177 
 
FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 
 
 " Tell me, my master dear, tell me, my sire," 
 Cried I at last, with eager hope to share 
 That all-convincing faith, — " but went there not 
 One, — once, — from hence, — made happy though it 
 
 were 
 Through his own merit or another's lot ? " 
 " I was new come into this place," said he, 
 Who seemed to guess the purport of my thought, 
 " When Him whose brows were bound with Victory 
 I saw come conquering through this prison dark. 
 He set the shade of our first parent free. 
 With Abel, and the builder of the ark, 
 And him that gave the laws immutable, 
 And Abraham, obedient patriarch, 
 David the king, and ancient Israel, 
 His father and his children at his side. 
 And the wife Rachel that he loved so well. 
 And gave them Paradise, — and before these men 
 None tasted of salvation that have died." 
 
 We did not pause while he was talking then, 
 But held our constant course along the track. 
 Where spirits thickly thronged the wooded glen. 
 And we had reached a point whence to turn back 
 Had not been far, when I, still touched with fear, 
 Perceived a fire, that, struggling with the black. 
 Made conquest of a luminous hemisphere. 
 The place was distant still, but I could see 
 Clustered about the fire, as we drew near. 
 Figures of an austere nobility. 
 " Thou who dost honor science and love art. 
 Pray who are these, whose potent dignity 
 Doth eminently set them thus apart? " 
 The poet answered me, " The honored fame 
 178 
 
FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 
 
 That made their lives illustrious touched the heart 
 
 Of God to advance them." Then a voice there came, 
 
 " Honor the mighty poet ; " and again, 
 
 " His shade returns, — do honor to his name." 
 
 And vifhen the voice had finished its refrain, 
 
 I saw four giant shadows coming on. 
 
 They seemed nor sad nor joyous in their mien. 
 
 And my good master said : "See him, my son, 
 
 That bears the sword and walks before the rest, 
 
 And seems the father of the three, — that one 
 
 Is Homer, sovran poet. The satirist 
 
 Horace comes next ; third, Ovid; and'the last 
 
 Is Lucan. The lone voice that name expressed 
 
 That each doth share with me ; therefore they haste 
 
 To greet and do me honor ; — nor do they wrong." 
 
 Thus did I see the assembled school who graced 
 
 The master of the most exalted song, 
 
 That like an eagle soars above the rest. 
 
 When they had talked together, though not long, 
 
 They turned to me, nodding as to a guest. 
 
 At which my master smiled, but yet more high 
 
 They lifted me in honor. At their behest 
 
 I went with them as of their company, 
 
 And made the sixth among those mighty wits. 
 
 Thus towards the light we walked in colloquy 
 Of things my silence wisely here omits, 
 As there 't was sweet to speak them, till we came 
 To where a seven times circled castle sits. 
 Whose walls are watered by a lovely stream. 
 This we crossed over as it had been dry. 
 Passing the seven gates that guard the same. 
 And reached a meadow, green as Arcady. 
 179 
 
FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 
 
 People were there with deep, slow-moving eyes 
 Whose looks were weighted with authority. 
 Scant was their speech, but rich in melodies. 
 The walls receding left a pasture fair, 
 A place all full of light and of great size, 
 So we could see each spirit that was there. 
 And straight before my eyes upon the green 
 Were shown to me the souls of those that were. 
 Great spirits it exalts me to have seen. 
 Electra with her comrades I descried, 
 I saw ^neas, and knew Hector keen, 
 And in full armor Csesar, falcon-eyed, 
 Camilla and the Amazonian queen, 
 King Latin with Lavinia at his side, 
 Brutus that did avenge the Tarquin's sin, 
 Lucrece, Cornelia, Martia Julia, 
 And by himself the lonely Saladin. 
 
 The Master of all thinkers next I saw 
 Amid the philosophic family. 
 AH eyes were turned on him with reverent awe ; 
 Plato and Socrates were next his knee, 
 Then Heraclitus and Empedocles, 
 Thales and Anaxagoras, and he 
 That based the world on chance ; and next to these, 
 Zeno, Diogenes, and that good leech 
 The herb-collector, Dioscorides. 
 Orpheus I saw, Livy and TuUy, each 
 Flanked by old Seneca's deep moral lore, 
 Euclid and Ptolemy, and within their reach 
 Hippocrates and Avicenna's store. 
 The sage that wrote the master commentary, 
 Averois, with Galen and a score 
 Of great physicians. But my pen were weary 
 Depicting all of that majestic plain 
 Splendid with many an antique dignitary. 
 1 80 
 
FOURTH CANTO OF INFERNO 
 
 My theme doth drive me on, and words are vain 
 To give the thought the thing itself conveys. 
 The six of us were now cut down to twain. 
 My guardian led me forth by other ways, 
 Far from the quiet of that trembling wind, 
 And from the gentle shining of those rays. 
 To places where all light was left behind. 
 
 i8i 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 There is a period in the advance of any great 
 man's influence between the moment when he 
 appears and the moment when he has be- 
 come historical, during which it is difficult 
 to give any succinct account of him. We 
 are ourselves a part of the thing we would 
 describe. The element which we attempt to 
 isolate for purposes of study is still living 
 within us. Our science becomes tinged with 
 autobiography. Such must be the fate of 
 any essay on Browning written at the present 
 time. 
 
 The generation to whom his works were 
 unmeaning has hardly passed away. The 
 generation he spoke for still lives. His in- 
 fluence seems still to be expanding. The 
 literature of Browning dictionaries, phrase- 
 books, treatises, and philosophical studies 
 grows daily. Mr. Cooke in his Guide to 
 Browning (1893) gives a condensed cata- 
 logue of the best books and essays on Brown- 
 ing, which covers many finely printed pages. 
 This class of book — the text-book — is not 
 185 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 the product of impulse. The text-book is a 
 commercial article and follows the demand 
 as closely as the reaper follows the crop. 
 We can tell the acreage under cultivation by 
 looking over the account books of the makers 
 of farm implements. Thousands of people 
 are now studying Browning, following in his 
 footsteps, reading lives of his heroes, and 
 hunting up the subjects he treated. 
 
 This Browningism which we are disposed 
 to laugh at is a most interesting secondary 
 outcome of his influence. It has its roots 
 in natural piety, and the educational value 
 of it is very great. 
 
 Browning's individuality created for him a 
 personal following, and he was able to re- 
 spond to the call to leadership. Unlike 
 Carlyle, he had something to give his disci- 
 ples beside the immediate satisfaction of a 
 spiritual need. He gave them not only meal 
 but seed. In this he was like Emerson; 
 but Emerson's little store of finest grain is of 
 a different soil. Emerson lived in a cottage 
 and saw the stars over his head through his 
 skylight. Browning, on the other hand, 
 loved pictures, places, music, men and 
 women, and his works are like the house of 
 a rich man, — a treasury of plunder from 
 many provinces and many ages, whose man- 
 i86 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 ners and passions are vividly recalled to us. 
 In Emerson's house there was not a peg to 
 hang a note upon, — "this is his bookshelf, 
 this his bed." But Browning's palace craves 
 a catalogue. And a proper catalogue to 
 such a palace becomes a liberal education. 
 
 Robert Browning was a strong, glowing, 
 whole-souled human being, who enjoyed life 
 more intensely than any Englishman since 
 Walter Scott. He was born among books; 
 and circumstances enabled him to follow his 
 inclinations and become a writer, — a poet by 
 profession. He was, from early youth to 
 venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality, 
 the very embodiment of spontaneous life; 
 and the forms of poetry in which he so fully 
 and so accurately expressed himself enable 
 us to know him well. Indeed, only great 
 poets are known so intimately as we know 
 Robert Browning. 
 
 Religion was at the basis of his character, 
 and it was the function of religious poetry 
 that his work fulfilled. Inasmuch as no man 
 invents his own theology, but takes it from 
 the current world and moulds it to his needs,, 
 it was inevitable that Robert Browning should 
 find and seize upon as his own all that was 
 optimistic in Christian theology. Everything 
 that was hopeful his spirit accepted; every- 
 187 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 thing that was sunny and joyful and good for 
 the brave soul he embraced. What was dis- 
 tressing he rejected or explained away. In 
 the world of Robert Browning everything was 
 right. 
 
 The range of subject covered by his poems 
 is wider than that of any other poet that ever 
 lived ; but the range of his ideas is exceed- 
 ingly small. We need not apologize for 
 treating Browning as a theologian and a 
 doctor of philosophy, for he spent a long life 
 in trying to show that a poet is always really 
 both — and he has almost convinced us. 
 The expositors and writers of text-books have 
 had no difficulty in formulating his theology, 
 for it is of the simplest kind ; and his views 
 on morality and art are logically a part of it. 
 The " message " which poets are convention- 
 ally presumed to deliver, was, in Browning's 
 case, a very definite creed, which may be 
 found fully set forth in any one of twenty 
 poems. Every line of his poetry is logically 
 dedicated to it. 
 
 He believes that the development of the 
 individual soul is the main end of existence. 
 The strain and stress of life are incidental to 
 growth, and therefore desirable. Develop- 
 ment and growth mean a closer union with 
 God. In fact, God is of not so much import- 
 i88 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 ance in Himself, but as the end towards 
 which man tends. That irreverent person 
 who said that Browning uses " God " as a 
 pigment made an accurate criticism of his 
 theology. In Browning, God is adjective to 
 man. Browning believes that all conven- 
 tional morality must be reviewed from the 
 standpoint of how conduct affects the actor 
 himself, and what effect it has on his individ- 
 ual growth. The province of art and of all 
 thinking and working is to make these truths 
 clear and to grapple with the problems they 
 give rise to. 
 
 The first two fundamental beliefs of Brown- 
 ing — namely : ( i ) that, ultimately speaking, 
 the most important matter in the world is 
 the soul of a man ; and (2) that a sense of 
 effort is coincident with development — are 
 probably true. We instinctively feel them to 
 be true, and they seem to be receiving support 
 from those quarters of research to which we 
 look for light, however dim. In the applica- 
 tion of his dogmas to specific cases in the 
 field of ethics, Browning often reaches conclu- 
 sions which are fair subjects for disagreement. 
 Since most of our conventional morality is 
 framed to repress the individual, he finds him- 
 self at war with it — in revolt against it. He 
 is habitually pitted against it, and thus ac- 
 189 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 quires modes of thought which sometimes 
 lead him into paradox — at least, to conclu- 
 sions at odds with his premises. It is in the 
 course of exposition, and incidentally to his 
 main purpose as a teacher of a few funda- 
 mental ideas, that Browning has created his 
 masterpieces of poetry. 
 
 Never was there a man who in the course 
 of a long life changed less. What as a boy 
 he dreamed of doing, that he did. The 
 thoughts of his earliest poems are the thoughts 
 of his latest. His tales, his songs, his mono- 
 logues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his 
 rage, his prayer, are all upon the same theme : 
 whatever fed his mind nourished these beliefs. 
 His interest in the world was solely an inter- 
 est in them. He saw them in history and in 
 music; his travels and studies brought him 
 back nothing else but proofs of them ; the 
 universe in each of its manifestations was a 
 commentary upon them. His nature was 
 the simplest, the most positive, the least 
 given to abstract speculation, which England 
 can show in his time. He was not a thinker, 
 for he was never in doubt. He had recourse 
 to disputation as a means of inculcating truth, 
 but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. 
 His conclusions are fixed from the start 
 Standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as 
 igo 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 absolute as that of a martyr, he has never for 
 one instant undergone the experience of doubt, 
 and only knows that there is such a thing 
 because he has met with it in other people. 
 The force of his feelings is so much greater 
 than his intellect that his mind serves his 
 soul like a valet. Out of the whole cosmos 
 he takes what belongs to him and sustains 
 him, leaving the rest, or not noting it. 
 
 There never was a great poet whose scope 
 was so definite. That is the reason why the 
 world is so cleanly divided into people who do 
 and who do not care for Browning. One real 
 glimpse into him gives you the whole of him. 
 The public which loves him is made up of 
 people who have been through certain spiritual 
 experiences to which he is the antidote. The 
 public which loves him not consists of people 
 who have escaped these experiences. To some 
 he is a strong, rare, and precious elixir, which 
 nothing else will replace. To others, who do 
 not need him, he is a boisterous and eccen- 
 tric person, — a Heracles in the house of 
 mourning. 
 
 Let us remember his main belief, — the 
 value of the individual. The needs of society 
 constantly require that the individual be sup- 
 pressed. They hold him down and punish 
 him at every point. The tyranny of order 
 191 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 and organization — of monarch or public 
 opinion — weights him and presses him down. 
 This is the inevitable tendency of all stable 
 social arrangements. Now and again there 
 arises some strong nature that revolts against 
 the influence of conformity which is becoming 
 intolerable, — against the atmosphere of caste 
 or theory ; of Egyptian priest or Manchester 
 economist ; of absolutism or of democracy. 
 
 And this strong nature cries out that the 
 souls of men are being injured, and that they 
 are important; that your soul and my soul 
 are more important than Caesar — or than 
 the survival of the fittest. Such a voice was the 
 voice of Christ, and the lesser saviors of the 
 world bring always a like message of revolt : 
 they arise to fulfil the same fundamental need 
 of the world. 
 
 Carlyle, Emerson, Victor Hugo, Browning, 
 were prophets to a generation oppressed in 
 spirit, whose education had oppressed them 
 with a Jewish law of Adam Smith and Jeremy 
 Bentham and Malthus, of Clarkson and Cob- 
 den, — of thought for the million, and for man 
 in the aggregate. " To what end is all this 
 beneficence, all this conscience, all this 
 theory? " some one at length cries out. " For 
 whom is it in the last analysis that you legis- 
 late ? You talk of man, I see only men!' 
 192 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 To men suffering from an age of devotion 
 to humanity came Robert Browning as a lib- 
 erator. Like Carlyle, he was understood first 
 in this country because we had begun earlier 
 with our theoretical and practical philanthro- 
 pies, and had taken them more seriously. 
 We had suffered more. We needed to be 
 told that it was right to love, hate, and be 
 angry, to sin and repent. It was a revelation 
 to us to think that we had some inheritance 
 in the joys and passions of mankind. We 
 needed to be told these things as a tired child 
 needs to be comforted. Browning gave them 
 to us in the form of a religion. There was no 
 one else sane or deep or wise or strong enough 
 to know what we lacked. 
 
 If ever a generation had need of a poet, — 
 of some one to tell them they might cry and 
 not be ashamed, rejoice and not find the rea- 
 son in John Stuart Mill; some one who 
 should justify the claims of the spirit which 
 was starving on the religion of humanity, — it 
 was the generation for whom Browning wrote. 
 
 Carlyle had seized upon the French Revo- 
 lution, which served his ends because it was 
 filled with striking, with powerful, with gro- 
 tesque examples of individual force. In his 
 Hero Worship he gives his countrymen a 
 philosophy of history based on nothing but 
 '3 193 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 worship of the individual. Browning with the 
 same end in view gave us pictures of the fif- 
 teenth and sixteenth centuries in France and 
 Italy. He glorified what we had thought 
 crime and error, and made men of us. He 
 was the apostle to the educated of a most 
 complex period, but such as he was, he was 
 complete. Those people to whom he has 
 been a poet know what it is for the heart to 
 receive full expression from the lips of an- 
 other. 
 
 The second thesis which Browning insists 
 on — the identity of spiritual suffering with 
 spiritual growth — is the one balm of the 
 world. It is said that recent physiological 
 experiment shows that muscles do not de- 
 velop unless exercised up to what is called 
 the " distress point." If this shall prove to 
 be an instance of a general law, — if the strug- 
 gles and agony of the spirit are really signs 
 of an increase of that spiritual life which is 
 the only sort of life we can conceive of now or 
 hereafter, — then the truth-to-feeling of much 
 of Browning's poetry has a scientific basis. 
 It cannot be denied that Browning held firmly 
 two of the most moving and far-reaching 
 ideas of the world, and he expanded them in 
 the root, leaf, flower, and fruit of a whole 
 world of poetic disquisition. 
 194 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 It is unnecessary at this day to point out 
 the beauties of Browning or the sagacity with 
 which he chose his efiFects. He gives us the 
 sallow wife of James Lee, whose soul is known 
 to him, Pippa the silk-spinning girl, two men 
 found in the morgue, persons lost, forgotten, 
 or misunderstood. He searches the world 
 till he finds the man whom everybody will 
 concur in despising, the mediaeval gramma- 
 rian, and he writes to him the most powerful 
 ode in English, the mightiest tribute ever 
 paid to a man. His culture and his learning 
 are all subdued to what he works in; they 
 are all in harness to draw his thought. He 
 mines in antiquity or drags his net over Ger- 
 man philosophy or modern drawing-rooms, — 
 all to the same end. 
 
 In that miracle of power and beauty — • 
 The Flight of the Duchess — he has im- 
 provised a whole civilization in order to make 
 the setting of contrast which shall cause the 
 soul of the little duchess to shine clearly. In 
 Childe Roland he creates a cycle, an epoch 
 of romance and mysticism, because he re- 
 quires it as a stage property. In A Death 
 in the Desert you have the East in the first 
 century — so vividly given that you wish in- 
 stantly to travel there, Bible in hand, to feel 
 the atmosphere with which your Bible ought 
 I9S 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 always to have been filled. His reading 
 brings him to Euripides. He sees that Al- 
 cestis can be set to his theme; and with a 
 week or two of labor, while staying in a 
 country house, he draws out of the Greek 
 fable the world of his own meaning and shows 
 it shining forth in a living picture of the Greek 
 theatre which has no counterpart for vitality 
 in any modern tongue. 
 
 The descriptive and narrative powers of 
 Browning are above, beyond, and outside of 
 all that has been done in English in our time, 
 as the odd moments prove which he gave to 
 the Pied Piper, The Ride from Ghent to 
 Aix, Incident in the French Camp. These 
 chips from his workshop passed instantly into 
 popular favor because they were written in 
 familiar forms. 
 
 How powerfully his gifts of utterance were 
 brought to bear upon the souls of men will 
 be recorded, even if never understood, by 
 literary historians. It is idle to look to the 
 present generation for an intelligible account 
 of One Word More, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Pros- 
 pice, Saul, The Blot on the 'Scutcheon. 
 They must be judged by the future and by 
 men who can speak of them with a steady 
 lip. 
 
 It must be conceded that the conventional 
 196 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 judgments of society are sometimes right, 
 and Browning's mission led him occasion- 
 ally into paradox and jeux d^ esprit. Bishop 
 Blougram is an attempt to discover whether 
 a good case cannot be made out for the in- 
 dividual hypocrite. The Statue and the Bust 
 is frankly a reductio ad absurdum, and ends 
 with a query. 
 
 There is more serious trouble with others. 
 The Grammarian's Funeral is false to fact, 
 and will appear so to posterity. The gram- 
 marian was not a hero, and our calmer mo- 
 ments show us that the poem is not a great 
 ode. It gave certain people the glow of a 
 great truth, but it remains a paradox and a 
 piece of exaggeration. The same must be 
 said of a large part of Browning. The New 
 Testament is full of such paradoxes of exag- 
 geration, like the parable of the unjust stew- 
 ard, the rich man's chance for heaven, the 
 wedding garment; but in these, the truth is 
 apparent, — we are not betrayed. In Brown- 
 ing's paradoxes we are often led on and 
 involved in an emotion over some situation 
 which does not honestly call for the emotion. 
 
 The most noble quality in Browning is 
 his temper. He does not proceed, as libera- 
 tors generally do, by railing and pulling 
 down. He builds up; he is positive, not 
 197 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 negative. He is less bitter than Christianity 
 itself. 
 
 While there is no more doubt as to the 
 permanent value of the content of Browning 
 than of the value of the spiritual truths of the 
 New Testament, there is very little likelihood 
 that his poems will be understood in the re- 
 mote future. At present, they are following 
 the waves of influence of the education which 
 they correct. They are built like Palladio's 
 Theatre at Vicenza, where the perspective 
 converges toward a single seat. In order to 
 be subject to the illusion, the spectator must 
 occupy the duke's place. The colors are 
 dropping from the poems already. The fee- 
 blest of them lose it first. There was a steady 
 falling off in power accompanied by a con- 
 stant increase in his peculiarities during the 
 last twenty years of his life, and we may 
 make some surmise as to how Balaustion's 
 Adventure will strike posterity by reading 
 Parleyings with Certain People. 
 
 The distinctions between Browning's char- 
 acters — which to us are so vivid — will to 
 others seem less so. Paracelsus and Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra, Lippo Lippi, Karshish, Capon- 
 sacchi, and Ferishtah will all appear to be 
 run in the same mould. They will seem to be 
 the thinnest disguises which a poet ever as- 
 ig8 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 sumed. The lack of the dramatic element in 
 Browning — a lack which is concealed from 
 us by our intense sympathy for him and by his 
 fondness for the trappings of the drama — will 
 be apparent to the after-comers. They will 
 say that all the characters in The Blot on 
 the 'Scutcheon take essentially the same 
 view of the catastrophe of the play; that 
 Pippa and Pompilia and Phene are the same 
 person in the same state of mind. In fact, 
 the family likeness is great. They will say 
 that the philosophic monologues are repeti- 
 tions of each other. It cannot be denied 
 that there is much repetition, — much thresh- 
 ing out of old straw. Those who have read 
 Browning for years and are used to the mon- 
 ologues are better pleased to find the old 
 ideas than new ones, which they could not 
 understand so readily. When the later 
 Browning takes us on one of those long 
 afternoon rambles through his mind, — over 
 moor and fen, through jungle, down preci- 
 pice, past cataract, — we know just where we 
 are coming out in the end. We know the 
 place better than he did himself. Nor will 
 posterity like Browning's manners, — the dig 
 in the ribs, the personal application, and 
 de te fdbula of most of his talking. These 
 unpleasant things are part of his success with 
 199 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 us to whom he means life, not art. Posterity 
 will want only art. We needed doctrine. If 
 he had not preached, we would not have lis- 
 tened to him. But posterity evades the 
 preachers and accepts only singers. Pos- 
 terity is so dainty that it lives on nothing but 
 choice morsels. It will cull such out of the 
 body of Browning as the anthologists are 
 beginning to do already, and will leave the 
 great mass of him to be rediscovered from 
 time to time by belated sufferers from the 
 philosophy of the nineteenth century. 
 
 There is a class of persons who claim for 
 Browning that his verse is really good verse, 
 and that he was a master of euphony. This 
 cannot be admitted except as to particular 
 instances in which his success is due to his 
 conformity to law, not to his violation of it. 
 
 The rules of verse in English are merely a 
 body of custom which has grown up uncon- 
 sciously, and most of which rests upon some 
 simple requirement of the ear. 
 
 In speaking of the power of poetry we are 
 dealing with what is essentially a mystery, the 
 outcome of infinitely subtle, numerous, and 
 complex forces. 
 
 The rhythm of versification seems to serve 
 the purpose of a prompter. It lets us know in 
 200 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 advance just what syllables are to receive the 
 emphasis which shall make the sense clear. 
 There are many lines in poetry which become 
 obscure the instant they are written in prose, 
 and probably the advantages of poetry over 
 prose, or, to express it modestly, the excuse 
 for poetry at all, is that the form facilitates 
 the comprehension of the matter. Rhyme is 
 itself an indication that a turning-point has 
 been reached. It punctuates and sets off the 
 sense, and relieves our attention from the 
 strain of suspended interest. All of the arti- 
 fices of poetical form seem designed to a like 
 end. Naturalness of speech is somewhat sacri- 
 ficed, but we gain by the sacrifice a certain uni- 
 formity of speech which rests and exhilarates. 
 We need not, for the present, examine the 
 question of euphony any further, nor ask 
 whether euphony be not a positive element 
 in verse, — an element which belongs to 
 music. 
 
 The negative advantages of poetry over 
 prose are probably sufficient to account for 
 most of its power. A few more considerations 
 of the same negative nature, and which affect 
 the vividness of either prose or verse, may be 
 touched upon by way of preface to the inquiry, 
 why Browning is hard to understand and why 
 his verse is bad. 
 
 201 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 Every one is more at ease in his mind when 
 he reads a language which observes the ordi- 
 nary rules of grammar, proceeds by means of 
 sentences having subjects and predicates, and 
 of which the adjectives and adverbs fall easily 
 into place. A doubt about the grammar is a 
 doubt about the sense. And this is so true 
 that sometimes when our fears are allayed 
 by faultless grammar we may read absolute 
 nonsense with satisfaction. We sometimes 
 hear it stated as a bitter epigram, that poetry 
 is likely to endure just in proportion as the 
 form of it is superior to the content. As to 
 the "inferiority" of the content, a moment's 
 reflection shows that the ideas and feehngs 
 which prevail from age to age, and in which 
 we may expect posterity to delight, are in 
 their nature, and of necessity, commonplace. 
 And if by " superiority of form " it is meant 
 that these ideas shall be conveyed in flowing 
 metres, — in words which are easy to pro- 
 nounce, put together according to the rules 
 of grammar, and largely drawn from the vul- 
 gar tongue, — we need not wonder that pos- 
 terity should enjoy it. In fact, it is just such 
 verse as this which survives from age to age. 
 
 Browning possesses one superlative excel- 
 lence, and it is upon this that he relies. It is 
 upon this that he has emerged and attacked 
 202 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 the heart of man. It is upon this that he 
 may possibly fight his way down to posterity 
 and live like a fire forever in the bosom of 
 mankind. 
 
 His language is the language of common 
 speech ; his force, the immediate force of life. 
 His language makes no compromises of any 
 sort. It is not subdued to form. The em- 
 phasis demanded by the sense is very often 
 not the emphasis demanded by the metre. 
 He cuts off his words and forces them ruth- 
 lessly into lines as a giant might force his 
 limbs into the armor of a mortal. The joints 
 and members of the speech fall in the wrong 
 places and have no relation to the joints and 
 members of the metre. 
 
 He writes like a lion devouring an antelope. 
 He rends his subject, breaks its bones, and 
 tears out the heart of it. He is not made 
 more, but less, comprehensible by the verse- 
 forms in which he writes. The sign-posts of 
 the metre lead us astray. He would be easier 
 to understand if his poems were printed in 
 the form of prose. That is the reason why 
 Browning becomes easy when read aloud; 
 for in reading aloud we give the emphasis of 
 speech, and throw over all effort to follow the 
 emphasis of the metre. This is also the reason 
 why Browning is so unquotable — why he has 
 203 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 made so little effect upon the language — why 
 so few of the phrases and turns of thought 
 and metaphor with which poets enrich a lan- 
 guage have been thrown into English by him. 
 Let a man who does not read poetry take up 
 a volume of Familiar Quotations, and he will 
 find page after page of lines and phrases 
 which he knows by heart — from Tennyson, 
 Milton, Wordsworth — things made familiar 
 to him not by the poets, but by the men 
 whom the poets educated, and who adopted 
 their speech. Of Browning he will know not 
 a word. And yet Browning's poetry is full of 
 words that glow and smite, and which have 
 been burnt into and struck into the most influ- 
 ential minds of the last fifty years. 
 
 But Browning's phrases are almost impos- 
 sible to remember, because they are speech 
 not reduced to poetry. They do not sing, 
 they do not carry. They have no artificial 
 buoys to float them in our memories. 
 
 It follows from this uncompromising nature 
 of Browning that when, by the grace of inspi- 
 ration, the accents of his speech do fall into 
 rhythm, his words will have unimaginable 
 sweetness. The music is so much a part of the 
 words — so truly spontaneous — that other 
 verse seems tame and manufactured beside his. 
 
 Rhyme is generally so used by Browning 
 304 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 as not to subserve the true function of rhyme. 
 It is forced into a sort of superficial confor- 
 mity, but marks no epoch in the verse. The 
 clusters of rhymes are clusters only to the eye 
 and not to the ear. The necessity of rhyming 
 leads Browning into inversions, — into expan- 
 sions of sentences beyond the natural close of 
 the form, — into every sort of contortion. 
 The rhymes clog and distress the sentences. 
 
 As to grammar. Browning is negligent. 
 Some of his most eloquent and wonderful pas- 
 sages have no grammar whatever. In Sor- 
 dello grammar does not exist ; and the want 
 of it, the strain upon the mind caused by 
 an effort to make coherent sentences out of a 
 fleeting, ever-changing, iridescent maze of 
 talk, wearies and exasperates the reader. Of 
 course no one but a school-master desires 
 that poetry shall be capable of being parsed ; 
 but every one has a right to expect that he 
 shall be left without a sense of grammatical 
 deficiency. 
 
 The Invocation in The Ring and the 
 Book is one of the most beautiful openings 
 that can be imagined. 
 
 " O l)a:ic love, half angel and half bird, 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire — 
 Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, 
 Took sanctuary within the holier blue, 
 
 205 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 And sang a kindred soul out to his face — 
 
 Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart — 
 
 When the first summons from the darkling earth 
 
 Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, 
 
 And bared them of the glory — to drop down. 
 
 To toil for man, to suffer or to die — 
 
 This is the same voice : can thy soul know change ? 
 
 Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help ! 
 
 Never may I commence my song, my due 
 
 To God who best taught song by gift of thee, 
 
 Except with bent head and beseeching hand — 
 
 That still, despite the distance and the dark 
 
 What was, again may be ; some interchange 
 
 Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought, 
 
 Some benediction anciently thy smile ; — 
 
 Never conclude, but raising hand and head 
 
 Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn 
 
 For all hope, all sustainment, all reward, 
 
 Their utmost up and on — so blessing back 
 
 In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, 
 
 Some whiteness, which, I judge, thy face makes 
 
 proud, 
 Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall." 
 
 These sublime lines are marred by appar- 
 ent grammatical obscurity. The face of 
 beauty is marred when one of the eyes seems 
 sightless. We re-read the lines to see if we 
 are mistaken. If they were in a foreign 
 language, we should say we did not fully 
 understand them. 
 
 In the dramatic monologues, as, for in- 
 stance, in The Ring and the Book and in the 
 206 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 innumerable other narratives and contempla- 
 tions where a single speaker holds forth, we 
 are especially called upon to forget grammar. 
 The speaker relates and reflects, — pours out 
 his ideas in the order in which they occur to 
 him, — pursues two or three trains of thought 
 at the same time, claims every license which 
 either poetry or conversation could yiccord 
 him. The effect of this method is so start- 
 ling, that when we are vigorous enough to 
 follow the sense, we forgive al^faults of metre 
 and grammar, and feel that this natural Niag- 
 ara of speech is the only way for the turbulent 
 mind of man to get complete utterance. We 
 forget that it is possible for the same thing to 
 be done, and yet to be subdued, and stilled, 
 and charmed into music. 
 
 Prospero is as natural and as individual as 
 Bishop Blougram. His grammar is as incom- 
 plete, yet we do not note it. He talks to 
 himself, to Miranda, to Ariel, all at once, 
 weaving all together his passions, his philoso- 
 phy, his narrative, and his commands. His 
 reflections are as profuse and as metaphysical 
 as anything in Browning, and yet all is clear, 
 — all is so managed that it lends magic. The 
 characteristic and unfathomable significance, 
 of this particular character Prospero comes 
 out of it. 
 
 207 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 " Prosfiero. My brother and thy uncle, called 
 Antonio — 
 I pray thee mark me, — that a brother should 
 Be so perfidious ! — he whom next thyself, 
 Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put 
 The manage of my state ; as at that time 
 Through all the seignories it was the first, 
 And Prospero, the Prime Duke, being so reputed 
 In dignity and for the liberal arts, 
 Without a parallel : those being all my study. 
 The government I cast upon my brother, 
 And to my state grew stranger, being transported 
 And wrapped in secret studies. Thy false uncle — 
 Dost thou attend me ? " 
 
 It is unnecessary to give examples from 
 Browning of defective verse, of passages 
 which cannot be understood, which cannot 
 be construed, which cannot be parodied, and 
 which can scarcely be pronounced. They 
 are mentioned only as throwing light on 
 Browning's cast of mind and methods of 
 work. His inability to recast and correct his 
 work cost the world a master. He seems to 
 have been condemned to create at white heat 
 and to stand before the astonishing draft, 
 which his energy had flung out, powerless to 
 complete it. 
 
 We have a few examples of things which 
 
 came forth perfect, but many of even the 
 
 most beautiful and most original of the shorter 
 
 poems are marred by some blotches that hurt 
 
 208 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 us and which one feels might have been struck 
 out or corrected in half an hour. How many 
 of the poems are too long ! It is not that 
 Browning went on writing after he had com- 
 pleted his thought, — for the burst of beauty- 
 is as likely to come at the end as at the 
 beginning, — but that his thought had to 
 unwind itself like web from a spider. He 
 could not command it. He could only un- 
 wind and unwind. 
 
 Pan and Luna is a sketch, as luminous 
 as a Correggio, but not finished. Caliban 
 upon Setebos, on the other hand, shows crea- 
 tive genius, beyond all modern reach, but 
 flounders and drags on too long. In the 
 poems which he revised, as, for instance, Herve 
 Riel, which exists in two or more forms, the 
 corrections are verbal, and were evidently 
 done with the same fierce haste with which 
 the poems were written. 
 
 We must not for an instant imagine that 
 Browning was indolent or indifferent; it is 
 known that he was a taskmaster to himself. 
 But he could not write other than he did. 
 When the music came and the verse caught 
 the flame, and his words became sweeter, and 
 his thought clearer, then he could sweep 
 down like an archangel bringing new strains 
 of beauty to the earth. But the occasions 
 14 209 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 when he did this are a handful of passages in 
 a body of writing as large as the Bible. 
 
 Just as Browning could not stop, so he 
 found it hard to begin. His way of beginning 
 is to seize the end of the thread just where he 
 can, and write down the first sentence. 
 
 " She should never have looked at me, 
 If she meant I should not love her ! " 
 
 " Water your damned flowerpots, do — " 
 
 " No ! for I '11 save it ! Seven years since." 
 
 " But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow ! " 
 
 " Fear Death ? to feel the fog in my throat." 
 
 Sometimes his verse fell into coils as it 
 came, but he himself, as he wrote the first 
 line of a poem, never knew in what form of 
 verse the poem would come forth. Hence 
 the novel figures and strange counterpoint. 
 Having evolved the first group of lines at 
 haphazard, he will sometimes repeat the form 
 (a very complex form, perhaps, which, in 
 order to have any organic effect, would have 
 to be tuned to the ear most nicely), and 
 repeat it clumsily. Individual taste must be 
 judge of his success in these experiments. 
 Sometimes the ear is worried by an attempt 
 to trace the logic of the rhymes which are 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 concealed by the rough jolting of the metre. 
 Sometimes he makes no attempt to repeat the 
 first verse, but continues in irregular improvi- 
 sation. 
 
 Browning never really stoops to literature ; 
 he makes perfunctory obeisance to it. The 
 truth is that Browning is expressed by his 
 defects. He would not be Robert Browning 
 without them. In the technical part of his 
 art, as well as in his spirit, Browning repre- 
 sents a reaction of a violent sort. He was 
 too great an artist not to feel that his viola- 
 tions of form helped him. The blemishes in 
 The Grammarian's Funeral — koti's busi- 
 ness, the enclitic de — were stimulants; they 
 heightened his effects. They helped him 
 make clear his meaning, that life is greater 
 than art. These savageries spoke to the 
 hearts of men tired of smoothness and plati- 
 tude, and who were relieved by just such a 
 breaking up of the ice. Men loved Browning 
 not only for what he was, but also for what he 
 was not. 
 
 These blemishes were, under the circum- 
 stances, and for a limited audience, strokes of 
 art. It is not to be pretended that, even from 
 this point of view, they were always success- 
 ful, only that they are organic. The nine- 
 teenth century would have to be lived over 
 
 211 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 again to wipe these passages out of Browning's 
 poetry. 
 
 In that century he stands as one of the 
 great men of England. His doctrines are 
 the mere effulgence of his personality. He 
 himself was the truth which he taught. His 
 life was the life of one of his own heroes ; and 
 in the close of his life — by a coincidence 
 which is not sad, but full of meaning — may 
 be seen one of those apparent paradoxes in 
 which he himself delighted. 
 
 Through youth and manhood Browning rose 
 like a planet calmly following the laws of his 
 own being. From time to time he put forth 
 his volumes which the world did not under- 
 stand. Neglect caused him to suffer, but not 
 to change. It was not until his work was all 
 but finished, not till after the publication of 
 The Ring and the Book, that complete rec- 
 ognition came to him. It was given him by 
 men and women who had been in the nursery 
 when he began writing, who had passed their 
 youth with his minor poems, and who under- 
 stood him. 
 
 In later life Browning's powers declined. 
 The torrent of feeling could no longer float 
 the raft of doctrine, as it had done so lightly 
 and for so long. His poems, always difficult, 
 grew dry as well. 
 
 212 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 But Browning was true to himself. He had 
 all his life loved converse with men and 
 women, and still enjoyed it. He wrote con- 
 stantly and to his uttermost. It was not for 
 him to know that his work was done. He 
 wrote on manfully to the end, showing, 
 occasionally, his old power, and always his 
 old spirit. And on his death-bed it was not 
 only his doctrine, but his life that blazed out 
 in the words : — 
 
 " One who never turned his back, but marched breast 
 forward, 
 Never doubted clouds would break, 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong 
 
 would triumph. 
 Held, we fall to rise — are baffled to fight better — 
 Sleep to wake." 
 
 213 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 In the early eighties, and in an epoch when 
 the ideals of George Eliot were still control- 
 ling, the figure of Stevenson rose with a sort 
 of radiance as a writer whose sole object was 
 to entertain. Most of the great novelists 
 were then dead, and the scientific school was 
 in the ascendant. Fiction was entering upon 
 its death grapple with sociology. Stevenson 
 came, with his tales of adventure and intrigue, 
 out-of-door life and old-time romance, and he 
 recalled to every reader his boyhood and the 
 delights of his earliest reading. We had for- 
 gotten that novels could be amusing. 
 
 Hence it is that the great public not only 
 loves Stevenson as a writer, but regards him 
 with a certain personal gratitude. There was, 
 moreover, in everything he wrote an engaging 
 humorous touch which made friends for him 
 everywhere, and excited an interest in his 
 fragile and somewhat elusive personality sup- 
 plementary to the appreciation of his books 
 as literature. Toward the end of his life 
 217 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 both he and the public discovered this, and 
 his railleries or sermons took on the form 
 of personal talk. 
 
 Beneath these matters lay the fact, known 
 to all, that the man was fighting a losing 
 battle against mortal sickness, and that 
 practically the whole of his work was done 
 under conditions which made any produc- 
 tivity seem a miracle. The heroic invalid 
 was seen through all his books, still sitting 
 before his desk or on his bed, turning out 
 with unabated courage, with increasing ability, 
 volume after volume of gayety, of boys' story- 
 book, and of tragic romance. 
 
 There is enough in this record to explain 
 the popularity, running at times into hero- 
 worship and at times into drawing-room 
 fatuity, which makes Stevenson and his work 
 a fair subject for study. It is not impossible 
 that a man who met certain needs of the 
 times so fully, and whom large classes of 
 people sprang forward to welcome, may in 
 some particulars give a clew to the age. 
 
 Any description of Stevenson's books is 
 unnecessary. We have all read them too 
 recently to need a prompter. The high 
 spirits and elfin humor which play about 
 and support every work justifies them all. 
 One of his books. The Child's Garden of 
 218 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Verses, is dififerent in kind from the rest It 
 has no prototype, and is by far the most 
 original thing that he did. The unsophisti- 
 cated and gay little volume is a work of the 
 greatest value. Stevenson seems to have 
 remembered the impressions of his childhood 
 with accuracy, and he has recorded them 
 without affectation, without sentimentality, 
 without exaggeration. In depicting children 
 he draws from life. He is at home in the 
 mysteries of their play and in the inconse- 
 quent operations of their minds, in the golden 
 haze of impressions in which they live. The 
 references to children in his essays and books 
 show the same understanding and sympathy. 
 There is more than mere literary charm in 
 what he says here. In the matter of child- 
 hood we must study him with respect. He 
 is an authority. 
 
 The slight but serious studies in biography 
 — alas ! too few — which Stevenson published, 
 ought also to be mentioned, because their 
 merit is apt to be overlooked by the admirers 
 of his more ambitious works. His under- 
 standing of two such opposite types of men 
 as Burns and Thoreau is notable, and no less 
 notable are the courage, truth, and penetra- 
 tion with which he dealt with them. His 
 essay on Burns is the most comprehensible 
 219 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 word ever said of Burns. It makes us love 
 Burns less, but understand him more. 
 
 The problems suggested by Stevenson are 
 more important than his work itself. We 
 have in him that rare combination, — a man 
 whose theories and whose practice are of a 
 piece. His doctrines are the mere descrip- 
 tion of his own state of mind while at 
 work. 
 
 The quality which every one will agree in 
 conceding to Stevenson is lightness of touch. 
 This quality is a result of his extreme lucidity, 
 not only of thought, but of intention. We 
 know what he means, and we are sure that we 
 grasp his whole meaning at the first reading. 
 Whether he be writing a tale of travel or 
 humorous essay, a novel of adventure, a story 
 of horror, a morality, or a fable ; in whatever 
 key he plays, — and he seems to have taken 
 delight in showing mastery in many, — the 
 reader feels safe in his hands, and knows that 
 no false note will be struck. His work makes 
 no demands upon the attention. It is food so 
 thoroughly peptonized that it is digested as 
 soon as swallowed and leaves us exhilarated 
 rather than fed. 
 
 Writing was to him an art, and almost 
 everything that he has written has a little 
 the air of being a tour de force. Steven- 
 220 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 son's books and essays were generally bril- 
 liant imitations of established things, done 
 somewhat in the spirit of an expert in bil- 
 liards. In short, Stevenson is the most ex- 
 traordinary mimic that has ever appeared in 
 literature. 
 
 That is the reason why he has been so 
 much praised for his style. When we say of 
 a new thing that it " has style," we mean that 
 it is done as we have seen things done 
 before. Bunyan, De Foe, or Charles Lamb 
 were to their contemporaries men without 
 style. The English, to this day, complain 
 of Emerson that he has no style. 
 
 If a man writes as he talks, he will be 
 thought to have no style, until people get 
 used to him, for literature means what has 
 been written. As soon as a writer is estab- 
 lished, his manner of writing is adopted by 
 the literary conscience of the times, and you 
 may follow him and still have " style." You 
 may to-day imitate George Meredith, and 
 people, without knowing exactly why they do 
 it, will concede you " style." Style means 
 tradition. 
 
 When Stevenson, writing from Samoa in the 
 agony of his South Seas (a book he could 
 not write because he had no paradigm and 
 original to copy from), says that he longs for 
 
 221 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 a " moment of style," he means that he 
 wishes there would come floating through 
 his head a memory of some other man's way 
 of writing to which he could modulate his 
 sentences. 
 
 It is no secret that Stevenson in early life 
 spent much time in imitating the styles of 
 various authors, for he has himself described 
 the manner in which he went to work to fit 
 himself for his career as a writer. His boyish 
 ambition led him to employ perfectly phenom- 
 enal diligence in cultivating a perfectly phe- 
 nomenal talent for imitation. 
 
 There was probably no fault in Stevenson's 
 theory as to how a man should learn to write, 
 and as to the discipline he must undergo. 
 Almost all the greatest artists have shown, 
 in their early work, traces of their early 
 masters. These they outgrow. " For as this 
 temple waxes, the inward service of the mind 
 and soul grows wide withal ; " and an author's 
 own style breaks through the coverings of his 
 education, as a hyacinth breaks from the 
 bulb. It is noticeable, too, that the early and 
 imitative work of great men generally belongs 
 to a particular school to which their maturity 
 bears a logical relation. They do not cruise 
 about in search of a style or vehicle, trying 
 all and picking up hints here and there, but 
 
 222 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 they fall incidentally and genuinely under 
 influences which move them and afterwards 
 qualify their original work. 
 
 With Stevenson it was different; for he 
 went in search of a style as Coelebs in search 
 of a wife. He was an eclectic by nature. 
 He became a remarkable, if not a unique phe- 
 nomenon, — for he never grew up. Whether 
 or not there was some obscure connection 
 between his bodily troubles and the arrest of 
 his intellectual development, it is certain that 
 Stevenson remained a boy till the day of his 
 death. 
 
 The boy was the creature in the universe 
 whom Stevenson best understood. Let us 
 remember how a boy feels about art, and why 
 he feels so. The intellect is developed in the 
 child with such astonishing rapidity that long 
 before physical maturity its head is filled 
 with ten thousand things learned from books 
 and not drawn directly from real life. 
 
 The form and setting in which the boy 
 learns of matters sticks in the mind as a part 
 of the matters themselves. He cannot dis- 
 entangle what is conventional from what is 
 original, because he has not yet a first-hand 
 acquaintance with life by which to interpret. 
 
 Every schoolboy of talent writes essays 
 in the style of Addison, because he is taught 
 223 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 that this is the correct way of writing. He 
 has no means of knowing that in writing in 
 this manner he is using his mind in a very 
 peculiar and artificial way, — a way entirely 
 foreign to Addison himself; and that he is 
 really striving not so much to say something 
 himself as to reproduce an effect. 
 
 There is one thing which young people do 
 not know, and which they find out during the 
 process of growing up, — and that is that 
 good things in art have been done by men 
 whose entire attention was absorbed in an 
 attempt to tell the truth, and who have 
 been chiefly marked by a deep unconscious- 
 ness. 
 
 To a boy, the great artists of the world are 
 a lot of necromancers, whose enchantments 
 can perhaps be stolen and used again. To a 
 man, they are a lot of human beings, and their 
 works are parts of them. Their works are 
 their hands and their feet, their organs, di- 
 mensions, senses, affections, passions. To a 
 man, it is as absurd to imitate the manner of 
 Dean Swift in writing as it would be to imi- 
 tate the manner of Dr. Johnson in eating. 
 But Stevenson was not a man, he was a 
 boy ; or, to speak more accurately, the atti- 
 tude of his mind towards his work remained 
 unaltered from boyhood till death, though 
 224 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSOlSl 
 
 his practice and experiment gave him, as he 
 grew older, a greater mastery over his mate- 
 rials. It is in this attitude of Stevenson's 
 mind toward his own work that we must 
 search for the heart of his mystery. 
 
 He conceived of himself as " an artist," 
 and of his writings as performances. As a 
 consequence, there is an undertone of insin- 
 cerity in almost everything which he has 
 written. His attention is never wholly ab- 
 sorbed in his work, but is greatly taken up 
 with the notion of how each stroke of it is 
 going to appear. 
 
 We have all experienced, while reading his 
 books, a certain undefinable suspicion which 
 interferes with the enjoyment of some people, 
 and enhances that of others. It is not so 
 much the cream-tarts themselves that we sus- 
 pect, as the motive of the giver. 
 
 " I am in the habit," said Prince Florizel, 
 " of looking not so much to the nature of the 
 gift as to the spirit in which it is offered." 
 
 " The spirit, sir," returned the young man, 
 with another bow, " is one of mockery." 
 
 This doubt about Stevenson's truth and 
 candor is one of the results of the artistic 
 doctrines which he professed and practised. 
 He himself regards his work as a toy; and 
 how can we do otherwise? 
 
 IS 225 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 It seems to be a law of psychology that the 
 only way in which the truth can be strongly 
 told is in the course of a search for truth. 
 The moment a man strives after some "ef- 
 fect," he disqualifies himself from making 
 that effect; for he draws the interest of his 
 audience to the same matters that occupy his 
 own mind ; namely, upon his experiment and 
 his efforts. It is only when a man is say- 
 ing something that he believes is obviously 
 and eternally true, that he can communicate 
 spiritual things. 
 
 Ultimately speaking, the vice of Steven- 
 son's theories about art is that they call for a 
 self-surrender by the artist of his own mind 
 to the pleasure of others, for a subordination 
 of himself to the production of this " effect " 
 in the mind of another. They degrade and 
 belittle him. Let Stevenson speak for him- 
 self; the thought contained in the follow- 
 ing passage is found in a hundred places 
 in his writings and dominated his artistic 
 life. 
 
 " The French have a romantic evasion for 
 one employment, and call its practitioners the 
 Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same 
 family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his 
 trade to please himself, gains his livelihood 
 by pleasing others, and has parted with 
 226 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 something of the sterner dignity of men. 
 The poor Daughter of Joy carrying her 
 smiles and her finery quite unregarded 
 through the crowd, makes a figure which it 
 is impossible to recall without a wounding 
 pity. She is the type of the unsuccessful 
 artist." 
 
 These are the doctrines and beliefs which, 
 time out of mind, have brought the arts into 
 contempt. They are as injurious as they are 
 false, and they will checkmate the progress 
 of any man or of any people that believes 
 them. They corrupt and menace not merely 
 the fine arts, but every other form of human 
 expression in an equal degree. They are as 
 insulting to the comic actor as they are to 
 Michael Angelo, for the truth and beauty of 
 low comedy are as dignified, and require of 
 the artist the same primary passion for life 
 for its own sake, as the truth and beauty of 
 The Divine Comedy. The doctrines are the 
 outcome of an Alexandrine age. After art 
 has once learnt to draw its inspiration directly 
 from life and has produced some master- 
 pieces, then imitations begin to creep in. 
 That Stevenson's doctrines tend to produce 
 imitative work is obvious. If the artist is a 
 fisher of men, then we must examine the 
 works of those who have known how to bait 
 227 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 their hooks : in fiction, — De Foe, Fielding, 
 Walter Scott, Dumas, Balzac. 
 
 To a study of these men, Stevenson had, 
 as we have seen, devoted the most plastic 
 years of his life. The style and even the 
 mannerisms of each of them, he had trained 
 himself to reproduce. One can almost write 
 their names across his pages and assign each 
 as a presiding genius over a share of his 
 work. Not that Stevenson purloined or 
 adopted in a mean spirit, and out of vanity. 
 His enthusiasm was at the bottom of all he 
 did. He was well read in the belles lettres 
 of England and the romanticists of France. 
 These books were his bible. He was steeped 
 in the stage-land and cloud-land of senti- 
 mental literature. From time to time, he 
 emerged, trailing clouds of glory and shower- 
 ing sparkles from his hands. 
 
 A close inspection shows his clouds and 
 sparkles to be stage properties ; but Steven- 
 son did not know it. The public not only 
 does not know it, but does not care whether 
 it be so or not. The doughty old novel 
 readers who knew their Scott and Ainsworth 
 and Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, their 
 Dumas and their Cooper, were the very 
 people whose hearts were warmed by Stev- 
 enson. If you cross-question one of these, 
 
 228 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 he will admit that Stevenson is after all a 
 revival, an echo, an after-glow of the roman- 
 tic movement, and that he brought nothing 
 new. He will scout any comparison between 
 Stevenson and his old favorites, but he is 
 ready enough to take Stevenson for what he 
 is worth. The most casual reader recognizes 
 a whole department of Stevenson's work as 
 competing in a general way with Walter 
 Scott. 
 
 Kidnapped is a romantic fragment whose 
 original is to be found in the Scotch scenes 
 of the Waverley Novels. An incident near 
 the beginning of it, the curse of Jennet 
 Clouston upon the House of Shaws, is trans- 
 ferred from Guy Mannering almost literally. 
 But the curse of Meg Merrilies in Guy Man- 
 nering — which is one of the most surprising 
 and powerful scenes Scott ever wrote — is an 
 organic part of the story, whereas the tran- 
 script is a thing stuck in for effect, and the 
 curse is put in the mouth of an old woman 
 whose connection with the plot is apocryphal, 
 and who never appears again. 
 
 Treasure Island is a piece of astounding 
 ingenuity, in which the manner is taken from 
 Robinson Crusoe, and the plot belongs to 
 the era of the detective story. The Treas- 
 ure of Franchard is a French farce or light 
 229 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 comedy of bourgeois life, of a type already a 
 little old-fashioned, but perfectly authentic. 
 The tone, the mise-en-scine, the wit, the char- 
 acter-drawing, the very language, are all so 
 marvellously reproduced from the French, 
 that we almost see the footlights while we 
 read it. 
 
 The Sieur de Maletroit's Door embodies 
 the same idea as a well-known French play 
 in verse and in one act. The version of 
 Stevenson is like an exquisite water-color 
 copy, almost as good as the original. 
 
 The Isle of Voices is the production of a 
 man of genius. No one can too much admire 
 the legerdemain of the magician who could 
 produce this thing ; for it is a story out of 
 the Arabian Nights, told with a perfection of 
 mannerism, a reproduction of the English in 
 which the later translators of the Arabian 
 Nights have seen fit to deal, a simulation of 
 the movement and detail of the Eastern stories 
 which fairly takes our breath away. 
 
 It is " ask and have " with this man. Like 
 Mephistopheles in the Raths-Keller, he gives 
 us what vintage we call for. Olalla is an 
 instance in point. Any one familiar with 
 M6rim6e's stories will smile at the naYvet6 
 with which Stevenson has taken the lead- 
 ing idea of Lokis, and surrounded it with 
 230 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 the Spanish sunshine of Carmen. But we 
 have " fables," moralities, and psychology, 
 Jekyl and Hyde, Markheim, and Will O' the 
 Mill. We have the pasteboard feudal style, 
 in which people say, " Ye can go, boy ; for I 
 will keep your good friend and my good gossip 
 company till curfew — aye, and by St. Mary till 
 the Sun get up again." We must have opera 
 bouffe, as in Prince Otto ; melodrama, as in 
 The Pavilion on the Links; the essay of 
 almost biblical solemnity in the manner of 
 Sir Thomas Browne, the essay of charming 
 humor in the style of Charles Lamb, the 
 essay of introspection and egotism in the 
 style of Montaigne. 
 
 Let us not for a moment imagine that 
 Stevenson has stolen these things and is try- 
 ing to palm them off on us as his own. He 
 has absorbed them. He does not know their 
 origin. He gives them out again in joy and 
 in good faith with zest and amusement and 
 in the excitement of a new discovery. 
 
 If all these many echoing voices do not 
 always ring accurately true, yet their number 
 is inordinate and remarkable. They will not 
 bear an immediate comparison with their 
 originals ; but we may be sure that the vin- 
 tages of Mephistopheles would not have stood 
 a comparison with real wine. 
 231 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 One of the books which established Steven- 
 son's fame was the New Arabian Nights. 
 The series of tales about Prince Florizel of 
 Bohemia was a brilliant, original, and alto- 
 gether delightful departure in light literature. 
 The stories are a frank and wholesome cari- 
 cature of the French detective story. They 
 are legitimate pieces of literature because 
 they are burlesque, and because the smiling 
 Mephistopheles who lurks everywhere in the 
 pages of Stevenson is for this time the 
 acknowledged showman of the piece. 
 
 A burlesque is always an imitation shown 
 off by the foil of some incongruous setting. 
 The setting in this case Stevenson found 
 about him in the omnibuses, the clubs, and the 
 railways of sordid and complicated London. 
 
 In this early book Stevenson seems to have 
 stumbled upon the true employment of his 
 powers without realizing the treasure trove, 
 for he hardly returned to the field of humor, 
 for which his gifts most happily fitted him. 
 As a writer of burlesque he truly expresses 
 himself. He is full of genuine fun. 
 
 The fantastic is half brother to the bur- 
 lesque. Each implies some original as a point 
 of departure, and as a scheme for treatment 
 some framework upon which the author's wit 
 and fancy shall be lavished. 
 232 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 It is in the region of the fantastic that 
 Stevenson loved to wander, and it is in this 
 direction that he expended his marvellous 
 ingenuity. His fairy tales and arabesques 
 must be read as they were written, in the 
 humor of forty fancies and without any heavy- 
 fisted intention of getting new ideas about 
 life. It will be said that the defect of Steven- 
 son is expressed by these very qualities, fancy 
 and ingenuity, because they are contradictory, 
 and the second destroys the first. Be this as 
 it may, there are many people whose pleasure 
 is not spoiled by elaboration and filigree 
 work. 
 
 Our ability to follow Stevenson in his fan- 
 tasias depends very largely upon how far our 
 imaginations and our sentimental interests are 
 dissociated from our interest in real life. 
 Commonplace and common-sense people, 
 whose emotional natures are not strongly at 
 play in the conduct of their daily lives, have 
 a fund of unexpended mental activity, of a 
 very low degree of energy, which delights to 
 be occupied with the unreal and the impos- 
 sible. More than this, any mind which is 
 daily occupied in an attempt to grasp some 
 of the true relations governing things as they 
 are, finds its natural relaxation in the contem- 
 plation of things as they are not, — things as 
 233 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 they cannot be. There is probably no one 
 who will not find himself thoroughly enjoy- 
 ing the fantastic, if he be mentally fatigued 
 enough. Hence the justification of a whole 
 branch of Stevenson's work. 
 
 After every detraction has been allowed for, 
 there remain certain books of Stevenson's of 
 an extraordinary and peculiar merit, books 
 which can hardly be classed as imitations or 
 arabesques, — Kidnapped, Weir of Hermis- 
 ton, The Merry Men. These books seem 
 at first blush to have every element of great- 
 ness, except spontaneity. The only trouble 
 is, they are too perfect. 
 
 If, after finishing Kidnapped, or The 
 Merry Men, we take up Guy Mannering, 
 or The Antiquary, or any of Scott's books 
 which treat of the peasantry, the first im- 
 pression we gain is, that we are happy. 
 The tension is gone ; we are in contact with 
 a great, sunny, benign human being who 
 pours a flood of life out before us and floats 
 us as the sea floats a chip. He is full of old- 
 fashioned and absurd passages. Sometimes 
 he proses, and sometimes he runs to seed. 
 He is so careless of his English that his sen- 
 tences are not always grammatical; but we 
 get a total impression of glorious and whole- 
 some life. 
 
 234 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 It is the man Walter Scott who thus ex- 
 cites us. This heather, these hills, these 
 peasants, this prodigality and vigor and 
 broad humor, enlarge and strengthen lis. If 
 we return now to Weir of Hermiston, we 
 seem to be entering the cell of an alchemist. 
 All is intention, all calculation. The very 
 style of Weir of Hermiston is English ten 
 times distilled. 
 
 Let us imagine that directness and uncon- 
 sciousness are the great qualities of style, 
 and that Stevenson believes this. The great- 
 est directness and unconsciousness of which 
 Stevenson himself was capable are to be 
 found in some of his early writings. Across 
 the Plains, for instance, represents his most 
 straightforward and natural style. But it 
 happens that certain great writers who 
 lived some time ago, and were famous exam- 
 ples of "directness," have expressed them- 
 selves in the speech of their own period. 
 Stevenson rejects his own style as not good 
 enough for him, not direct enough, not un- 
 conscious enough ; he will have theirs. And 
 so he goes out in quest of purity and truth, 
 and brings home an elaborate archaism. 
 
 Although we think of Stevenson as a 
 writer of fiction, his extreme popularity is 
 due in great measure to his innumerable 
 235 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 essays and bits of biography and autobiog- 
 raphy, his letters, his journals, and travels and 
 miscellaneous reminiscences. 
 
 It was his own belief that he was a very 
 painstaking and conscientious artist, and this 
 is true to a great extent. On the day of his 
 death he was engaged upon the most highly 
 organized and ambitious thing he ever at- 
 tempted, and every line of it shows the hand 
 of an engraver on steel. But it is also true 
 that during the last years of his life he lived 
 under the pressure of photographers and 
 newspaper syndicates, who came to him with 
 great sums of money in their hands. He was 
 exploited by the press of the United States, 
 and this is the severest ordeal which a writer 
 of English can pass through. There was one 
 year in which he earned four thousand pounds. 
 His immeasurable generosity kept him forever 
 under the harrow in money matters, and added 
 another burden to the weight carried by this 
 dying and indomitable man. It is no wonder 
 that some of his work is trivial. The wonder 
 is that he should have produced it at all. 
 
 The journalistic work of Stevenson, begin- 
 ning with his Inland Voyage, and the letters 
 afterwards published as Across the Plains, is 
 valuable in the inverse ratio to its embellish- 
 ment. Sidney Colvin suggested to him that 
 236 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 in the letters Across the Plains the lights 
 were turned down. But, in truth, the light 
 is daylight. The letters have a freshness that 
 midnight oil could not have improved, and 
 this fugitive sketch is of more permanent in- 
 terest than all the polite essays he ever 
 wrote. 
 
 If we compare the earlier with the later 
 work of Stevenson as a magazine writer, we 
 are struck with the accentuation of his man- 
 nerisms. It is not a single style which grows 
 more intense, but his amazing skill in many 
 which has increased. 
 
 The following is a specimen of Stevenson's 
 natural style, and it would be hard to find a 
 better : — 
 
 "The day faded; the lamps were lit; a 
 party of wild young men, who got off next 
 evening at North Platte, stood together on 
 the stern platform singing The Sweet By- 
 and-By with very tuneful voices ; the chums 
 began to put up their beds; and it seemed 
 as if the business of the day were at an end. 
 But it was not so ; for the train stopping at 
 some station, the cars were instantly thronged 
 with the natives, wives and fathers, young 
 men and maidens, some of them in little 
 more than night-gear, some with stable lan- 
 terns, and all offering beds for sale." 
 237 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 The following is from an essay written by 
 Stevenson while under the influence of the 
 author of Rab and his Friends. 
 
 " One such face I now remember ; one 
 such blank some half a dozen of us labor to 
 dissemble. In his youth he was a most beau- 
 tiful person, most serene and genial by dispo- 
 sition, full of racy words and quaint thoughts. 
 Laughter attended on his coming. . . . 
 From this disaster like a spent swimmer he 
 came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money 
 and consideration ; creeping to the family he 
 had deserted ; with broken wing never more 
 to rise. But in his face there was the light 
 of knowledge that was new to it. Of the 
 wounds of his body he was never healed; 
 died of them gradually, with clear-eyed resig- 
 nation. Of his wounded pride we knew only 
 by his silence." 
 
 The following is in the sprightly style of 
 the eighteenth century : — 
 
 " Cockshot is a different article, but vastly 
 entertaining, and has been meat and drink to 
 me for many a long evening. His manner is 
 dry, brisk, and pertinacious, and the choice 
 of words not much. The point about him is 
 his extraordinary readiness and spirit. You 
 can propound nothing but he has either a 
 theory about it ready made or will have one 
 238 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay 
 its timbers and launch it on the minute. 
 ' Let me see,' he will say, ' give me a mo- 
 ment, I should have some theory for that.' " 
 
 But for serious matters this manner would 
 never do, and accordingly we find that, when 
 the subject invites him, Stevenson falls into 
 English as early as the time of James L 
 
 Let us imagine Bacon dedicating one of his 
 smaller works to his physicians : — 
 
 "There are men and classes of men that 
 stand above the common herd : the soldier, the 
 sailor, and the shepherd not unfrequently ; 
 the artist rarely ; rarelier still the clergyman ; 
 the physician almost as a rule. ... I forget 
 as many as I remember and I ask both to 
 pardon me, these for silence, those for inade- 
 quate speech." 
 
 After finishing off this dedication to his 
 satisfaction, Stevenson turns over the page 
 and writes a NOTE in the language of two 
 and one-half centuries later. He is now the 
 elegant litterateur of the last generation — , 
 one would say James Russell Lowell : — 
 
 " The human conscience has fled of late 
 the troublesome domain of conduct for what 
 I should have supposed to be the less con- 
 genial field of art: there she may now be 
 said to rage, and with special severity in all 
 239 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 that touches dialect, so that in every novel 
 the letters of the alphabet are tortured, and 
 the reader wearied, to commemorate shades 
 of mispronunciation." 
 
 But in this last extract we are still three 
 degrees away from what can be done in the 
 line of gentility and delicate efifeteness of 
 style. Take the following, which is the very 
 peach-blow of courtesy : — 
 
 " But upon one point there should be no 
 dubiety: if a man be not frugal he has no 
 business in the arts. If he be not frugal he 
 steers directly for that last tragic scene of 
 le vieux saltimhanque ; if he be not frugal he 
 will find it hard to continue to be honest. 
 Some day when the butcher is knocking at 
 the door he may be tempted, he may be 
 obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece 
 of work. If the obligation shall have arisen 
 through no wantonness of his own, he is even 
 to be commended, for words cannot describe 
 how far more necessary it is that a man 
 should support his family than that he should 
 attain to — or preserve — distinction in the 
 arts," etc. 
 
 Now the very next essay to this is a sort 
 of intoned voluntary played upon the more 
 sombre emotions. 
 
 "What a monstrous spectre is this man, 
 240 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting 
 alternate feet or lying drugged in slumber; 
 killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small 
 copies of himself; grown upon with hair like 
 grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter 
 in his face ; a thing to set children scream- 
 ing ; — and yet looked at nearlier, known as 
 his fellows know him, how surprising are his 
 attributes." 
 
 There is a tincture of Carlyle in this mix- 
 ture. There are a good many pages of Gothic 
 type in the later essays, for Stevenson thought 
 it the proper tone in which to speak of death, 
 duty, immortality, and such subjects as that. 
 He derived this impression from the works 
 of Sir Thomas Browne. But the solemnity 
 of Sir Thomas Browne is like a melodious 
 thunder, deep, sweet, unconscious, ravishing. 
 
 " Time sadly overcometh all things and is 
 now dominant and sitteth upon a sphinx and 
 looketh upon Memphis and old Thebes, while 
 his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous 
 upon a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, mak- 
 ing puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning 
 old glories into dreams. History sinketh 
 beneath her cloud. The traveller as he 
 passeth through these deserts asketh of her 
 'who builded them?' And she mumbleth 
 something, but what it is he heareth not." 
 i6 241 
 
/ / 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 The frenzy to produce something like this 
 sadly overcomes Stevenson, in his later es- 
 says. But perhaps it were to reason too 
 curiously to pin Stevenson down to Browne. 
 All the old masters stalk like spectres through 
 his pages, and among them are the shades of 
 the moderns, even men that we have dined 
 with. 
 
 According to Stevenson, a certain kind of 
 subject requires a certain " treatment," and 
 the choice of his tone follows his title. These 
 " treatments " are always traditional, and even 
 his titles tread closely on the heels of former 
 titles. He can write the style of Charles 
 Lamb better than Lamb could do it himself, 
 and his Hazlitt is very nearly as good. He 
 fences with his left hand as well as with his 
 right, and can manage two styles at once like 
 Franz Liszt playing the allegretto from the 
 7th symphony with an air of Offenbach twined 
 about it. 
 
 It is with a pang of disappointment that we 
 now and then come across a style which we 
 recognize, yet cannot place. 
 
 People who take enjoyment in the reminis- 
 cences awakened by conjuring of this kind 
 can nowhere in the world find a master like 
 Stevenson. Those persons belong to the 
 bookish classes. Their numbers are insigni- 
 242 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 ficant, but they are important because they 
 give countenance to the admiration of others 
 who love Stevenson with their hearts and 
 souls. 
 
 The reason why Stevenson represents a 
 backward movement in literature, is that 
 literature lives by the pouring into it of new 
 words from speech, and new thoughts from 
 life, and Stevenson used all his powers to 
 exclude both from his work. He lived and 
 wrote in the past. That this Scotchman 
 should appear at the end of what has been 
 a very great period of English literature, and 
 summarize the whole of it in his two hours' 
 traffic on the stage, gives him a strange place 
 in the history of that literature. He is the 
 Improvisatore, and nothing more. It is im- 
 possible to assign him rank in any line of 
 writing. If you shut your eyes to try and 
 place him, you find that you cannot do it. 
 The effect he produces while we are reading 
 him vanishes as we lay down the book, and 
 we can recall nothing but a succession of 
 flavors. It is not to be expected that pos- 
 terity will take much interest in him, for his 
 point and meaning are impressional. He is 
 ephemeral, a shadow, a reflection. He is the 
 mistletoe of English literature whose roots 
 are not in the soil but in the tree. 
 243 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 But enough of the nature and training of 
 Stevenson which fitted him to play the part 
 he did. The cyclonic force which turned him 
 from a secondary London novelist into some- 
 thing of importance and enabled him to give 
 full play to his really unprecedented talents 
 will be recognized on glancing about us. 
 
 We are now passing through the age of 
 the Distribution of Knowledge. The spread 
 of the English-speaking race since 1850, and 
 the cheapness of printing, have brought in 
 primers and handbooks by the million. All 
 the books of the older literatures are being 
 abstracted and sown abroad in popular edi- 
 tions. The magazines fulfil the same func- 
 tion ; every one of them is a penny cyclopedia. 
 Andrew Lang heads an army of organized 
 workers who mine in the old literature and 
 coin it into booklets and cash. 
 
 The American market rules the supply of 
 light literature in Great Britain. While Lang 
 culls us tales and legends and lyrics from the 
 Norse or Provengal, Stevenson will engage to 
 supply us with tales and legends of his own — 
 something just as good. The two men serve 
 the same public. 
 
 Stevenson's reputation in England was that 
 of a comparatively light weight, but his suc- 
 cess here was immediate. We hailed him 
 244 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 as a classic — or something just as good. 
 Everything he did had the very stamp and 
 trademark of Letters, and he was as strong 
 in one department as another. We loved 
 this man; and thenceforward he purveyed 
 " literature " to us at a rate to feed sixty 
 millions of people and keep them clamoring 
 for more. 
 
 Does any one believe that the passion of 
 the American people for learning and for 
 antiquity is a slight and accidental thing? 
 Does any one believe that the taste for imita- 
 tion old furniture is a pose? It creates an 
 eddy in the Maelstrom of Commerce. It is 
 a power like Niagara, and represents the sin- 
 cere appreciation of half educated people for 
 second rate things. There is here nothing 
 to be ashamed of In fact there is every- 
 thing to be proud of in this progress of the 
 arts, this importation of culture by the carload. 
 The state of mind it shows is a definite and 
 typical state of mind which each individual 
 passes through, and which precedes the dis- 
 covery that real things are better than sham. 
 When the latest Palace Hotel orders a hun- 
 dred thousand dollars' worth of Louis XV. 
 furniture to be made — and most well made 
 — in Buffalo, and when the American public 
 gives Stevenson an order for Pulvis et Umbra 
 245 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 — the same forces are at work in each case. 
 It is Chicago making culture hum. 
 
 And what kind of a man was Stevenson? 
 Whatever may be said about his imitative- 
 ness, his good spirits were real. They are at 
 the bottom of his success, the strong note in his 
 work. They account for all that is paradoxi- 
 cal in his effect. He often displays a senti- 
 inentalism which has not the ring of reality. 
 And yet we do not reproach him. He has 
 by stating his artistic doctrines in their frankest 
 form revealed the scepticism inherent in 
 them. And yet we know that he was not a 
 sceptic ; on the contrary, we like him, and he 
 was regarded by his friends as little lower 
 than the angels. 
 
 Why is it that we refuse to judge him by 
 his own utterances? The reason is that all 
 of his writing is playful, and we know it. 
 The instinct at the bottom of all mimicry 
 is self-concealment. Hence the illusive and 
 questionable personality of Stevenson. Hence 
 our blind struggle to bind this Proteus who 
 turns into bright fire and then into running 
 water under our hands. The truth is that 
 as a literary force, there was no such man 
 as Stevenson ; and after we have racked our 
 brains to find out the mechanism which has 
 been vanquishing the chess players of Europe, 
 246 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 there emerges out of the Box of Maelzel a 
 pale boy. 
 
 But the courage of this boy, the heroism of 
 his life, illumine all his works with a per- 
 sonal interest. The last ten years of his life 
 present a long battle with death. 
 
 We read of his illnesses, his spirit; we hear 
 how he never gave up, but continued his 
 works by dictation and in dumb show when 
 he was too weak to hold the pen, too weak 
 to speak. This courage and the lovable 
 nature of Stevenson won the world's heart. 
 He was regarded with a peculiar tenderness 
 such as is usually given only to the young. 
 Honor, and admiration mingled with affec- 
 tion followed him to his grave. Whatever his 
 artistic doctrines, he revealed his spiritual 
 nature in his work. It was this nature 
 which made him thus beloved. 
 
 247