FOUR AMERICANS

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REPRINTS FROM THE YALE REVIEW

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_A Book of Yale Review Verse_

1917

_War Poems from The Yale Review_

1918

_War Poems from The Yale Review_

(_Second Edition_)

1919

_Four Americans: Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman_

1919

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FOUR AMERICANS

ROOSEVELTHAWTHORNEEMERSONWHITMAN

BY

HENRY A. BEERS

AUTHOR OF

STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATUREA HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUTPUBLISHED FOR THE YALE REVIEW

BY THE

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESSMDCCCCXX

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BYYALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published, 1919Second printing, 1920

CONTENTS

 PAGE

 I. Roosevelt as Man of Letters 7

 II. Fifty Years of Hawthorne 33

III. A Pilgrim in Concord 59

 IV. A Wordlet about Whitman 85

ROOSEVELT AS MAN OF LETTERS

In a club corner, just after Roosevelt's death, the question was askedwhether his memory would not fade away, when the living man, with hisvivid personality, had gone. But no: that personality had stamped itselftoo deeply on the mind of his generation to be forgotten. Too manyobservers have recorded their impressions; and already a dozenbiographies and memoirs have appeared. Besides, he is his own recorder. He published twenty-six books, a catalogue of which any professionalauthor might be proud; and a really wonderful feat when it is rememberedthat he wrote them in the intervals of an active public career as CivilService Commissioner, Police Commissioner, member of his statelegislature, Governor of New York, delegate to the National RepublicanConvention, Colonel of Rough Riders, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Vice-President and President of the United States. 

Perhaps in some distant future he may become a myth or symbol, likeother mighty hunters of the beast, Nimrod and Orion and Tristram ofLyonesse. Yet not so long as "African Game Trails" and the "HuntingTrips of a Ranchman" endure, to lift the imagination to those noblesports denied to the run of mortals by poverty, feebleness, timidity, the engrossments of the humdrum, everyday life, or lack of enterpriseand opportunity. Old scraps of hunting song thrill us with the greatadventure: "In the wild chamois' track at break of day"; "We'll chasethe antelope over the plain"; "Afar in the desert I love to ride"; andthen we go out and shoot at a woodchuck, with an old double-barrelledshotgun--and miss! If Roosevelt ever becomes a poet, it is while he isamong the wild creatures and wild landscapes that he loved: in thegigantic forests of Brazil, or the almost unnatural nature of theRockies and the huge cattle ranches of the plains, or on the limitlessSouth African veldt, which is said to give a greater feeling of infinitythan the ocean even. 

Roosevelt was so active a person--not to say so noisy and conspicuous;he so occupied the centre of every stage, that, when he died, it was asthough a wind had fallen, a light had gone out, a military band hadstopped playing. It was not so much the death of an individual as ageneral lowering in the vitality of the nation. America was lessAmerica, because he was no longer here. He should have lived twentyyears more had he been willing to go slow, to loaf and invite his soul, to feed that mind of his in a wise passiveness. But there was no reposeabout him, and his pleasures were as strenuous as his toils. JohnBurroughs tells us that he did not care for fishing, the contemplativeman's recreation. No contemplation for him, but action; no angling in aclear stream for a trout or grayling; but the glorious, dangerousexcitement of killing big game--grizzlies, lions, African buffaloes, mountain sheep, rhinoceroses, elephants. He never spared himself: hewore himself out. But doubtless he would have chosen the crowded hour ofglorious life--or strife, for life and strife were with him the same. 

He was above all things a fighter, and the favorite objects of hisdenunciation were professional pacifists, nice little men who had lettheir muscles get soft, and nations that had lost their fighting edge. Aggressive war, he tells us in "The Winning of the West, " is not alwaysbad. "Americans need to keep in mind the fact that, as a nation, theyhave erred far more often in not being willing enough to fight than inbeing too willing. " "Cowardice, " he writes elsewhere, "in a race, as inan individual, is the unpardonable sin. " Is this true? Cowardice is aweakness, perhaps a disgraceful weakness: a defect of character whichmakes a man contemptible, just as foolishness does. But it is not a sinat all, and surely not an unpardonable one. Cruelty, treachery, andingratitude are much worse traits, and selfishness is as bad. I haveknown very good men who were cowards; men that I liked and trusted butwho, from weakness of nerves or other physical causes--perhaps fromprenatal influences--were easily frightened and always constitutionallytimid. The Colonel was a very pugnacious man: he professed himself to bea lover of peace--and so did the Kaiser--but really he enjoyed the_gaudium certaminis_, as all bold spirits do. 

In the world-wide sense of loss which followed his death, some ratherexaggerated estimates made themselves heard. A preacher announced thatthere had been only two great Americans, one of whom was TheodoreRoosevelt. An editor declared that the three greatest Americans wereWashington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. But not all great Americans havebeen in public life; and, of those who have, very few have beenPresidents of the United States. What is greatness? Roosevelt himselfrightly insists on character as the root of the matter. Still characteralone does not make a man great. There are thousands of men in commonlife, of sound and forceful character, who never become great, who arenot even potentially great. To make them such, great abilities areneeded, as well as favoring circumstances. In his absolute manner--amanner caught perhaps partly from Macaulay, for whose qualities as awriter he had a high and, I think, well-justified regard--he pronouncesCromwell the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century. Was he so?He was the greatest English soldier and magistrate of that century; buthow about Bacon and Newton, about Shakespeare and Milton?

Let us think of a few other Americans who, in their various fields, might perhaps deserve to be entitled great. Shall we say JonathanEdwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, RobertFulton, S. F. B. Morse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, HoraceGreeley, Henry Ward Beecher, Admiral Farragut, General W. T. Sherman, James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Robert E. Lee? Noneof these people were Presidents of the United States. But to the man inthe street there is something imposing about the office and title of achief magistrate, be he emperor, king, or elected head of a republic. Itsets him apart. Look at the crowds that swarm to get a glimpse of thePresident when he passes through, no matter whether it is GeorgeWashington or Franklin Pierce. 

It might be safer, on the whole, to say that the three names inquestion are those of our greatest presidents, not of the greatestAmericans. And even this comparison might be questioned. Some, forexample, might assert the claims of Thomas Jefferson to rank with theothers. Jefferson was a man of ideas who made a strong impression on hisgeneration. He composed the Declaration of Independence and founded theDemocratic party and the University of Virginia. He had a more flexiblemind than Washington, though not such good judgment; and he hadsomething of Roosevelt's alert interest in a wide and diversified rangeof subjects. But the latter had little patience with Jefferson. He mayhave respected him as the best rider and pistol shot in Virginia; but inpolitics he thought him a theorist and doctrinaire imbued with theabstract notions of the French philosophical deists and democrats. Jefferson, he thought, knew nothing and cared nothing about militaryaffairs. He let the army run down and preferred to buy Louisiana ratherthan conquer it, while he dreamed of universal fraternity and was theforerunner of the Dove of Peace and the League of Nations. 

Roosevelt, in fact, had no use for philosophy or speculative thoughtwhich could not be reduced to useful action. He was an eminentlypractical thinker. His mind was without subtlety, and he had littleimagination. A life of thought for its own sake; the life of a dreameror idealist; a life like that of Coleridge, with his paralysis of willand abnormal activity of the speculative faculty, eternally spinningmetaphysical cobwebs, doubtless seemed to the author of "The StrenuousLife" a career of mere self-indulgence. It is not without significancethat, with all his passion for out of doors, for wild life and the studyof bird and beast, he nowhere, so far as I can remember, mentionsThoreau, [A] who is far and away our greatest nature writer. Doubtless hemay have esteemed him as a naturalist, but not as a transcendentalist oras an impracticable faddist who refused to pay taxes becauseMassachusetts enforced the fugitive slave law. We are told that hisfellow historian, Francis Parkman, had a contempt for philosophers likeEmerson and Thoreau and an admiration for writers such as Scott andCooper who depicted scenes of bold adventure. The author of "The OregonTrail" and the author of "African Game Trails" had a good deal incommon, especially great force of will--you see it in Parkman's jaw. Hewas a physical wreck and did his work under almost impossibleconditions; while Roosevelt had built up an originally sicklyconstitution into a physique of splendid vigor. 

Towards the critical intellect, as towards the speculative, Rooseveltfelt an instinctive antagonism. One of his most characteristicutterances is the address delivered at the Sorbonne, April 30, 1910, "Citizenship in a Republic. " Here, amidst a good deal of moralcommonplace--wise and sensible for the most part, but sufficientlyplatitudinous--occurs a burst of angry eloquence. For he was always athis strongest when scolding somebody. His audience included theintellectual _élite_ of France; and he warns it against the besettingsin of university dons and the learned and lettered class in general, asupercilious, patronizing attitude towards the men of action who aredoing the rough work of the world. Critics are the object of hisfiercest denunciation. "A cynical habit of thought and speech, areadiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries toperform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact withlife's realities--all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fainthink, of superiority, but of weakness. .. . It is not the critic whocounts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, orwhere the doer of deeds could have done them better. .. . Shame on the manof cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into afastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workadayworld. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a smallfield of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink fromcontact with their fellows. "

The speaker had seemingly himself been stung by criticism; or he wasreacting against Matthew Arnold, the celebrated "Harvard indifference, "and the cynical talk of the clubs. 

We do not expect our Presidents to be literary men and arecorrespondingly gratified when any of them shows signs of almost humanintelligence in spheres outside of politics. Of them all, none touchedlife at so many points, or was so versatile, picturesque, and generallyinteresting a figure as the one who has just passed away. Washington wasnot a man of books. A country gentleman, a Virginia planter andslave-owner, member of a landed aristocracy, he had the limitededucation of his class and period. Rumor said that he did not write hisown messages. And there is a story that John Quincy Adams, regarding aportrait of the father of his country, exclaimed, "To think that thatold wooden head will go down in history as a great man!" But this wasthe comment of a Boston Brahmin, and all the Adamses had bitter tongues. Washington was, of course, a very great man, though not by virtue of anyintellectual brilliancy, but of his strong character, his immensepractical sagacity and common sense, his leadership of men. 

As to Lincoln, we know through what cold obstruction he struggled upinto the light, educating himself to be one of the soundest statesmenand most effective public speakers of his day--or any day. There was aninborn fineness or sensitiveness in Lincoln, a touch of the artist (heeven wrote verses) which contrasts with the phlegm of his illustriouscontemporary, General Grant. The latter had a vein of coarseness, ofcommonness rather, in his nature; evidenced by his choice of associatesand his entire indifference to "the things of the mind. " He was almostilliterate and only just a gentleman. Yet by reason of his dignifiedmodesty and simplicity, he contrived to write one of the best ofautobiographies. 

Roosevelt had many advantages over his eminent predecessors. Of oldKnickerbocker stock, with a Harvard education, and the habit of goodsociety, he had means enough to indulge in his favorite pastimes. Torun a cattle ranch in Dakota, lead a hunting party in Africa and anexploring expedition in Brazil, these were wide opportunities, but hefully measured up to them. Mr. W. H. Hays, chairman of the RepublicanNational Committee, said of him, "He had more knowledge about morethings than any other man. " Well, not quite that. We have all knownpeople who made a specialty of omniscience. If a man can speak twolanguages besides his own and can read two more fairly well, he is atonce credited with knowing half a dozen foreign tongues as well as heknows English. Let us agree, however, that Roosevelt knew a lot about alot of things. He was a rapid and omnivorous reader, reading a book withhis finger tips, gutting it of its contents, as he did the birds that heshot, stuffed, and mounted; yet not inappreciative of form, andaccustomed to recommend much good literature to his countrymen. He tookan eager interest in a large variety of subjects, from Celtic poetry andthe fauna and flora of many regions to simplified spelling and the splitinfinitive. 

A young friend of mine was bringing out, for the use of schools andcolleges, a volume of selections from the English poets, all learnedlyannotated, and sent me his manuscript to look over. On a passage aboutthe bittern bird he had made this note, "The bittern has a harsh, throaty cry. " Whereupon I addressed him thus: "Throaty nothing! You areguessing, man. If Teddy Roosevelt reads your book--and he readseverything--he will denounce you as a nature faker and put you down formembership in the Ananias Club. Recall what he did to ErnestSeton-Thompson and to that minister in Stamford, Connecticut. Rememberhow he crossed swords with Mr. Scully touching the alleged dangerousnature of the ostrich and the early domestication of the peacock. So faras I know, the bittern thing has no voice at all. His real stunt is asfollows. He puts his beak down into the swamp, in search of insects andsnails or other marine life--_est-ce que je sais?_--and drawing in thebog-water through holes in his beak, makes a booming sound which is mostimpressive. Now do not think me an ornithologist or a bird sharp. Personally I do not know a bittern from an olive-backed thrush. But Ihave read some poetry, and I remember what Thomson says in 'TheSeasons':

 The bittern knows his time with bill ingulf'd To shake the sounding marsh. 

See also 'The Lady of the Lake':

 And the bittern sound his drum, Booming from the sedgy shallow. 

See even old Chaucer who knew a thing or two about birds, _teste_ his'Parlament of Foules, ' admirably but strangely edited by Lounsbury, whose indifference to art was only surpassed by his hostility to nature. Says Chaucer:

 And as a bytoure bumblith in the myre. "

My friend canceled his note. It is, of course, now established that thebittern "booms"--not in the mud--but in the air. 

Mr. Roosevelt was historian, biographer, essayist, and writer ofnarrative papers on hunting, outdoor life, and natural history, and inall these departments did solid, important work. His "Winning of theWest" is little, if at all, inferior in historical interest to thesimilar writings of Parkman and John Fiske. His "History of the NavalWar of 1812" is an astonishing performance for a young man oftwenty-four, only two years out of college. For it required a carefulsifting of evidence and weighing of authorities. The job was done withpatient thoroughness, and the book is accepted, I believe, asauthoritative. It is to me a somewhat tedious tale. One sea fight ismuch like another, a record of meaningless slaughter. 

Of the three lives, those of Gouverneur Morris, T. H. Benton, and OliverCromwell, I cannot speak with confidence, having read only the last. Ishould guess that the life of Benton was written more _con amore_ thanthe others, for the frontier was this historian's favorite scene. Thelife of Cromwell is not so much a formal biography as a continuous essayin interpretation of a character still partly enigmatic in spite of allthe light that so many acute psychologists have shed upon it. It is arelief to read for once a book which is without preface, footnote, orreference. It cannot be said that the biographer contributes anythingvery new to our knowledge of his subject. The most novel features of hiswork are the analogies that he draws between situations in English andAmerican political history. These are usually ingenious andilluminating, sometimes a little misleading; as where he praisesLincoln's readiness to acquiesce in the result of the election in 1864and to retire peaceably in favor of McClellan; contrasting it withCromwell's dissolution of his Parliaments and usurpation of the supremepower. There was a certain likeness in the exigencies, to be sure, but abroad difference between the problems confronting the two rulers. Lincoln was a constitutional President with strictly limited powers, bound by usage and precedent. For him to have kept his seat by militaryforce, in defiance of a Democratic majority, would have been an act oftreason. But the Lord Protector held a new office, unknown to the oldconstitution of England and with ill-defined powers. A revolution hadtossed him to the top and made him dictator. He was bound to keep thepeace in unsettled times, to keep out the Stuarts, to keep down theunruly factions. If Parliament would not help, he must govern withoutit. Carlyle thought that he had no choice. 

Roosevelt's addresses, essays, editorials, and miscellaneous papers, which fill many volumes, are seldom literary in subject, and certainlynot in manner. He was an effective speaker and writer, using plain, direct, forcible English, without any graces of style. In these papershe is always the moralist, earnest, high-minded, and the preacher ofmany gospels: the gospel of the strenuous life; the gospel of what usedto be called "muscular Christianity"; the gospel of large families; ofhundred per cent Americanism; and, above all, of military preparedness. I am not here concerned with the President's political principles, norwith the specific measures that he advocated. I will only say, to guardagainst suspicion of unfair prejudice, that, as a Democrat, afreetrader, a state-rights man, individualist, and anti-imperialist, Inaturally disapproved of many acts of his administration, of theadministration of his predecessor, and of his party in general. Idisapproved, and still do, of the McKinley and Payne-Aldrich tariffs; ofthe Spanish war--most avoidable of wars--with its sequel, the conquestof the Philippines; above all, of the seizure of the Panama Canal zone. 

But let all that pass: I am supposed to be dealing with my subject asman of letters. As such the Colonel of the Rough Riders was the highcommander-in-chief of rough writers. He never persuaded his readers intoan opinion--he bullied them into it. When he gnashed his big teeth andshook his big stick, . .. The bold Ascalonite Fled from his iron ramp; old warriors turned Their plated backs under his heel;

mollycoddles, pussy-footers, professional pacifists, and nice little menwho had lost their fighting edge, all scuttled to cover. He callednames, he used great violence of language. For instance, a certainpresident of a woman's college had "fatuously announced . .. That it wasbetter to have one child brought up in the best way than several notthus brought up. " The woman making this statement, wrote the Colonel, "is not only unfit to be at the head of a female college, but is not fitto teach the lowest class in a kindergarten; for such teaching is notmerely folly, but a peculiarly repulsive type of mean and selfishwickedness. " And again: "The man or woman who deliberately avoidsmarriage . .. Is in effect a criminal against the race and should be anobject of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people. "

Now, I am not myself an advocate of race suicide but I confess to afeeling of sympathy with the lady thus denounced, whose point of viewis, at least, comprehensible. Old Malthus was not such an ass as somefolks think. It is impossible not to admire Roosevelt's courage, honesty, and wonderful energy: impossible to keep from liking the manfor his boyish impulsiveness, camaraderie, sporting blood, and hatred ofa rascal. But it is equally impossible for a man of any spirit to keepfrom resenting his bullying ways, his intolerance of quiet, peaceablepeople and persons of an opposite temperament to his own. Even nice, timid little men who have let their bodies get soft do not like to bebullied. It puts their backs up. His ideal of character was manliness, asound ideal, but he insisted too much upon the physical side of it, "red-bloodedness" and all that. Those poor old fat generals inWashington who had been enjoying themselves at their clubs, playingbridge and drinking Scotch highballs! He made them all turn out and ridefifty miles a day. 

Mr. Roosevelt produced much excellent literature, but no masterpieceslike Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural. Probably hissketches of ranch life and of hunting trips in three continents will beread longest and will keep their freshness after the public questionswhich he discussed have lost interest and his historical works have beenin part rewritten. In these outdoor papers, besides the thrillingadventures which they--very modestly--record, there are even passages ofdescriptive beauty and chapters of graphic narrative, like the tale ofthe pursuit and capture of the three robbers who stole the boats on theMissouri River, which belonged to the Roosevelt ranch. This last wouldbe a capital addition to school readers and books of selected standardprose. 

Senator Lodge and other friends emphasize the President's sense ofhumor. He had it, of course. He took pains to establish the true readingof that famous retort, "All I want out of you is common civility anddamned little of that. " He used to repeat with glee Lounsbury'switticism about "the infinite capability of the human mind to resist theintroduction of knowledge. " I wonder whether he knew of that other goodsaying of Lounsbury's about the historian Freeman's being, in his ownperson, a proof of the necessity of the Norman Conquest. He had, at allevents, a just and high estimate of the merits of my brilliantcolleague. "Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tuimeminisse!" But Roosevelt was not himself a humorist, and his writingsgive little evidence of his possession of the faculty. Lincoln, now, wasone of the foremost American humorists. But Roosevelt was too strenuousfor the practice of humor, which implies a certain relaxation of mind: adetachment from the object of immediate pursuit: a superiority topractical interests which indulges itself in the play of thought; and, in the peculiarly American form of it, a humility which inclines one tolaugh at himself. Impossible to fancy T. R. Making the answer thatLincoln made to an applicant for office: "I haven't much influence withthis administration. " As for that variety of humor that is called irony, it demands a duplicity which the straight-out-speaking Roosevelt couldnot practise. He was like Epaminondas in the Latin prose compositionbook, who was such a lover of truth that he never told a falsehood evenin jest--_ne joco quidem_. 

The only instance of his irony that I recall--there may be others--isthe one recorded by Mr. Leupp in his reply to Senator Gorman, who hadcharged that the examiners of the Civil Service Commission had turneddown "a bright young man" in the city of Baltimore, an applicant for theposition of letter-carrier, "because he could not tell the most directroute from Baltimore to Japan. " Hereupon the young Civil ServiceCommissioner challenged the senator to verify his statement, but Mr. Gorman preserved a dignified silence. Then the Commissioner overwhelmedhim in a public letter from which Mr. Leupp quotes the closing passage, beginning thus: "High-minded, sensitive Mr. Gorman! Clinging, trustfulMr. Gorman! Nothing could shake his belief in that 'bright young man. 'Apparently he did not even yet try to find out his name--if he had aname, " and so on for nearly a page. Excellent fooling, but a bit toolong and heavy-handed for the truest ironic effect. 

Many of our Presidents, however little given to the use of the pen, havebeen successful coiners of phrases--phrases that have stuck: "entanglingalliances, " "era of good feeling, " "innocuous desuetude, " "a condition, not a theory. " Lincoln was happiest at this art, and there is no need tomention any of the scores of pungent sayings which he added to thelanguage and which are in daily use. President Roosevelt was no whitbehind in this regard. All recognize and remember the many phrases towhich he gave birth or currency: "predatory wealth, " "bull moose, " "hitthe line hard, " "weasel words, " "my hat is in the ring, " and so on. Hetook a humorous delight in mystifying the public with reconditeallusions, sending everyone to the dictionary to look out "Byzantinelogothete, " and to the Bible and cyclopedia to find Armageddon. 

Roosevelt is alleged to have had a larger personal following than anyother man lately in public life. What a testimony to his popularity isthe "teddy bear"; and what a sign of the universal interest, hostile orfriendly, which he excited in his contemporaries, is the fact that Mr. Albert Shaw was able to compile a caricature life of him presenting manyhundred pictures! There was something German about Roosevelt'sstandards. In this last war he stood heart and soul for America and herallies against Germany's misconduct. But he admired the Germans'efficiency, their highly organized society, their subordination of theindividual to the state. He wanted to Prussianize this great peacefulrepublic by introducing universal obligatory military service. Heinsisted, like the Germans, upon the _Hausfrau's_ duty to bear and rearmany children. If he had been a German, it seems possible that, with hisviews as to the right of strong races to expand, by force if necessary, he might have justified the seizure of Silesia, the partition ofPoland, the _Drang nach Osten_, and maybe even the invasion ofBelgium--as a military measure. 

And so of religion and the church, which Germans regard as a departmentof government. Our American statesman, of course, was firmly in favor ofthe separation of church and state and of universal toleration. But headvises everyone to join the church, some church, any old church; notbecause one shares its beliefs--creeds are increasingly unimportant--butbecause the church is an instrument of social welfare, and a man can domore good in combination with his fellows than when he stands alone. There is much truth in this doctrine, though it has a certain naïveté, when looked at from the standpoint of the private soul and its spiritualneeds. 

As in the church, so in the state, he stood for the associativeprinciple as opposed to an extreme individualism. He was a practicalpolitician and therefore an honest partisan, feeling that he could workmore efficiently for good government within party lines than outsidethem. He resigned from the Free Trade League because his party wascommitted to the policy of protection. In 1884 he supported his party'splatform and candidate, instead of joining the Mugwumps and voting forCleveland, though at the National Republican Convention, to which hewent as a delegate, he had opposed the nomination of Blaine. I do notbelieve that his motive in this decision was selfish, or that he quailedunder the snap of the party lash because he was threatened withpolitical death in case he disobeyed. Theodore Roosevelt was nobody'sman. He thought, as he frankly explained, that one who leaves hisfaction for every slight occasion, loses his influence and his power forgood. Better to compromise, to swallow some differences and to stick tothe crowd which, upon the whole and in the long run, embodies one'sconvictions. This is a comprehensible attitude, and possibly it is thecorrect one for the man in public life who is frequently a candidate foroffice. Yet I wish he could have broken with his party and voted forCleveland. For, ironically enough, it was Roosevelt himself whoafterward split his party and brought in Wilson and the Democrats. 

Disregarding his political side and considering him simply as man ofletters, one seeks for comparisons with other men of letters who were atonce big sportsmen and big writers; Christopher North, for example:"Christopher in his Aviary" and "Christopher in his Shooting Jacket. "The likeness here is only a very partial one, to be sure. The Americanwas like the Scotchman in his athleticism, high spirits, breezyoptimism, love of the open air, intense enjoyment of life. But he hadnot North's roystering conviviality and uproarious Toryism; and thekinds of literature that they cultivated were quite unlike. 

Charles Kingsley offers a closer resemblance, though the differenceshere are as numerous as the analogies. Roosevelt was not a clergyman, and not a creative writer, a novelist, or poet. His temperament was notvery similar to Kingsley's. Yet the two shared a love for boldadventure, a passion for sport, and an eager interest in the life ofanimals and plants. Sport with Kingsley took the shape of trout fishingand of riding to hounds, not of killing lions with the rifle. He wasfond of horses and dogs; associated democratically with gamekeepers, grooms, whippers-in, poachers even; as Roosevelt did with cowboys, tarpon fishers, wilderness guides, beaters, trappers, and all whom WaltWhitman calls "powerful uneducated persons, " loving them for theirpluck, coolness, strength, and skill. Kingsley's "At Last, a Christmasin the West Indies, " exhibits the same curiosity as to tropical botanyand zoology that Roosevelt shows in his African and Brazilian journeys. Not only tastes, but many ideals and opinions the two men had incommon. "Parson Lot, " the Chartist and Christian Socialist, had the samesympathy with the poor and the same desire to improve the condition ofagricultural laborers and London artisans which led Roosevelt to promoteemployers' liability laws and other legislation to protect theworkingman from exploitation by conscienceless wealth. Kingsley, likeRoosevelt, was essentially Protestant. Neither he nor Mr. Rooseveltliked asceticism or celibacy. As a historian, Kingsley did not rank atall with the author of "The Winning of the West" and the "Naval War of1812. " On the other hand, if Roosevelt had written novels and poetry, Ithink he would have rejoiced greatly to write "Westward Ho, " "The LastBuccaneer, " and "Ode to the North-East Wind. "

In fine, whatever lasting fortune may be in store for Roosevelt'swritings, the disappearance of his vivid figure leaves a blank in thecontemporary scene. And those who were against him can join with thosewho were for him in slightly paraphrasing Carlyle's words of dismissalto Walter Scott, "Theodore Roosevelt, pride of all Americans, take ourproud and sad farewell. "

FOOTNOTE:

[A] Mr. Edwin Carty Ranck, of the Roosevelt Memorial Committee, calls attention to the following sentence, which I had overlooked: "As awoodland writer, Thoreau comes second only to Burroughs. "--"TheWilderness Hunter, " p. 261. 

FIFTY YEARS OF HAWTHORNE

Hawthorne was an excellent critic of his own writings. He recognizesrepeatedly the impersonal and purely objective nature of his fiction. R. H. Hutton once called him the ghost of New England; and those who lovehis exquisite, though shadowy, art are impelled to give corporealsubstance to this disembodied spirit: to draw him nearer out of hischill aloofness, by associating him with people and places with whichthey too have associations. 

I heard Colonel Higginson say, in a lecture at Concord, that if a fewdrops of redder blood could have been added to Hawthorne's style, hewould have been the foremost imaginative writer of his century. Theghosts in "The Æneid" were unable to speak aloud until they had drunkblood. Instinctively, then, one seeks to infuse more red corpuscles intothe somewhat anæmic veins of these tales and romances. For Hawthorne'sfiction is almost wholly ideal. He does not copy life like Thackeray, whose procedure is inductive: does not start with observed characters, but with an imagined problem or situation of the soul, inventingcharacters to fit. There is always a dreamy quality about the action:no violent quarrels, no passionate love scenes. Thus it has been oftenpointed out that in "The Scarlet Letter" we do not get the history ofDimmesdale's and Hester's sin: not the passion itself, but only itssequels in the conscience. So in "The House of the Seven Gables, " and"The Marble Faun, " a crime has preceded the opening of the story, whichdeals with the working out of the retribution. 

When Hawthorne handled real persons, it was in the form of the charactersketch--often the satirical character sketch, --as in the introduction to"The Scarlet Letter" which scandalized the people of Salem. If he couldhave made a novel out of his custom-house acquaintances, he might havegiven us something less immaterial. He felt the lack of solidity in hisown creations: the folly of constructing "the semblance of a world outof airy matter"; the "value hidden in petty incidents and ordinarycharacters. " "A better book than I shall ever write was there, " heconfesses, but "my brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning totranscribe it. "

Now and then, when he worked from observation, or utilized his ownexperiences, a piece of drastic realism results. The suicide of Zenobiais transferred, with the necessary changes, from a long passage in "TheAmerican Note Books, " in which he tells of going out at night, with hisneighbors, to drag for the body of a girl who had drowned herself in theConcord. Yet he did not refrain the touch of symbolism even here. Thereis a wound on Zenobia's breast, inflicted by the pole with whichHollingsworth is groping the river bottom. 

And this is why one finds his "American Note Books" quite as interestingreading as his stories. Very remarkable things, these note books. Theyhave puzzled Mr. James, who asks what the author would be at in them, and suggests that he is writing letters to himself, or practising hishand at description. They are not exactly a _journal in-time_; nor arethey records of thought, like Emerson's ten volumes of journals. Theyare carefully composed, and are full of hints for plots, scenes, situations, characters, to be later worked up. In the three collections, "Twice-Told Tales, " "Mosses from an Old Manse, " and "The Snow Image, "there are, in round numbers, a hundred tales and sketches; and Mr. Conway has declared that, in the number of his original plots, no modernauthor, save Browning, has equalled Hawthorne. Now, the germ of many, ifnot most, of these inventions may be found in some brief jotting--aparagraph, or a line or two--in "The American Note Books. "

Yet it is not as literary material that these notes engage me most--byfar the greater portion were never used, --but as records of observationand studies of life. I will even acknowledge a certain excitement whenthe diarist's wanderings lead him into my own neighborhood, howeverinsignificant the result. Thus, in a letter from New Haven in 1830, hewrites, "I heard some of the students at Yale College conjecturing thatI was an Englishman. " Mr. Lathrop thinks that it was on this tripthrough Connecticut that he hit upon his story, "The Seven Vagabonds, "the scene of which is near Stamford, in the van of a travelling showman, where the seven wanderers take shelter during a thunderstorm. Howquaintly true to the old provincial life of back-country New England arethese figures--a life that survives to-day in out-of-the-way places. Holgrave, the young daguerreotypist in "The House of the Seven Gables, "a type of the universal Yankee, had practised a number of these queertrades: had been a strolling dentist, a lecturer on mesmerism, asalesman in a village store, a district schoolmaster, editor of acountry newspaper; and "had subsequently travelled New England and theMiddle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticutmanufactory of Cologne water and other essences. " The Note Books tell usthat, at North Adams in 1838, the author foregathered with asurgeon-dentist, who was also a preacher of the Baptist persuasion: andthat, on the stage-coach between Worcester and Northampton, they took upan essence-vender who was peddling anise-seed, cloves, red-cedar, wormwood, opodeldoc, hair-oil, and Cologne water. Do you imagine thatthe essence-peddler is extinct? No, you may meet his covered wagonto-day on lonely roads between the hill-villages of Massachusetts andConnecticut. 

It was while living that strange life of seclusion at Old Salem, compared with which Thoreau's hermitage at Walden was like the centralroar of Broadway, that Hawthorne broke away now and then from hissolitude, and went rambling off in search of contacts with real life. Here is another item that he fetched back from Connecticut under date ofSeptember, 1838: "In Connecticut and also sometimes in Berkshire, thevillages are situated on the most elevated ground that can be found, sothat they are visible for miles around. Litchfield is a remarkableinstance, occupying a high plain, without the least shelter from thewinds, and with almost as wide an expanse of view as from amountain-top. The streets are very wide--two or three hundred feet atleast--with wide green margins, and sometimes there is a wide greenspace between two road tracks. .. . The graveyard is on the slope, and atthe foot of a swell, filled with old and new gravestones, some of redfreestone, some of gray granite, most of them of white marble and one ofcast iron with an inscription of raised letters. " Do I not know thatwind-swept hilltop, those grassy avenues? Do I not know that ancientgraveyard, and what names are on its headstones? Yes, even as the heartknoweth its own bitterness. 

As we go on in life, anniversaries become rather melancholy affairs. Theturn of the year--the annual return of the day--birthdays or death-daysor set festal occasions like Christmas or the New Year, bring remindersof loss and change. This is true of domestic anniversaries; while publicliterary celebrations, designed to recall to a forgetful generation thecentenary or other dates in the lives of great writers, appear too oftenbut milestones on the road to oblivion. Fifty years is too short a timeto establish a literary immortality; and yet, if any American writer hasalready won the position of a classic, Hawthorne is that writer. Speaking in this country in 1883, Matthew Arnold said: "Hawthorne'sliterary talent is of the first order. His subjects are generally not tome subjects of the highest interest; but his literary talent is . .. Thefinest, I think, which America has yet produced--finer, by much, thanEmerson's. " But how does the case stand to-day? I believe thatHawthorne's fame is secure as a whole, in spite of the fact that much ofhis work has begun to feel the disintegrating force of hostilecriticism, and "the unimaginable touch of time. "

For one thing, American fiction, for the past fifty years, has beentaking a direction quite the contrary of his. Run over the names thatwill readily occur of modern novelists and short-story writers, and askyourself whether the vivid coloring of these realistic schools must notinevitably have blanched to a still whiter pallor those visionary talesof which the author long ago confessed that they had "the pale tints offlowers that blossomed in too retired a shade. " With practice has gonetheory; and now the critics of realism are beginning to nibble at theaccepted estimates of Hawthorne. A very damaging bit of dissection isthe recent essay by Mr. W. C. Brownell, one of the most acute andunsparingly analytic of American critics. It is full of cruelly cleverthings: for example, "Zenobia and Miriam linger in one's memory ratheras brunettes than as women. " And again, _à propos_ of RogerChillingworth in "The Scarlet Letter, "--"His characters are notcreations, but expedients. " I admire these sayings; but they seem to me, like most epigrams, brilliant statements of half-truths. In general, Mr. Brownell's thesis is that Hawthorne was spoiled by allegory: that heabused his naturally rare gift of imagination by declining to grapplewith reality, which is the proper material for the imagination, butallowing his fancy--an inferior faculty--to play with dreams andsymbols; and that consequently he has left but one masterpiece. 

This is an old complaint. Long ago, Edgar Poe, who did not live to read"The Scarlet Letter, " but who wrote a favorable review of "TheTwice-Told Tales, " advised the author to give up allegory. In 1880, Mr. Henry James wrote a life of Hawthorne for the English Men of Lettersseries. This was addressed chiefly to the English public and was thoughtin this country to be a trifle unsympathetic; in particular in itspatronizing way of dwelling upon the thinness of the American socialenvironment and the consequent provincialism of Hawthorne's books. The"American Note Books, " in particular, seem to Mr. James a chronicle ofsmall beer, and he marvels at the triviality of an existence which couldreduce the diarist to recording an impression that "the aromatic odor ofpeat smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant. " This peat-smokeentry has become proverbial, and is mentioned by nearly everyone whowrites about Hawthorne. Yet on a recent rereading of James's biography, it seemed to me not so unsympathetic as I had remembered it; but, ineffect, cordially appreciative. He touches, however, on this same point, of the effect on Hawthorne's genius of his allegorizing habit. "Hawthorne, " says Mr. James, "was not in the least a realist--he wasnot, to my mind, enough of one. " The biographer allows him a liberalshare of imagination, but adds that most of his short tales are morefanciful than imaginative. "Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, isnothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one ofthe lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know, have a great stomach for it; they delight in symbols andcorrespondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a verydifferent story. I frankly confess that it has never seemed to me afirst-rate literary form. It is apt to spoil two good things--a storyand a moral. "

Except in that capital satire, "The Celestial Railroad, " an ironicalapplication of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to modern religion, Hawthorneseldom uses out-and-out allegory; but rather a more or less definitesymbolism. Even in his full-length romances, this mental habit persistsin the typical and, so to speak, algebraic nature of his figures andincidents. George Woodberry and others have drawn attention to the wayin which his fancy clings to the physical image that represents themoral truth: the minister's black veil, emblem of the secret of everyhuman heart; the print of a hand on the heroine's cheek in "TheBirthmark, " a sign of earthly imperfection which only death caneradicate; the mechanical butterfly in "The Artist of the Beautiful, "for which the artist no longer cares, when once he has embodied histhought. Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" has every day a hot-houseflower sent down from a Boston conservatory and wears it in her hair orthe bosom of her gown, where it seems to express her exotic beauty. Itis characteristic of the romancer that he does not specify whether thissymbolic blossom was a gardenia, an orchid, a tuberose, a japonica, orwhat it was. Thoreau, if we can imagine him writing a romance, wouldhave added the botanical name. 

"Rappacini's Daughter" is a very representative instance of those"insubstantial fictions for the illustration of moral truths, not alwaysof much moment. " The suggestion of this tale we find in a quotation fromSir Thomas Browne in "The American Note Books" for 1837: "A story therepasseth of an Indian King that sent unto Alexander a fair woman fedwith aconite and other poisons, with this intent complexionally todestroy him. " Here was one of those morbid situations, with a hint ofpsychological possibilities and moral applications, that never failed tofascinate Hawthorne. He let his imagination dwell upon it, and graduallyevolved the story of a physician who made his own daughter the victim ofa scientific experiment. In this tale, Mr. Brownell thinks, thenarrative has no significance apart from the moral; and yet the moral isquite lost sight of in the development of the narrative, which mighthave been more attractive if told simply as a fairy tale. This is quiterepresentative of Hawthorne's usual method. There is no explicit moralto "Rappacini's Daughter. " But there are a number of parallels andapplications open to the reader. He may make them, or he may abstainfrom making them as he chooses. Thus we are vaguely reminded ofMithridates, the Pontic King, who made himself immune to poisons bytheir daily employment. The doctor's theory, that every disease can becured by the use of the appropriate poison, suggests the aconite andbelladonna of the homeopathists and their motto, _similia similibuscurantur_. Again we think of Holmes's novel "Elsie Venner, " of the girlimpregnated with the venom of the rattlesnake, whose life ended when theserpent nature died out of her; just as Beatrice, in Hawthorne's story, is killed by the powerful antidote which slays the poison. A veryobvious incidental reflection is the cruelty of science, sacrificing itsbest loved object to its curiosity. And may we not turn the whole taleinto a parable of the isolation produced by a peculiar and unnaturalrearing, say in heterodox beliefs, or unconventional habits, unfittingthe victim for society, making her to be shunned as dangerous?

The lure of the symbolic and the marvelous tempted Hawthorne constantlyto the brink of the supernatural. But here his art is delicate. Theold-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition for modern credulity. The modern ghost is a "clot on the brain. " Recall the ghosts in HenryJames's "The Turn of the Screw"--just a suspicion of evil presences. Thetrue interpretation of that story I have sometimes thought to be, thatthe woman who saw the phantoms was mad. Hawthorne is similarlyambiguous. His apparently preternatural phenomena always admit of anatural explanation. The water of Maule's well may have turned bitter inconsequence of an ancient wrong; but also perhaps because of adisturbance in the underground springs. The sudden deaths of Coloneland Judge Pyncheon may have been due to the old wizard's curse that "Godwould give them blood to drink"; or simply to an inherited tendency toapoplexy. _Did_ Donatello have furry, leaf-shaped ears, or was thismerely his companions' teasing? Did old Mistress Hibben, the sister ofGovernor Bellingham of Massachusetts, attend witch meetings in theforest, and inscribe her name in the Black Man's book? Hawthorne doesnot say so, but only that the people so believed; and it is historicalfact that she was executed as a witch. Was a red letter A actually seenin the midnight sky, or was it a freak of the aurora borealis? What didChillingworth see on Dimmesdale's breast? The author will not tell us. But if it was the mark of the Scarlet Letter, may we not appeal to thephenomena of stigmatism: the print, for example, of the five wounds ofChrist on the bodies of devotees? Hawthorne does not vouch for the truthof Alice Pyncheon's clairvoyant trances: he relates her story as alegend handed down in the Pyncheon family, explicable, if you please, onnatural grounds--what was witchcraft in the seventeenth century havingbecome mesmerism or hypnotism in the nineteenth. 

Fifty years after his death, Hawthorne is already a classic. For evenMr. Brownell allows him one masterpiece, and one masterpiece means animmortality. I suppose it is generally agreed that "The Scarlet Letter"is his _chef-d'oeuvre_. Certainly it is his most intensely conceivedwork, the most thoroughly fused and logically developed; and is freefrom those elements of fantasy, mystery, and unreality which enter intohis other romances. But its unrelieved gloom, and the author'sunrelaxing grasp upon his theme, make it less characteristic than someof his inferior works; and I think he was right in preferring "The Houseof the Seven Gables, " as more fully representing all sides of hisgenius. The difference between the two is the difference between tragedyand romance. While we are riding the high horse of criticism and feelingvirtuous, we will concede the superiority of the former _genre_; butwhen we give our literary conscience the slip, we yield ourselves againto the fascination of the haunted twilight. 

The antique gabled mansion in its quiet back street has the charm of thestill-life sketches in the early books, such as "Sights from a Steeple, ""A Rill from the Town Pump, " "Sunday at Home, " and "The Toll-gatherer'sDay. " All manner of quaint figures, known to childhood, pass along thatvisionary street: the scissors grinder, town crier, baker's cart, lumbering stage-coach, charcoal vender, hand-organ man and monkey, adrove of cattle, a military parade--the "trainers, " as we used to callthem. Hawthorne had no love for his fellow citizens and took little partin the modern society of Salem. But he had struck deep roots into thesoil of the old witch town, his birthplace and the home of generationsof his ancestors. Does the reader know this ancient seaport, with itsdecayed shipping and mouldering wharves, its silted up harbor and idlecustom-house, where Hawthorne served three years as surveyor of theport? Imposing still are the great houses around the square, built byretired merchants and shipmasters whose fortunes were made in the EastIndia trade: with dark old drawing-rooms smelling of sandalwood andfilled with cabinets of Oriental curiosities. Hawthorne had little to dowith the aristocracy of Salem. But something of the life of these oldfamilies may be read in Mrs. Stoddard's novel "The Morgesons, "--a bookwhich I am perpetually recommending to my friends, and they asperpetually refusing to read, returning my copy after a superficialperusal, with uncomplimentary comments upon my taste in fiction. 

Hawthorne's academic connections are of particular interest. It iswonderful that he and Longfellow should have been classmates at Bowdoin. Equally wonderful that Emerson's "Nature" and Hawthorne's "Mosses"should have been written in the same little room in the Old Manse atConcord. It gives one a sense of how small New England was then, and inhow narrow a runway genius went. Bowdoin College in those days was alittle country school on the edge of the Maine wilderness, only twentyyears old, its few buildings almost literally planted down among thepine stumps. Hawthorne's class--1825--graduated but thirty-seven strong. And yet Hawthorne and Longfellow were not intimate in college butbelonged to different sets. And twelve years afterward, when Longfellowwrote a friendly review of "Twice-Told Tales" in _The North AmericanReview_, his quondam classmate addressed him in a somewhat formal letterof thanks as "Dear Sir. " Later the relations of the two became closer, though never perhaps intimate. It was Hawthorne who handed over toLongfellow that story of the dispersion of the Acadian exiles ofGrandpré, which became "Evangeline": a story which his friend Conollyhad suggested to Hawthorne, as mentioned in "The American Note Books. "The point which arrested Hawthorne's attention was the incident in theBayou Teche, where Gabriel's boat passes in the night within a few feetof the bank on which Evangeline and her company are sleeping. 

This was one of those tricks of destiny that so often engagedHawthorne's imagination: like the tale of "David Swan" the farmer's boywho, on his way to try his fortune in the city, falls asleep by awayside spring. A rich and childless old couple stop to water theirhorse, are taken by his appearance and talk of adopting him, but driveaway on hearing someone approaching. A young girl comes by and falls somuch in love with his handsome face that she is tempted to waken himwith a kiss, but she too is startled and goes on. Then a pair of trampsarrive and are about to murder him for his money, when they in turn arefrightened off. Thus riches and love and death have passed him in hissleep; and he, all unconscious of the brush of the wings of fate, awakens and goes his way. Again, our romancer had read the commonhistorical accounts of the great landslide which buried the inn in theNotch of the White Mountains. The names were known of all who had beenthere that night and had consequently perished--with one exception. Onestranger had been present, who was never identified: Hawthorne's fancyplayed with this curious problem, and he made out of it his story of"The Ambitious Guest, " a youth just starting on a brilliant career, entertaining the company around the fire, with excited descriptions ofhis hopes and plans; and then snuffed out utterly by ironic fate, andnot even numbered among the missing. 

Tales like these are among the most characteristic and original of theauthor's works. And wherever we notice this quality in a story, we callit Hawthornish. "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, " is Hawthornish; so is"Peter Schemil, the Man without a Shadow"; or Balzac's "Peau deChagrin"; or later work, some of it manifestly inspired by Hawthorne, like Stevenson's tale of a double personality, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; or Edward Bellamy's "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process"--a process forensuring forgetfulness of unpleasant things--a modern water of Lethe. Even some of James's early stories like "The Madonna of the Future" and"The Last of the Valerii, " as well as Mr. Howells's "UndiscoveredCountry, " have touches of Hawthorne. 

Emerson and Hawthorne were fellow townsmen for some years at Concord, and held each other in high regard. One was a philosophical idealist:the other, an artist of the ideal, who sometimes doubted whether thetree on the bank, or its image in the stream was the more real. But theytook no impress from one another's minds. Emerson could not read hisneighbor's romances. Their morbid absorption in the problem of evilrepelled the resolute optimist. He thought the best thing Hawthorne everwrote was his "Recollections of a Gifted Woman, " the chapter in "Our OldHome" concerning Miss Delia Bacon, originator of the Baconian theory ofShakespeare, whom Hawthorne befriended with unfailing patience andcourtesy during his Liverpool consulship. 

Hawthorne paid a fine tribute to Emerson in the introduction to "Mossesfrom an Old Manse, " and even paid him the honor of quotation, contraryto his almost invariable practice. I cannot recall a half dozenquotations in all his works. I think he must have been principledagainst them. But he said he had come too late to Concord to fall underEmerson's influence. No risk of that, had he come earlier. There was ajealous independence in Hawthorne which resented the too close approachof an alien mind: a species of perversity even, that set him incontradiction to his environment. He always fought shy of literarypeople. During his Liverpool consulship, he did not make--apparently didnot care to make--acquaintance with his intellectual equals. He did notmeet Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mill, Grote, Charles Reade, George Eliot, or any other first-class minds. He barely met theBrownings, but did not really come to know them till afterwards inItaly. Surrounded by reformers, abolitionists, vegetarians, comeoutersand radicals of all gospels, he remained stubbornly conservative. Heheld office under three Democratic administrations, and wrote a campaignlife of his old college friend Franklin Pierce when he ran forPresident. Commenting on Emerson's sentence that John Brown had made thegallows sacred like the cross, Hawthorne said that Brown was ablood-stained fanatic and justly hanged. 

This conservatism was allied with a certain fatalism, hopelessness, andmoral indolence in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in "The BlithedaleRomance, " is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all tohis hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristicallyHawthorne gives us no details of his plan. It is vagueness itself, andits advocate is little better than a type. Holgrave again, in "The Houseof the Seven Gables, " is the scornful young radical; and both he andHollingsworth are guilty of the mistake of supposing that they can doanything directly to improve the condition of things. God will bringabout amendment in his own good time. And this fatalism again is subtlyconnected with New England's ancestral creed--Calvinism. Hawthorne--ithas been pointed out a hundred times--is the Puritan romancer. His talesare tales of the conscience: he is obsessed with the thought of sin, with the doctrines of foreordination and total depravity. In thetheological library which he found stowed away in the garret of the OldManse, he preferred the seventeenth-century folio volumes of Puritandivinity to the thin Unitarian sermons and controversial articles in thefiles of _The Christian Examiner_. The former, at least, had once beenwarm with a deep belief, however they had now "cooled down even to thefreezing point. " But "the frigidity of the modern productions" was"inherent. " Hawthorne was never a church-goer and adhered to noparticular form of creed. But speculatively he liked his religion thick. 

 The Psalm-tunes of the Puritan, The songs that dared to go Down searching through the abyss of man, His deeps of conscious woe--

spoke more profoundly to his soul than the easy optimism of liberalChristianity. Hawthorne was no transcendentalist: he went to Brook Farm, not as a Fourierite or a believer in the principles of association, butattracted by the novelty of this experiment at communal living, and bythe interesting varieties of human nature there assembled: literarymaterial which he used in "The Blithedale Romance. " He complains slylyof Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer which hooked the other cows(though Colonel Higginson once assured me that this heifer was only asymbol, and that Margaret never really owned a heifer or cow of anykind). 

Mr. Lathrop proposed, as a rough formula for Hawthorne, Poe and Irving_plus_ something of his own. The resemblances and differences betweenPoe and Hawthorne are obvious. The latter never deals in physicalhorror: his morbidest tragedy is of a spiritual kind; while onceonly--in the story entitled "William Wilson"--Poe enters that field ofethical romance which Hawthorne constantly occupies. What he has incommon with Irving is chiefly the attitude of spectatorship, and thecareful refinement of the style, so different from the loud, brassymanner of modern writing. Hawthorne never uses slang, dialect, oaths, orcolloquial idioms. The talk of his characters is book talk. Why is itthat many of us find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorneirritating? Is it the fault of the writer or of the reader? Partly ofthe former, I think: that anxious finish, those elaborately roundedperiods have something of the artificial, which modern naturalism hastaught us to distrust. But also, I believe, the fault is largely ourown. We have grown so nervous, in these latter generations, so used toshort cuts, that we are impatient of anything slow. Cut out thedescriptions, cut out the reflections, _coupez vos phrases_. Hawthorne'sstyle was the growth of reverie, solitude, leisure--"fine old leisure, "whose disappearance from modern life George Eliot has lamented. On thewalls of his study at the "Wayside" was written--though not by his ownhand--the motto, "There is no joy but calm. "

Sentiment and humor do not lie so near the surface in Hawthorne as inIrving. He had a deep sense of the ridiculous, well shown in suchsketches as "P's Correspondence" and "The Celestial Railroad"; or in thedescription of the absurd old chickens in the Pyncheon yard, shrunk byin-breeding to a weazened race, but retaining all their top-knottedpride of lineage. Hawthorne's humor was less genial than Irving's, andhad a sharp satiric edge. There is no merriment in it. Do you rememberthat scene at the Villa Borghese, where Miriam and Donatello break intoa dance and all the people who are wandering in the gardens join withthem? The author meant this to be a burst of wild mænad gaiety. As suchI do not recall a more dismal failure. It is cold at the heart of it. It has no mirth, but is like a dance without music: like a dance of deafmutes that I witnessed once, pretending to keep time to the inaudiblescrapings of a deaf and dumb fiddler. 

Henry James says that Hawthorne's stories are the only good Americanhistorical fiction; and Woodberry says that his method here is the sameas Scott's. The truth of this may be admitted up to a certain point. OurPuritan romancer had certainly steeped his imagination in the annals ofcolonial New England, as Scott had done in his border legends. He wasfamiliar with the documents--especially with Mather's "Magnalia, " thatgreat source book of New England poetry and romance. But it was not thehistory itself that interested him, the broad picture of an extinctsociety, the _tableau large de la vie_, which Scott delighted to paint;rather it was some adventure of the private soul. For example, Lowellhad told him the tradition of the young hired man who was chopping woodat the backdoor of the Old Manse on the morning of the Concord fight;and who hurried to the battlefield in the neighboring lane, to find botharmies gone and two British soldiers lying on the ground, one dead, theother wounded. As the wounded man raised himself on his knees and staredup at the lad, the latter, obeying a nervous impulse, struck him on thehead with his axe and finished him. "The story, " says Hawthorne, "comeshome to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moralexercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequentcareer and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood-stain. .. . Thisone circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tellsus of the fight. " How different is this bit of pathology from the publicfeeling of Emerson's lines:

 Spirit that made those heroes dare To die and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee. 

A PILGRIM IN CONCORD

 Rura quae Liris quietâ Mordet aquâ, taciturnus amnis. 

The Concord School of Philosophy opened its first session in the summerof 1879. The dust of late July lay velvet soft and velvet deep on allthe highways; or, stirred by the passing wheel, rose in slow clouds, notunemblematic of the transcendental haze which filled the mentalatmosphere thereabout. 

Of those who had made Concord one of the homes of the soul, Hawthorneand Thoreau had been dead many years--I saw their graves in SleepyHollow;--and Margaret Fuller had perished long ago by shipwreck on FireIsland Beach. But Alcott was still alive and garrulous; and ElleryChanning--Thoreau's biographer--was alive. Above all, the sage ofConcord, "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit, "still walked his ancient haunts; his mind in many ways yet unimpaired, though sadly troubled by aphasia, or the failure of verbal memory. Itwas an instance of pathetic irony that in his lecture on "Memory, "delivered in the Town Hall, he was prompted constantly by his daughter. 

It seemed an inappropriate manner of arrival--the Fitchburg Railroad. One should have dropped down upon the sacred spot by parachute; or, atworst, have come on foot, with staff and scrip, along the Lexingtonpike, reversing the fleeing steps of the British regulars on that Aprilday, when the embattled farmers made their famous stand. But Iremembered that Thoreau, whose Walden solitude was disturbed by gangs ofIrish laborers laying the tracks of this same Fitchburg Railroad, consoled himself with the reflection that hospitable nature made theintruder a part of herself. The embankment runs along one end of thepond, and the hermit only said:

 It fills a few hollows And makes banks for the swallows, And sets the sand a-blowing And the black-berries growing. 

Afterwards I witnessed, and participated in, a more radical profanationof these crystal waters, when two hundred of the dirtiest children inBoston, South-enders, were brought down by train on a fresh-air-fundpicnic and washed in the lake just in front of the spot where Thoreau'scabin stood, after having been duly swung in the swings, teetered onthe see-saws, and fed with a sandwich, a slice of cake, a pint ofpeanuts, and a lemonade apiece, by a committee of charitable ladies--oneof whom was Miss Louisa Alcott, certainly a high authority on "LittleWomen" and "Little Men. "

Miss Alcott I had encountered on the evening of my first day in Concord, when I rang the door bell of the Alcott residence and asked if the seerwas within. I fancied that there was a trace of acerbity in the mannerof the tall lady who answered my ring, and told me abruptly that Mr. Alcott was not at home, and that I would probably find him at Mr. Sanborn's farther up the street. Perspiring philosophers with dustersand grip-sacks had been arriving all day and applying at the Alcotthouse for addresses of boarding houses and for instructions of allkinds; and Miss Louisa's patience may well have been tried. She did nottake much stock in the School anyway. Her father was supremely happy. One of the dreams of his life was realized, and endless talk andsoul-communion were in prospect. But his daughter's view of philosophywas tinged with irony, as was not unnatural in a high-spirited woman whohad borne the burden of the family's support, and had even worked out indomestic service, while her unworldly parent was transcendentalizingabout the country, holding conversation classes in western towns, fromwhich after prolonged absences he sometimes brought home a dollar, andsometimes only himself. "Philosophy can bake no bread, but it can giveus God, freedom, and immortality" read the motto--from Novalis--on thecover of the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, published at Concordin those years, under the editorship of Mr. William T. Harris; but breadmust be baked, for even philosophers must eat, and an occasionalimpatience of the merely ideal may be forgiven in the overworkedpractician. 

On Mr. Frank Sanborn's wide, shady verandah, I found Mr. Alcott, a mostquaint and venerable figure, large in frame and countenance, withbeautiful, flowing white hair. He moved slowly, and spoke deliberatelyin a rich voice. His face had a look of mild and innocent solemnity, andhe reminded me altogether of a large benignant sheep or other ruminatinganimal. He was benevolently interested when I introduced myself as thefirst fruits of the stranger and added that I was from Connecticut. Hehimself was a native of the little hill town of Wolcott, not many milesfrom New Haven, and in youth had travelled through the South as a Yankeepeddler. "Connecticut gave him birth, " says Thoreau; "he peddled firsther wares, afterwards, he declares, his brains. "

Mr. Sanborn was the secretary of the School, and with him I enrolledmyself as a pupil and paid the very modest fee which admitted me to itssymposia. Mr. Sanborn is well known through his contributions to Concordhistory and biography. He was for years one of the literary staff of_The Springfield Republican_, active in many reform movements, and anefficient member of the American Social Science Association. Almost fromhis house John Brown started on his Harper's Ferry raid, and people inConcord still dwell upon the exciting incident of Mr. Sanborn's arrestin 1860 as an accessory before the fact. The United States deputymarshal with his myrmidons drove out from Boston in a hack. They luredthe unsuspecting abolitionist outside his door, on some pretext orother, clapped the handcuffs on him, and tried to get him into the hack. But their victim, planting his long legs one on each side of thecarriage door, resisted sturdily, and his neighbors assaulted theofficers with hue and cry. The town rose upon them. Judge Hoar hastilyissued a habeas corpus returnable before the Massachusetts SupremeCourt, and the baffled minions of the slave power went back to Boston. 

The School assembled in the Orchard House, formerly the residence of Mr. Alcott, on the Lexington road. Next door was the Wayside, Hawthorne'shome for a number of years, a cottage overshadowed by the steep hillsidethat rose behind it, thick with hemlocks and larches. On the ridge ofthis hill was Hawthorne's "out door study, " a foot path worn by his ownfeet, as he paced back and forth among the trees and thought out theplots of his romances. In 1879 the Wayside was tenanted by GeorgeLathrop, who had married Hawthorne's daughter, Rose. He had alreadypublished his "Study of Hawthorne" and a volume of poems, "Rose andRooftree. " His novel, "An Echo of Passion, " was yet to come, a bookwhich unites something of modern realism with a delicately symbolic artakin to Hawthorne's own. 

A bust of Plato presided over the exercises of the School, and"Plato-Skimpole"--as Mr. Alcott was once nicknamed--made the openingaddress. I remember how impressively he quoted Milton's lines:

 How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute. 

Our _pièce de résistance_ was the course of lectures in which Mr. Harrisexpounded Hegel. But there were many other lecturers. Mrs. Edna Cheneytalked to us about art; though all that I recall of her conversation isthe fact that she pronounced _always olways_, and I wondered if that wasthe regular Boston pronunciation. Dr. Jones, the self-taught Platonistof Jacksonville, Illinois, interpreted Plato. Quite a throng of hisdisciples, mostly women, had followed him from Illinois and swelled thenumbers of the Summer School. Once Professor Benjamin Peirce, the greatHarvard mathematician, came over from Cambridge, and read us one of hisLowell Institute lectures, on the Ideality of Mathematics. He had a mostdistinguished presence and an eye, as was said, of black fire. TheHarvard undergraduates of my time used to call him Benny Peirce; and onthe fly leaves of their mathematical text books they would write, "Whosteals my Peirce steals trash. " Colonel T. W. Higginson read a singlelecture on American literature, from which I carried away for future usea delightful story about an excellent Boston merchant who, being askedat a Goethe birthday dinner to make a few remarks, said that he "guessedthat Go-ethe was the N. P. Willis of Germany. "

Colonel Higginson's lecture was to me a green oasis in the arid desertof metaphysics, but it was regarded by earnest truth-seekers in theclass as quite irrelevant to the purposes of the course. The lecturerhimself confided to me at the close of the session a suspicion that hisaudience cared more for philosophy than for literature. Once or twiceMr. Emerson visited the School, taking no part in its proceedings, butsitting patiently through the hour, and wearing what a newspaperreporter described as his "wise smile. " After the lecture for thesession was ended, the subject was thrown open to discussion and therewas an opportunity to ask questions. Most of us were shy to speak out inthat presence, feeling ourselves in a state of pupilage. Usually therewould be a silence of several minutes, as at a Quaker meeting waitingfor the spirit to move; and then Mr. Alcott would announce in hissolemn, musical tones "I have a thought"; and after a weighty pause, proceed to some Orphic utterance. Alcott, indeed, was what might becalled the leader on the floor; and he was ably seconded by MissElizabeth Peabody, the sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife. MissPeabody was well known as the introducer of the German kindergarten, andfor her life-long zeal in behalf of all kinds of philanthropies andreforms. Henry James was accused of having caricatured her in his novel"The Bostonians, " in the figure of the dear, visionary, vaguelybenevolent old lady who is perpetually engaged in promoting "causes, "attending conventions, carrying on correspondence, forming committees, drawing up resolutions, and the like; and who has so many "causes" onhand at once that she gets them all mixed up and cannot remember whichof her friends are spiritualists and which of them are concerned inwoman's rights movements, temperance agitations, and universal peaceassociations. Mr. James denied that he meant Miss Peabody, whom he hadnever met or known. If so, he certainly divined the type. In her lateryears, Miss Peabody was nicknamed "the grandmother of Boston. "

I have to acknowledge, to my shame, that I was often a truant to thediscussions of the School, which met three hours in the morning andthree in the afternoon. The weather was hot and the air in the OrchardHouse was drowsy. There were many outside attractions, and more and moreI was tempted to leave the philosophers to reason high--

 Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate-- Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute--

while I wandered off through the woods for a bath in Walden, some oneand a half miles away, through whose transparent waters the pebbles onthe bottom could be plainly seen at a depth of thirty feet. Sometimes Iwent farther afield to White Pond, described by Thoreau, or Baker Farm, sung by Ellery Channing. A pleasant young fellow at Miss Emma Barrett'sboarding house, who had no philosophy, but was a great hand at picnicsand boating and black-berrying parties, paddled me up the Assabeth, orNorth Branch, in his canoe, and drove me over to Longfellow's WaysideInn at Sudbury. And so it happens that, when I look back at my fortnightat Concord, what I think of is not so much the murmurous auditorium ofthe Orchard House, as the row of colossal sycamores along the villagesidewalk that led us thither, whose smooth, mottled trunks in themoonlight resembled a range of Egyptian temple columns. Or I haunt againat twilight the grounds of the Old Manse, where Hawthorne wrote his"Mosses, " and the grassy lane beside it leading down to the site of therude bridge and the first battlefield of the Revolution. Here were theheadstones of the two British soldiers, buried where they fell; here theConcord monument erected in 1836:

 On this green bank, by this soft stream We set to-day a votive stone: That memory may their deed redeem When, like our sires, our sons are gone. 

In the field across the river was the spirited statue of the minuteman, designed by young Daniel Chester French, a Concord boy who has sincedistinguished himself as a sculptor in wider fields and more imposingworks. 

The social life of Concord, judging from such glimpses as could be hadof it, was peculiar. It was the life of a village community, marked bythe friendly simplicity of country neighbors, but marked also by unusualintellectual distinction and an addiction to "the things of the mind. "The town was not at all provincial, or what the Germans call_kleinstädtisch_:--cosmopolitan, rather, as lying on the highway ofthought. It gave one a thrill, for example, to meet Mr. Emerson comingfrom the Post Office with his mail, like any ordinary citizen. The pettyconstraint, the narrow standards of conduct which are sometimes the baneof village life were almost unknown. Transcendental freedom ofspeculation, all manner of heterodoxies, and the individual queernessesof those whom the world calls "cranks, " had produced a generaltolerance. Thus it was said, that the only reason why services were heldin the Unitarian Church on Sunday was because Judge Hoar didn't quitelike to play whist on that day. Many of the Concord houses have gardensbordering upon the river; and I was interested to notice that the boatsmoored at the bank had painted on their sterns plant names or birdnames taken from the Concord poems--such as "The Rhodora, " "The Veery, ""The Linnæa, " and "The Wood Thrush. " Many a summer hour I spent withEdward Hoar in his skiff, rowing, or sailing, or floating up and down onthis soft Concord stream--Musketaquit, or "grass-ground river"--movingthrough miles of meadow, fringed with willows and button bushes, with acurrent so languid, said Hawthorne, that the eye cannot detect which wayit flows. Sometimes we sailed as far as Fair Haven Bay, whose "dark andsober billows, " "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, "Thoreau thought as fine as anything on Lake Huron or the northwestcoast. Nor were we, I hope, altogether unperceiving of that other riverwhich Emerson detected flowing underneath the Concord--

 Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain, But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee as though through Concord plain. .. . 

 I see the inundation sweet, I hear the spending of the stream, Through years, through men, through nature fleet, Through love and thought, through power and dream. 

Edward Hoar had been Thoreau's companion in one of his visits to theMaine woods. He knew the flora and fauna of Concord as well as hisfriend the poet-naturalist. He had a large experience of the world, hadrun a ranch in New Mexico and an orange plantation in Sicily. He was notso well known to the public as his brothers, Rockwood Hoar, AttorneyGeneral in Grant's Cabinet, and the late Senator George Frisbie Hoar, ofWorcester; but I am persuaded that he was just as good company; and, then, neither of these distinguished gentlemen would have wasted wholeafternoons in eating the lotus along the quiet reaches of theMusketaquit with a stripling philosopher. 

The appetite for discussion not being fully satisfied by the statedmeetings of the School in the Orchard House, the hospitable Concordfolks opened their houses for informal symposia in the evenings. I wasprivileged to make one of a company that gathered in Emerson's library. The subject for the evening was Shakespeare, and Emerson read, byrequest, that mysterious little poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle, "attributed to Shakespeare on rather doubtful evidence, but included forsome reason in Emerson's volume of favorite selections, "Parnassus. " Hebegan by saying that he would not himself have chosen this particularpiece, but as it had been chosen for him he would read it. And this hedid, with that clean-cut, refined enunciation and subtle distribution ofemphasis which made the charm of his delivery as a lyceum lecturer. Whenhe came to the couplet, Truth may seem, but cannot be, Beauty brag, but 'tis not she, I thought that I detected an idealistic implication in the lines whichaccounted for their presence in "Parnassus. "

That shy recluse, Ellery Channing, most eccentric of thetranscendentalists, was not to be found at the School or the eveningsymposia. He had married a sister of Margaret Fuller, but for years hehad lived alone and done for himself, and his oddities had increasedupon him with the years. I had read and liked many of his poems--thosepoems so savagely cut up by Poe, when first published in 1843--and myexpressed interest in these foundlings of the Muse gave me theopportunity to meet the author of "A Poet's Hope" at one hospitabletable where he was accustomed to sup on a stated evening every week. 

The Concord Summer School of Philosophy went on for ten successiveyears, but I never managed to attend another session. A friend from NewHaven, who was there for a few days in 1880, brought back the news thata certain young lady who was just beginning the study of Hegel the yearbefore, had now got up to the second intention, and hoped in time toattain the sixth. I never got far enough in Mr. Harris's lectures todiscover what Hegelian intentions were; but my friend spoke of them asif they were something like degrees in Masonry. In 1905 I visitedConcord for the first and only time in twenty-six years. There is a gooddeal of philosophy in Wordsworth's Yarrow poems--

 For when we're there, although 'tis fair, 'Twill be another Yarrow!--

and I have heard it suggested that he might well have added to histrilogy, a fourth member, "Yarrow Unrevisited. " There is a loss, thoughConcord bears the strain better than most places, I think. As we go onin life the world gets full of ghosts, and at the capital oftranscendentalism I was peculiarly conscious of the haunting of thesespiritual presences. Since I had been there before, Emerson and Alcottand Ellery Channing and my courteous host and companion, Edward Hoar, and my kind old landlady Miss Barrett--who had also been Emerson'slandlady and indeed everybody's landlady in Concord, and whom heryoungest boarders addressed affectionately as Emma--all these and manymore had joined the sleepers in Sleepy Hollow. The town itself hassuffered comparatively few changes. True there is a trolley line throughthe main street--oddly called "The Milldam, " and in Walden wood I met anautomobile not far from the cairn, or stone pile, which marks the siteof Thoreau's cabin. But the woods themselves were intact and the limpidwaters of the pond had not been tapped to furnish power for any electriclight company. The Old Manse looked much the same, and so did theWayside and the Orchard House. Not a tree was missing from the mysticring of tall pines in front of Emerson's house at the fork of theCambridge and Lexington roads. On the central square the ancient tavernwas gone where I had lodged on the night of my arrival and where myhost, a practical philosopher--everyone in Concord had hisphilosophy, --took a gloomy view of the local potentialities of the hotelbusiness. He said there was nothing doing--some milk and asparagus wereraised for the Boston market, but the inhabitants were mostly literarypeople. "I suppose, " he added, "we've got the smartest literary man inthe country living right here. " "You mean Mr. Emerson, " I suggested. "Yes, sir, and a gentleman too. "

"And Alcott?" I ventured. 

"Oh, Alcott! The best thing he ever did was his daughters. "

This inn was gone, but the still more ancient one across the squareremains, the tavern where Major Pitcairn dined on the day of theLexington fight, and from whose windows or door steps he is alleged bythe history books to have cried to a group of embattled farmers, "Disperse, ye Yankee rebels. "

Concord is well preserved. Still there are subtle indications of theflight of time. For one thing, the literary pilgrimage business hasincreased, partly no doubt because trolleys, automobiles, and bicycleshave made the town more accessible; but also because our literature is ageneration older than it was in 1879. The study of American authors hasbeen systematically introduced into the public schools. The men who madeConcord famous are dead, but their habitat has become increasinglyclassic ground as they themselves have receded into a dignified, historic past. At any rate, the trail of the excursionist--the "cheaptripper, " as he is called in England, --is over it all. Basket partieshad evidently eaten many a luncheon on the first battle-field of theRevolution, and notices were posted about, asking the public not todeface the trees, and instructing them where to put their paperwrappers and _fragmenta regalia_. I could imagine Boston schoolma'amspointing out to their classes, the minuteman, the monument, and otherobjects of interest, and calling for names and dates. The shores ofWalden were trampled and worn in spots. There were springboards therefor diving, and traces of the picnicker were everywhere. Trespasserswere warned away from the grounds of the Old Manse and similar historicspots, by signs of "Private Property. "

Concord has grown more self-conscious under the pressure of all thispublicity and resort. Tablets and inscriptions have been put up atpoints of interest. As I was reading one of these on the square, I wasapproached by a man who handed me a business card with photographs ofthe monument, the Wayside, the four-hundred-year-old oak, withinformation to the effect that Mr. ---- would furnish guides and liveryteams about the town and to places as far distant as Walden Pond andSudbury Inn. Thus poetry becomes an asset, and transcendentalism isexploited after the poet and the philosopher are dead. It took Emersoneleven years to sell five hundred copies of "Nature, " and Thoreau'sbooks came back upon his hands as unsalable and were piled up in theattic like cord-wood. I was impressed anew with the tameness of theConcord landscape. There is nothing salient about it: it is the averagemean of New England nature. Berkshire is incomparably more beautiful. And yet those flat meadows and low hills and slow streams are dear tothe imagination, since genius has looked upon them and made them itsown. "The eye, " said Emerson, "is the first circle: the horizon thesecond. "

And the Concord books--how do they bear the test of revisitation? To me, at least, they have--even some of the second-rate papers in the "Dial"have--now nearly fifty years since I read them first, that freshnesswhich is the mark of immortality. 

 No ray is dimmed, no atom worn: My oldest force is good as new; And the fresh rose on yonder thorn Gives back the bending heavens in dew. 

I think I do not mistake, and confer upon them the youth which was thenmine. No, the morning light had touched their foreheads: theyouthfulness was in _them_. 

Lately I saw a newspaper item about one of the thirty thousand literarypilgrims who are said to visit Concord annually. Calling upon Mr. Sanborn, he asked him which of the Concord authors he thought would lastlongest. The answer, somewhat to his surprise, was "Thoreau. " I do notknow whether this report is authentic; but supposing it true, it is notinexplicable. I will confess that, of recent years, I find myselfreading Thoreau more and Emerson less. "Walden" seems to me more of abook than Emerson ever wrote. Emerson's was incomparably the largernature, the more liberal and gracious soul. His, too, was the seminalmind; though Lowell was unfair to the disciple, when he described him asa pistillate blossom fertilized by the Emersonian pollen. For Thoreauhad an originality of his own--a flavor as individual as the tang of thebog cranberry, or the wild apples which he loved. One secure advantagehe possesses in the concreteness of his subject-matter. The master, withhis abstract habit of mind and his view of the merely phenomenalcharacter of the objects of sense, took up a somewhat incurious attitudetowards details, not thinking it worth while to "examine toomicroscopically the universal tablet. " The disciple, though he professedthat the other world was all his art, had a sharp eye for this. Emersonwas Nature's lover, but Thoreau was her scholar. Emerson's method wasintuition, while Thoreau's was observation. He worked harder thanEmerson and knew more, --that is, within certain defined limits. Thus heread the Greek poets in the original. Emerson, in whom there was aspice of indolence--due, say his biographers, to feeble health in earlylife, and the need of going slow, --read them in translations and excusedhimself on the ground that he liked to be beholden to the great Englishlanguage. 

Compare Hawthorne's description, in the "Mosses, " of a day spent on theAssabeth with Ellery Channing, with any chapter in Thoreau's "Week. "Moonlight and high noon! The great romancer gives a dreamy, poeticversion of the river landscape, musically phrased, pictorially composed, dissolved in atmosphere--a lovely piece of literary art, with the softblur of a mezzotint engraving, say, from the designs by Turner inRogers's "Italy. " Thoreau, equally imaginative in his way, writes like abotanist, naturalist, surveyor, and local antiquary; and in a pungent, practical, business-like style--a style, as was said of Dante, in whichwords are things. Yet which of these was the true transcendentalist?

Matthew Arnold's discourse on Emerson was received with strong dissentin Boston, where it was delivered, and in Concord, where it was readwith indignation. The critic seemed to be taking away, one afteranother, our venerated master's claims as a poet, a man of letters, anda philosopher. What! Gray a great poet, and Emerson not! Addison agreat writer, and Emerson not! Surely there are heights and depths inEmerson, an inspiring power, an originality and force of thought whichare neither in Gray nor in Addison. And how can these denials beconsistent with the sentence near the end of the discourse, pronouncingEmerson's essays the most important work done in English prose duringthe nineteenth century--more important than Carlyle's? A truly enormousconcession this; how to reconcile it with those preceding blasphemies?

Let not the lightning strike me if I say that I think Arnold wasright--as he usually was right in a question of taste or criticaldiscernment. For Emerson was essentially a prophet and theosophist, andnot a man of letters, or creative artist. He could not have written asong or a story or a play. Arnold complains of his want of concreteness. The essay was his chosen medium, well-nigh the least concrete, the leastliterary of forms. And it was not even the personal essay, like Elia's, that he practised, but an abstract variety, a lyceum lecture, amoralizing discourse or sermon. For the clerical virus was strong inEmerson, and it was not for nothing that he was descended from eightgenerations of preachers. His concern was primarily with religion andethics, not with the tragedy and comedy of personal lives, this motleyface of things, _das bunte Menschenleben_. Anecdotes and testimoniesabound to illustrate this. See him on his travels in Europe, leastpicturesque of tourists, hastening with almost comic precipitation pastgalleries, cathedrals, ancient ruins, Swiss alps, Como lakes, Rhinecastles, Venetian lagoons, costumed peasants, "the great sinful streetsof Naples"--and of Paris, --and all manner and description of local colorand historic associations; hastening to meet and talk with "a fewminds"--Landor, Wordsworth, Carlyle. Here he was in line, indeed, withhis great friend, impatiently waving aside the art patter, with whichSterling filled his letters from Italy. "Among the windy gospels, "complains Carlyle, "addressed to our poor Century there are few louderthan this of Art. .. . It is a subject on which earnest men . .. Had better. .. 'perambulate their picture-gallery with little or no speech. '""Emerson has never in his life, " affirms Mr. John Jay Chapman, "felt thenormal appeal of any painting, or any sculpture, or any architecture, orany music. These things, of which he does not know the meaning in reallife, he yet uses, and uses constantly, as symbols to convey ethicaltruths. The result is that his books are full of blind places, like thenotes which will not strike on a sick piano. " The biographers tell usthat he had no ear for music and could not distinguish one tune fromanother; did not care for pictures nor for garden flowers; could seenothing in Dante's poetry nor in Shelley's, nor in Hawthorne's romances, nor in the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen. Edgar Poe was to him "thejingle man. " Poe, of course, had no "message. "

I read, a number of years ago, some impressions of Concord by RogerRiordan, the poet and art critic. I cannot now put my hand, for purposesof quotation, upon the title of the periodical in which these appeared;but I remember that the writer was greatly amused, as well as somewhatprovoked, by his inability to get any of the philosophers with whom hesought interviews to take an æsthetic view of any poem, or painting, orother art product. They would talk of its "message" or its "ethicalcontent"; but as to questions of technique or beauty, they gently putthem one side as unworthy to engage the attention of earnest souls. 

At the symposium which I have mentioned in Emerson's library, waspresent a young philosopher who had had the advantage ofreading--perhaps in proof sheets--a book about Shakespeare by Mr. DentonJ. Snider. He was questioned by some of the guests as to the characterof the work, but modestly declined to essay a description of it in thepresence of such eminent persons; venturing only to say that it "gavethe ethical view of Shakespeare, " information which was received by thecompany with silent but manifest approval. 

Yet, after all, what does it matter whether Emerson was singly any oneof those things which Matthew Arnold says he was not--great poet, greatwriter, great philosophical thinker? These are matters of classificationand definition. We know well enough the rare combination of qualitieswhich made him our Emerson. Let us leave it there. Even as a formalverse-writer, when he does emerge from his cloud of encumbrances, it isin some supernal phrase such as only the great poets have the secret of:

 Music pours on mortals its beautiful disdain;

or:

 Have I a lover who is noble and free? I would he were nobler than to love me. 

A WORDLET ABOUT WHITMAN

In this year many fames have come of age; among them, Lowell's and WaltWhitman's. As we read their centenary tributes, we are reminded thatLowell never accepted Whitman, who was piqued by the fact and referredto it a number of times in the conversations reported by the BoswellianTraubel. Whitmanites explain this want of appreciation as owing toLowell's conventional literary standards. 

Now convention is one of the things that distinguish man from theinferior animals. Language is a convention, law is a convention; and soare the church and the state, morals, manners, clothing--_teste_ "SartorResartus. " Shame is a convention: it is human. The animals are withoutshame, and so is Whitman. His "Children of Adam" are the children of ourcommon father before he had tasted the forbidden fruit and discoveredthat he was naked. 

Poetry, too, has its conventions, among them, metre, rhythm, and rhyme, the choice of certain words, phrases, images, and topics, and therejection of certain others. Lowell was conservative by nature andthoroughly steeped in the tradition of letters. Perhaps he was tootightly bound by these fetters of convention to relish their suddenloosening. I wonder what he would have thought of his kinswoman Amy'sfree verses if he had lived to read them. 

If a large, good-natured, clean, healthy animal could write poetry, itwould write much such poetry as the "Leaves of Grass. " It would tell howgood it is to lie and bask in the warm sun; to stand in cool, flowingwater, to be naked in the fresh air; to troop with friendly companionsand embrace one's mate. "Leaves of Grass" is the poetry of puresensation, and mainly, though not wholly, of physical sensation. In afamous passage the poet says that he wants to go away and live with theanimals. Not one of them is respectable or sorry or conscientious orworried about its sins. 

But his poetry, though animal to a degree, is not unhuman. We do notknow enough about the psychology of the animals to be sure whether, ornot, they have any sense of the world as a whole. Does an elephant or aneagle perhaps, viewing some immense landscape, catch any glimpse of theuniverse, as an object of contemplation, apart from the satisfaction ofhis own sensual needs? Probably not. But Whitman, as has been said ahundred times, was "cosmic. " He had an unequalled sense of the bignessof creation and of "these States. " He owned a panoramic eye and a largepassive imagination, and did well to loaf and let the tides of sensationflow over his soul, drawing out what music was in him without much carefor arrangement or selection. 

I once heard an admirer of Walt challenged to name a single masterpieceof his production. Where was his perfect poem, his gem of flawlessworkmanship? He answered, in effect, that he didn't make masterpieces. His poetry was diffused, like the grass blades that symbolized for himour democratic masses. 

Of course, the man in the street thinks that Walt Whitman's stuff is notpoetry at all, but just bad prose. He acknowledges that there aresplendid lines, phrases, and whole passages. There is that onebeginning, "I open my scuttle at night, " and that glorious apostrophe tothe summer night, "Night of south winds, night of the large, few stars. "But, as a whole, his work is tiresome and without art. It is alive, tobe sure, but so is protoplasm. Life is the first thing and form issecondary; yet form, too, is important. The musician, too lazy or tooimpatient to master his instrument, breaks it, and seizes a megaphone. Shall we call that originality or failure?

It is also a commonplace that the democratic masses of America havenever accepted Walt Whitman as their spokesman. They do not read him, donot understand or care for him. They like Longfellow, Whittier, andJames Whitcomb Riley, poets of sentiment and domestic life, truly poetsof the people. No man can be a spokesman for America who lacks a senseof humor, and Whitman was utterly devoid of it, took himself mostseriously, posed as a prophet. I do not say that humor is a desirablequality. The thesis may even be maintained that it is a disease of themind, a false way of looking at things. Many great poets have beenwithout it--Milton for example. Shelley used to speak of "the witheringand perverting power of comedy. " But Shelley was slightly mad. At allevents, our really democratic writers have been such as Mark Twain andJames Whitcomb Riley. I do not know what Mark Twain thought of Walt, butI know what Riley thought of him. He thought him a grand humbug. Certainly if he had had any sense of humor he would not have pepperedhis poems so naïvely with foreign words, calling out "Camerado!" everand anon, and speaking of a perfectly good American sidewalk as a"trottoir" _quasi Lutetia Parisii_. And if he had not had a streak ofhumbug in him, he would hardly have written anonymous puffs of his ownpoetry. 

But I am far from thinking Walt Whitman a humbug. He was a man of geniuswhose work had a very solid core of genuine meaning. It is good to readhim in spots--he is so big and friendly and wholesome; he feels so good, like a man who has just had a cold bath and tingles with the joy ofexistence. 

Whitman was no humbug, but there is surely some humbug about the Whitman_culte_. The Whitmanites deify him. They speak of him constantly as aseer, a man of exalted intellect. I do not believe that he was a greatthinker, but only a great feeler. Was he the great poet of America, oreven a great poet at all? A great poet includes a great artist, and"Leaves of Grass, " as has been pointed out times without number, is theraw material of poetry rather than the finished product. 

A friend of mine once wrote an article about Whitman, favorable on thewhole, but with qualifications. He got back a copy of it through themail, with the word "Jackass!" pencilled on the margin by some outragedWhitmaniac. I know what has been said and written in praise of old Waltby critics of high authority, and I go along with them a part of theway, but only a part. And I do not stand in terror of any critics, however authoritative; remembering how even the great Goethe was takenin by Macpherson's "Ossian. " A very interesting paper might be writtenon what illustrious authors have said of each other: what Carlyle saidof Newman, for instance; or what Walter Scott said of Joanna Baillie andthe like. 

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