LI i<ARY 
 
 UN! 
 
 CA 1FORNIA 
 SANTA CRUZ 
 
SHORT STUDIES 
 
 AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM. 
 1880. - 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1879, 
 BY T. W. HIGGINSON. 
 
 Ail rights reserved. 
 
95 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THESE brief papers were originally published in 
 "The Literary World" (Boston), and are here 
 reprinted in a revised form, with some additions. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, M ASS., Dec. i, 1879. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 I. HAWTHORNE 3 
 
 II. POE , . .12 
 
 IIL THOREAU 22 
 
 IV. HOWELLS 32 
 
 V. HELEN JACKSON 40 
 
 VL HENRY JAMES, JR 51 
 
SHORT STUDIES 
 
 OF 
 
 AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 HAWTHORNE. 
 
 I DO not know when I have been more surprised 
 than on being asked, the other day, whether 
 Hawthorne was not physically very small. It 
 seemed at the moment utterly unconceivable that 
 he should have been any thing less than the sombre 
 and commanding personage he was. Ellery Chan- 
 ning well describes him as a 
 
 " Tall, compacted figure, ably strung, 
 To urge the Indian chase, or point the way." 
 
 One can imagine any amount of positive energy 
 that of Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance as 
 included within a small physical frame. But the 
 self-contained purpose of Hawthorne, the large 
 resources, the waiting power, these seem to the 
 imagination to imply an ample basis of physical 
 life ; and certainly his stately and noble port is 
 
 3 
 
4 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 inseparable, in my memory, from these charac- 
 teristics. 
 
 Vivid as this impression is, I yet saw him but 
 twice, and never spoke to him. I first met him on 
 a summer morning, in Concord, as he was walking 
 along the road near the Old Manse, with his wife 
 by his side, and a noble-looking baby-boy in a 
 little wagon which the father was pushing. I re- 
 member him as tall, firm, and strong in bearing ; 
 his wife looked pensive and dreamy, as she indeed 
 was, then and always ; the child was Julian, then 
 known among the neighbors as " the Prince.'* 
 When I passed, Hawthorne lifted upon me his 
 great gray eyes, with a look too keen to seem in- 
 different, too shy to be sympathetic and that was 
 all. But it comes back to memory like that one 
 glimpse of Shelley which Browning describes, and 
 which he likens to the day when he found an 
 eagle's feather. 
 
 Again I met Hawthorne at one of the sessions 
 of a short-lived literary club ; and I recall the 
 imperturbable dignity and patience with which he 
 sat through a vexatious discussion, whose details 
 seemed as much dwarfed by his presence as if he 
 had been a statue of Olympian Zeus. After his 
 death I had a brief but intimate acquaintance with 
 that rare person, Mrs. Hawthorne ; and with one 
 
HAWTHORNE. 5 
 
 still more finely organized, and born to a destiny 
 of sadness, their elder daughter. I have staid 
 at " The Wayside," occupying a room in the small 
 tower built by Hawthorne, and containing his lofty 
 and then deserted study, which still bore upon its 
 wall the Tennysonian motto, " There is no joy but 
 calm," this having been inscribed, however, not 
 by himself, but by his son. It is not my purpose 
 to dwell upon the facts of private life ; and these 
 circumstances are mentioned only because it is well 
 to know at what angle of incidence any critic has 
 been touched by the personality of a great author. 
 
 Perhaps it always appears to men, as they grow 
 older, that there was rather more of positive force 
 and vitality in their own generation and among 
 their immediate predecessors, than among those 
 just coming on the stage. This may be the reason 
 why there seems to me a perpetual sense of grasp 
 and vigor in Hawthorne's most delicate sketches ; 
 while much of the most graceful writing jiow done 
 in America makes no such impression, but either 
 seems like dainty confectionery, or like carving 
 minute heads on cherry-stones. In England the 
 tendency is just now to the opposite fault, to a 
 distrust of all nice attention to form in writing, as 
 being necessarily a weakness. Hawthorne happily 
 escaped both these dangerous alternatives; and, 
 
6 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 indeed, it is hard to see that his genius was much 
 affected by his surroundings, after all. He had, to 
 be sure, the conscientious fidelity of Puritanism in 
 his veins, a thing equally important for literature 
 and for life : without it he might have lavished 
 and wasted himself like Poe. He had what Em- 
 erson once described as "the still living merit 
 of the oldest New-England families ; " 1 he had 
 moreover the unexhausted wealth of the Puritan 
 traditions, a wealth to which only he and Whit- 
 tier have as yet done any justice. The value of 
 the material to be found in contemporary Ameri- 
 can life he never fully recognized ; but he was the 
 first person to see that we really have, for romantic 
 purposes, a past ; two hundred years being really 
 quite enough to constitute antiquity. This was what 
 his " environment " gave him, and this was much. 
 
 But, after all, his artistic standard was his own : 
 there was nobody except Irving to teach him any 
 thing in that way ; and Irving's work lay rather on 
 the surface, and could be no model for Hawthorne's. 
 Yet from the time when the latter began to write 
 for " The Token," at twenty-three, his powers of 
 execution, as of thought, appear to have been full- 
 grown. The quiet ease is there, the pellucid lan- 
 guage, the haunting quality : these gifts were born 
 
 1 " The Dial," iii., 101. 
 
HAWTHORNE. 7 
 
 in him ; we cannot trace them back to any period 
 of formation. And when we consider the degree 
 to which they were developed, how utterly unfilled 
 remains his peculiar throne ; how powerless would 
 be the accumulated literary forces of London, for 
 instance, at this day, to produce a single page that 
 could possibly be taken for Hawthorne's, we see 
 that there must, after all, be such a thing as literary 
 art, and that he must represent one of the very 
 highest types of artist. 
 
 Through Hawthorne's journals we trace the men- 
 tal impulses by which he first obtained his themes. 
 Then in his unfinished " Septimius Felton," for- 
 tunately unfinished for this purpose, we see his 
 plastic imagination at work in shaping the romance ; 
 we watch him trying one mode of treatment, then 
 modifying it by another; always aiming at the 
 main point, but sometimes pausing to elaborate the 
 details, and at other times dismissing them to be 
 worked out at leisure. There hangs before me, as 
 I write, a photograph of one of Raphael's rough 
 sketches, drawn on the back of a letter : there is 
 a group of heads, then another group on a different 
 scale ; you follow the shifting mood of the artist's 
 mind ; and so it is in reading " Septimius Felton." 
 In all Hawthorne's completed works, the pencilling 
 is rubbed out, and every trace of the preliminary 
 labor nas disappeared. 
 
8 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 One of the most characteristic of Hawthorne's 
 literary methods is his habitual use of guarded 
 under-statements and veiled hints. It is not a sign 
 of weakness, but of conscious strength, when he sur- 
 rounds each delineation with a sort of penumbra, 
 takes you into his counsels, offers hypotheses, as, 
 " May it not have been? " or, " Shall we not rather 
 say?" and sometimes, like a conjurer, urges par- 
 ticularly upon you the card he does not intend you 
 to accept. He seems not quite to know whether 
 Arthur Dimmesdale really had a fiery scar on his 
 breast, or what finally became of Miriam and her 
 lover. He will gladly share with you any informa- 
 tion he possesses, and, indeed, has several valuable 
 hints to offer ; but that is all. The result is, that 
 you place yourself by his side to look with him at 
 his characters, and gradually share with him the 
 conviction that they must be real. Then, when he 
 has you thus in possession, he calls your attention 
 to the profound ethics involved in the tale, and yet 
 does it so gently that you never think of the moral 
 as being obtrusive. 
 
 All this involved a trait which was always su- 
 preme in him, a marvellous self-control. He 
 had by nature that gift which the musical com- 
 poser Jomelli went to a teacher to seek, " the art 
 of not being embarrassed by his own ideas." Mrs. 
 
HAWTHORNE. 9 
 
 Hawthorne told me that her husband grappled alone 
 all winter witli " The Scarlet Letter," and came daily 
 from his study with a knot in his forehead ; and yet 
 his self-mastery was so complete that every sentence 
 would seem to have crystallized in an atmosphere 
 of perfect calm. We see the value of this element 
 in his literary execution, when we turn from it to 
 that of an author so great as Lowell, for instance, 
 and see him often entangled and weighed down by 
 his own rich thoughts, his style being overcrowded 
 by the very wealth it bears. Hawthorne never 
 needed Italic letters to distribute his emphasis, 
 never a footnote for assistance. There was no con- 
 ception so daring that he shrank from attempting 
 it ; and none that he could not so master as to 
 state it, if he pleased, in terms of monosyllables. 
 
 For all these merits he paid one high and inexor- 
 able penalty, the utter absence of all immediate 
 or dazzling success. His publisher, Goodrich, tells 
 us, in his " Reminiscences," 1 that Hawthorne and 
 Willis began to write together in " The Token," 
 in 1827, and that the now-forgotten Willis "rose 
 rapidly to fame," while Hawthorne's writings " did 
 not attract the slightest attention." The only rec- 
 ognition of his merits that I have been able to 
 find in the contemporary criticism of those early 
 
 Vol. ii., p 269. 
 
10 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 years is in "The New-England Magazine" for 
 October, 1834, where he is classed approvingly 
 with those who were then considered the emi- 
 nent writers of the day, Miss Sedgwick, Miss 
 Leslie, Verplanck, Greenwood, and John Neal. 
 " To them," the critic says, " we may add an 
 anonymous author of some of the most delicate 
 and beautiful prose ever published this side of 
 the Atlantic, the author of 'The Gentle Boy.' nl 
 For twenty years he continued to be, according 
 to his own statement, " the obscurest man of 
 letters in America." Goodrich testifies that it 
 was almost impossible to find a publisher for 
 "Twice-Told Tales" in 1837, and I can myself 
 remember how limited a circle greeted the re- 
 print in the enlarged edition of 1841. When 
 Poe, about 1846, wrote patronizingly of Haw- 
 thorne, he added, " It was never the fashion, until 
 lately, to speak of him in any summary of our best 
 authors." 2 Whittier once told me that when he 
 himself had obtained, with some difficulty, in 1847, 
 the insertion of one of Hawthorne's sketches in 
 "The National Era," the latter said quietly, 
 " There is not much market for my wares." It has 
 always seemed to me the greatest triumph of his 
 
 1 New-England Magazine, October, 1834, p. 331. 
 
 2 Poe's Works (ed. 1853), iii. 189. 
 
HAWTHORNE. II 
 
 genius, not that he bore poverty without a murmur, 
 for what right has a literary man, who can com- 
 mand his time and his art, to sigh after the added 
 enjoyments of mere wealth? but that he went on 
 doing work of such a quality for an audience so 
 small or so indifferent. 
 
 Whether more immediate applause would have 
 modified the result, it is now impossible to say. 
 Having so much, why should we ask for more? 
 An immediate popularity might possibly have 
 added a little more sunshine to his thought, a 
 few drops of redder blood to his style; thus 
 averting the only criticism that can ever be justly 
 made on either. Yet this very privation has made* 
 him a nobler and tenderer figure in literary history ; 
 and a source of more tonic influence for young 
 writers, through all coming time. The popular 
 impression of Hawthorne as a shy and lonely 
 man, gives but a part of the truth. When we 
 think of him as reading " The Scarlet Letter -' to 
 his sympathetic wife, until she pressed her hands 
 to her ears, and could bear no more ; or when we 
 imagine him as playing with his children so gayly 
 that one of them told me " there never was such 
 a playmate in all the world," we may teel that he 
 had, after all, the very best that earth can give, and 
 all our regrets seem only an impertinence. 
 
12 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 POE. 
 
 IT happens to us rarely in our lives to come 
 consciously into the presence of that extraor- 
 dinary miracle we call genius. Among the many 
 literary persons whom I have happened to meet, 
 at home or abroad, there are not half a dozen 
 who have left an irresistible sense of this rare 
 quality ; and, among these few, Poe stands next 
 to Hawthorne in the vividness of personal im- 
 pression he produced. I saw him but once ; and 
 it was on that celebrated occasion, in 1845, when 
 he startled Boston by substituting his boyish pro- 
 duction, " Al Aaraaf," for the more serious poem 
 which he was to have delivered before the Ly- 
 ceum. There was much curiosity to see him ; 
 for his prose-writings had been eagerly read, at 
 least among college-students, and his poems were 
 just beginning to excite still greater attention. 
 After a rather solid and very partisan address by 
 Caleb Gushing, then just returned from his Chi- 
 nese embassy, the poet was introduced. I dis- 
 
POE. 13 
 
 tinctly recall his face, with its ample forehead, 
 brilliant eyes, and narrowness of nose and chin ; 
 an essentially ideal face, not noble, yet any thing 
 but coarse ; with the look of over-sensitiveness 
 which when uncontrolled may prove more debas- 
 ing than coarseness. It was a face to rivet one's 
 attention fe any crowd, yet a face that no one 
 would feel safe in loving. It is not perhaps strange 
 that I find or fancy in the portrait of Charles 
 Baudelaire, Poe's French admirer and translator, 
 some of the traits that are indelibly associated with 
 that one glimpse of Poe. 
 
 I remember that when introduced he stood with 
 a sort of shrinking before the audience, and then 
 began in a thin, tremulous, hardly musical voice, 
 an apology for his poem, and a deprecation of the 
 expected criticism of the Boston public ; reiterating 
 this in a sort of persistent, querulous way, which did 
 not seem like satire, but impressed me at the time 
 as nauseous flattery. It was not then generally 
 known, nor was it established for a long time after, 
 even when he had himself asserted it, that the 
 poet was himself born in Boston ; and no one can 
 now tell, perhaps, what was the real feeling behind 
 the apparently sycophantic attitude. When, at 
 the end, he abruptly began the recitation of his 
 rather perplexing poem, everybody looked thor- 
 
14 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 oughly mystified. The verses had long since been 
 printed in his youthful volume, and had re-appeared 
 within a few days, if I mistake not, in Wiley & 
 t Putnam's edition of his poems; and they pro- 
 duced no very distinct impression on the audience 
 until Poe began to read the maiden's song in the 
 second part. Already his tones had been soften- 
 ing to a finer melody than at first, and when he 
 came to the verse, 
 
 *' Ligeia ! Ligeia, 
 
 My beautiful one ! 
 Whose harshest idea 
 
 Will to melody run, 
 Oh ! is it thy will 
 
 On the breezes to toss ? 
 Or capriciously still 
 
 Like the lon albatross 
 Incumbent on night 
 
 (As she on the air) 
 To keep watch with delight 
 
 On the harmony there ? " 
 
 his voice seemed attenuated to the finest golden 
 thread ; the audience became hushed, and, as it 
 were, breathless ; there seemed no life in the hall 
 but his ; and every syllable was accentuated with 
 such delicacy, and sustained with such sweetness, 
 as I never heard equalled by other lips. When 
 the lyric ended, it was like the ceasing of the 
 
POE. 15 
 
 gypsy's chant in Browning's "Flight of the 
 Duchess ; " and I remember nothing more, except 
 that in walking back to Cambridge my comrades 
 and I felt that we had been under the spell of some 
 wizard. Indeed, I feel much the same in the 
 retrospect, to this day. 
 
 The melody did not belong, in this case, to the 
 poet's voice alone : it was already in the words. 
 His verse, when he was willing to give it natural 
 utterance, was like that of Coleridge in rich sweet- 
 ness, and like that was often impaired by theories 
 of structure and systematic experiments in metre. 
 Never in American literature, I think, was such a 
 fountain of melody flung into the air as when 
 "Lenore" first appeared in "The Pioneer;" and 
 never did fountain so drop downward as when Poe 
 re- arranged it in its present form. The irregular 
 measure had a beauty as original as that of 
 " Christabel ; " and the lines had an ever-varying, 
 ever-lyrical cadence of their own, until their author 
 himself took them, and cramped them into couplets. 
 What a change from 
 
 " Peccavimus ! 
 But rave not thus ! 
 
 And let the solemn song 
 Go up to God so mournfully that she may feel no wrong I " 
 
l6 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 to the amended version, portioned off in regular 
 lengths, thus : 
 
 " Peccavimus ! but rave not thus ! and let a Sabbath song 
 Go up to God so solemnly, the dead may feel no wrong." 
 
 Or worse yet, when he introduced that tedious 
 jingle of slightly varied repetition which in later 
 year reached its climax in lines like these : 
 
 "Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride, 
 Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling 
 bride." 
 
 This trick, caught from Poe, still survives in our 
 literature ; made more permanent, perhaps, by the 
 success of his " Raven." This poem, which made 
 him popular, seems to me far inferior to some of 
 his earlier and slighter effusions ; as those exquisite 
 verses " To Helen," which are among our American 
 classics, and have made 
 
 "The glory that was Greece, 
 And the grandeur that was Rome," 
 
 a permanent phrase in our language. 
 
 Poe's place in purely imaginative prose-writing is 
 as unquestionable as Hawthorne's. He even suc- 
 ceeded, which Hawthorne did not, in penetrating 
 the artistic indifference of the French mind ; and 
 it was a substantial triumph, when we consider that 
 Baudelaire put himself or his friends to the trouble 
 
POE. 1 7 
 
 of translating even the prolonged platitudes of 
 " Eureka," and the wearisome narrative o'f " Arthur 
 Gordon Pym." Neither Poe nor Hawthorne has 
 ever been fully recognized in England ; and yet no 
 Englishman of our time, not even De Quincey, has 
 done any prose imaginative work to be named with 
 theirs. But in comparing Poe with Hawthorne, 
 we see that the genius of the latter has hands and 
 feet as well as wings, so that all his work is solid 
 as masonry, while Poe's is broken and disfigured 
 by all sorts of inequalities and imitations; he 
 not disdaining, for want of true integrity, to dis- 
 guise and falsify, to claim knowledge that he did 
 not possess, to invent quotations and references, 
 and even, as Griswold showed, to manipulate and 
 exaggerate puffs of himself. I remember the cha- 
 grin with which I looked through Tieck, in my 
 student-days, to find the "Journey into the Blue 
 Distance " to which Poe refers in the " House of 
 Usher ; " and how one of the poet's intimates 
 laughed me to scorn for being deceived by any of 
 Poe's citations, saying that he hardly knew a word 
 of German. 
 
 But, making all possible deductions, how wonder- 
 ful remains the power of Poe's imaginative tales, 
 and how immense is the ingenuity of his puzzles 
 and disentanglements ! The conundrums of Wilkie 
 
l8 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 Collins never renew their interest after the answer 
 is known ; but Poe's can be read again and again. 
 It is where spiritual depths are to be touched, that 
 he shows his weakness ; where he attempts it, as in 
 " William Wilson," it seems exceptional ; where 
 there is the greatest display of philosophic form, he 
 is often most trivial, whereas Hawthorne is often 
 profoundest when he has disarmed you by his sim- 
 plicity. The truth is, that Poe lavished on things 
 comparatively superficial those great intellectual 
 resources which Hawthorne reverently husbanded 
 and used. That there is something behind even 
 genius to make or mar it, this is the lesson of the 
 two lives. 
 
 Poe makes one of his heroes define another as 
 " that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man 
 of genius." It is in the malice and fury of his own 
 critical work that his low moral tone most betrays 
 itself. No atmosphere can be more belittling than 
 that of his " New York Literati : " it is a mass of 
 vehement dogmatism and petty personalities ; opin- 
 ions warped by private feeling, and varying from 
 page to page. He seemed to have absolutely no 
 fixed standard of critical judgment, though it is true 
 that there was very little anywhere in America during 
 those acrimonious days, when the most honorable 
 head might be covered with insult or neglect, 
 
POE. 19 
 
 while any young poetess who smiled sweetly on Poe 
 or Griswold or Willis might find herself placed 
 among the Muses. Poe complimented and rather 
 patronized Hawthorne, but found him only " pecul- 
 iar and not original ; " * saying of him, " He has 
 not half the material for the exclusiveness of litera- 
 ture that he has for its universality," whatever that 
 may mean ; and finally he tried to make it appear 
 that Hawthorne had borrowed from himself. He 
 returned again and again to the attack on Long- 
 fellow as a wilful plagiarist, denouncing the trivial 
 resemblance between his " Midnight Mass for the 
 Dying Year " and Tennyson's " Death of the Old 
 Year," as " belonging to the most barbarous class 
 of literary piracy." 2 To make this attack was, as 
 he boasted, " to throttle the guilty ; " * and while 
 dealing thus ferociously with Longfellow, thus con- 
 descendingly with Hawthorne, he was claiming a 
 foremost rank among American authors for obscuri- 
 ties now forgotten, such as Mrs. Amelia B. Welby 
 and Estelle Anne Lewis. No one ever did more 
 than Poe to lower the tone of literary criticism in 
 this country ; and the greater his talent, the greater 
 the mischief. 
 As a poet he held for a time the place earlier 
 
 Works, ed. 1853, III., 202. * Works, ed. 1853, HI., 325. 
 III., 300. 
 
20 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 occupied by Byron, and later by Swinburne, as the 
 patron saint of all wilful boys suspected of genius, 
 and convicted at least of its infirmities. He be- 
 longed to the melancholy class of wasted men, like 
 the German Hoffman, whom perhaps of all men of 
 genius he most resembled. No doubt, if we are 
 to apply any standard of moral weight or sanity to 
 authors, a proposal which Poe would doubtless 
 have ridiculed, it can only be in a very large 
 and generous way. If a career has only a manly 
 ring to it, we can forgive many errors as in read- 
 ing, for instance, the autobiography of Benvenuto 
 Cellini, carrying always his life in his hand amid a 
 brilliant and reckless society. But the existence of 
 a poor Bohemian, besotted when he has money, 
 angry and vindictive when the money is spent, this 
 is a dismal tragedy, for which genius only makes 
 the footlights burn with more lustre. There is a 
 passage in Keats's letters, written from the haunts 
 of Burns, in which he expresses himself as filled with 
 pity for the poet's life : " he drank with blackguards, 
 he was miserable ; we can see horribly clear in the 
 works of such a man his life, as if we were God's 
 spies." Yet Burns's sins and miseries left his heart 
 unspoiled, and this cannot be said of Poe. After 
 all, the austere virtues the virtues of Emerson, 
 Hawthorne, Whittier are the best soil for genius. 
 
POE. 21 
 
 I like best to think of Poe as associated with 
 his betrothed, Sarah Helen Whitman, whom I saw 
 sometimes in her later years. That gifted woman 
 had outlived her early friends and loves and hopes, 
 and perhaps her literary fame, such as it was : she 
 had certainly outlived her recognized ties with Poe, 
 and all but his memory. There she dwelt in her 
 little suite of rooms, bearing youth still in her heart 
 and in her voice, and on her hair also, and in her 
 dress. Her dimly-lighted parlor was always decked, 
 here and there, with scarlet ; and she sat, robed in 
 white, with her back always turned to the light, thus 
 throwing a discreetly tinted shadow over her still 
 thoughtful and noble face. She seemed a person 
 embalmed while still alive : it was as if she might 
 dwell forever there, prolonging into an indefinite 
 future the tradition of a poet's love ; and when we 
 remembered that she had been Poe's betrothed, that 
 his kisses had touched her lips, that she still believed 
 in him and, was his defender, all criticism might well, 
 for her sake, be disarmed, and her saintly life atone 
 for his stormy and sad career. 
 
22 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 THOREAU. 
 
 THERE is no fame more permanent than that 
 which begins its real growth after the death 
 of an author ; and such is the fame of Thoreau. 
 Before his death he had published but two books, 
 " A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," 
 and " Walden." Four more have since been 
 printed, besides a volume of his letters and two 
 biographies. One of these last appeared within 
 a year or two in England, where he was, up to 
 the time of his death, absolutely unknown. Such 
 things are not accidental or the result of whim, and 
 they indicate that the literary fame of Thoreau is 
 secure. Indeed, it has already survived two of the 
 greatest dangers that can beset reputation, a bril- 
 liant satirist for a critic, and an injudicious friend 
 for a biographer. 
 
 Both admirer and censor, both Channing in his 
 memoir, and Lowell in his well known criticism, 
 have brought the eccentricities of Thoreau into un- 
 due prominence, and have placed too little stress 
 
THOREAU. 23 
 
 on the vigor, the good sense, the clear perceptions, 
 of the man. I have myself walked, talked, and 
 corresponded with him, and can testify that the 
 impression given by both these writers is far re- 
 moved from that ordinarily made by Thoreau him- 
 self. While tinged here and there, like most New 
 England thinkers of his time, with the manner of 
 Emerson, he was yet, as a companion, essentially 
 original, wholesome, and enjoyable. Though more 
 or less of a humorist, nursing his own whims, and 
 capable of being tiresome when they came upper- 
 most, he was easily led away from them to the vast 
 domains of literature and nature, and then poured 
 forth endless streams of the most interesting talk. 
 He taxed the patience of his companions, but not 
 more so, on the whole, than is done by many other 
 eminent talkers when launched upon their favorite 
 themes. 
 
 It is hard for one who thus knew him to be quite 
 patient with Lowell in what seems almost wanton 
 misrepresentation. Lowell applies to Thoreau the 
 word " indolent : " but you might as well speak of 
 the indolence of a self-registering thermometer; 
 it does not go about noisily, yet it never knows an 
 idle moment. Lowell says that Thoreau " looked 
 with utter contempt on the august drama of des- 
 tiny, of which his country was the scene, and on 
 
24 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 which the curtain had already risen ; " ] but was it 
 Thoreau, or Lowell, who found a voice when the 
 curtain fell, after the first act of that drama, upon 
 the scaffold of John Brown ? Lowell accuses him 
 of a " seclusion which keeps him in the public 
 eye," and finds something " delightfully absurd " in 
 his addressing six volumes under such circum- 
 stances to the public, when the fact is that four of 
 these volumes were made up by friends, after Tho- 
 reau's death, from his manuscripts, or from his 
 stray papers in newspapers and magazines. Lowell 
 accepts throughout the popular misconception 
 and has, indeed, done much to strengthen it that 
 Thoreau hated civilization, and believed only in 
 the wilderness ; whereas Thoreau defined his own 
 position on this point with exceeding clearness, and 
 made it essentially the same with that of his critics. 
 " For a permanent residence it seemed to me that 
 there could be no comparison between this [Con- 
 cord] and the wilderness, necessary as the latter is 
 for a resource and a background, the raw material 
 of all our civilization. The wilderness is simple 
 almost to barrenness. The partially cultivated 
 country it is which chiefly has inspired, and will 
 continue to inspire, the strains of poets such as 
 compose the mass of any literature." 2 
 
 1 My Study Windows, p. 206. 2 Maine Woods, p. 159; written in 1846. 
 
THOREAU. 25 
 
 Seen in the light of such eminently sensible re- 
 marks as these, it will by and by be discovered 
 that Thoreau's whole attitude has been need- 
 lessly distorted. Lowell says that " his shanty- 
 life was mere impossibility, so far as his own 
 conception of it goes, as an entire independency 
 of mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder 
 bottom." l But what a man of straw is this that 
 Lowell is constructing ! What is this " shanty- 
 life " ? A young man living in a country village, 
 and having a passion for the minute observation of 
 nature, and a love for Greek and Oriental reading, 
 takes it into his head to build himself a study, not 
 in the garden or the orchard, but in the woods, by 
 the side of a lake. Happening to be poor, and to 
 live in a time when social experiments are in vogue 
 at Brook Farm and elsewhere, he takes a whimsical 
 satisfaction in seeing how cheaply he can erect his 
 hut, and afterwards support himself by the labor of 
 his hands.. He is not really banished from the 
 world, nor does he seek or profess banishment: 
 indeed, his house is not two miles from his mother's 
 door ; and he goes to the village every day or two, 
 by his own showing, to hear the news. 2 In this 
 quiet abode he spends two years, varied by an 
 occasional excursion into the deeper wilderness at a 
 
 1 My Study Windows, p. 208. * Walden, p. 181. 
 
26 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 distance. He earns an honest living by gardening 
 and land-surveying, makes more close and delicate 
 observations on nature than any other American 
 has ever made, and writes the only book yet written 
 in America, to my thinking, that bears an annual 
 perusal. Can it be really true that this is a life so 
 wasted, so unpardonable ? 
 
 The artist LaFarge built himself a studio as bare 
 as Thoreau's and almost as lonely, among the Para- 
 dise Rocks, near Newport, and used to withdraw 
 from the fashionable summer world to that safe 
 retreat. Lowell himself has celebrated in immor- 
 tal verse the self-seclusion of Professor Gould, 
 who would lock himself into his Albany observa- 
 tory, and leave his indignant trustees to " admire 
 the keyhole's contour grand " from without. Is 
 the naturalist's work so much inferior to the art- 
 ist's, are the stars of thought so much less impor- 
 tant than those of space, that LaFarge and Gould 
 are to be praised for their self-devotion, and yet 
 Thoreau is to be held up to all coming time as 
 selfish? For my own part, with " Walden " in my 
 hands, I wish that every other author in Amer- 
 ica might try the experiment of two years in a 
 " shanty." 
 
 Let me not seem to do injustice to Lowell, who 
 closes his paper on Thoreau with a generous tribute 
 
THOREAU. 27 
 
 that does much to redeem his earlier injustice. 
 The truth is, that Thoreau shared the noble protest 
 against worldliness of what is called the " transcen- 
 dental " period, in America, and naturally shared 
 some of the intellectual extravagances of that seeth- 
 ing time ; but he did not, like some of his con- 
 temporaries, make his whims an excuse for mere 
 selfishness, and his home life always the best test 
 was thoroughly affectionate and faithful. His 
 lifelong celibacy was due, if I have been correctly 
 informed, to an early act of lofty self-abnegation 
 toward his own brother, whose love had taken the 
 same direction with his own. Certainly his per- 
 sonal fortitude amid the privations and limitations 
 of his own career was nothing less than heroic. 
 There is nothing finer in literary history than his 
 description, in his unpublished diary, of receiving 
 from his publisher the unsold copies nearly the 
 whole edition of his " Week on the Concord and 
 Merrimack Rivers," and of his carrying the melan- 
 choly burden up-stairs on his shoulders to his 
 study. "I have now a library," he says, "of 
 nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred 
 of which I wrote myself." ! 
 
 It will always be an interesting question, how far 
 
 1 By the kindness of my friend H. G. O Blake, Esq., of Worcester, 
 Mass., the custodian of Thoreau's manuscripts, I am enabled to print 
 this entire passage at the end of this chapter. 
 
28 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 Thoreau's peculiar genius might have been modi- 
 fied or enriched by society or travel. In his diary 
 he expresses gratitude to Providence, or, as he 
 quaintly puts it, " to those who have had the hand- 
 ling of me," that his life has been so restricted in 
 these directions, and that he has thus been com- 
 pelled to extract its utmost nutriment from the soil 
 where he was born. Yet in examining these diaries, 
 even more than in reading his books, one is led to 
 doubt, after all, whether this mental asceticism was 
 best for him, just as one suspects that the vegetable 
 diet in which he exulted may possibly have short- 
 ened his life. A larger experience might have lib- 
 eralized some of his judgments, and softened some 
 of his verdicts. He was not as just to men as to 
 woodchucks ; and his " simplify, I say, simplify," 
 might well have been relaxed a little for mankind, 
 in view of the boundless affluence of external 
 nature. The world of art might also have deeply 
 influenced him, had the way been opened for its 
 closer study. Emerson speaks of " the raptures of 
 a citizen arrived at his first meadow ; " but a deep, 
 ascetic soul like Thoreau's could hardly have failed 
 to be touched to a far profounder emotion by the 
 first sight of a cathedral. 
 
 The impression that Thoreau was but a minor 
 Emerson will in time pass away, like the early class- 
 
THOREAU. 29 
 
 ification of Emerson as a second-hand Carlyle. 
 All three were the children of* their time, and had 
 its family likeness ; but Thoreau had the lumen sic- 
 </////, or " dry light," beyond either of the others ; 
 indeed, beyond all men of his day. His tempera- 
 ment was like his native air in winter, clear, frosty, 
 inexpressibly pure and bracing. His power of lit- 
 erary appreciation was something marvellous, and 
 his books might well be read for their quotations, 
 like the sermons of Jeremy Taylor. His daring 
 imagination ventured on the delineation of just 
 those objects in nature which seem most defiant of 
 description, as smoke, mist, haze ; and his three 
 poems on these themes have an exquisite felicity of 
 structure such as nothing this side of the Greek 
 anthology can equal. Indeed, the value of the 
 classic languages was never better exemplified than 
 in their influence on his training. They were real 
 " humanities " to him ; linking him with the great 
 memories of the race, and with high intellectual 
 standards, so that he could never, like some of his 
 imitators, treat literary art as a thing unmanly and 
 trivial. His selection of points in praising his 
 favorite books shows this discrimination. He loves 
 to speak of " the elaborate beauty and finish, and 
 the lifelong literary labors of the ancients . . . 
 works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful 
 
30 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 almost, as the morning itself." * I remember ho\v 
 that fine old classical scholar, the late John Glen 
 King, of Salem, used to delight in Thoreau as being 
 " the only man who thoroughly loved both nature 
 and Greek." 
 
 Thoreau died at forty-four, without having 
 achieved fame or fortune. It is common to speak 
 of his life as a failure ; but to me it seems, with all 
 its drawbacks, to have been a great and eminent 
 success. Even testing it only by the common appe- 
 tite of authors for immortality, his seems already a 
 sure and enviable place. Time is rapidly melting 
 away the dross from his writings, and exhibiting 
 their gold. But his standard was higher than the 
 mere desire for fame, and he has told it plainly. 
 "There is nowhere recorded," he complains, "a 
 simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of 
 life, any memorable praise of God. ... If the day 
 and the night are such that you greet them with joy, 
 and life emits a fragrance, like flowers and sweet- 
 scented herbs, is more elastic, starry, and immor- 
 tal, that is your success." - 
 
 NOTE. The following passage is now first published, 
 from Thoreau's manuscript diary, the date being Oct. 28, 
 
 I853-- 
 
 " For a year or two past, my publisher, Munroe, has been 
 
 Walden, p. 113. Walden, pp. 85, 233. 
 
THOREAU. 31 
 
 writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be 
 made of the copies of ' A Week on the Concord and Mer- 
 rimack Rivers,' still on hand, and at last suggesting that he 
 had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had 
 them all sent to me here ; and they have arrived to-day by 
 express, piling the man's wagon, seven hundred and six 
 copies out of an edition of one thousand, which I bought of 
 Munroe four years ago, and have been ever since paying for, 
 and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me 
 at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. 
 They are something more substantial than fame, as my 
 back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs 
 to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. 
 Of the remaining two hundred ninety and odd, seventy-five 
 were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of 
 nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which 
 I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should be- 
 hold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up in my 
 chamber, half as high as my head, my opera omnia. This 
 /s authorship. These are the work of my brain. There 
 was just one piece of good luck in the venture. The un- 
 bound were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout 
 paper wrappers, and inscribed, * H. D. Thoreau's Concord 
 River, fifty copies.' So Munroe had only to cross out 
 ' River,' and write ' Mass.,' and deliver them to the express- 
 man at once. I can see now what I write for, and the result 
 of my labors. Nevertheless, in spite of this result, sitting 
 beside the inert mass of my works, I take up my pen to- 
 night to record what thought or experience I may have 
 had, with as much satisfaction as ever. Indeed, I believe 
 that this result is more inspiring and better than if a thou- 
 sand had bought my wares. It affects my privacy less, and 
 leaves me freer." 
 
32 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 HOWELLS. 
 
 IT has perhaps been a misfortune to Mr. How- 
 ells, that in his position of editor of " The Atlan- 
 tic Monthly " he has inevitably been shielded from 
 much of that healthful discussion which is usually 
 needed for the making of a good author. Sir 
 Arthur Helps says, that, if ordinary criticism gives 
 us little, it is still worth having : if it is not marked 
 by common sense, it still brings to us the common 
 nonsense, which is quite as important. But the 
 conductor of the leading literary magazine of a 
 nation is very apt to escape this wholesome ordeal. 
 Delicacy of course forbids his admitting any men- 
 tion of himself, whether for praise or blame, within 
 his own pages. Moreover, his leading literary con- 
 temporaries are also his contributors ; and for them 
 to discuss him freely, even elsewhere, is like publicly 
 .debating the character of one's habitual host. Com- 
 pare the position, in this respect, of Mr. Howells 
 and Mr. Henry James, Jr. Their writings are equal- 
 ly conspicuous before the community ; their merits 
 
HOWELLS. 33 
 
 are equally marked, and so also are their demerits, 
 real or attributed ; yet what, a difference in the 
 amount of criticism awarded to each ! Each new 
 book by Mr. Howells is received with an almost 
 monotonous praise, as if it had no individuality, no 
 salient points ; while each story by Mr. James is 
 debated through and through the newspapers, as if 
 it were a fresh Waverley novel. I see no reason 
 for this difference, except that Mr. Howells edits 
 " The Atlantic Monthly," and that all other Ameri- 
 can writers are, as it were, sitting at his table, or 
 wishing themselves there. He must himself regret 
 this result, for he is too essentially an artist not to 
 prize honest and faithful criticism ; and it is almost 
 needless to say that his career as an author has 
 been thoroughly modest and free from all the arts 
 of self-praise. 
 
 The peculiar c^ana^ef 4ws- prose style Jias_also, 
 doubtless, had its effect in disarming criticism. He 
 rarely fails to give pleasure by the mere process of 
 writing, and this is much, to begin with ; just as, 
 when we are listening to conversation, a musical 
 voice gratifies us almost more than wit or wisdom. 
 Mr. Howells is without an equal in America and 
 therefore without an equal among his English- 
 speaking contemporaries as to some of the most 
 attractive literary graces. He has no rival in half- 
 
34 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 tints, in modulations, in subtile phrases that touch 
 the edge of an assertion and yet stop short of it. 
 He is like a skater who executes a hundred graceful 
 curves within the limits of a pool a few yards square. 
 Miss Austen, the novelist, once described her art as 
 a little bit of ivory, on which she produced small 
 effect after much labor. She underrated her own 
 skill, as the comparison in some respects underrates 
 that of Howells; but his field is or has until 
 lately seemed to be the little bit of ivory. 
 
 This is attributing to him only what he has been 
 careful to claim for himself. He tells his methods 
 very frankly, and his first literary_j)rinciple has been 
 to looJ^aimyJrQiXL-grjea^^assions, and rather to ele- 
 vate the commonpkcer4)y minute__touches. Not 
 only does he prefer this, but he does not hesitate to 
 tell us sometimes, half jestingly, that it is the only 
 thing to do. " As in literature the true artist will 
 shun the use even of real events if they are of an 
 improbable character, so the sincere observer of 
 man will not desire to look upon his heroic or oc- 
 casional phases, but will seek him in his habitual 
 moods of vacancy and tiresomeness." l He may 
 not mean to lay this down as a canon of universal 
 authority, but he accepts it himself; and he accepts 
 with it the risk involved of a too-limited and micro- 
 
 1 Their Wedding Journey, p. 86. 
 
HOWELLS. 35 
 
 scopic range. That he has finally escaped this 
 peril, is due to the fact that his method went, after 
 all, deeper than he admitted : he was not merely a 
 good-natured observer, like Geoffrey Crayon, Gen- 
 tleman, but he had thoughts and purposes, some- 
 thing to protest against, and something to say. 
 
 He is often classed with Mr. James as represent- 
 ing the international school of novelists, yet in 
 reality they belong to widely different subdivisions. 
 After all, Mr. James has permanently set up his 
 easel in Europe, Mr. Howells in America ; and the 
 latter has been, from the beginning, far less anxious 
 to compare Americans with Europeans than with 
 one another. He is international only if we adopt 
 Mr. Emerson's saying, that Europe stretches to the 
 Alleghanies. As a native of Ohio, transplanted to 
 Massachusetts, he never can forego the interest im- 
 plied in this double point of view. The Euro- 
 peanized American, and, if we may so say, the 
 Americanized American, are the typical figures that 
 re-appear in his books. Even in "The Lady of 
 the Aroostook," although the voyagers reach the 
 other side at last, the real contrast is found on 
 board ship ; and, although his heroine was reared 
 in a New- England village, he cannot forego the sat- 
 isfaction of having given her California for a birth- 
 place. Mr. James writes " international episodes : " 
 
36 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 Mr. Hovvells writes inter-oceanic episodes : his best 
 scenes imply a dialogue between the Atlantic and 
 Pacific slopes. 
 
 It was long expected that there would appear 
 some sequel to his " Chance Acquaintance." Bos- 
 tonians especially wished to hear more of Miles 
 Arbuton : they said, " It is impossible to leave a 
 man so well-dressed in a situation so humiliating." 
 But the sequel has, in reality, come again and 
 again ; the same theme re-appears in " Out of the 
 Question," in " The Lady of the Aroostook ; " it 
 will re-appear while Mr. Howells lives. He is really 
 contributing important studies to the future organ- 
 ization of our society. Ho\v is it to be stratified ? 
 How much weight is to be given to intellect, to 
 character, to wealth, to antecedents, to inheritance ? 
 Not only must a republican nation meet and solve 
 these problems, but the solution is more assisted 
 by the writers of romances than by the compilers 
 of statistics. Fourth of July orators cannot even 
 state the problem : it almost baffles the finest touch. 
 As, in England, you may read every thing ever writ- 
 ten about the Established Church, and yet, after all, 
 if you wish to know what a bishop or a curate is, 
 you must go to Trollope's novels, so, to trace 
 American " society " in its formative process, you 
 must go to Howells ; he alone shows you the es- 
 
HOWELLS. 37 
 
 sential forces in action. He can philosophize well 
 enough on the subject, as .where he points out 
 thai hereditary wealth in America as yet represents 
 " nothing in the world, no great culture, no political 
 influence, no civic aspiration, not even a pecuniary 
 force, nothing but a social set, an alien club life, 
 a tradition of dining." l But he is not at heart a 
 philosopher ; he is a novelist, which is better, and 
 his dramatic situations recur again and again to the 
 essential point. 
 
 It is this constant purpose which gives dignity 
 and weight to his American delineations, even 
 where he almost wantonly checks himself and dis- 
 appoints us. Were he merely, as some suppose, a 
 skilful miniature-painter of young girls at watering- 
 places, his sphere would be very circumscribed. 
 At times he seems tempted to yield to this limita- 
 tion during his brief foray into the path of short 
 dramatic sketches, for instance. These sketches 
 provoked comparison with innumerable French tri- 
 fles, which they could not rival in execution. " Pri- 
 vate Theatricals " offers the same thing on a larger 
 scale, and under still greater disadvantages. Mrs. 
 Farrell reveals herself, at the first glance, as a 
 coquette too shallow and vulgar to be really inter- 
 esting; and she never rises above that level until 
 
 1 Their Wedding Journey, p. 69. 
 
38 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 she disappears from the scene, flinging her last net 
 for the cow-boy in the pasture. Her habit of flirt- 
 ing is a garment deliberately put on, an armor that 
 creaks in the wearing. But if you wish to see how 
 a Frenchman draws a coquette, read " Le Fianc 
 de Mile. St. Maur," by Cherbuliez. The coquetry 
 of Mme. d'Arolles is always round her as an atmos- 
 phere, intangible, all-embracing, fold within fold ; 
 she coquets even with a rudimentary organ in 
 herself that might be called her conscience ; and 
 then, besides this enveloping atmosphere, she wears 
 always a thin garment of social refinement that 
 seems to shield her even when the last shred of 
 decorum is about to drop. She is a thoroughly 
 artistic creation ; in watching her never so closely, 
 you cannot see the wires pulled ; but in " Private 
 Theatricals " we seem constantly to have notice 
 given, " Please observe, Mrs. Farrell is about to 
 attitudinize ! " 
 
 The moral of all this is, that Mr. Howells can- 
 not be, if he would, an artist per se, like Droz, in 
 reading whose brilliant trifles we are in a world 
 where the execution is all, the thought nothing, and 
 the moral less than nothing. Nor does he suc- 
 ceed, like Thackeray, in making a novel attractive 
 without putting a single agreeable character into 
 it : Thackeray barely accomplished this in " Vanity 
 
HOWELLS. 39 
 
 Fair ; " Mr. Howells was far less successful in the 
 most powerful and least satisfactory of all his hooks, 
 " A Foregone Conclusion." The greatest step he 
 has ever taken, both in popularity and in artistic 
 success, has been won by trusting himself to a gen- 
 erous impulse, and painting in " The Lady of the 
 Aroostook " a character worth the pains of describ- 
 ing. The book is not, to my thinking, free from 
 faults : the hero poses and proses, and the drunken 
 man is so realistic as to be out of place and over- 
 done ; but the character of the heroine seems to 
 me the high-water mark of Mr. Howells. It has 
 been feared that he would always remain the charm- 
 ing delineator of people who were, after all, under- 
 sized, heroes and heroines like the little figurines 
 from Tanagra, or the admirable miniature groups 
 of John Rogers. He has now allowed himself a 
 bolder sweep of arm, a more generous handling of 
 full--sized humanity ; and with this work begins, 
 we may fain believe, the maturity of his genius. 
 
40 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 HELEN JACKSON. (" H. H.") 
 
 M'LLE DE MONTPENSIER, grand-daugh- 
 ter of Henri Quatre, is said to have been 
 " so famous in history that her name never appears 
 in it ; " she being known only as " La Grande 
 Mademoiselle." This anonymousness may help the 
 fame of a princess, but it must hurt that of an au- 
 thor. The initials " L. E. L.," so familiar to some 
 ,of us in childhood, stood for a fame soon forgotten ; 
 and this not so much because her poetry was weak, 
 but because her name was in a manner nameless. 
 However popular might be the poems of " H. H.," 
 they were still attached to a rather vague and form- 
 less personality so long as these initials only were 
 given ; to combine with this the still remoter indi- 
 viduality of " Saxe Holm," was only to deepen the 
 sense of vagueness ; and if all the novels of the 
 " No Name " series, instead of two of them, had 
 been attributed to the same shadowy being, every 
 one would have pronounced the suggestion quite 
 credible. To take these various threads of mystery, 
 
HELEN JACKSON. 41 
 
 and weave them into a substantial fame, this passed 
 the power of public admiration. At any rate, an 
 applause so bewildered could hardly be heard across 
 the Atlantic ; and it is almost exasperating to find 
 that in England, for instance, where so many feeble 
 American reputations have been revived only to 
 die, there are few critics who know even the name 
 of the woman who has come nearest in our day and 
 tongue to the genius of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 
 and who has made Christina Rossetti and Jean 
 Ingelow appear but second-rate celebrities. 
 
 When some one asked Emerson a few years 
 since whether he did not think " H. H." the best 
 woman-poet on this continent, he answered in his 
 meditative way, " Perhaps we might as well omit 
 the woman ; " thus placing her, at least in that mo- 
 ment's impulse, at the head of all. He used to cut 
 her poems from the newspapers as they appeared, 
 to carry them about with him, and to read them 
 aloud. His especial favorites were the most con- 
 densed and the deepest, those having something of 
 that kind of obscurity which Coleridge pronounced 
 to be a compliment to the reader. His favorite 
 among them all is or was the sonnet entitled 
 
42 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 "THOUGHT. 
 
 " O Messenger, art thou the king, or I ? 
 Thou dalliest outside the palace-gate 
 Till on thine idle armor lie the late 
 And heavy dews : the morn's bright, scornful eye 
 Reminds thee ; then, in subtle mockery, 
 Thou smilest at the window where I wait 
 Who bade thee ride for life. In empty state 
 My days go on, while false hours prophesy 
 Thy quick return ; at last in sad despair 
 I cease to bid thee, leave thee free as air ; 
 When lo ! thou stand's! before me glad and fleet, 
 And lay'st undreamed-of treasures at my feet. 
 Ah ! messenger, thy royal blood to buy, 
 I am too poor. Thou art the king, not I." l 
 
 The uncontrollableness of thought by will has 
 never been better expressed by words than in this 
 sonnet ; and there are others which utter emotion 
 so profoundly, and yet with such artistic quiet, 
 that each brief poem seems the summary of a life. 
 Take this, for instance, describing a love that, hav- 
 ing once found its shore, burns its ships behind it, 
 and absolutely cuts off all retreat : 
 
 "BURNT SHIPS. 
 
 " O Love, sweet Love, who came with rosy sail 
 And foaming prow across the misty sea ! 
 O Love, brave Love, whose faith was full and free 
 i Verses by H. H.. p. 121. 
 
HELEN JACKSON. 43 
 
 That lands of sun and gold which could not fail 
 Lay in the west, that blooiji no wintry gale 
 Could blight, and eyes whose love thine own should be, 
 Called thee with steadfast voice of prophecy 
 To shores unknown ! 
 
 " O Love, poor Love, avail 
 Thee nothing now thy faiths, thy braveries ; 
 There is no sun, no bloom ; a cold wind strips 
 The bitter foam from off the wave where dips 
 No more thy prow ; the eyes are hostile eyes ; 
 The gold is hidden ; vain thy tears and cries : 
 O Love, poor Love, why didst thou burn thy ships ? "* 
 
 " H. H." writes another class of poems, that, with 
 a grace and wealth like Andrew Marvell's, carry us 
 into the very life of external nature, or link it with 
 the heart of man. Emerson's " Humblebee " is 
 not a creation more fresh and wholesome than is 
 
 "MY STRAWBERRY. 
 
 " O marvel, fruit of fruits, I pause 
 To reckon thee. I ask what cause 
 Set free so much of red from heats 
 At core of earth, and mixed such sweets 
 With sour and spice; what was that strength 
 Which out of darkness, length by length, 
 Spun all thy shining thread of vine 
 Netting the fields in bond as thine ; 
 I see thy tendrils drink by sips 
 From grass and clover's smiling lips ; 
 1 Verses, p. 71. 
 
44 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 I hear thy roots dig down for wells 
 Tapping the meadow's hidden cells ; 
 Whole generations of green things, 
 Descended from long lines of springs, 
 I see make room for thee to bide 
 A quiet comrade by their side ; 
 I see the creeping peoples go 
 Mysterious journeys to and fro ; 
 Treading to right and left of thee, 
 Doing thee homage vvonderingly. 
 I see the wild bees as they fare 
 Thy cups of honey drink, but spare ; 
 I mark thee bathe and bathe again 
 In sweet uncalendared spring rain. 
 I watch how all May has of sun 
 Makes haste to have thy ripeness done, 
 While all her nights let dews escape 
 To set and cool thy perfect shape. 
 Ah, fruit of fruits, no more I pause 
 To dream and seek thy hidden laws ! 
 I stretch my hand, and dare to taste 
 In instant of delicious waste 
 On single feast, all things that went 
 To make the empire thou hast spent." I 
 
 As the most artistic among her verses I should 
 class the "Gondolieds," in which all Venice seems 
 reflected in the movement and cadence, while the 
 thought is fresh and new and strong. Then there 
 are poems which seem to hold all secrets of pas- 
 
 > Verses, p. 166. 
 
HELEN JACKSON. 45 
 
 sion trembling on the lips, yet forbear to tell them ; 
 and others, on a larger scale, which have a grander 
 rhythmical movement than most of our poets have 
 dared even to attempt. Of these the finest, to my 
 ear, is " Resurgam ; " but I remember that Char- 
 lotte Cushman preferred the " Funeral March," and 
 loved to read it in public. Those who heard her 
 can never forget the solemnity with which she re- 
 cited those stately cadences, or the grandeur of her 
 half-glance over the shoulder as she named first 
 among the hero's -funeral attendants 
 
 " Majestic Death, his freedman, following." 
 
 " H. H." reaches the popular heart best in a class 
 of poems easy to comprehend, thoroughly human 
 in sympathy ; poems of love, of motherhood, of 
 bereavement ; poems such as are repeated and 
 preserved in many a Western cabin, cheering and 
 strengthening many a heart. Other women have 
 exerted a similar power ; but in the hands of a 
 writer like Alice Gary, for instance, the influence 
 is shallow, though pure and wholesome ; she 
 sounds no depths as this later poet sounds them. 
 The highest type of this class of Helen Jackson's 
 verses may be found in the noble poem entitled 
 " Spinning," which begins : -. 
 
46 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 " Like a blind spinner in the sun 
 
 I tread my days ; 
 I know that all the threads will run 
 
 Appointed ways ; 
 
 I know each day will bring its task, 
 And, being blind, no more I ask." J 
 
 No finer symbolic picture of human life has ever 
 been framed : Henry Vaughan, had he been a 
 woman, might have written it. 
 
 If, in addition to her other laurels, Mrs. Jackson 
 is the main author of the " Saxe Holm " tales, she 
 must be credited not only with some of the very 
 best stories yet written in America, " Draxy Mil- 
 ler's Dowry," for instance, but with one of the 
 best-kept of all literary secrets. There has been 
 something quite dramatic in the skill with which 
 the puzzle has been kept alive by the appearance 
 of imaginary claimants if imaginary they be to 
 the honor of this authorship : now a maiden lady 
 in the interior of New York ; now a modest young 
 girl whose only voucher, Celia Burleigh, died with- 
 out revealing her name. I do not know whether 
 any of these claimants took the pains to write out 
 whole stories in manuscript, as an Irish pretend- 
 er copied out whole chapters of Miss Edgeworth's 
 "Castle Rackrent," with corrections and erasures, 
 
 1 Verses, p. 14. 
 
HELEN JACKSON. 47 
 
 but it is well known that the editors of " Scrib- 
 ner's Monthly " were approached by some one who 
 professed to have dropped the " Saxe Holm " sto- 
 ries in the street, and demanded that they should 
 be restored to him. He was suppressed by the 
 simple expedient of inviting him to bring in some 
 specimens of his own poetry, that it might be com- 
 pared with that of " Draxy Miller ; " but the mod- 
 est young girls and the apocryphal rural contribu- 
 tors were less easily abolished, though time has 
 abated their demands. The more Mrs. Jackson 
 denied the authorship, the more resolutely the pub- 
 lic mind intrenched itself in the belief that she had 
 something to do with the stories, and that at least 
 the verses therein contained were hers and hers 
 alone. There were coincidences of personal and 
 local details, to connect her with the veiled author ; 
 and the fantastic title of one tale, "The One- 
 legged Dancers," had previously appeared in her 
 " Bits of Travel." l The final verdict seemed to be 
 that she must have written the books, with enough 
 of aid from some friend to justify her persistent 
 denial ; and ingenious critics soon began to see 
 internal traces of a double authorship, while this 
 to other critics seemed altogether absurd. 
 
 The publication of " Mercy Philbrick's Choice " 
 
 Bits of Travel, p. 65. 
 
48 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 and " Hetty's Strange History " only revived the 
 same questions. The plots of these books showed 
 the hand of " Saxe Holm," the occasional verses 
 that of "H. H." Both novels brought a certain dis- 
 ' appointment : they had obvious power, but were too 
 painful to be heartily enjoyed. After all, the public 
 mind is rather repelled by a tragedy, since people 
 wish to be made happy. Great injustice has been 
 done by many critics, I think, to " Hetty's Strange 
 History." While its extraordinary power is con- 
 ceded, it has been called morbid and immoral ; yet 
 it is as stern a tale of retribution as " Madame 
 Bovary" or "The Scarlet Letter." We rarely find 
 Un fiction Iny severity of injustice meted out to a 
 I wrong act done from noble motives. In Jean 
 Paul's "Siebenkas" the husband feigns death in 
 order that his wife may find happiness without him : 
 he succeeds in hit effort, and is at last made happy 
 himself. In " Hetty's Strange History " the wife 
 effaces herself with precisely the same object, for 
 her husband's sake : but the effort fails ; the hus- 
 band is not made happy by her absence, and when 
 they are re-united the memory of her deception 
 cannot be banished, so that after the first bliss of 
 re-union they find that complete healing can never 
 come. Only a deep nature could have planned, 
 
HELEN JACKSON. 49 
 
 only a very firm pen could have traced, the final 
 punishment of Hetty's sin. 
 
 One of the acutest critics in America said of 
 Saxe Holm : " She stands on the threshold of the 
 greatest literary triumphs ever won by an Amer- 
 ican woman." It must be owned that she still lin- 
 gers there : we still wait for any complete and 
 unquestionable victory. Who knows but that versa- 
 tile imagination may already have sought some other 
 outlet, and she may already be mystifying her pub- 
 lic under some new name ? And of " H. H." as a 
 poet it must be said that she seems of late to be 
 half shrinking from her full career, and to be turn- 
 ing rather to the path of descriptive prose. She 
 has always excelled in this : her " German Land- 
 lady" is unsurpassed in its way, and her new expe- 
 riences of Western residence have only added ful- 
 ness and finish to this part of her literary work. No 
 one has ever written of frontier-life so well as she, 
 in her " Bits of Travel at Home ; " with such hearty 
 sympathy, with a tone so discriminating, and with 
 such absence of the merely coarse or melodramatic. 
 All the California writers have not secured for the 
 life of that region such a place in the world of art 
 as she is giving to Colorado ; all their work, how- 
 ever brilliant, is encumbered with what is crude, 
 cheap, exaggerated, and therefore temporary ; hers 
 
50 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 is clear and firm and strong ; and those who regret 
 her absence from her early home can yet rejoice 
 that she dwells amid scenery so magnificent, and 
 in so absorbing a current of human life. 
 
HENRY JAMES, JR. 51 
 
 HENRY JAMES, JR. 
 
 WE are growing more cosmopolitan and 
 varied, in these United States of America ; 
 and our authors are gaining much, if they are also 
 losing a little, in .respect to training. The early 
 career of an American author used to be tolerably 
 fixed and clear, if limited ; a college education, 
 a few months in Europe, a few years in some 
 profession, and then an entrance into literature 
 by some side-door. In later times, the printing- 
 office has sometimes been substituted for the col- 
 lege, and has given a new phase of literary char- 
 acter distinct from the other, but not less valuable. 
 Mr. Henry James, Jr., belongs to neither of the 
 classes thus indicated : he may be said to have 
 been trained in literature by literature itself, so early 
 did he begin writing, and so incessantly has he writ- 
 ten. We perhaps miss in his works something of 
 the method which the narrower classical nurture 
 was supposed to give; and we find few traces 
 of that contact with the mass of mankind which 
 
52 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 comes through mere daily duty to the professional 
 man, the business man, the journalist. Mr. James 
 has kept a little too good company : we do not find 
 in his books such refreshing types of hearty and 
 robust manhood as Howells, with all his dainti- 
 ness, finds it easy to depict in Colonel Ellison and 
 the skipper of the Aroostook. Then Mr. James's 
 life has been so far transatlantic, that one hardly 
 knows whether he would wish to be accounted an 
 American writer, after all ; so that his education, 
 his point of view, his methods, all unite to place 
 him in a class by himself. 
 
 It is pleasant to see a man write, as he has 
 always done, with abundant energy, and seemingly 
 from the mere love of writing. Yet it is im- 
 possible to deny that he has suffered from this 
 very profusion. Much of his early work seems a 
 sort of self-training, gained at the expense of his 
 readers ; each sheet, each story, has been hurried 
 into print before the ink was dry, in order to test 
 it on the public, a method singularly removed 
 from the long and lonely maturing of Hawthorne. 
 " Eoisivete est necessaire aux esprifs, aussi bien 
 que le travail" Even the later books of Mr. 
 James, especially his travels and his essays, show 
 something of this defect. What a quarry of admira- 
 ble suggestions is, for instance, his essay on Balzac ; 
 
HENRY JAMES, JR. 53 
 
 but how prolix it is, what repetitions, what a want 
 of condensation and method ! The same is true, 
 in a degree, of his papers on George Sand and 
 Targe" nieff, while other chapters in his "French 
 Poets and Novelists " are scarcely more than 
 sketches : the paper on the Theatre Fran^ais 
 hardly mentions Sarah Bernhardt; and, indeed, 
 that on Turgnieff says nothing of his masterpiece, 
 "Terres Vierges." Through all these essays he 
 shows delicacy, epigram, quickness of touch, pene- 
 tration ; but he lacks symmetry of structure, and 
 steadiness of hand. 
 
 We can trace in the same book, also, some of 
 the author's limitations as an imaginative artist, 
 since in criticising others a man shows what is 
 wanting in himself. When he says, for instance, 
 that a monarchical society is "more available for 
 the novelist than any other," he shows that he does 
 not quite appreciate the strong point of republi- 
 canism, in that it develops real individuality in pro- 
 portion as it diminishes conventional distinctions. 
 The truth is, that the modern novel has risen with 
 the advance of democratic society, on the ruins of 
 feudalism. Another defect is seen from time to 
 time, when, in criticising some well-known book, 
 he misses its special points of excellence. Take, 
 for instance, his remarks on that masterly and 
 
54 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 repulsive novel, "Madame Bovary." To say of the 
 author of that work that his " theory as a novelist, 
 briefly expressed, is to begin at the outside," 1 
 seems almost whimsically unjust. There is not a 
 character in modern fiction developed more essen- 
 tially from within than that of this heroine : all her 
 sins and sorrows are virtually predicted in the early 
 chapters ; even Mr. James has to admit that it 
 " could not have been otherwise " 2 with her, 
 thereby taking back his own general assertion. 
 Then he says "every thing in the book is ugly," 3 
 whereas one of its salient points is the beauty of 
 the natural descriptions in which its most painful 
 incidents are framed. Finally, and this is the 
 most puzzling misconception of all, Mr. James 
 utterly fails to see the bearing of one of the pivotal 
 points of the narrative, an unfortunate surgical 
 operation performed by the heroine's husband, a 
 country doctor : he calls it an " artistic bravado," 8 
 and treats it as a mere episode of doubtful value, 
 whereas it is absolutely essential to the working-out 
 of the plot. The situation is this : Madame Bovary 
 is being crushed to the earth by living in a social 
 vacuum, with a stupid husband whom she despises, 
 and has already deceived. She has just felt a 
 
 1 French Poets and Novelists, p. 256. * Ibid., p. a6i. 
 
 Ibid., p. 265. 
 
HENRY JAMES, JR. 55 
 
 twinge of remorse, after receiving an affectionate 
 letter from her father ; when suddenly this com- 
 monplace husband is presented to her eyes in a 
 wholly new light, that of an unappreciated man of 
 genius, who has by a single act won a place among 
 the great surgeons of his time. All that is left 
 undepraved in her nature is touched and roused by 
 this : she will do any thing, bear any thing, for 
 such a husband. The illusion lasts but a few days, 
 and is pitilessly torn away : the husband proves a 
 mere vulgar, ignorant quack, even duller, emptier, 
 more hopeless, than she had dreamed. The re- 
 action takes her instantly downward, and with that 
 impulse she sinks to rise no more. The author 
 himself (Flaubert) takes the pains to warn us dis- 
 tinctly beforehand of the bearing of this inci- 
 dent ; l but his precaution seems needless, the thing 
 explains itself. It is one of the strongest and 
 clearest passages in the whole tragedy, and it seems 
 as if there must be some defect of artistic sensibility 
 in any critic who misses his way here. Or else 
 which is more probable it is another instance of 
 that haste in literary workmanship which is one 
 of Mr. James's besetting sins. 
 
 1 " Elle demeurait fort embarrassee dans sa velUiti de sacrz/tcf, 
 quand Vapothecaire vint a propos lui fournir une occasion." 
 MADAME BOVARY, p. aio. 
 
$6 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 It may be one result of this extreme rapidity of 
 production, that Mr. James uses certain catch-words 
 so often as to furnish almost a shibboleth for his 
 style ; such words, for instance, as " brutal," " puer- 
 ile," " immense." Another result is seen in his in- 
 difference to careful local coloring, especially where 
 the scene is laid in the United States. When he 
 draws Americans in Europe, he is at home ; when 
 he brings Europeans across the Atlantic, he never 
 seems quite sure of his ground, except in Newport, 
 which is in some respects the least American spot 
 on this continent. He opens his " Europeans " by 
 exhibiting horse-cars in the streets of Boston nearly 
 ten years before their introduction, and his whole 
 sketch of the Wentworth family gives a sense of 
 vagueness. It is not difficult to catch a few unmis- 
 takable points, and portray a respectable elderly 
 gentleman reading " The Daily Advertiser ; " but 
 all beyond this is indefinite, and, when otherwise, 
 sometimes gives quite an incorrect impression of 
 the place and period described. The family por- 
 trayed has access to " the best society in Boston ; " 
 yet the daughter, twenty-three years old, has " never 
 seen an artist," though the picturesque figure of 
 Allston had but lately disappeared from the streets, 
 at the time mentioned, and Cheney, Staigg, and 
 Eastman Johnson might be seen there any day, with 
 
HENRY JAMES, JR. 57 
 
 plenty of other artists less known. The household 
 is perfectly amazed and overwhelmed at the sight of 
 two foreigners, although there probably were more 
 cultivated Europeans in Boston thirty years ago than 
 now, having been drawn thither by- the personal 
 celebrity or popularity of Agassiz, Ticknor, Longfel- 
 low, Sumner, and Dr. Howe. The whole picture 
 though it is fair to remember that the author calls it 
 a sketch only seems more like a delineation of 
 American society by Fortunio or Alexandre Dumas 
 fits, than like a portraiture by one to the manor born. 
 The truth is, that Mr. James's cosmopolitanism is, 
 after all, limited : to be really cosmopolitan, a man 
 must be at home even in his own country. 
 
 There are no short stories in our recent litera- 
 ture, I think, which are so good as Mr. James's 
 best, " Madame de Mauves," for instance, and 
 " The Madonna of the Future." Even these some- 
 times lack condensation ; but they have a thor- 
 oughly original grasp, and fine delineations of char- 
 acter. It is a great step downward from these to 
 the somewhat vulgar horrors contained in "A 
 Romance of Certain Old Clothes." The author 
 sometimes puts on a cynicism which does not go 
 very deep ; and the young lovers of his earlier tales 
 had a disagreeable habit of swearing at young 
 ladies, and ordering them about. Yet he has kept 
 
58 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 himself very clear from the disagreeable qualities of 
 the French fiction he loves. His books never 
 actually leave a bad taste in one's mouth, as Char- 
 lotte Bronte said of French novels ; and, indeed, no 
 one has touched with more delicate precision the 
 vexed question of morality in art. He finely calls 
 the longing after a moral ideal " this southern slope 
 of the mind," l and says of the ethical element, 
 " It is in reality simply a part of the richness of 
 inspiration : it has nothing to do with the artistic 
 process, and it has every thing to do with the artis- 
 tic effect." 2 This is admirable ; and it is a vindica- 
 tion of this attribute when we find that Mr. James's 
 imost successful social stories, "An International 
 Episode," and " Daisy Miller," have been written 
 with distinct purpose, and convey lessons. He 
 has achieved no greater triumph than when, in this 
 last-named book, he succeeds in holding our sym- 
 pathy and even affection, after all, for the essential 
 innocence and rectitude of the poor wayward girl 
 whose follies he has so mercilessly portrayed. 
 
 It cannot be said that Mr. James has yet suc- 
 ceeded in producing a satisfactory novel : as a 
 clever woman has said, he should employ some one 
 else to write the last few pages. However strong 
 the characterizations, however skilful the plot, the 
 
 1 French Poets and Novelists, p. 114. * Ibid., p. 82. 
 
HENRY JAMES, JR. 59 
 
 reader is left discontented. If in this respect he 
 seems behind Howells, it must be remembered that 
 James habitually deals with profounder emotions, 
 and is hence more liable to be overmastered. 
 Longfellow says to himself in his " Hyperion," " O 
 thou poor authorling ! Reach a little deeper into 
 the human heart ! Touch those strings, touch 
 those deeper strings more boldly, or the notes shall 
 die away like whispers, and no ear shall hear them 
 save thine own." It is James rather than Howells 
 who has heeded this counsel. The very disap- 
 pointment which the world felt at the close of 
 " The American " was in some sense a tribute to 
 its power : the author had called up characters and 
 situations which could not be cramped, at last, 
 within the conventional limits of a stage-ending. 
 As a piece of character-drawing, the final irresolu- 
 tion of the hero was simply perfect : it seemed one 
 of the cases where a romancer conjures up persons 
 who are actually alive, and who insist on working 
 out a destiny of their own, irrespective of his 
 wishes. To be thus conquered by one's own crea- 
 tion might seem one of those defeats that are 
 greater than victories ; yet it is the business of the 
 novelist, after all, to keep his visionary people well in 
 hand, and to contrive that they shall have their own 
 way, and yet not spoil his climax. In life, as in " The 
 
60 SHORT STUDIES OF AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 American," the most complicated situations often 
 settle themselves by events unseen, and the most 
 promising tragedies are cheated of their crisis. But 
 it is not enough that literary art should give a true 
 transcript of nature ; for the work must also com- 
 ply with the laws of art, and must have a beginning, 
 a middle, and an end. " Un ouvrage d'art doit 
 &trc un etrc, et non une chose arbitraire" l 
 
 1 Pens^es de J. Joubcrt, p. 289. 
 
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