THE LIBRARY 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 Professor Aram Torossian 
 1884-1941 
 

 t 
 
AMERICAN PEOSE MASTERS 
 
BOOKS BY W. C. BROWNELL 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 
 
 FRENCH TRAITS. An Essay in Compara 
 tive Criticism 81.50 
 
 FRENCH ART. Classic and Contemporary 
 Painting and Sculpture $1.50 
 
 The Same. Illustrated Edition. With For 
 ty-eight Full-page Plates $3.75 net 
 
 VICTORIAN PROSE MASTERS. . . .$1.50 net 
 
 AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS $1.50 net 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 COOPER HAWTHORNE EMERSON POE 
 LOWELL HENRY JAMES 
 
 BY 
 W. C.^BROWNELL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 
 1909 
 
Copyright, 1909, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 
 
 Published October, 1909 
 
 /*> > 5 
 
 ilFI 
 
TO JOHN W. SIMPSON 
 
 77; 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 COOPER PAOB 
 
 i FORM AND SUBSTANCE 3 
 
 ii DEFECTIVE ART 6 
 
 in ROMANTIC REALISM 13 
 
 iv INDIANS 20 
 
 v CHARACTERS 25 
 
 vi WOMEN .............. 42 
 
 vii PATRIOTISM 49 
 
 HAWTHORNE 
 
 i POPULAR ESTIMATE 63 
 
 ii REVERIE AND MIRAGE 65 
 
 HI ALLEGORY 75 
 
 iv FANCY vs. IMAGINATION 82 
 
 v CHARACTER AND ENVIRONMENT 97 
 
 vi CULTURE 106 
 
 vii "THE SCARLET LETTER" 116 
 
 vin STYLE 123 
 
 EMERSON 
 
 i NATIONAL CHARACTER 133 
 
 ii MORAL GREATNESS 133 
 
 in INTELLECT 138 
 
 iv PHILOSOPHY 152 
 
 v CULTURE . . 164 
 
 vi STYLE 178 
 
 vii POETRY 189 
 
 vin THE ESSAYS 200 
 
 vii 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 POE 
 
 i EXOTIC ART 207 
 
 ii POETRY 209 
 
 in TECHNIC 217 
 
 iv LACK OF SUBSTANCE 231 
 
 v SCENIC IMAGINATION 240 
 
 vi CULTURE AND CRITICISM 248 
 
 vii THE POE LEGEND 256 
 
 LOWELL 
 
 i IMPROVIZATION 271 
 
 ii PERSONALITY 274 
 
 HI CULTURE 284 
 
 iv CRITICISM 299 
 
 v STYLE 316 
 
 vi POETRY 325 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 i ARTISTIC ATTITUDE 339 
 
 ii REALISM . . , 343 
 
 HI THEORETIC ART 349 
 
 iv DETACHMENT 356 
 
 v PURSUIT OF THE RECONDITE 362 
 
 vi CHARACTER PORTRAYAL 369 
 
 vii CULTURE 382 
 
 vni STYLE 393 
 
 vni 
 
COOPER 
 
COOPER 
 
 THE literary standard of his countrymen is undoubt- 
 edly far higher than it was in Cooper s own day. No 
 writer at present with a tenth of his ability would com- 
 mit his literary faults faults for which the standard of 
 his day is largely responsible, since it was oblivious to 
 them and since they are precisely those which any widely 
 accepted standard would automatically correct. In 
 other words, Cooper wrote as well as, and builded better 
 than, any one required of him and though genius, ex 
 hypothesi t escapes the operation of evolutionary law, 
 literary or any other artistic expression is almost as 
 much a matter of supply and demand as railroads or 
 any other means of communication; the demand, that 
 is, produces, controls, and gives its character to the 
 supply. The theory that art is due to artists leaves 
 the origin of artists unexplained. 
 
 But it is a depressing phenomenon in current Ameri 
 can letters that our standard, though satisfactorily 
 higher, should be applied with so little intelligence and 
 elasticity, so mechanically. It is widely held, and the 
 puniest whipsters flourish it like a falchion when they 
 play at soldiers our popular literary game at present, it 
 
 3 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 sometimes seems. It is not to deny that this diversion 
 has its uses to assert that it has its limitations. To have 
 popularized a high literary standard is an accomplish 
 ment of which American letters may well be proud. 
 Indeed it is, perhaps, the result of which hitherto a 
 few eminent names excepted it has most reason to be 
 proud. And no doubt there is still reason to hope that 
 our high popular standard may become even higher and 
 more popular than it is ! Meantime one would like to 
 see its application more elastic, less mechanical. The 
 way in which it has been applied to the detriment of 
 Cooper s fame, has been not merely unintelligent but 
 thoroughly discreditable. For Cooper, from any point 
 of view, is one of the most distinguished of our literary 
 assets, and there is something ludicrous in being before 
 all the world as, assuredly, we sometimes are in 
 recognizing our own merit where it is contestable and 
 in neglecting it where it is not. 
 
 It is only superficially remarkable that Cooper should 
 have been over thirty when he wrote his first story. Had 
 he possessed the native temperament of the literary 
 artist, he certainly would not have deferred experimen 
 tation so long. Nor would he, probably, if he had had 
 to cast about for a livelihood, or if his environment had 
 been other than it was. But to determine the literary 
 vocation of a man of literary genius, yet nevertheless a 
 man who had been occupied in wholly unliterary pur 
 suits until so ripe a maturity as his, the accident of a 
 whim was not only an appropriate but altogether the 
 most natural cause. "Precaution" was the result of 
 
 4 
 
COOPER 
 
 such an accident. It has no other merit, but it estab 
 lished the fact, which apparently he had never suspected, 
 that he had the gift of improvisation; and when he 
 found his material, in his next book, he produced a 
 work that established his reputation as a writer of 
 romance. He did much better, as he did far worse, 
 afterward, but "The Spy" is eminently characteristic. 
 It betrays his faults very nearly all of them, I think 
 and most of his virtues. It signalized the entrance into 
 the field of romance, in the fulness of untried but un 
 common powers, of a born story-teller. This he was 
 first of all. Some of his stories are dull, but they are 
 never not stories. He belongs, accordingly, in the same 
 category with Scott and Dumas and George Sand, and 
 in general, the writers whose improvising imagination 
 is a conspicuous if not their preponderant faculty a 
 faculty which, though it may sometimes weary others, 
 seems itself never to tire. 
 
 To be one of the great romancers of the world is, in -ft\JAA HI 
 itself, a distinction. But there is more than one kind $+. y&s 
 of romance, and Cooper s has the additional interest 
 of reality. It is based on very solid substance. It is 
 needless to say that it has no interest of literary form 
 such as distinguishes, though it may not preserve, the 
 exhilarating sophistication of Stevenson. It quite lacks 
 the spiritual fancy of Hawthorne, the inventive extrava 
 gance of Poe, the verve of Dumas s opulent irresponsi 
 bility, the reach and scope of Scott s massive imagina 
 tiveness, the richness and beauty of George Sand s 
 poetic improvisation. It has, however, on its side a 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 certain advantage in being absolutely native to its 
 material. More than any other writer of "tales" 
 Cooper fused romance and realism. His books are 
 flights of the imagination, strictly so-called, and at the 
 same time the human documents which it has been left 
 to a later age thus to label. There is not a character, 
 not an incident, in Cooper that could be accused of ex- 
 aggeration from the standpoint of rationality. And yet 
 ^ e Breeze of adventure blows through his pages as if he 
 had no care whatever for truth and fact. Second, no 
 doubt, to Scott in romantic imaginativeness, he is even 
 his superior in the illusion which gives his books an un- 
 pretentious and convincing air of relating rather than of 
 inventing, of keeping within bounds and essaying no 
 literary flights of, as Arnold said in eulogy of German 
 poetry, "going near the ground." 
 
 II 
 
 The circumstances of his life explain the characteristics 
 t)f his books with even more completeness than circum- 
 P> Stances as has now become a commonplace explain 
 -J^ everything, and constitute as well as alter cases. He had 
 j)^ VL little systematic education. His character was developed 
 and affirmed before his mind was either trained or 
 i - r . .^stored. His taste naturally suffered. Taste is the prod- 
 ip* uct of tradition, and of tradition he was quite indepen 
 dent, quite ignorant. Fortunately, he was also ignorant 
 of its value, and when at thirty he began to produce 
 literature his energy was unhampered by diffidence. 
 
 6 
 
COOPER 
 
 But it was inevitable that the literature he produced 
 should be extremely unliterary, and noticeably so in pro 
 portion to its power. The fact that he was thirty before 
 he took up his pen is proof enough that he was not a 
 literary genius, proof enough, indeed, that his talent was 
 not distinctively a literary talent. He had not even a 
 tincture of bookishness. Of the art of literature he had 
 perhaps never heard. It was quite possible in his day 
 singular as it may seem in ours not to hear of it. 
 He indulged in no youthful experimentation in it, unlike 
 Irving. He left school early and was a sailor, a man of 
 business, a gentleman of more or less leisure enough, 
 at all events, to encourage a temperament that was aris 
 tocratic and critical, and not in the least speculative, 
 adventurous, and aesthetic. 
 
 What encouragement the literary temperament could ^ 
 find, too, in the America of his youth is well known. "* %*&** 
 The conditions drove Irving abroad, and made a recluse ^tfo& ^ 
 of Hawthorne. Cooper throve under them. They (fo* 
 suited his genius, and when he had once started he ~ 
 worked freely in them. He was personally interested in 
 life, in people, in social and political phenomena, in 
 American history and promise, American traits as al 
 ready determined, American ideas and "institutions," in 
 the country itself, its lakes and woods and plains and 
 seashore, its mountains and rivers, as well as its cities 
 and " settlements " as Leatherstocking calls them. At 
 least until he began "The Spy" he had never thought of 
 all this as "material," if, indeed, he ever did afterward 
 in the express and aesthetic sense in which, for ex- 
 
 7 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 ample, Stevenson would have regarded it. He was its 
 historian, its critic, its painter, in his own view. He 
 classed his books as works of the imagination in the 
 rather conventional and limited sense in virtue of which 
 fiction is necessarily, and by definition, imaginative. 
 His "art" was for him the art of story-telling, in which 
 
 e cnaracters an d incidents are imagined instead of 
 being real. That his fiction was imaginative rather than 
 merely imagined, I mean, probably never occurred to 
 him. He never philosophized about it at all, and as he 
 began it by conscious imitation of convention, continued 
 it conventionally, so far as his procedure was conscious. 
 As he wrote "Precaution" to determine whether or no 
 he "could write a novel," he wrote "The Pilot" to prove 
 that he could write a more seamanlike tale than "The 
 Pirate" of Scott. He continued to write story after 
 story, because he had made a success of story-telling, 
 and demonstrated it to be his vocation. 
 
 But story-telling did not absorb his interests. He 
 wrote other things, too. He has decided rank as a pub 
 licist. And he spoiled some of his novels by his pre 
 occupations of that kind although, indeed, he gave 
 value and solidity to others of them in the same way; 
 "The Bravo" is, for example, as strong a story as "The 
 Ways of the Hour" is weak. Distinctly what we should 
 call " unliterary ," however, his point of view remained, 
 as it had been at the outset. Without the poetic or 
 artistic temperament at least in sufficiently controlling 
 force to stimulate self-expression before almost middle 
 life he subsisted in an environment, both personal and 
 
 8 
 
COOPER 
 
 national, so hostile to the aesthetic and academic as to 
 color what manifestations of these it suffered at all with 
 a decidedly provincial tinge. The conjunction was 
 fortunate. If it was responsible for a long list of the 
 most unliterary works by any writer of eminence in 
 any literature as I suppose Cooper s may be called it 
 nevertheless produced an author of acknowledged 
 power and indisputable originality, whose force and 
 vitality are as markedly native and personal as their 
 various manifestations are at times superficial, careless, 
 and conventional. In a word, Cooper was, if not a 
 great writer, a man of conspicuously large mental andj 
 moral stature, of broad vision, of wide horizon, of inde-| ^ $ 
 pendent philosophy. 
 
 His prolixity is perhaps his worst fault; it is, at all y . 
 
 events, the source of the worst fault his novels have, the (^ W*& 
 heaviest handicap a novel can have namely, their ^l^ 
 tedium. To begin with, hardly one of them is without 
 its tiresome character. Not a few have more than one. 
 Few of his best characters avoid tedium at times; at 
 times even Leatherstocking is a bore. Cooper must 
 himself, in actual life, have been fond of bores. Perhaps 
 his irascibility was soothed by studying this particular 
 foible of his fellows. The trait is to be suspected in 
 other writers of fiction; Scott, for example. For my 
 own part, I recall no character in Cooper as tiresome as 
 some of "Scott s bores," as they are proverbially called. 
 Cooper, however, in this respect is, in general, unsur 
 passed. The Scotch doctor in "The Spy," the Dutch 
 father in "The Water-Witch," the Italian disputants in 
 
 9 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 " Wing-and-Wing," the crack-brained psalmodist in 
 "The Last of the Mohicans" but it is idle to specify, 
 the list is too long. 
 
 It is true that to represent a bore adequately a novelist 
 cannot avoid making him tiresome. That is his raison 
 d etre, and for a novelist nihil humani can be alienum. 
 But Terence himself would have modified his maxim if 
 he could have foreseen Cooper s addiction to this especial 
 genus. And, as I say, some of the best and most inter 
 esting of his personages prose at times interminably: 
 the Pathfinder talking about his own and Killdeer s 
 merits at the prize-shooting, not a few, indeed, of the 
 deliverances of this star character of Cooper s entire 
 company are hard to bear. And both the bores who 
 are so explicitly and, thus, exhaustively exhibited as 
 such and the non-bores who nevertheless so frequently 
 bore us have the painful and monotonous family re 
 semblance of all being tiresome in one way in pro 
 lixity. They are really not studied very closely as 
 bores or as occasionally tiresome personages, but are 
 extremely simplified by being represented merely as 
 long-winded. No shades of character, no particular 
 and individual weaknesses are illustrated by their 
 prolixity. Their prolixity is itself the trait that dis 
 tinguishes them. 
 
 The conclusion is inevitable that his characters are 
 often so prolix and often such prolix characters because 
 which also we know to be the fact Cooper himself 
 was. Speaking of the unreadable "Mercedes of Cas 
 tile," Professor Lounsbury truly says that the author 
 
 10 
 
COOPER 
 
 is as long getting under way with his story as Columbus 
 himself was in arranging for his voyage. And though 
 this inexplicable novel is probably his dullest, there are 
 few others that do not contain long passages whose , *t 
 redundancy is remorseless. He has no standards. He *! 
 feels no responsibility. He never thinks of the reader. 
 He follows his own inclination completely, quite without 
 concern for company, one must conclude. There was 
 no tribunal whose judgments he had to consider; there 
 was no censure to be dreaded, no praise he had to try to 
 earn by being other than his own disposition prompted, 
 by being more simple, more concise, more respectful 
 of the reader s intelligence no ideal of perfection, in 
 short, at which the pressure of current criticism con 
 strained him to aim. And of technical perfection in 
 any but its broadest details such as general composi 
 tion and construction he had no notion. His pace 
 was leisurely, because such was his habit of mind, and 
 there was nothing extraneous to hasten it. He lingered 
 because he liked to, and his public was not impatient. 
 He repeated because he enjoyed repetition, and there 
 was no one to wince at it. He was as elaborate in com 
 monplace as the dilettante can be in paradox because 
 novelty as such did not attract nor familiarity repel 
 either himself or his public. As to literary standards, 
 the times have certainly changed since his day. In 
 literary performance there is perhaps an occasional re 
 minder that the tendency to prolixity still subsists. 
 And in actual life! but, of course, changes in \ho] 
 macrocosm are naturally more gradual. 
 
 11 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 
 Yet even our own time may profitably inquire how it 
 is that Cooper s popularity has triumphed so completely 
 over so grave a fault. Largely, I think, it is due to the 
 fact that the fault is a " literary" that is to say, a 
 technical defect, and is counterbalanced by the vitality 
 and largeness of the work of which it, too, is a character 
 istic. It is far from negligible. On the contrary, it is, 
 however accounted for, the chief obstacle that prevents 
 Cooper from attaining truly classic rank the rank 
 never quite attained by any one destitute of the sense 
 of form, the feeling for perfection which is what makes 
 art artistic, however inane or insubstantial it may be. 
 But Cooper s technical blemishes are in no danger of 
 being neglected. As Thackeray said impatiently of 
 Macaulay s, "What critic can t point them out?" To 
 point out Cooper s is so easy that his critics are singularly 
 apt to sag into caricature in the process. Nevertheless, 
 though it is indubitable that his prolixity is a grave de 
 fect, it is important to remember that it is a formal 
 rather than a substantial one, and that in popular 
 esteem it has been more than counterbalanced by com 
 pensations of substance. What is less evident, but 
 what is still more worth indicating, is that there is, 
 speaking somewhat loosely, a certain artistic fitness in 
 his diffuseness, and that this is probably the main rea 
 son why it has so slightly diminished not only his pop 
 ularity, but his legitimate fame. It is, in a word, and 
 except in its excess, an element of his illusion. And 
 in a sense, thus, it is rather a quality than a defect of 
 his work. His illusion is incontestable. No writer of 
 
 12 
 
COOPER 
 
 romance has more. It is simply impossible to praise 
 him too highly here. And where the effect is so plainly 
 secured one may properly divine some native felicity 
 in the cause, however, abstractly considered, inade 
 quate to anything such a cause may seem. 
 
 m 
 
 Cooper is usually called the American Scott in a sense 
 that implies his indebtedness to Scott as a model and a 
 master. His romances are esteemed imitations of the 
 Waverley Novels, differing from their originals as all 
 imitations do in having less energy, less spontaneity of 
 necessity, therefore, less originality. This is to consider 
 mere surface resemblance. How much or how little 
 Cooper owed to Scott is a question for the literary histo 
 rian rather than the critic. Doubtless he copied Scott in 
 various practical ways. Romance had received a stamp, 
 a cachet, from Scott that, devoted to the same genre, it 
 was impossible to ignore. Scott s own derivation may be 
 defined quite as clearly, and the record of it is, like sim 
 ilar studies, one that has its uses. But for other than di 
 dactic purposes it is the contrast rather than the resem 
 blance, even, between him and Cooper that is pertinent. 
 It is misleading to compare them in any sense which 
 implies that Cooper s originality is in any way inferior. 
 It is idle to characterize so voluminous a writer as imita 
 tive. Whatever its initial impetus imitation will not 
 furnish the momentum for forty volumes. Cooper s 
 inspiration is as genuine, his zest as great, his genius as 
 
 13 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 individual, as Scott s own. He was less of an artist. 
 He was nothing at all of a poet at least, in any con 
 structional sense. It is simply impossible to fancy him 
 essaying verse. Even balladry, even rhyming, is beyond 
 
 him. 
 
 "Tunstall lies dead upon the field, 
 His life-blood stains the spotless shield;" 
 
 there is not a note like that in his equipment. For a 
 writer of romance the defect is grave. Nor did he know 
 the world of society as Scott knew it. Any one who 
 can take literally Scott s generous compliment to Miss 
 Austen must never have read "St. Ronan s Well." 
 Neither did he inhabit the same world of the imagina 
 tion. If he had far less temperament he had also far 
 less culture. His environment forbade it; and he lived 
 in the present. His conservatism was a rationalized 
 liberalism nothing akin to the instinctive toryism that 
 made it natural for Scott to poetize history. And con 
 sequently his environment and his genius combined to 
 confine him in the main to a field which, however inter 
 esting in itself, is incontestably inferior to the grandiose 
 theatre of Scott s fiction. A splendid historical pageant 
 winds its way through the Waverley Novels, with which 
 nothing that the pioneer America of Cooper s day fur 
 nished could compare. 
 
 It is, indeed, in his material that Cooper presents the 
 greatest possible contrast to Scott. It is vain, I think, 
 for American chauvinism itself to deny that our civiliza 
 tion is less romantic than an older one, than that of 
 Europe. To begin with, it has less background, and, as 
 
 14 
 
COOPER 
 
 Stevenson pointed out, romanticism in literature largely 
 consists in consciousness of the background. Nothing, 
 it is true, is more romantic than nature, except nature 
 plus man. But the exception is prodigious. Nature in 
 Cooper counts as romantically as she does in Scott, but 
 it is nature without memories, without monuments, with 
 out associations. Man, too, with him, though count 
 ing on the whole as romantically, does not count as 
 background. His figures are necessarily foreground 
 figures. They are not relieved against the wonderful 
 tapestry of the past. In a word, there is necessarily 
 little history in Cooper. Of course, there is "The 
 Bravo," as admirable a tale as "Mercedes of Castile" 
 is an unprofitable one. But the mass of Cooper s most 
 admirable accomplishment is thoroughly and fortunately 
 American, and compared with Europe America has no 
 history. Scott s material in itself, thus, constitutes an 
 incontestable romantic superiority. For fiction history 
 provides offhand a whole world for the exercise of the 
 imagination. 
 
 It may undoubtedly be urged that a romantic situa 
 tion is such in virtue of its elements and not of its asso 
 ciations; that the escape of Uncas from the Hurons in 
 "The Last of the Mohicans" is as romantic as Edward 
 Waverley s visit to the cave of Donald Bean Lean. Or 
 to consider more profoundly, it may be said that, looking 
 within, Hawthorne found in the spiritual drama of New 
 England Puritanism the very quintessence of the roman 
 tic, thrown into all the sharper relief by its excessively 
 austere and arid environment that is to say, by a 
 
 15 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 featureless and thoroughly imromantic background. 
 Still, in considering the mass of a writer s work its 
 romantic interest is not to be admeasured mainly by its 
 situations, or its psychology, but by the texture of its 
 entire fabric. And owing to its wealth of imaginative 
 association, the romance of the Waverley Novels is in 
 dubitably deeper, richer, more important than that of 
 the Leatherstocking Tales. Bernardin de Saint Pierre 
 passes for the father of French literary romanticism, for 
 instance, but it can be only in a purely poetic or very 
 technical sense that "Paul et Virginie" can be called 
 as romantically important as "The Cloister and the 
 Hearth." 
 
 There is a quality in Cooper s romance, however, 
 that gives it as romance an almost unique distinction. 
 I mean jts_ solid alliance with_reality. It is thoroughly 
 romantic, and yet very likely owing to his imaginative 
 deficiency, if anything can be so owing it produces, for 
 romance, an almost unequalled illusion of life itself. 
 This writer, one says to one s self, who was completely 
 unconscious of either the jargon or the philosophy of 
 "art," and who had but a primitively romantic civil 
 ization to deal with, has, nevertheless, in this way 
 produced the rarest, the happiest, artistic result. He 
 looked at his material as so much life; it interested him 
 because of the human elements it contained. Scott 
 viewed his through an incontestably more artistic tem 
 perament, as romantic material. "Quentin Durward" 
 is, it is true, a masterpiece and, to take an analogous 
 novel of Cooper s, "The Bravo" is not; the presenta- 
 
 16 
 
COOPER 
 
 tion of the latter s substance is not masterly enough to 
 answer the requirements of a masterpiece ; the substance 
 itself is far less important than the splendid historical 
 picture, with its famous historical portraits, that Scott 
 has painted in his monumental work. But Scott was 
 inspired, precisely, by the epic potentialities for paint 
 ing and portraiture of the struggle between Louis and 
 Charles and its extraordinarily picturesque accessories. 
 Cooper s theme was the effect of oligarchical tyranny 
 on the social and political life of Venice at the acme 
 of her fame and glory. Humanly speaking, "The 
 Bravo" has more meaning. Historical portraiture 
 aside, I do not think there is in "Quentin Durward" 
 the sense of actual life and its significance that one gets 
 from the tragedy of Jacopo Frontoni s heroic story and 
 the picture of the vicious Venetian state whose sway 
 corrupted "alike the ruler and the ruled" and where 
 "each lived for himself." The gist of the latter book 
 is more serious; it is conceived more in the modern man 
 ner; it is not a mere panorama of mediaeval panoply 
 and performance, but a romance with a thesis at least 
 so much of a thesis as any highly concentrated epoch 
 must suggest to a thinking and reflective, instead of a 
 merely seeing and feeling student of its phenomena. 
 
 Cooper s genius was a thinking and reflective one. 
 He was certainly not a meditative philosopher, but it 
 was life that interested him and not story-telling as such, 
 even if he might at times get less life and more conven 
 tion into his books than a romancer pur sang. The 
 essence of his romance is that there is no routine in his 
 
 17 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 substance only in its presentation. His central theme, 
 his main substance, is, like Scott s, his native land. As 
 a romancer his whole attitude toward the pioneer civili 
 sation he depicted was one of sympathetic and intelli 
 gent interest. He was an observer, a spectator, suffi 
 ciently detached to view his subject in the requisite 
 perspective. Some of it he caricatured, and he was op 
 pressively didactic in some of his poorer books. But that 
 proceeded from his constitutional limitations as an artist. 
 On the whole his general and personal interest in the life 
 he depicted makes his account of it solider art, gives his 
 romance even, as I said, more substance and meaning 
 than Scott s historiography. It is more nearly "criti 
 cism of life" than the result of a romantic temperament 
 dealing in a purely romantic way with purely romantic 
 elements can be. It is true that Tory as he was, Scott 
 held the balance very true in his pictures of the Cavalier 
 and Roundhead, the Stuart and Hanoverian, contests. 
 But there is more of the philosophy of the latter struggle 
 in "The Two Admirals" than there is in "Waverley" 
 itself. 
 
 In "Waverley" the romantic element of the struggle 
 between the legitimist and the legitimate parties, as we 
 may say, is powerfully set forth, the passionate ardor of 
 the one and the practical good sense of the other effec 
 tively contrasted, though largely by indirection and in an 
 accessory way. In "Wyandotte" the antagonism be 
 tween Tory and patriot, between the British and the 
 American partisan, is given far more relief. It is not 
 used merely as a romantic element, tragically dividing a 
 
 18 
 
COOPER 
 
 household as it does, but exhibited as a clash of states 
 of mind, of feeling, of conscience, of tradition. It is 
 the subject, or at least a part of the subject, not mainly 
 a contribution to its color. The reader notes the reasons 
 that made Major Willoughby a loyalist and Captain 
 Beekman a patriot. The book is a picture of the times, 
 as well as a story, in presenting not only the action but 
 the thinking of the times. One remarks in it that there 
 wore "issues" then as well as events. And, of course, 
 with Cooper s noteworthy largeness they are presented 
 with due impartiality, and in this way, too, acquire a 
 sense of verisimilitude and a value that treatment of 
 them as solely romantic elements could not secure. 
 
 And in the way of pure romance romance quite 
 independent of any associations of time and place there 
 are novels of Cooper that are unsurpassed. For an 
 example of this element, in virtue of which, after all, 
 Cooper s tales have made the tour of the world, take the 
 introductory book of the famous Leatherstocking Tales. 
 "The Deerslayer" is, indeed, a delightful romance, full 
 of imaginative interest, redolent of the woods, compact 
 of incident, and alive with suspense. How many times 
 has the genuine lover of Cooper paid it the tribute of a 
 rereading? For such a reader every small lake in the 
 woods is a Glimmerglass; around its points might at 
 any moment appear one of old Hutter s canoes; at any 
 moment down on yonder sand-spit Le Loup Cervier 
 might issue from the underbrush; in a clearing beyond 
 the nearer tree-tops the Deerslayer might so easily be 
 bound to the stake, be looking into the rifle barrel of his 
 
 19 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 torturer reassured by his expert knowledge and sang 
 froid to note its ever so slight deflection from a fatal aim ! 
 "Treasure Island"? A literary tour de force, not only 
 suspiciously clever (aside from the admirable beginning), 
 but so easy not to go on with, so little illusory! "La 
 Dame de Monsoreau " ? Pure melodrama, impossible 
 of realization even on the stage, its unreality certain of 
 exposure even by the friendly histrionic test. Quite 
 without the aid of a "literary" presentation, quite with 
 out the supplement of historic suggestion and a monu 
 mental background, the romance of "The Deerslayer" 
 is, nevertheless, so intrinsic, so essential, and so per 
 vasive as to give the work commanding rank in its class. 
 No tinsel, literary or other, accentuates its simplicity, 
 and no footlight illumination colors its freshness. 
 Cooper is hardly to be called a poet, as I have said. 
 Yet "The Deerslayer s " romance is, in the net impres 
 sion it leaves, in the resultant effect of its extraordinary 
 visualization of wild and lovely material, as poetic as 
 Chateaubriand s, and fully as effective as that of any 
 work of Scott. 
 
 IV 
 
 a. 
 
 The verisimilitude of Cooper s Indians has been the 
 
 main point of attack of his caricaturing critics. None 
 of them has failed to have his fling at this. It is ex 
 traordinary what a convention his assumed idealization 
 of the Indian has become. I say extraordinary, because 
 it is the fact that the so-called "noble red man," whom 
 he is popularly supposed to have invented, does not 
 
 20 
 
COOPER 
 
 exist in his books at all. Successful or not, his Indians, 
 like his other characters, belong to the realm of attempted A 
 
 portraiture of racial types, and are, in intention, at all <*w| 7 
 events, in no wise purely romantic creations. 
 
 If they were they would, of course, be superabund 
 antly justified. Ethnology might be reminded that fic 
 tion is, to some extent, at least, outside its jurisdiction. 
 The claims of history are far higher, but only a pedant 
 sneers at "Ivanhoe," in which Freeman asserted there 
 was an error on every page, though this is undeniably 
 regrettable; and, in recent times, certainly, the great 
 Dumas is not asked to be otherwise, though a reader 
 here and there may be found who would give him higher 
 rank had he been something other. The introduction 
 into literature of the North American Indian, consid 
 ered merely as a romantic element, was an important 
 event in the history of fiction. He was an unprece 
 dented and a unique figure at least on the scale and 
 with the vividness with which he is depicted in Cooper, 
 for the Indians of Mrs. Behn and Voltaire and Cha 
 teaubriand can in comparison hardly be said to count 
 at all. They are incarnated abstractions didactically 
 inspired for the most part; L Inge nu, the virtuous, 
 for example, being no more than an expedient for the 
 contrasted exhibition of civilized vices. But Cooper s 
 Indians, whatever their warrant in truth, were notable 
 actors in the picturesque drama of pioneer storm and 
 stress. They stand out in individual as well as racial 
 relief, like his other personages, American, English, 
 French, and Italian, and discharge their roles in idio- 
 
 21 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 syncratic, as well as in energetic, fashion. To object to 
 them on the ground that, like Don Quixote and Athos, 
 the Black Knight and Saladin, Uncle Toby and Dal- 
 getty, they are ideal types without actual analogues 
 would be singularly ungracious. 
 
 However, they are not ideal types, but depend for 
 their validity in large degree on their reality of portraiture 
 as well as on their romantic interest. As I say, they 
 stand on the same ground as Cooper s other characters, 
 and share with them the seriousness a close correspon 
 dence to life gives to fiction that has a realistic basis, 
 however great its romantic interest may also be. They 
 are not in the least "ideal" personages. Cooper does 
 not, to be sure, take quite the cowboy view of the Indian, 
 and people with a smattering of pioneering who regard 
 the cowboy as an expert in Indians and echo his opinion 
 that " the only good Indian is a dead one," may find him 
 unduly discriminating. Still, the cowboy s ethnological 
 experience is, after all, limited, and the frontiersman of 
 recent years has had to deal not with the Indian of the 
 time of Cooper s tales, but with his descendants de 
 moralized by contact with his censors, to say nothing 
 of the "century of dishonor." Cooper s view is cer 
 tainly that the Indian is human. But the fact which is 
 so generally lost sight of is that the "noble red man" 
 the fictitious character he is charged with inventing 
 is not to be found in his pages. In general he endows 
 the Indian with traits that would be approved as authen 
 tic even by the ranchman, the rustler, or the army 
 officer. His Indians are in the main epitomized in 
 
 22 
 
COOPER 
 
 Magua. And in the mass the race is depicted pretty 
 much as Hawkeye conceived the Mingoes of the Mo 
 hawk Valley and Leatherstocking the Sioux of the 
 prairies "varmints" one and all. The exceptions are 
 few. There are the Delawares, Chingachgook and 
 Uncas, Conanchet, and the Pawnee Hardheart hardly 
 any others of importance. And the "goodness" of 
 these is always carefully characterized as sui generis. 
 The difference between their moral "gifts," as Leather- 
 stocking often enough points out, and those of the 
 white man is always made to appear as radical. The 
 most "idealized" of them is shown as possessing pas 
 sions and governed by a code that sharply distinguish 
 him from a white of analogous superiority to his fellows. 
 Nor is his ability exaggerated. In spite of his special 
 senses, developed by his life in peace and war, his wood 
 craft and physical prowess, when it comes to the pinch 
 in any case his inferiority to the white man is generally 
 marked. So far from being untruthful idealizations 
 Cooper s little group of "good Indians" is in both qual 
 ity and importance considerably below what a writer 
 not actuated by the truly realistic purpose that was 
 always his would be justified in depicting as representa 
 tive of the best specimens of the Indian race. The his 
 tory of this country abounds in figures from Massasoit 
 to Brant, from Osceola to Joseph, of moral and mental 
 stature hardly emulated by any of Cooper s aborigines. 
 The only approach to them is in the sage Tamenund of 
 the Lenni Lenape, who is introduced at a great age, and 
 with failing faculties almost extinct. Chingachgook 
 
 23 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 dies a drunkard as old Indian John. Uncas is slain 
 when a mere youth, before his character is thoroughly 
 developed. Conanchet proves untamable by the best of 
 white influences. Wyandotte preserves his fundamental 
 treachery and vengefulness through years of faithful 
 service to the family to which he is attached. Catlin, 
 who passed his life among the Indians, took a far more 
 favorable view of them. 
 
 The truth is that not only is Indian character not mis 
 represented by Copper, at least in being idealized, but 
 his Indian characters are as carefully studied and as suc 
 cessfully portrayed as his white ones. Their psychology 
 even is set forth with as much definition. They are as 
 much personalities and differ from each other as much. 
 Representatives of a single tribe have their marked in 
 dividual differences. The Hurons Rivenoak and Le 
 Renard Subtil have but a family resemblance. With 
 the naturally greater simplicity of the savage they are, 
 nevertheless, not represented without the complexities 
 that constitute and characterize the individual. The 
 Tuscarora who enters the room where a mortal struggle 
 is taking place, extinguishes the light, and, one against 
 a dozen, slays the enemies of the white household he 
 serves, in a fray as dramatic as, and far more credible 
 than, the famous fatal fight of the Chevalier de Bussy, is 
 a genuine hero. Yet he is the same man who, for in 
 justice long since forgotten by all but himself, murders 
 his benefactor in absolute cold blood. And the incon 
 sistency is not an anomaly. It is an Indian trait. In 
 
 short, Cooper s Indians are at once Indians to the^coge, 
 
 
 
COOPER 
 
 and thoroughly individualized as well._ The "stock" 
 Indian is no more to be found in his books than the 
 "ideal" primitive hero. He has added to the tradi 
 tional material of romance an entire race of human 
 beings, possessing in common the romantic elements of 
 strangeness and savagery, but also illustrating a dis 
 tinctive and coherent racial character. 
 
 " If Cooper, "said Balzac, " had succeeded in the paint 
 ing of character as well as he did in the painting of the 
 phenomena of nature he would have uttered the last 
 word of our art." The phenomena of nature considered 
 as material for literary art probably seem less important, 
 less apt, at any rate, nowadays than they did in Balzac s 
 time. In France especially the generation to which 
 Chateaubriand remained an inspiration esteemed them 
 in a degree that appears to us exaggerated. They were 
 much more of a novelty, to begin with. The eighteenth 
 century, even in England, had certainly little minded 
 them. And certainly they are well handled by Cooper. 
 Nowhere else has prose rendered the woods and the sea 
 so vividly, so splendidly, so adequately and so simply. 
 Too much can hardly be said of this element of the sea 
 stories and the Leatherstocking Tales. But there is a 
 peculiarity in Cooper s view and treatment of nature. 
 Nature was to him a grandiose manifestation of the 
 Creator s benevolence and power, a vision of beauty and 
 force unrolled by Omnipotence, but a panorama, not a 
 
 25 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 presence. There was nothing Wordsworthian, nothing 
 pantheistic in his feeling for her for "it" he would 
 have said. No flower ever gave him thoughts that lay 
 too deep for tears. He was at one with nature as Dr. 
 Johnson was with London. There is something ex 
 tremely tonic and natural in the simplicity of such an 
 attitude, and as a romancer the reality and soundness 
 of it stood Cooper in good stead. It is due to it that 
 nature in his books is an environment, an actual me 
 dium, in which his personages live and move rather than 
 a background against which they are relieved, or a rival 
 to which their interest yields. It is the theatre of their 
 action. It simply never occurs to Cooper to "paint the 
 phenomena of nature" except as thus related to his 
 people or their story though generally more closely re 
 lated than an accessory, and never less so than an atmos 
 phere. But he knew the sea and the woods, and felt 
 them as no other romancer has ever done, and he 
 made such distinguished use of them as abundantly to 
 merit Balzac s eulogy. 
 
 To say, however, that he did not succeed in the 
 painting of character as in a domain wherein he was 
 unrivalled is not to depreciate his portraiture. And 
 certainly Balzac s meaning is merely that in the one 
 field his excellence was unique and in the other it was 
 not. Balzac, moreover, exaggerated, as I have inti 
 mated, the value for fiction of painting the phenomena 
 of nature; he meant his praise to be very high praise in 
 deed, and it would greatly have surprised him, we may 
 be sure, to have had any one, as has since been done, 
 
 26 
 
COOPER 
 
 take his reference to Cooper s powers of portraiture as 
 depreciatory, as a putting of his finger on Cooper s 
 weak point. He adored Cooper. His admiration of 
 him was not undiscriminating any more than any 
 other of his admirations. But his enthusiasm for him 
 at his best even at his second best was unbounded. 
 "The Pathfinder," says his latest biographer, M. Andre* 
 Le Breton, "lui arrachait de veritables rugissements de 
 plaisir et d admiration." It is idle to refer Balzac s 
 "rugissements de plaisir" at any rate as late as 1840 
 altogether to the "painting of k the phenomena of 
 nature." It is true that what captivated him especially 
 perhaps was the life in general that Cooper depicted 
 the wild, free, savage life of the frontier, easily para 
 disaic (in idea!) to a Parisian. "Oh," he says in a 
 letter of 1830, "to lead the life of a Mohican, to run 
 over the rocks, to swim the sea, to breathe the free air, 
 the sun! Oh, how I have conceived the savage! Oh, 
 how admirably I have understood the pirates, the ad 
 venturers, their lives of opposition and outlawry! 
 There, I said to myself, life is courage, good rifles, the 
 art of navigating in the wide ocean, and the hatred of 
 men." And ten years later his enthusiasm was quite 
 as great. But it is naive to suppose that what made 
 this "life" so attractive to Balzac was in the last analysis 
 anything else than the people who lived it. In "Jack 
 Tier," for example, the phenomena of nature are as 
 effectively depicted as in the somewhat analogous 
 "Red Rover." What makes the book itself less effec 
 tive? Mainly the comparative inferiority of the char- 
 
 27 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 acters, though the story, it is true, is less heroic and 
 though some of the characters are very good indeed. 
 However, here is Balzac s own estimate of Leather- 
 1 stocking: "Je ne sais pas si Voeuvre de Walter Scott 
 fournit une creation aussi grandiose que celle de ce heros 
 Ides savanes et des forets." And though, in speaking of 
 Cooper and Scott, he says "I un est Vhistorien de la 
 nature, Vautre de I humanite" the antithesis is doubt 
 less due to the greater prominence of nature in Cooper s 
 works as in his material, to Cooper s artistic inferiority, 
 and to the vaster stage of the Waverley drama to say 
 nothing of the charms for Balzac of antithesis in itself. 
 Cooper, continues M. Le Breton, after citing the above 
 phrase, is not less than Scott "a great painter of man 
 ners," and "I fear," he says, later, "that the usurers of 
 Balzac, his lawyers, bankers, and notaries, owe too 
 much to the sojourn his imagination had made in the 
 cabin of Leatherstocking or the wigwam of Chingach- 
 gook, and that there are in the Comedie Humaine too 
 many Mohicans in spencers or Hurons in frock-coats." 
 The criticism of Balzac is sound enough, but the 
 compliment to Cooper is equally clear. To have shared 
 with Scott the derivation of "the master of us all," as 
 Mr. Henry James calls Balzac (who has other titles to 
 fame, but in the light of a provenience from Cooper 
 none so piquant), of itself constitutes a position in the 
 hierarchy of fiction. And in so far as Balzac does 
 derive from Cooper, he does so in virtue of Cooper s 
 realism. His Mohicans in spencers and Hurons in 
 frock-coats really testify to the vivid reality of Cooper s 
 
 28 
 
COOPER 
 
 characters, which so impressed the great French realist 
 as to lead him to transfer to the boulevards in uncon 
 scious caricature the types which in their native environ 
 ment possessed a vitality energetic enough to impose 
 imitation even on a romancer of whose greatness origi 
 nality is a conspicuous trait. 
 
 Interesting testimony, however, to the force and truth 
 of Cooper s characters as Balzac s authoritative approval 
 and their influence on his own are, it is interesting 
 only in an authoritative way, and as counterbalancing 
 the judgment of critics of less weight. The char 
 acters are there to speak for themselves to any reader, 
 as they spoke to Balzac. Sainte-Beuve praises them 
 without reserve. In reviewing an early work he speaks 
 enthusiastically of Cooper s" faculte* cr^atrice qui enfante 
 et met au monde des caracteres nouveaux, et en vertu 
 de laquelle Rabelais a produit Panurge, Le Sage Gil 
 Bias/ et Richardson Clarissa. " They certainly differ 
 in value and solidity, and not only because the types 
 they represent or the conceptions they incarnate so dif 
 fer, but in what for the sake of clearness may be called 
 the un-Shakespearean way of being characterized with 
 varying effectiveness. Balzac notes the inferiority of 
 his secondary personages to those of Scott which is 
 true only of his conventional secondary personages, I 
 think. For these he had not the zest that the true artist 
 has in all his creations. His personages interested him 
 personally or not at all. And when he has no interest 
 he is the last word of the perfunctory. But it is cer 
 tainly true that he is nowhere less perfunctory than in 
 
 29 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 the creation of character, and that as a rule even his 
 secondary characters adequately fill the r6le assigned 
 to them. Even if they are not made much of, even if he 
 does not, as the French expression is, les faire valoir, 
 they are real enough. They are the exact analogues of 
 the negligible folk one meets in life. 
 
 There are, however, those who, appreciating Cooper s 
 success with Leatherstocking, with Long Tom Coffin, 
 with Betty Flanagan, and others, have maintained that 
 it is with low life only that he is successful, and that he 
 fails when he attempts to depict the higher social types. 
 The view is a superficial one. It is in general a super 
 ficial or else an insignificant view when taken of a writer 
 of conspicuous distinction in character portrayal. Char 
 acter is character. There are not two kinds of it, 
 high and low, except in the sense in which youth and 
 old age, for example, may be said to differ in character. 
 There is as much and as little of it at one end of the 
 social scale as at the other. What types a writer with 
 an eye for it and a faculty for effectively embodying 
 his conception of it will best succeed in depends 
 upon his experience. When Cooper wrote his experi 
 mental English novel "Precaution" he was writing of 
 something he knew nothing about. In "The Spy" 
 and "The Pioneer," which followed it, the gentry are 
 as good as the humble folk. Leatherstocking and 
 Betty Flanagan are effective largely because they are 
 picturesque, and it is in the lower walks of life that the 
 picturesque is especially to be found. And romance 
 deals largely in the picturesque. 
 
 30 
 
COOPER 
 
 Of course temperament is to some extent a factor 
 in determining the types that an author treats most 
 successfully. So great a writer as Dickens, it is true, 
 has sometimes been said to have succeeded best with 
 characters from low life. If one contrasts Lord 
 Frederick Verisopht with Sam Weller one perceives 
 that the author s genius is most at home in the society 
 of the latter. And whatever Dickens s experience his 
 temperament, undoubtedly, led him to depict the lower, 
 with more zest than the upper, ten. He depicted them, 
 however, for the benefit of the upper. And, whatever 
 his feeling for character, his high spirits irresistibly 
 impelled him toward caricature. Naturally a novelist 
 producing caricature for the benefit of the reading 
 classes finds the material readiest to his hand in another 
 class. Naturally, too, a writer of romance and ad 
 venture finds most effective what is, except in its out 
 lines and saliencies, least familiar. Stevenson s read 
 ers would find John Silver rather flat if he were a 
 titular gentleman. Readers aside, moreover, the more 
 civilized, the higher in the social scale, the character 
 is, the less accentuated it is, externally. For romantic 
 purposes, at least for the purposes of realistic romance 
 such as Cooper s, it is normally of inferior interest, for 
 less is apt normally to happen to it. In ideal romance, 
 of course, neither this nor any similar consideration 
 matters. No one expects a character in Dumas or in 
 Disraeli to be in character otherwise than to be con 
 sistent with itself. The ends of realistic romance are 
 better served by the more elemental natures that have 
 
 31 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 not been smoothed and polished into conformity and 
 are independent of convention. The passions that 
 agitate aristocratic bosoms are more sophisticated and 
 their dramatic result is in the domain rather of the 
 novelist of manners or of the psychological novelist 
 than of the realistic romancer. 
 
 Any preponderance of low over high life personages, 
 therefore, among Cooper s successful characters might 
 very well be accounted for by the kind of fiction he 
 wrote. Certainly beyond such as may be thus ac 
 counted for no such preponderance exists. He had 
 simply no talent at all for caricature. His failures 
 when he attempted it are grotesque. For example, the 
 vulgar American journalist in "Homeward Bound." He 
 could no more have invented a Dick Swiveller than 
 he could have imagined Hamlet. But within his 
 range of experience and imagination, one of his char 
 acters is as good as another, so far as the class to which 
 they belong is concerned. The "blue" admiral in 
 "The Two Admirals" is quite as fine in his way as 
 Long Tom Coffin is in his. His type is simply less 
 picturesque. Perhaps, indeed, a fo castle reader, were 
 there such, would think him equally picturesque. In 
 all the nautical novels, in fact, the quarter deck people 
 are quite as well done as the able seamen. Lord 
 Geoffrey Cleveland, the midshipman favorite of Admiral 
 Bluewater, is a charming character. There are a score 
 of lieutenants, most of them of gentle birth and breed 
 ing, that are extraordinarily good, each one of them 
 an individual and no more mere types than the actual 
 
 32 
 
COOPER 
 
 people of one s acquaintance. Griffith, Barnstable, 
 Winchester, Yelverton, Griffin I have my own idea, I 
 confess, of how each of them looks. When "The 
 Pilot" appeared Miss Mitford wrote: "No one but 
 Smollett has ever attempted to delineate the naval 
 character; and then his are so coarse and hard. Now 
 this has the same truth and power with a deep, grand 
 feeling. . . . Imagine the author s boldness in taking 
 Paul Jones for a hero, and his power in making one 
 care for him." This is very true. Cooper does on 
 occasion combine truth, power, and a deep, grand 
 feeling. He was the manliest of men himself and he 
 had a sympathetic sense for what is noble and elevated 
 in character. He found it, to be sure, in the humbler 
 social types, but I think not disproportionately. His 
 patricians are, on the whole, as good as his plebs, so 
 far as verisimilitude is concerned. To find him ex 
 clusively or mainly successful in the characters belong 
 ing to "low life" is, I think, to miss his chief distinction 
 that is to say, his genius for the portrayal of char 
 acter as character, within the limits of his experience 
 and the types his observation suggested to his imagi 
 nation. 
 
 If he had imagined no other character than Leather- 
 stocking, this creation alone would set him in the front 
 rank of the novelists of the world. It is singular that 
 this feat, as it may in justice be called, has brought him 
 so little purely literary recognition. Perhaps it is be 
 cause every one makes Leatherstocking s acquaintance 
 in childhood, and acceptance of him is accordingly 
 
 33 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 perfunctory and unthinking, like that of Robinson 
 Crusoe, for example. No one seems really to reflect 
 on the extraordinary nature of Cooper s accomplish 
 ment. Merit in American literature is the last thing, 
 one would say, that escapes notice at least at home. 
 We have apparently a national disposition to create 
 our geniuses out of hand. Our criticism is geniality 
 itself. It assigns us great writers poets, historians, 
 novelists, critics with the utmost imperturbability, and 
 on the slightest provocation. Certainly in no country, 
 at any epoch, has appreciation of its own men of letters 
 been as ready or, as one may say, so energetic. The 
 predisposition in their favor is perhaps the most per 
 sistent survival from days pungently depicted by 
 Cooper, who seems, in this respect, too, to have few 
 successors in which it was a wide-spread belief that 
 on any battlefield we could "lick all creation." Yet 
 here is an American literary possession that really 
 ranks with all but the greatest, who is never thought of 
 when our literary auctioneers are extolling and exalting 
 our stock. Not long ago one of our acutest and most 
 careful critics was coupling Leatherstocking with Ir- 
 ving s Knickerbocker and speculating about the ideal 
 or mythical character of both. They were this and 
 not that, et ccetera. 
 
 Thackeray wrote literary criticism lightly and had 
 an instinctive repugnance to curbing his prejudices. 
 But in the matter of fiction his authority is unimpeach 
 able. No one ever and others have tried parodied 
 Cooper so well. His " Leatherlegs " is an amusing 
 
 34 
 
COOPER 
 
 figure. His serious judgment, however, is as follows: 
 "I have to own," he says, "that I think the heroes of 
 another writer, viz., Leatherstocking, Uncas, Hard- 
 heart, Tom Coffin, are quite the equals of Scott s men; 
 perhaps Leatherstocking is better than any one in 
 1 Scott s lot. La Longue Carabine is one of the great 
 prize men of fiction. He ranks with your Uncle Toby, 
 Sir Roger de Coverley, Falstaff heroic figures all, 
 American or British and the artist has deserved well 
 of his country who devised them." He has indeed. 
 
 From the point of view of literature the drama itself 
 is finally assayed for character rather than action. This 
 is true even of Greek tragedy, where everything revolves 
 about the action, where the action is altogether the over 
 whelming motif. The Greeks were nothing if not didac 
 tic, one may say, and the gospel of art for art s sake would 
 be understood no more on Parnassus than on Olympus, 
 would seem equally aloof from the vital interests of 
 man to the audiences of Menander and to the pupils of 
 the Platonic Academy, where no one entered who was 
 ignorant of geometry, and where the basis of .aesthetics 
 was assumed to be ethical and utilitarian. Even in a 
 drama which in the best of taste, of course, and in the 
 most serious artistic sense preached, as we may be 
 sure "The Coephori" preached to the trembling Fe 
 lixes of its day, a drama of which the thesis is so tre 
 mendously concrete as to make the characters seem 
 abstract, the vigor of the presentation is due to the force 
 with which the characters, however traditional, are con 
 ceived and portrayed. And the same thing is true of 
 
 35 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 romance. What gives the story vital rather than tran 
 sient interest is the personages to whom the events 
 happen. It is the human nature in the "Arabian 
 Nights," in the "Decameron," in "Gil Bias," that 
 secures their perennial interest. Just as this element 
 in Balzac usually counteracts the effect of his occasional 
 melodrama, and in Dumas often palliates his essential 
 levity, and in Hugo endues with grandeur what else 
 would be insipid. An example of romance deprived of 
 this element is Stevenson s "Prince Otto." Story, 
 style, everything is there but character. The person 
 ages are the toys of the dilettante. "The Prisoner of 
 Zenda" is a more considerable performance precisely 
 because, inferior in other respects, its characters are felt 
 and rendered with more energy. It is far less " literary," 
 it is true, but so far as it goes it is solider literature. 
 What is it that gives such a romance as "Ivanhoe" its 
 value as literature in other words, its enduring interest ? 
 Not the tourney, the attack on Front de Bceuf s castle, 
 the bout between Friar Tuck and the Black Knight, the 
 archery exhibition of Locksley, but the character of 
 Rebecca of York and the warfare between good and 
 evil in the passionate soul of the Templar, as truly 
 the protagonist of the book as Lucifer is of "Paradise 
 Lost," or Hector who has infinitely more character 
 than Achilles of the "Iliad." What would the ultra- 
 romantic "Rob Roy" be without Di Vernon and Rash- 
 leigh Osbaldistone ? What would "Robinson Crusoe" 
 be without the autobiographer s account of his interior 
 experiences as well as his adventures ? Could anything 
 
 36 
 
COOPER 
 
 more insipid be imagined than the mere adventures of 
 Don Quixote recounted by a Dumas or a Stevenson? 
 Gautier s "Le Capitaine Fracasse" is a delightful im 
 aginative work, but the defect that has probably pre 
 vented its ever being reread is that its figures are feeble. 
 On the other hand, the character interest of "Hamlet" 
 or "Macbeth," for example, is so overwhelming as to 
 obscure for most readers, probably, the splendidly 
 romantic setting in which it is fixed. But the point is 
 too obvious to dwell upon. The most inveterate lover 
 of the story for the story s sake must admit that what 
 makes literature of romance is the element that dis 
 tinguishes its classic examples from the excellent stories 
 of Horace Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe the element of 
 character, namely. On any other theory that now for 
 gotten masterpiece, "The Three Spaniards," a veritable 
 marvel of purely narrative romance, should still be in 
 every one s hands. 
 
 Even in romance, therefore, what gives the story vital 
 rather than transient interest is the personages to whom 
 the events happen, and the function of the most romantic 
 events is largely to elucidate the actors in them. A 
 main excellence of romance as a literary form is that it 
 elucidates a range of character with which only the 
 imagination can adequately deal, traits and personalities 
 which lie outside the realm of the novel of manners. Its 
 environment has thus its own peculiar advantages, but 
 when it exalts its environment at the expense of its 
 figures it proportionately loses value as literature. 
 What, accordingly, sets Cooper by the side of Scott is 
 
 37 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 his instinct and practice in precisely this respect. He 
 always has a story and always tells it well. Whatever 
 its defects it moves, and it never lacks incident. No 
 tedium of disquisition or digression, no awkwardness of 
 construction, prevents it from being a series of events, 
 a succession of pictures organically interrelated and 
 tending cumulatively toward a climax. He accepted 
 the story quite unconsciously as the essential condition 
 of his production, and developed it not only loyally 
 but enthusiastically with all the energy of remarkable 
 powers of invention and an attentive conformity to what 
 he conceived to be its general character and import. 
 This is why the young will always read him. He is, in 
 fact, one of the great story-tellers of literature so much 
 so, indeed, that the narrative probably absorbed most of 
 his conscious effort in all his books. He thought of 
 these, and often described them on his title-pages as 
 " tales." In his day the narrative had not become "a 
 slender thread." Things happened in it. Whether it 
 followed the most commonplace traditions of the novel, 
 and continued the practice of slipshod contradictions 
 and inherent improbabilities, or whether it exhibited a 
 nice sense of constructive propriety and singleness of 
 effect (as in " Wing-and-Wing," or "The Deerslayer"), 
 it was invariably his preoccupation. 
 
 But if his characters, on the other hand, show no par 
 ticular care, it is because they are the direct products of 
 his genius. They probably "came to him in his sleep." 
 They are not "studied" from life or worked out from a 
 central imaginative conception. They are thoroughly 
 
 38 
 
COOPER 
 
 realistic and yet imaginatively typical simply because 
 Cooper had a remarkable instinct for character. He 
 could read it and divine it in life, and when he came to 
 create it and put it in situations of his own imagining he 
 knew how it would act and what traits it would develop. 
 For the time being he undoubtedly lived with his crea 
 tions as if they were actual people. His acquaintance 
 with actual people was very large. He alludes in "The 
 Two Admirals" to "the course of a chequered life in 
 which we have been brought in collision with as great a 
 diversity of rank, profession, and character, as often falls 
 to the lot of any one individual," and the multifarious 
 variety of personages with which his novels are peopled 
 proceeds from this circumstance plus, of course, his 
 genius in transmuting through his imagination his ex 
 perience into his creation. And not only was his expe 
 rience wide both in his native pioneer civilization and 
 in the more highly developed European world but he 
 was conspicuously endowed with the philosophic tem 
 perament. On what he saw he reflected. The individ 
 uals he met did not merely impress him with their 
 peculiarities, they taught him human nature. He had 
 the great advantage, associated with his deficiency of 
 not being a writer from the first, of having been first a 
 man. No writer of romance has been, as indisputably 
 Cooper was, distinctly a publicist also. Scott s politics, 
 for example, are negligible; Cooper s are rational, dis 
 criminating, and suggestive. He knew men as Lincoln 
 knew them which is to say, very differently from 
 Dumas and Stevenson. 
 
 39 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 Consequently, the world of his creation is above all a 
 solid one. Romantic as it is in form, its substance is of 
 the reality secured by confining the form, the story, to 
 its office of creating the illusion and not constituting 
 the primum mobile. Slipshodas his story is now and 
 then in disregarding probability and consistency an far" 
 as incident is concerned, the characters are 
 
 promised by this carelessness^ and where they are con- 
 cerned he always checTEshis romance by the law of the 
 situation, so to speak. They never share the occasional 
 improbability or inconsistency of the events in which 
 they participate, and the latter, accordingly, in any large 
 sense, count no more than a self-correcting misprint. 
 The consistency of Leatherstocking s character, for 
 example, is hardly affected by his being represented as 
 eighty years old on one page of "The Prairie" and 
 eighty-odd on another. In "The Deerslayer" a sin 
 gle set of chessmen is provided with five castles. But 
 such carelessness does not destroy the illusion of the 
 story sufficiently to impair the integrity of the char 
 acters. These surely triumph over even a superfluity 
 of chess castles, and like their congeners in all, or nearly 
 all, the other books, establish the solidity of the world 
 they inhabit by the definiteness, completeness, and com 
 prehension with which they are portrayed. 
 
 No writer, not even the latest so-called psychological 
 novelist, ever better understood the central and cardinal 
 principle of enduing a character with life and reality 
 namely, the portrayal of its moral complexity. The 
 equal in this vital respect of the New Hampshire man, 
 
 40 
 
COOPER 
 
 Ithuel Bolt, in " Wing-and-Wing," hardly exists in Scott, 
 and must be sought in Thackeray or George Eliot. 
 An essay could be written on him as on a character of 
 history. As a New England type, too, he is a master 
 piece of great representative value. Having him end 
 his days as a deacon of his especial denomination, after 
 a lifetime of chicane and deceit, notably self-deception, 
 was an inspiration, which must have been appreciated, 
 even, or perhaps particularly, in New Hampshire itself. 
 Spike in " Jack Tier " is a scoundrel, but he has, neverthe 
 less, a side in virtue of which his wife clings to him 
 far otherwise explicably than Nancy to Bill Sikes, for 
 example. The struggle between good and evil impulses 
 in the breast of the Red Rover is a truly heroic por 
 trayal. The internal conflict that paralyzes the will of 
 the "blue" admiral in "The Two Admirals" is treated 
 with truly psychologic insight. To open any of the 
 more important "tales" is to enter a company of per 
 sonages in each of whom coexist in virtue of the subtle 
 law that constitutes character by unifying moral com 
 plexity foibles, capacities, qualities, defects, weakness 
 and strength, good and bad, and the inveterate hetero 
 geneity of the human heart is fused into a single person 
 ality. And the variety, the multifariousness of the pop 
 ulous world that these personages, thus constituted, 
 compose, is an analogue on a larger scale of their own 
 individual differentiation. Cooper s world is a micro 
 cosm quite worthy to be set by the side of those of 
 the great masters of fiction and, quite as effectively 
 as theirs, mirroring a synthesis of the actual world to 
 
 41 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 which it corresponds, based on a range of experience 
 and framed with imaginative powers equalled by them 
 alone. 
 
 VI 
 
 Cooper s women are generally believed, I suppose, 
 especially to illustrate his limitations as a novelist of 
 character. They are usually decried if not derided. 
 His heroines are deemed the woodenest of conventional 
 types, and their sisters the most mechanical of foils. 
 Their creator s practice of referring to them as "females" 
 is found amusing, for though it was a common enough 
 practice of his day it has certainly become so obsolete 
 as to seem singular to the reader of current books ex 
 clusively. Professor Lounsbury, who is the wittiest of 
 writers, and in consequence a little at the mercy of a 
 master faculty, has a good deal of fun with these 
 "females" in his model biography. He pictures for 
 them all "the same dreary and rather inane future," as 
 members of Dorcas societies, as "carrying to the poor 
 bundles of tracts and packages of tea," as haling ragged 
 children into the Sunday-school and making slippers for 
 the rector. He says that "in fiction at least one longs 
 for a ruddier life than flows in the veins of these pale 
 bleached-out personifications of the proprieties," though 
 "they may possibly be far more agreeable to live with" 
 than the "women for whom men are willing or anxious 
 to die." As regards not by any means all but a certain 
 class of Cooper s "females," one can but "feel what he 
 means." Tastes differ, and in the quiet scholastic closes 
 
 42 
 
COOPER 
 
 of New Haven no doubt they like a little more gin 
 ger, "in fiction at least," than palates more accustomed 
 to it demand. In the dustier and more driving world 
 at large the simplicity and sweetness of these natures 
 may be considered to make in an equivalent way the 
 same appeal of novelty. However what " one longs for, 
 in fiction at least," is not the measure of a novelist s 
 success in character portraiture. To say that his char 
 acters are conventional is, if they are, a just reproach. 
 To say that they are insipid is not. Professor Lounsbury 
 may very explicably sigh for "the stormier characters of 
 fiction that" as he conceives "are dear to the carnal- 
 minded," and the carnal-minded may in turn perversely 
 delight in Arcadian innocence; but the business of the 
 novelist, and of the realistic romance writer such as 
 Cooper, is to "pander" to the desires of neither, but to 
 "feel" his characters as individuals, whatever their 
 nature, and to depict them with personal zest and 
 attention. 
 
 It would, of course, be idle to deny that some of 
 Cooper s "females" are conventional, but I think they 
 are far fewer than is popularly imagined. Some, at all 
 events, of those gentle and placid beings that he was 
 fond of creating are very real. It is possibly because 
 they are measured by the standard provided by more 
 modern fiction rather than by actual life that they are 
 found conventional. They would appear truer accord 
 ing to this paradoxical standard if they were more ex 
 ceptional. But the very definite forecast that Professor 
 Lounsbury makes for them shows how real they seem 
 
 43 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 to him, after all. The reader, he says, " is as sure as if 
 their career had been actually unrolled before his eyes 
 of the part they will play in life." They are types of a 
 kind of woman probably far more persistent in life 
 than in fiction and more persistent in life than is gener 
 ally suspected at the present perhaps transitional crisis 
 in mankind s view of woman. In fiction we have, for 
 the moment at least, and except in such rare instances 
 as the fiction of Mr. Howells, lost sight of that side of the 
 "female" in virtue of which she used to be called "the 
 weaker vessel." The rise and education, the enormous 
 increase and differentiation of the activities of woman 
 at the present time, have in life also somewhat obscured 
 this side of her nature. It is, however, too essential and 
 integral a side to be more than temporarily forgotten, 
 and it would not be surprising if, in the not remote 
 future, some disquietude at woman s failure to take very 
 significant advantage of her very signal opportunities 
 should qualify the current conviction that her insignifi 
 cance hitherto has been wholly due to her subjection. 
 "Educate them as much as you please and give them all 
 the privileges they want/ observed an empirical phil 
 osopher once, "you will still have to take care of them." 
 Woman herself would probably still agree that when 
 pain and anguish wring her brow the male of her species 
 is called upon to be a ministering angel of extremely 
 energetic efficiency. Cooper s women certainly have to 
 be taken care of, but this fact does not demonstrate 
 them to be wooden and conventional, and is apparently 
 not inconsistent with the nature of the ewig Weibliches, 
 
 44 
 
COOPER 
 
 however tame the resultant fiction, as fiction, may be 
 found. 
 
 At any rate, these types existed in abundance in 
 Cooper s day, and were not perfunctorily adopted by 
 him from the characterless religious and other contem 
 porary novel. JDtJsJn range rather than in quality that 
 his portraiture of women is deficient. He portrayecTthe 
 types he knew as realistically as he did his men, but his 
 knowledge of women was not wide. He was eminently 
 a man s man. The domestic affections probably taught 
 him most of what he knew of woman, and of women in 
 general he probably met comparatively few. And of 
 these, of course, he "studied" none, that particular exer 
 cise of the literary artist s faculties being in his day but 
 imperfectly developed. His clinging weaklings are as 
 good as Scott s, I think. But he had nothing like Scott s 
 social experience, and his women are less varied in con 
 sequence. Possibly, also, they are less varied because 
 he had less ideality; for Scott was a poet and Cooper 
 was not; though I think he shows a very charming 
 ideality in his treatment of his women not only is not 
 one of them brutally limned, but there is a marked 
 chivalry in his treatment of all of them. Moreover, in 
 some of them there is a spiritual strength that qualifies 
 their softness very nobly as well as very truly. There is 
 scarcely in all Scott the equal in this respect of Ghita 
 Caraccioli, in "Wing-and-Wing" a tale which, aside 
 from its adventurous interest and the admirable art that 
 makes it exceptional among Cooper s works, is a par 
 ticularly moving love story. 
 
 45 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 And the range of Cooper s female characters is far 
 wider than is commonly appreciated or than is common 
 in romance. Romance in general does not very insist 
 ently demand the feminine element except, of course, 
 the romance that demands nothing else such as "Paul 
 et Virginie." In the romance of adventure woman, al 
 most of necessity, plajs_jL^uj)or^inate^ part. She is 
 almostinevitably reduced to the type, in order to count 
 as a dramatic factor. The realism of Cooper s romance 
 appears here as elsewhere. There are few of his women 
 who are purely lay figures even among the insipid ones, 
 as I have said, at least if we except the inferior novels 
 novels which, in Cooper s case, ought not to be con 
 sidered at all; he wrote enough good ones to earn neg 
 ligibility for such books as " Mercedes of Castile" and 
 "The Ways of the Hour." Even such effaced char 
 acters as Alice Munro in "The Last of the Mohicans" 
 are real enough. In almost every case, however insig 
 nificant and insipid they may be, they have the effect of 
 being thoroughly alive of having been felt and defi 
 nitely visualized by their author. To this extent and in 
 this way they bear, perhaps, even more striking witness 
 to his master faculty, the faculty of creating character, 
 than their more accentuated sisters. 
 
 But these latter are, for romance, as distinguished 
 from the novel of character and manners pure and 
 simple (which Cooper essayed, to be sure, but in which 
 certainly his success was not notable), unusually numer 
 ous and varied. Compare the women of "Ivanhoe" 
 and "Waverley," for example, with those of "The Last 
 
 46 
 
COOPER 
 
 of the Mohicans" and "The Deerslayer." The back 
 ground of the two former books has more dignity and 
 importance than the woods of America in the middle of 
 the eighteenth century could possibly provide. But the 
 characters of the four American "females" and the con 
 trast between the members of each couple of them are at 
 least as firmly drawn, as vivid, and as effective; they do 
 not so markedly function merely as antagonistic influ 
 ences on the heart of the hero or the action of the tale. 
 Cora Munro, with her strain of negro blood appealing 
 so strongly to both of her redskin admirers, her inevi-i 
 tably hopeless passion for Hey ward and her truly tragic j 
 predestination, is an original and admirable creation. 
 The two girls in "The Deerslayer" are masterpieces. 
 Judith Hutter particularly is a character worthy of a 
 place among the important figures of fiction. Her 
 beauty, her worldliness, her exotic refinement, set off 
 against the rude and vulgar background of her family 
 environment and blending exquisitely with the wild 
 beauty of her lacustrine surroundings, her sensibility to 
 such simple elevation as she finds in the Deerslayer s 
 character, the delicacy of her wooing of him and acqui 
 escence in his rejection of her, and her final acceptance 
 of her inevitable fate, compose a portrait with acces 
 sories rare in fiction of any kind and particularly rare 
 in romance. 
 
 The feeble-minded Hetty, who serves superficially as 
 her foil, is portrayed with equal attentiveness and great 
 delicacy. There is something very gentle and attaching 
 in the art with which Cooper, quite without the con- 
 
 47 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 sciousness of doing anything unusual, and as simply as 
 if it were the most natural thing in the world, achieves 
 the difficult task of making convincing and interesting 
 a character whose rectitude and fearlessness of nature 
 enable her to play a role of pathetic dignity hardly ham 
 pered by a clouded mind. Here his touch, so heavy in 
 generalization, in humor, and in broader portraiture 
 often, is lightness itself. Some sympathetic strain in 
 his nature endued him, too, with an analogous felicity in 
 portraying such Ariel-like women as the masquerading 
 mistresses of the Red Rover and the Skimmer of the 
 Seas. These characters with him are the very converse 
 of conventional, both in conception and in presentation, 
 and they are at the same time perfectly embodied and 
 realized with a definiteness and verisimilitude such as 
 Scott in vain labored to impute to his tricksy Fenella in 
 "Peveril of the Peak." They have the touch of fancy 
 and the magic of strangeness, but they are understood 
 as women in a way quite beyond the reach of a writer to 
 whom the sex is the sealed book it is sometimes asserted 
 to have been for Cooper. 
 
 Katharine Plowden in "The Pilot" is a breezy and 
 even a brilliant girl. The heroine of "The Bravo" is 
 extremely winning and pathetic. Mildred Button in 
 "The Two Admirals" has as much dignity and resource 
 as gentleness. The Wept of Wish- ton- Wish is a unique 
 study, or at least sketch, of a white girl with an Indian 
 soul. Maud Willoughby in "Wyandotte" is a charm 
 ing beauty with a reserve of force such as Kingsley 
 might have conceived. And of Betty Flanagan in 
 
 48 
 
COOPER 
 
 "The Spy" it is perhaps enough to record Miss Edge- 
 worth s testimony in a letter to the author asserting that 
 no Irish pen could have drawn her better. In fine, to 
 my own sense, at least, Cooper drew well in the main 
 such women as he drew. Of some of them he made 
 memorable successes. That he drew no great variety 
 of them and essentially duplicated his "females" now 
 and then was very largely due to the limitedness of his 
 experience, so generally confined to his acquaintance 
 with his own sex save for a circle probably without 
 much variety. The wide experience of people he 
 speaks of in "The Two Admirals" in the passage I have 
 already cited refers exclusively to men. Of course if he 
 had been a sufficiently imaginative writer, if rather his 
 imagination had not been less spiritual than romantic, 
 he would have been less dependent on experience. But 
 the romantic writer with a spiritual imagination is apt 
 to be as insubstantial as he is rare, and in his portraits 
 of women, as elsewhere, Cooper s romanticism is thor 
 oughly realistic, and with whatever modification due 
 to the sex of its subjects, thoroughly substantial and 
 robust. 
 
 VII 
 
 There is one aspect of his contribution to literature 
 that makes American neglect of Cooper s merits and 
 his fame incomprehensible on any creditable grounds. 
 That aspect is as varied as it is salient, but from its 
 every facet is reflected the rational aggrandizement of 
 America. Quite aside from the service to his country 
 
 49 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 involved in the fact itself of his foreign literary popu 
 larity greater than that of all other American authors 
 combined it is to be remarked that the patriotic is as 
 prominent as any other element of his work. To him, 
 to be sure, we owe it that immediately on his discovery, 
 the European world set an American author among the 
 classics of its own imaginative literature; through him 
 to this world not only American native treasures of 
 romance, but distinctively American traits, ideas and 
 habits, moral, social, and political, were made known 
 and familiar. He first painted for Europe the portrait 
 of America. And the fact that it is in this likeness that 
 the country is still so generally conceived there eloquently 
 attests the power with which it was executed. The 
 great changes that time has wrought in its lineaments 
 have found no hand to depict them vigorously enough 
 at least in fiction to secure the substitution of a later 
 presentment for Cooper s. But in speaking of the 
 patriotic element in his work, I refer only indirectly to 
 its service in exalting American literature in European 
 eyes and acquainting European minds with American 
 character. Mainly I wish to signalize what indirectly 
 this proceeds from the truth that in a large sense the 
 subject of Cooper s entire work is America, nothing 
 more, nothing less. 
 
 The substance of it, of course, is, materially speaking, 
 preponderantly American. But what I mean is that 
 even when he was writing such books as "The Bravo," 
 "The Headsman," and "The Heidenmauer," he was 
 distinctly thinking about his own country as well as his 
 
 50 
 
COOPER 
 
 more immediate theme. In each of these novels the 
 theme is really democracy. The fact has been made a 
 reproach to him, and charged with the assumed "in 
 artistic" intrusion of preachment into his romance. 
 Doubtless a picture of Venice at the time when her sin 
 ister oligarchy was most despotic painted by a pure 
 literary artist like Theophile Gautier, for example, 
 might be spectacularly more "fetching." Cooper s, how 
 ever, has the merit of being significant. One gets a 
 little tired of the fetich of art, which is, nowadays, 
 brought out of its shrine on so many occasions and ven 
 erated with such articulate inveteracy. Art in any 
 other sense than that of a sound and agreeable way of 
 doing things in accordance with their own law might 
 sometimes, one impatiently reflects, be left to itself, to 
 its practitioners, and to the metaphysicians. One may 
 wish incidentally there were more of it! But to re 
 proach such a work as "The Bravo" with a quality that 
 secures its effectiveness is not at all credibly to assert 
 that it would have been a masterpiece of pure beauty 
 had it lacked this quality. As it is, it is an extremely 
 good story made an extremely effective one by the fact 
 that Cooper s democracy gave him a point of view from 
 which the mockery styled the Republic of Venice ap 
 peared in a particularly striking light. These novels 
 show at any rate how good a democrat Cooper was, 
 how firmly grounded were his democratic principles, 
 how sincere were his democratic convictions. They 
 show him also as an American democrat believing 
 in law as well as liberty, that is to say and not in the 
 
 51 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 least a visionary. The preface alone of "The Heads 
 man" demonstrates the intelligent enthusiasm with 
 which he held his social and political creed. Europe, 
 which nevertheless he thoroughly appreciated, did not 
 disorient him. Nor on his return, whatever may su 
 perficially be inferred from his splenetic expressions of 
 disgust with its defects, did his own country disillusion 
 ize him. 
 
 The undoubted aristocratic blend of his temperament 
 and his traditions did not in the least conflict with his 
 democracy, his Americanism. There is nothing a 
 priori inconsistent in the holding of democratic con 
 victions by the most aristocratic natures. The history 
 of all religions, for example, is conclusive as to this; 
 and from Pericles to the Gracchi, from Montaigne to 
 Emerson, the phenomenon is common enough in politics 
 and philosophy as well. Nor are Cooper s later Amer 
 ican books a posteriori evidence of his defection. The 
 excuses and perversions, the faults, and even the eccen 
 tricities of democracy, and the way in which these were 
 illustrated by the democracy of his day, are certainly 
 castigated caricatured on occasion with vigor, with 
 zest, with temper, indeed. But the wounds are the faith 
 ful ones of a friend an extremely candid friend, of 
 course in a period of American evolution when candor 
 of the kind was apt to be confounded with censure. His 
 candor, however, was merely the measure of his dis 
 crimination. His censure is always delivered from a 
 patriotic stand-point. The thirigs, the traits, he satirizes 
 and denounces are in his view the excrescences of de- 
 
 52 
 
COOPER 
 
 mocracy, and infuriate him as perversions, not as in 
 herent evils. There is not the remotest trace of the 
 snob in him. His often trivial and sometimes absurd 
 excursions into the fields of etiquette and etymology, 
 his rating of his countrymen for their minor crudities 
 and fatuities, are the naive, and sometimes elephantine 
 endeavors of a patriotic censor conscious of the value 
 of elegance to precisely such a civilization as our own. 
 We can see readily enough to-day that it is calumny to 
 attribute his democracy in Europe to pure idealism, and 
 his disgust with demagogy after his return to an irasci 
 bility that changed his convictions. The discriminating 
 American Lowell, for a prominent example is natu 
 rally an advocate of democracy abroad and a critic of it 
 at home. And Cooper s temperament was not more 
 irascible than his mind was judicial. There is, appar 
 ently, a native relation between irascibility and the 
 judicial quality. Breadth of view, unless it is com 
 bined with the indifference of the dilettante, is naturally 
 impatient of narrowness. 
 
 Defects of temper, at all events, which were conspicu 
 ous in Cooper, certainly coexisted with a fair-mindedness 
 equally characteristic. Not a great, he was distinctly 
 a large, man in all intellectual respects. Professor 
 Trent in his "History of American Literature" re 
 curs to this central trait again and again, one is glad 
 to note, in his exceptionally appreciative characteriza 
 tion. He was peppery, but not petulant, iracund with 
 out truculence. His quarrels with his encroaching 
 Cooperstown neighbors, and with the unspeakable 
 
 53 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 press of his day, undoubtedly lacked dignity, but in all 
 cases he was in the right, and his outraged sense of jus 
 tice was at the bottom of his violence. And his fair- 
 mindedness so penetrated his patriotism as to render it 
 notably intelligent, and therefore beneficent. In his day 
 intelligent patriotism was not thorough-going enough to 
 be popular. Partisanship was exacted. The detach 
 ment which Cooper owed to his experience and judicial- 
 mindedness was simply not understood. It seemed 
 necessarily inconsistent with patriotic feeling. Such 
 scepticism is, in fact, not unknown in our own time! 
 But in Cooper s, appreciation of foreign, and criticism 
 of native, traits was in itself almost universally suspect. 
 Yet such candor as his in noting excellence in men and 
 things of other nations and civilizations is even nowa 
 days rarely to be encountered. France, Italy, England, 
 the Irish, Swiss, Germans every nationality, in fact, 
 that figures in his pages are depicted with absolute 
 sympathy and lack of prejudice. In " Jack Tier," writ 
 ten during the Mexican War, the Mexican character 
 at its best is incarnated in the most polished and high- 
 minded, the most refined and least vulgar of person 
 alities. In the matter of national traits it is still more 
 or less true that, as Stendhal observed, "la diffe 
 rence fait la haine"; but to no writer of the English 
 tongue at all events, even since his time, could the re 
 proach be addressed with less reason than to Cooper. 
 "Wing-and-Wing" is a text-book of true cosmopoli 
 tanism, and "Wyandotte" a lesson in non-partisanship 
 at home. 
 
 54 
 
COOPER 
 
 No doubt it is only logical to be cosmopolitan and 
 liberal when one is lecturing one s countrymen on their 
 narrowness and provinciality. But the disposition to 
 lecture them on this particular theme itself witnesses 
 Cooper s genuine fair-mindedness and his desire to com 
 municate it to his readers. Moreover, the quality ap 
 pears in his writings quite as often instinctively as 
 expressly; it pervades their purely artistic as well as 
 their didactic portions. And there are two manifesta 
 tions of it that are particularly piquant and certainly to 
 be reckoned among Cooper s patriotic services. One 
 is his treatment of New England, and the other that of 
 the Protestant "sects" as distinguished from the Epis 
 copal "Church." 
 
 Upon the New England of his day Cooper turned the 
 vision of a writer who was also a man of the world a 
 product of civilization at that time extremely rare 
 within its borders. He was himself an eminent example 
 of what used to be called in somewhat esoteric eulogy 
 by those who admired the type, a conservative, and 
 New England was the paradise of the radical, the vision 
 ary, the doctrinaire. He had no disposition, accord 
 ingly, to view it with a friendly eye or to pass by any 
 of its imperfections. The narrowness, the fanaticism, 
 the absurd self-sufficiency and shallowness, the contempt 
 for the rest of the country, the defects of the great 
 New England qualities of thrift and self-reliance char 
 acteristic of the section, were particularly salient to 
 him, and to signalize them was irresistible to an eman 
 cipated observer who could contemplate them from a 
 
 55 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 detached stand-point. It would be idle to pretend 
 that he interpreted New England types with the inti 
 mate appreciation of Hawthorne. On the other hand, 
 his detachment being more complete, his portrayal of 
 them often gives them the relief which can only be 
 brought out by the colorless white light of cold im 
 partiality. Occasionally, without doubt, he satirizes 
 rather than depicts them though more rarely than 
 his heavy touch leads the reader to imagine. But 
 from " Wing-and-Wing" to "Satanstoe" the New Eng 
 land contingent of his company of characters is por 
 trayed with a searching and self-justifying veracity, at 
 least as to its essential features; and, as was his habit, 
 discriminatingly portrayed. Ithuel Bolt is certainly 
 one of the notable characters of fiction, and yet he 
 could no more have been born and developed outside 
 of New England than Leatherstocking could have 
 hailed from Massachusetts. If the Rev. Meek Wolfe 
 in "The Wept of Wish-ton- Wish " is a caricature, he is 
 fully offset by the fine portrait of the Puritan head of 
 the household. 
 
 It is difficult now to recall the New England of 
 Cooper s day. Never, perhaps, in the world s history 
 was so much and so wide-spread mental activity so in 
 timately associated with such extreme provinciality. 
 For a miniature portrait of it consult the first pages of 
 Lowell s essay on Thoreau. At present we need to 
 have the eminence of the section recalled to us. Pro 
 fessor Barrett Wendell s engaging "Literary History," 
 in which he not only limits American literature of 
 
 56 
 
COOPER 
 
 much value to New England, but even tucks it into the 
 confines of Harvard College, is an interesting reminder 
 of days that seem curiously distant. Between 1825 and 
 1850, at all events, New England, always the apex, had 
 become also the incubus of our civilization, and called 
 loudly for the note-taking of a chiel from beyond its 
 borders. Cooper performed that service. And, as I 
 say, it is to be counted to him for patriotism. To him 
 we owe it that not only American authorship but Ameri 
 can literature has been from his day of national rather 
 than sectional character. The world he represented to 
 the Europe of his day was a comprehensively Ameri 
 can world, and the country as a whole, with the there 
 tofore false proportion of its different sections duly 
 rectified, first appeared in effective presentation in the 
 domain of art. 
 
 His analogous hostility to ecclesiastical sectarianism 
 was, perhaps, a corollary of his view of the New Eng 
 land whence largely this sectarianism came. English 
 non-conformity transplanted added to its own defects 
 those inseparable from an establishment, which prac 
 tically it enjoyed. Its contentiousness became tyran 
 nous, and its virtual establishment, destitute of 
 traditions, served mainly to crystallize its crudities. 
 Cooper s episcopalianism was in a doctrinal sense, 
 no doubt, equally narrow. And his piety was strongly 
 tinctured with dogma. Some of his polemic is absurd, 
 and when he is absurd he is so to a degree only 
 accounted for by his absolute indifference to appear 
 ing ridiculous. "The Crater" is an extraordinary 
 
 57 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 exhibition of denominational fatuity. But in his day 
 his churchmanship gave him in religious matters the 
 same advantage of detachment that his treatment of 
 New England enjoyed. It gave him a standard of taste, 
 of measure, of decorum, of deference to tradition and 
 custom, and made him a useful and unsparing critic of 
 the rawness and irresponsibility so rife around him, in a 
 field of considerably more important mundane concern 
 to the community of that time than owing largely to its 
 own transformation it has since become. He knew 
 the difference in the ecclesiastical field, as few in his day 
 did, between "a reading from Milton and a reading 
 from Eliza Cook." The intellectual mediocrity of the 
 Episcopal pulpit did not blind him, as it did others, to 
 "the Church s" distinctive superiorities, secular and 
 religious. A ritual, a clergy (however triturate as a 
 hierarchy), a sense of historic continuity, the possession 
 of traditions, the spirit of conformity in lieu of self- 
 assertion (a spirit so necessary to "the communion of 
 saints"), set off the "Churchmen" of that day some 
 what sharply from the immensely larger part of their 
 respective societies. And Cooper s criticism of the 
 more unlovely traits of the descendants of the Puritans 
 and the Scotch-Irish immigration on the whole made for 
 an ideal which, socially considered, must be regarded as 
 superior to that he found defective. His "conserva 
 tive" spirit, in a word, enabled him to perform a genuine 
 and patriotic service to our civilization in this respect, as 
 it did in the case of its portrayal of New England types 
 of character. And as in the latter case he is not to be 
 
 58 
 
COOPER 
 
 charged with a provinciality equivalent to that which he 
 exposed, but really judges it from an open-minded and 
 cosmopolitan stand-point, so, too though naturally in 
 a distinctly lesser degree, in consequence of his own 
 ecclesiastical and theological rigidities he exhibits the 
 defectiveness of American non-conformity from a dis 
 tinctly higher plane than its own. The proof of this 
 and of his large tolerance in religious matters where 
 his controversial spirit is not aroused is the fact that 
 Catholicism and Catholics always receive just and ap 
 preciative treatment at his hands. Even atheism itself 
 he treats with perfect and comprehending appreciation. 
 In this respect the scene in " Wing-and-Wing " where 
 Raoul Yvard is about to be executed as a spy forms a 
 striking contrast to the somewhat analogous one in 
 "Quentin Durward," where Scott uses the death of the 
 unbelieving Hayraddin Mograbin to point a series of 
 perfunctory commonplaces. 
 
 I come back in conclusion to Professor Trent s 
 epithet. Cooper s was above all a large nature. Even 
 his littlenesses were those of a large nature. Let us 
 refine and scrutinize, hesitate and distinguish, when we 
 have corresponding material to consider. But in con 
 sidering Cooper s massive and opulent work it is inex 
 cusable to obscure one s vision of the forest by a study 
 of the trees. His work is in no sense a jardin des plantes; 
 it is like the woods and sea that mainly form its subject 
 and substance. Only critical myopia can be blind to the 
 magnificent forest, with its pioneer clearings, its fringe 
 of "settlements," its wood-embosomed lakes, its neigh- 
 
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.^:.y. : .: .-: :.. ~-i ::.-_.-7i?.5 
 
 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 I 
 
 HAWTHORNE was so exceptional a writer that he has 
 very generally been esteemed a great one. In America 
 such an estimate has been almost universal. He won 
 his way slowly, but his first solid achievement met with 
 ready appreciation and thenceforward fame awaited his 
 subsequent, and retroactively rewarded his earlier, per 
 formances. We stood in much need of great writers 
 at the time; and, though our literary pantheon is now 
 more populous, it would occur to no one, probably, to 
 displace his figure from the niche where it was speedily 
 installed, and where even a lesser one would have been 
 welcome. His works never having been supplanted 
 among us, it is hardly surprising that with us they stand 
 where they did. Comparisons are in their favor. They * Vy . ^/] 
 are thoroughly original, quite without literary deriva- j 
 tion upon which much of our literature leans with such \ i 
 
 deferential complacence. Even the theme of many of jJ/vvul^j 
 them the romance of Puritan New England was 
 Hawthorne s discovery. They are works of pure litera 
 ture and therefore in a field where competition is not 
 numerous. They altogether eschew the ordinary, the 
 literal, and they have the element of spiritual distinction, 
 
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 which still further narrows their eminence and gives 
 them still greater relief. Withal they are extremely 
 characteristic, extremely personal. They represent, one 
 and all, their author and no one but their author, whom, 
 therefore, they have the effect of making a very precise, 
 a very definite figure. He was himself a very definite, 
 even a unique, figure and one that harmonized obviously 
 or to employ the prevailing tone of Hawthorne criti 
 cism, exquisitely and beautifully with their exceptional 
 quality. He unquestionably dwelt apart, and partly, 
 perhaps, for this reason his soul was generally believed 
 to be like a star. At the same time there is nothing 
 eccentric, no excess, in his genius to disintegrate his en 
 during reputation with the alloy of the transient and the 
 meretricious. His writings satisfy academic standards 
 appeal to the conservatism of culture. And their 
 yle, clear, chaste, and correct, is of the preservative 
 Border. They form a large constituent portion of our 
 classics our somewhat slender sheaf of truly classic 
 production. As such they are read more precisely, 
 have been read by everybody. Up to the present time 
 at least they have been universally part of the "required 
 reading," so to speak, of youth and the recollection of 
 eld a recollection always roseate if afforded half a 
 chance, and in Hawthorne s case, one suspects, enjoy 
 ing practical immunity from the readjustments and 
 rectification of later re-reading. 
 
 On the whole, Hawthorne and his country are quits. 
 If he enriched its literary treasure and contributed gen 
 erously to its literary glory, as incontestably he did, it 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 furnished him with both a comparatively clear field for 
 the exercise, and a comparatively undistracting back 
 ground for the exhibition, of his genius. In no litera 
 ture would his works have been unobserved or even 
 obscured by competition. But, as contributions to Ameri 
 can literature they have abroad undoubtedly achieved 
 success by an ampler margin, and have at home been 
 awarded an importance commensurate with their origi 
 nality. Hitherto, at all events, among ourselves their 
 lack of substance has been deemed a quality instead of 
 a defect and, indeed, their "airy and charming insub- 
 stantiality" their chief title to fame. We have had so 
 few poets! The temptation has been great to eke out 
 the roll with Hawthorne, and, sometimes, not to mince 
 matters, to call him the greatest of them all. "The 
 rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest 
 in some ideal respects since Shakespeare," says Lowell 
 in his hearty wholesale way. We shall see as time 
 passes. But one thing is certain. If Hawthorne s im 
 portance is to remain at its present evaluation it will 
 not be because of his "insubstantiality." It will be, as 
 it is in the case of every writer who makes no sensuous 
 appeal, because of the amount and quality of significant;! 
 truth effectively expressed in his writings. \ 
 
 This was not quite his own view, it may be said. 
 And what his own view was he made perfectly plain. 
 Though not an expansive, Hawthorne s was a perfectly 
 
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 candid nature. A recluse in life, he overflows to the 
 reader. He does not tell very much, but apparently 
 he tells everything. His confidences are not ample. 
 Nothing is ample in his writings but the plethora of 
 detail and the fulness of fancies. But he has no reti 
 cences. If he communicates little, he has nothing to 
 conceal. He discourses of his stories, of their particular 
 genre, with admirable good sense and is very far from 
 overvaluing them; of the kind of man he is, without 
 coquetry or other self-consciousness. He is, however, 
 passably complacent, at least in the sense that resigna 
 tion is complacent. He is never dissatisfied. He does 
 not strive or cry, or emulate or regret. He would gladly 
 be more popular if he could, but, like Luther, he can do 
 no other. Not that he blames the public in the least. 
 He "rather wonders how the Twice-Told Tales should 
 have gained what vogue they did than that it was so 
 little and so gradual." He is a little perverse about his 
 talent at times. He half wishes it were not so gloomy, 
 but feels that it is irremediable, that he is under the spell 
 of a rather mournful and melancholy inspiration. He 
 finds his things lack sunlight, that they in a sort turn out 
 that way without his co-operation. One of the most 
 naive performances in literature is due to this feeling. 
 He writes an altogether inapt introduction to his one 
 masterpiece to relieve and lighten its dark tone in 
 which it wholly fails, since it has nothing to do with the 
 story, and in which, if successful, it would have been 
 calamitous. But at heart he is altogether reconciled 
 to his moonlight shadows and low tones. It is only in 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 the interest of the public that he laments them. He 
 looks upon "The Scarlet Letter" as a "volume," not as 
 a production. It needs piecing out, being scant, being 
 in short a longer "Twice-Told Tale." Hence the 
 "Custom House" prologue a graceful, pleasant, not 
 very genial essay which used to be thought a marvel 
 quite eclipsing "Elia," and which he designs to secure 
 the balance as well as increase the bulk of a story other 
 wise slight and sombre considered as a volume. He 
 paid off some old scores in the process. Otherwise, it is 
 doubtful if he would have had the zest to make the 
 requisite effort. He could not be made to take any of 
 it back. He was as implacable as he was upright, and 
 as unyielding as he was straightforward. He made very 
 little effort of any kind. His industry was measurably 
 constant, but rather of the routine order. He wrote his 
 fiction much as he wrote his interminable note-books, . , 
 without exaltation, without heat, without noteworthy (&i ^ il)^ 
 struggle. He took great pains but with great placidity. ^ 
 It is significant that the only exception is the writing of 
 his only chef-d ceuvre. When he wrote "The Scarlet 
 Letter" he shut himself up and wrestled continuously 
 with the angel of his inspiration till he had conquered. 
 Whereupon, somewhat relieved, no doubt, he resumed 
 his habitual serenity and comfortably relaxed into the 
 more congenial function of characterizing the types and 
 curios of his custom-house experience. Tension was as j 
 foreign to him as expansion. In the prologue he seems ! 
 to have returned from an excursion into the realm of 
 energy and effort, of artistic endeavor, and to have 
 
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 settled down once more in the region of old manses 
 and twice-told tales where he was completely, even 
 radiantly, domesticated. 
 
 It is in a sense tragic that he should have had so 
 little vocation. Emerson makes the same complaint of 
 Thoreau content, he deplores, to be the captain of a 
 huckleberry party. All one can say is that with more 
 vocation Hawthorne would not have been Hawthorne, 
 who is as indisputably the author of his other works as 
 of "The Scarlet Letter." The preface to the "Twice- 
 Told Tales," in which and in the "Mosses from an Old 
 Manse " he felt his way to his larger fiction, is, in the 
 main, an admirable piece of self-characterization, much 
 of it as applicable to his entire work as to these unpre 
 tending stories. It contains three especially significant 
 sentences. "The sketches are not," he says, "it is 
 hardly necessary to say, profound, but it is rather more 
 remarkable that they so seldom, if ever, show any design 
 on the writer s part to make them so." Again, they "are 
 not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and 
 heart (had it been so they could hardly have failed to be 
 more deeply and permanently valuable), but his attempts, 
 and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an inter 
 course with the world." And, finally, in words that go 
 to the root of the matter: "Whether from lack of power, 
 or an unconquerable reserve, the Author s touches have 
 often an effect of tameness." 
 
 Now it is evident that intercourse with the world is 
 not opened on these terms. The world assumes that 
 the recluse issuing from his seclusion should bring with 
 
 68 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 him his warrant for dwelling in it, should communicate 
 the result of communing with his own mind and heart. 
 If this result is not profound or deeply and permanently 
 valuable, it is asking too much of the heedless world to 
 ask it to accept unconquerable reserve as the reason. 
 The world is bound to esteem this the best you can do 
 and refuses to ascribe its lack of profundity merely to L^jL 
 the truly remarkable, as you say absence of any de 
 sign on your part to make it more worth while. It may, 
 of course, be said that a recluse is as much entitled to 
 claim attention for trifles as any one else. Only, in that 
 case his status of recluse is immaterial. And, plainly, 
 Hawthorne was not at all disposed to consider it imma 
 terial. He thought it, as others have done, the most 
 material fact about both him and his work, as is plain 
 from his calling his reserve "unconquerable." So that 
 it is impossible to share his uncertainty as to whether the 
 tameness of his touches proceeds from this reserve or 
 from lack of power. The answer clearly is : both. And 
 to go a step further, and as I say to the root of the 
 matter, his unconquerable reserve proceeds in all proba 
 bility from his lack of power at least of anything like 
 sustained, unintermittent power that can be relied upon 
 and evoked at will by its possessor. 
 
 Power at all events is precisely the element most con 
 spicuously lacking in the normal working of this imagi- / 
 nation which to Lowell recalls Shakespeare s. Repeat- L i / 
 edly he seems to be on the point of exhibiting power, tyi oA 7 
 of moving us, that is to say; but, except, I think, in (t fo 
 "The Scarlet Letter," he never quite does so. His un- 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 conquerable reserve steps in and turns him aside. He 
 never crosses the line, never makes the attempt. He is 
 too fastidious to attempt vigor and fail. His intellec 
 tual sensitiveness, to which failure in such an endeavor 
 would be acutely palpable, prevents the essay. In the 
 instance of "The Scarlet Letter," where he does achieve 
 it, he does so as it were in spite of himself, and it is 
 curious that he instinctively re-establishes his normal 
 equilibrium by failing to appreciate his achievement. 
 At least he prefers to it his "House of the Seven Gables." 
 He is much more at home in amusing himself than 
 in creating something. "I have sometimes," he says, 
 "produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far 
 as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train 
 of incidents in which the spirit and mechanism of the 
 fairy legend should be combined with the characters and 
 manners of familiar life." He was content if his effect 
 was pleasing so far as his own mind was concerned. 
 And his own mind was easily pleased with the kind of 
 process he describes. That is, he follows his tempera- 
 
 tyfl* mental bent with tranquil docility instead of compelling 
 Cw \jh fr to serve him in the construction of some fabric of 
 
 \^ ,\ importance. The latter business demands energy and 
 effort. And if he made so little effort it is undoubtedly 
 because he had so little energy. His genius was a re 
 flective one. He loved to muse. Reverie was a state of 
 mind which he both indulged and applauded, and there 
 can hardly be a more barren one for the production of 
 anything more significant than conceits and fancies. 
 Reality repelled him. What attracted him was mirage. 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 Mirage is his specific aim, the explicit goal of his art 
 which thus becomes inevitably rather artistry than art. 
 His practice is sustained by his theory. Speaking of a 
 scene mirrored in a river he exclaims, "Which, after all, 
 was the most real the picture or the original ? the 
 objects palpable to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis 
 in the stream beneath ? Surely the disembodied images 
 stand in closer relation to the soul." If this were a 
 figure expressive of the mirroring of nature by art it 
 would be a happy one, though not convincing to those 
 who believe that the artistic synthesis of nature should I 
 be more rather than less definite than its material. But, 
 it is not a figure. It is a statement of Hawthorne s 
 preference for the vague and the undefined in nature 
 itself as nearer to the soul. Nearer to the soul of the 
 poet it may be, not to that of the artist. The most 
 idealizing artist can count on enough vagueness of his 
 own whether it handicap his effort or illumine his 
 result in dealing with his material. And it is not near 
 to the soul of the poet endowed with the architectonic 
 faculty the poet in the Greek sense, the maker. It is 
 the congenial content of contemplation indeterminate 
 and undirected. 
 
 The contemplative mind, the contemplative mood, 
 are above all hospitable to fancy, and in fancy Haw- 
 thorne s mind and mood were wonderfully rich. He 
 had but to follow its beckoning and42jrusi himself to 
 its guidance to make a pretty satisfactory journey, at 
 least so far as his own mind was concerned. He speaks, 
 to be sure, of "setting fancy resolutely to work," but I 
 
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 think he must have referred to continued rather than to 
 arduous labor. A certain degree of indolence must have 
 been allied with his indifference, as the beginnings of 
 his career, somewhat hesitant and tentative, indicate. 
 Once started, however, most of the undertakings that 
 mark it must have proceeded with the same absence of 
 friction as his career itself. Those occasions on which 
 his fancy may be said to have worked resolutely are 
 probably those in which it functioned regularly and in 
 somewhat routine fashion, as, for example, those " com 
 positions," as they may be called in quite the school-boy 
 sense, in which he seemed to give himself a theme and 
 proceed to set down all he could " think up " about it 
 "Sights from a Steeple," "A Rill from the Town Pump," 
 "Little Annie s Ramble," and a number of similar 
 sketches consonant with the "in lighter vein" text of 
 school "readers," and very popular in their day. In 
 general, one imagines he did not have to set fancy reso 
 lutely to work, but merely to give it free play. The re 
 sult was amazingly productive. How many "Mosses" 
 and " Twice-Told Tales" are there? Certainly a pro 
 digious number when one considers the narrowness of 
 their range and their extraordinary variety within it. 
 Their quality is singularly even, I think. Some of 
 them a few are better than others, but mainly in 
 more successfully illustrating their common quality. 
 What this is Hawthorne himself sufficiently indicates in 
 saying, "Instead of passion there is sentiment; and even 
 in what purport to be pictures of actual life we have 
 allegory." But his consciousness of his limitations does 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 not exorcise them, though his candor, which is charm 
 ing, wins our appreciation for their corresponding excel 
 lences. 
 
 Or, rather, no. It is so absolute as to make us feel a 
 little ungracious at our inability to take quite his view 
 after all. After all, it is plain that he has a paternal 
 feeling for them that it is a little difficult to share. Sen 
 timent replaces passion, it is true. But the sentiment 
 is pale for sentiment. It is sentiment insufficiently 
 senti. Allegory, it is true, replaces reality, but the 
 allegory itself is insufficiently real. The tales are not; 
 merely in a less effective, less robust, less substantial 
 category than that which includes passion and actual 
 life, but within their own category they are most of 
 them unaccented and inconclusive. They are too 
 faint in color and too frail in construction quite to 
 merit the inference of Hawthorne s pretty deprecation. 
 They have not " the pale tint of flowers that blossomed 
 in too retired a shade." They are hardly flowers at all, 
 but grasses and ferns. And while he exaggerates in 
 saying that "if opened in the sunshine" they are "apt 
 to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages," he is 
 distinctly optimistic in thinking that they would gain ^ 
 greatly by being read "in the clear, brown, twilight 
 atmosphere" in which they were written, and that they 
 cannot always " be taken into the reader s mind without 
 a shiver." They can always. There is not a shiver ^ 
 in them. Their tone is lukewarm and their temper 
 Laodicean. Witchery is precisely the quality they sug 
 gest but do not possess. Their atmosphere is not that 
 
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 of the clear brown twilight in which familiar objects are 
 poetized, but that of the gray day in which they acquire 
 monotone. The twilight and moonlight, so often fig 
 uratively ascribed to Hawthorne s genius, are in fact 
 a superstition. There is nothing eerie or elfin about his 
 genius. He is too much the master of it and directs it 
 with a too voluntary control. Fertile as it is, its multi 
 farious conceits and caprices are harnessed and handled 
 with the light, firm hand of perfect precision and guided 
 along a level course of extremely unbroken country. 
 There is no greater sanity to be met with in literature 
 than Hawthorne s. The wholesome constitution of his 
 mind is inveterate and presides with unintermittent con 
 stancy in his prose. Now caprice, conducted by reason, 
 infallibly incurs the peril of insipidity, and it is not to be 
 denied that many of the tales settle comfortably into the 
 category of the prosaic. 
 
 Why, then, have they their reputation, and why does 
 one feel a little awkward and unsympathetic in confess 
 ing that he finds them dull ? In the first place the fond 
 ness of the public for them has been, in strict history, an 
 acquired taste. They met with very little favor at first. 
 The genial Longfellow praised them to deaf ears. After 
 the appearance of "The Scarlet Letter" readers turned 
 back to them in appreciative disposition and, as is 
 usually the case under such circumstances, found or 
 fancied in them what they looked for. But mainly they 
 won and have kept their classic position, it is not to be 
 doubted, because of their originality, their refinement, 
 and their elevation. There is certainly nothing else like 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 them; their taste is perfect; and, in general, they deal 
 with some phase of the soul, some aspect or quality or 
 transaction of the spiritual life. They are the echoes 
 of no literary precedent, but as much Hawthorne s own 
 as his physiognomy. They exhibit a literary fastidious 
 ness not so much free from as absolutely dead to the 
 manifold seductions of the meretricious, a literary breed 
 ing so admirable as to seem unconscious of the existence 
 of vulgar expedients. And their informing purpose lies 
 quite outside the material world and its sublunary 
 phenomena. No small portion of their originality con 
 sists, indeed, in the association of their refinement and 
 elevation with what we can now see is their mediocrity. 
 Elsewhere in the world of fiction mediocrity is associated 
 with anything but fineness of fibre and spirituality. The 
 novelty of the combination in Hawthorne s case was dis 
 concerting, and it is small wonder that for a time at 
 Least for a generation, no doubt, so gradual is the read 
 justment of popular esteem of the unpopular the im 
 portance of the "Twice-Told Tales" and the "Mosses" 
 was argued from their distinction. Finally, some of . 
 them too few assuredly are good stories. *4 
 
 III 
 
 The rest are sterilized by the evil eye of Allegory under 
 whose baleful spell for some reason or other he early fell. 
 Neither the culture nor the criticism of his environment, 
 from which besides he had as much as possible separated 
 himself, was sufficient to rectify the individual whim by 
 
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 the general consensus; and in any case conformity to 
 aught but his own traditions, which were conventional 
 enough essentially, was as foreign to him as was the 
 eccentricity that surrounded him. Having elected the 
 service of this insipid sprite, there was no influence to 
 turn him from it, and he persisted with the overweening 
 obstinacy of the invincibly modest. Probably his ances 
 tral strain had much to do with this addiction. It was, 
 perhaps, a compromise on his part between his imagina 
 tion and his inheritance. His imagination impelled him 
 to the production of fiction, his Puritanism restrained 
 his fiction within the confines of the didactic. At any 
 rate, he took his bent, his pli, at the outset and rejoiced 
 calmly and temperately in the practice of this hybrid 
 and artificial genre. It is not to be denied that he had 
 an aptitude for it. But his aptitude is less than his 
 j affection, and his devotion has something exasperating 
 about it the exasperation always aroused by the con 
 secration of high powers to comparatively trivial ends. 
 | Allegory justifies itself when the fiction is the fact and the 
 Lmoral the induction. "Gulliver" and "The Pilgrim s 
 Progress," for example. Bunyan s imagination created 
 a world of types so vividly presented as to have the force 
 of individuals, provided them with adventures as ani 
 mating as the incidents of romance, and enforced his 
 moral by giving an independent and ideal verisimilitude 
 to its innocent and unconscious exponents. "The Pil 
 grim s Progress" is undoubtedly a tract, but if it had 
 been only a tract it would never have achieved uni 
 versal canonization. It is the splendid panoramic con- 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 struction of a great imagination inspired by the experi 
 ence of the soul in the struggle with sin. It is, in a word, 
 a work of art in itself, leaning lightly though, of course, 
 to all the more purpose on its moral, as lightly as a 
 dream on its interpretation or a vision on the conscious 
 concentration of the seer. Most persons probably read 
 "Gulliver" for the story and miss the satire. The 
 "Divine Comedy" and "Don Quixote" and "Paradise 
 Lost" are allegories; JSsop s "Fables," even "Plu 
 tarch s Lives," are allegories; history, conceived as 
 philosophy teaching by example, is an allegory. So, in 
 a sense, Is all art. But allegory is art only when its 
 representation is as imaginatively real as its meaning. 
 The mass of allegory allegory strictly devoted to ex 
 position and dependent upon exegesis, allegory ex 
 plicitly so called is only incidentally art at all. 
 
 Hawthorne s is of this order. His subject is always 1 
 something other than its substance. Everything mean s 
 something else. Dealing with the outer world solely for 
 the sake of the inner, he is careless of its character and 
 often loses its significance in mere suggestiveness. His 
 ^eaimgj.sJth^lHUxleiL_Qf his story, not. Jhe automatic 
 moral complement of its vivid and actual reality. Hence 
 the sense of reality is absent from it, and for this nothing 
 will atone in any form of art where the sense of unreality 
 is not sought instead. It is rather singular that this 
 latter effect is one he never sought. He never entered 
 fairy-land except to retell its classic tales in his 
 manuals, "The Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood 
 Tales," which have only a juvenile appeal and where 
 
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 he was not at his happiest, I think, though the volumes 
 have his usual distinction and, measured by the "jour 
 neyman-work" standard, have unquestionably titular 
 rank. His occasional effort for a slightly triturate effect 
 of reality is witnessed in the introduction to "The 
 Threefold Destiny," in which he says: "Rather than a 
 story of events claiming to be real, it may be considered 
 as an allegory, such as the writers of the last century 
 would have expressed in the shape of an Eastern tale, 
 but to which I have endeavored to give a more life-like 
 warmth than could be infused into those fanciful pro 
 ductions." The endeavor can hardly be called fatuous 
 considering the comparisons it emulates, but the result, 
 though more concrete than usual with him, is as usual 
 less life-like in its warmth than ingenious in its illustra 
 tion of its moral theme. In general, however, his dis 
 position is disclosed by such a sentence as this in the 
 "Sketches from Memory": "On this theme" namely 
 "the vain search for an unearthly treasure" "me- 
 thinks I could frame a tale with a deep moral." He did 
 frame such a tale "The Great Carbuncle" whose 
 moral is doubtless deep to those to whom all morals are 
 so, and of which, at any rate, in accordance with his 
 practice the moral, not the tale, is the thing. 
 
 His faculty of discovering morals on which tales 
 could be framed is prodigious. It rises to the distinction 
 of a special capacity of the mind, like the gift for lan 
 guages or a genius for chess. It is, as one may say, a 
 by-product of the Puritan preoccupation. He did not 
 find sermons in stones. He had the sermons already; 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 his task was to find the stones to fit them. \ And these 
 his fancy furnished him with a fertility paralleling his use 
 for them. But his interest in shaping these was con 
 centrated on their illustrative and not on their real quali 
 ties. Instead of realizing vividly and presenting con 
 cretely the elements of his allegory, he contented himself 
 with their plausibility as symbols. On this he always 
 insisted and to compass it he expended much ingenuity. 
 His fancy was of the kind that never completely loses 
 its hold of the actual. His literary taste was too serious 
 to content itself with pure mystification. The insub- 
 stantiality he sought was to consist in the envelope, not 
 in the object. He desired to dissemble, not to abjure 
 reality. But the sense of reality even as a substructure 
 for fancifulness is not to be obtained merely by the in 
 genuity which finds a possible scientific basis for what 
 performs its sole service as apparently imaginary. 
 
 To take a crude instance of this oftenest subtle prac 
 tice: "Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent" is not, artistic 
 ally speaking, made more real by the foot-note that 
 explains the actual occurrence of the physical fact in 
 several cases. The story as a story stands or falls by the 
 reality with which the man with the snake in his bosom 
 is presented. In the course of this presentation the 
 victim exclaims, "It gnaws me! It gnaws me." "And 
 then," the narrator says, "there was an audible hiss, 
 but whether it came from the apparent lunatic s own 
 lips, or was the real hiss of a serpent, might admit of 
 discussion." We are, of course, spared the discussion, 
 which might easily fail to interest us, but the point is 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 that the suggestion of it is precisely one of those touches 
 which diminish the sense of reality in the presentation, 
 and of which Hawthorne is so inordinately fond. Here 
 it is of small comparative importance. The same thing 
 is even charming, I think, in the author s speculation 
 about Donatello s possibly pointed ears in "The Marble 
 Faun," though I think also that he greatly overworks the 
 faun-like resemblance, which apparently he cannot con 
 vince himself he has made sufficiently clear, and follows 
 to ridiculous lengths in Donatello s skippings and capri- 
 olings, as well as in his conformation and character. 
 But oftenest his intrusion of symbolism, that parasite on 
 allegory itself, is a crying abuse of a perfectly superficial 
 and trivial expedient. He was, in fact, allegory-mad. 
 . Allegory was his obsession. Consequently, he not only 
 fails to handle the form in the minimizing manner of the 
 masters, but often fails in effectiveness on the lower 
 plane where the moral occupies the foreground. "The 
 Birthmark" is an instance. Nothing could be finer than 
 the moral of this tale, which inculcates the fatal error of 
 insisting on absolute perfection in what one loves most 
 absolutely. But it is a moral even more obscurely 
 brought out than it is fantastically symbolized. In the 
 same way, the moral of "Rappacini s Daughter," dis 
 tinctly the richest and warmest of Hawthorne s produc 
 tions, is still less effectively enforced. It is quite lost 
 sight of in the development of the narrative, which is 
 given an importance altogether disproportionate to the 
 moral, and which yet is altogether dependent upon the 
 moral for significance sustained as it is, and attractive, 
 
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 as it might have been, had it been taken as a fairy tale 
 frankly from the first. 
 
 In consequence, too, of this obsession by allegory, the 
 tales in which he leaves it alone altogether or at all 
 events does not lean upon it, are the best, I think. His 
 excellent faculty is released for freer play in such tales 
 as "The Gentle Boy," in which if he is less original, he 
 is more human, and takes his place and holds his own 
 in the lists of literature instead of standing apart in 
 the brown twilight and indulging his fancy in framing 
 insubstantial fictions for the illustration of moral truths, 
 not always of much moment. But the tendency grew 
 upon him and developed into a fondness for almost pure 
 symbolism, symbolism in which paradoxically the alle 
 gorizing element itself becomes attenuated and no truths 
 at all are illustrated the result being simply one thing 
 told in terms of another. In 1858 that is, at the age of 
 fifty-four this is what attracts his mature powers and 
 ripened mind, as recorded in the "Italian Note-Books": 
 Apropos of a newspaper paragraph respecting a ring 
 worn by a widower and containing a stone into which 
 his wife s body had been "chemically resolved," he says, 
 "I think I could make a story on this idea," and pro 
 ceeds to sketch it. "The ring should be one of the 
 widower s bridal gifts to a second wife; and, of course, 
 it should have wondrous and terrible qualities, sym 
 bolizing all that disturbs the quiet of a second marriage," 
 and so on, in enumeration of this disturbing detail. 
 The "story" could hardly have been remarkable, but, 
 assuming that it had to be built on the "idea," it would 
 
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 clearly be better for the story, once built, to take the 
 "idea" out of it afterward. A great deal of Haw 
 thorne would be the better for the extraction of the alle 
 gorical and symbolic elements combined with it and 
 constituting in its author s view its raison d etre. Very 
 certainly it would be if upon the rest he had seriously 
 exercised his imagination, instead of so completely sur 
 rendering to his fancy, content to deprecate complete 
 irresponsibility by the counterpoise of his disillusioning 
 good sense which was remarkable, but the intrusion of 
 which leaves his story often still more "in the air." 
 
 " 
 
 iv 
 
 For the real misfortune of Hawthorne and ours 
 was the misconception of his talent, resulting in this 
 cultivation of his fancy to the neglect of his imagination. 
 Issuing from the curious by-paths of literature into which 
 this led him a seclusion that quite matched the seclu 
 sion of his life and engaging in the general literary com 
 petition on the immemorial terms for the exercise of the 
 imagination, it is not to be doubted that he would have 
 produced works far otherwise important than those 
 which in the main he wrote. "The Scarlet Letter" is 
 there to prove it. His imagination was a puissant one 
 or "beautiful and light," as Mr. James says: the dis 
 tinction is not important analytically, since in the case 
 of the imagination power is a prerequisite to its beautiful 
 and light as well as to its robust exercise, just as force 
 is essential to the most sensitive precision ; it is the effects 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 that are beautiful and light, not their agent. And such 
 effects which I should, rather, incline to call incon 
 clusive and faint Hawthorne produced, by following 
 the line of least resistance, not by effort and concen 
 tration. Instead of giving a tale more substance he 
 wrote another equally slight. And he neglected his 
 imagination because he shrank from reality. Now, 
 reality is precisely the province, the only province, the 
 only concern, the only material of this noblest of facul 
 ties. It is, of course, as varied as the universe of which 
 it is composed. There is the reality of "Tom Jones" 
 and the reality of "Lear," for example; the reality of 
 the ideal, indeed, as well as that of the phenomenal 
 its opposite being not the ideal but the fanciful. And 
 Hawthorne coquetted and sported with it and made 
 mirage of it. Instead of accepting it as the field 
 of his imagination he made it the playground of his 
 fancy. 
 
 Imagination and fancy differ, according to the old 
 metaphysic, in that, both transcending experience, one 
 observes and the other transgresses law. Every one thus 
 discriminates, at all events, between the imaginative 
 and the fanciful. No writer ever had a deeper sense, or 
 at least a firmer conviction, of the august immutability 
 of law those ordaining principles of the universe un- 
 begotten by the race of mortal men and forever immune 
 from the sleep of oblivion itself to paraphrase the 
 classic panegyric. His frequent theme the soul and 
 the conscience absolutely implies the recognition of 
 law and involves its acceptance. And philosophically 
 
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 his conception of his theme fundamentally, even fatal 
 istically, insists on it. Three of the four novels embody 
 its predetermination. But too often in his treatment of 
 his theme its basis crumbles. The centre of gravity too 
 often falls outside of it falls outside of law as well as 
 of experience because reality impresses and appeals to 
 him so little, because his necessity for dissolving it into 
 the insubstantial is so imperative, that the theme itself 
 is frittered away in the course of its exposition. The 
 law, the moral truth, which is the point of departure, or, 
 as I say, the foundation of his more serious work, is not 
 only not enforced but positively enervated. At every 
 turn the characters and events might, one feels, evade 
 its constraint, so wholly does the unreal and the fantastic 
 predominate in both their constitution and their evolu 
 tion. Beings so insubstantial and transactions so fan 
 tastic (one or both elements are generally present) can 
 but fitfully and feebly illustrate anything so solid and 
 stable as the moral principles upon which the real uni 
 verse is conducted. 
 
 On the other hand, as I have already noted, when 
 his theme is purely fanciful it frequently does not receive 
 a frankly fantastic treatment. He seems to shrink from 
 anything so inelastic as the careful preservation of its 
 proper character and is, in a word, so enamored of 
 mirage that he even seems bent on blurring his illusion, 
 and if it seems to be acquiring a consistency of its own 
 introduces some element of reality for its resolution. 
 This practice, to be sure, has small comparative im 
 portance, save as illustrating the inveteracy of his bias. 
 
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 It has spoiled far less literature than his fanciful per 
 version of the imagination, which has had serious re 
 sults. I do not suppose anything could have been 
 made of "Septimius Felton, or the Elixir of Life" in 
 any case, except under the happiest circumstances and 
 with the nicest art. But it is a capital instance of what 
 Hawthorne s fancy can do with a theme of some sug- 
 gestiveness in the way of emptying it of all signifi 
 cance. Contrast his performance for a moment with 
 the treatment of the same theme by unmixed imagina 
 tive genius Swift s account of his Struldbrugs. The 
 mere material of this vision of earthly immortality, 
 without the addition of any further detail, felicitously 
 moulded into the form of a romance, would make one 
 of the masterpieces of literature. For its profound and 
 sombre power resides in its appalling reality. This 
 is what a draught of the Elixir of Life would pro 
 duce if the puerile decoction over which Septimius 
 Felton labors through so many wearisome pages had 
 crowned his hopes this, and not the insipid experi 
 ences foreshadowed in the vaporings of his infatuated 
 fancy. 
 
 But " Septimius Felton" is a posthumous production 
 and one of Hawthorne s failures. Consider a work of 
 far more serious ambition if not in all respects of more 
 representative character " The Marble Faun." There 
 is the same kind of ineffectiveness and for the same 
 reason, the frivolity of fancy. The theme of "The 
 Marble Faun," the irretrievableness of evil conjoined 
 with its curious transforming power the theme in short 
 
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 of that profoundly imaginative masterpiece, the myth of 
 the Fall of Man is rather stated than exemplified in the 
 story, overlaid as this is with its reticulation of fantastic 
 unreality. Its elaboration, its art, tends to enfeeble its 
 conception ; its substance extenuates its subject. It has 
 had an extraordinary vogue. In Rome for thousands of 
 Americans "Hilda s tower" probably still divides in 
 terest with the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Stanze. 
 Dean Stanley said he had read it seven times and meant 
 to continue. But though its central conception is one 
 of the noblest in literature, and though there are charm 
 ing and truly characteristic touches in it for instance 
 the effect on innocence of the mere consciousness of evil 
 as shown in Hilda, the admirable little icicle existing 
 for this express purpose its significance is entombed 
 rather than exhibited in its treatment. Probably its ad 
 mirers considered that the treatment poetized the moral. 
 That is clearly the author s intention. But a truth is not 
 poetized by being devitalized, and certainly the con 
 sequences of sin and the inexorableness of expiation are 
 inadequately presented in a tale padded out of all pro 
 portion by material alien in its nature, however " artis 
 tic" in its atmosphere and constituting half its volume, 
 and a tale moreover obliged to make its moral plain in 
 a formal statement, and to rectify its inconclusiveness 
 in a postscript. The lack of construction, of orderly 
 evolution, in the book is an obvious misfortune and 
 shows very clearly Hawthorne s artistic weakness, 
 whatever his poetic force. But its essential defect is 
 its lack of the sense of reality, to secure which is the 
 
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 function of the imagination, and through which alone 
 the truth of the fundamental conception can flower 
 into effective exposition. 
 
 Though what I have called its alien constituent is 
 real enough ruins, studios, the campagna, the carnival, 
 etc. the material of "The Marble Faun" is perhaps 
 too miscellaneous and unrelated for Hawthorne s im 
 agination to unify into a solid support of his moral 
 theme, even if it had not, after its habitual fashion, re 
 laxed into the fantasticality of fancy in the detail. But 
 certainly his imaginative success varies directly as the 
 density of his material. This is greatest in "The 
 Scarlet Letter," for instance; least in "Septimius Fel- 
 ton " among the longer productions. In " The House of 
 the Seven Gables" there is detail enough, but of singular 
 thinness and an almost gaseous expansion. The interest 
 of "The Blithedale Romance," the most artistically 
 articulated as well as the most naturalistic of his novels, 
 resides almost altogether in the part suggested directly 
 by Hawthorne s Brook Farm experience. " Everything, 
 you know," he says or makes Sybil Darcy say, "has its 
 spiritual meaning, which is to the literal meaning what 
 the soul is to the body." This unfortunate doctrine is 
 the only thing that Hawthorne ever appears to have 
 taken literally. But even this doctrine, taken literally, 
 recognizes the literal meaning and the body as media 
 for the manifestation of the spiritual meaning and the 
 soul. Hawthorne s distinction assuredly lay in his 
 treatment of the soul, yet since he was in no danger at 
 all from materialistic excess or emphasis but quite the 
 
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 contrary, his treatment of the soul is most successful 
 when he is least neglectful of the body. 
 
 It is indeed generally true that even the magical and 
 the miraculous gain rather than lose from the empha 
 sized reality of their setting; it is even true that some of 
 the most noteworthy works of the imagination contain 
 ing this element have depended for their abiding interest 
 on this setting even more than on their miracles and 
 magic. It requires no realistic pedantry to perceive 
 that even such a work as "The Arabian Nights" to 
 take a crucial instance exerts its permanent charm 
 largely in virtue of its splendid portrayal of an entire civ 
 ilization, whose manners, personages, institutions, and 
 happenings are so solidly depicted as to anchor in reality 
 the dreams in which they figure. Quite aside from the 
 historical value of the "Nights " indirect account of an 
 extraordinary society in decadence though it is not to 
 belittle but to magnify fiction to recognize this service as 
 within its province, however ponderous such a view 
 would have seemed to Hawthorne quite independently 
 of the value of their "criticism of life" in itself, that is to 
 say, it is directly because of this very element that their 
 magic element is given a body and substance without 
 which its appeal to the imagination would be slender 
 and insipid. The magic is a convention like the con 
 ventions of the stage. Its interest is in its assumed 
 reality. If Scheherazade had constantly called Scha- 
 riar s attention to the fact of its assumption, as Haw 
 thorne does with his readers, we may be sure that her 
 career would have been brief. On the contrary, she 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 makes the unreal seem real by the surrounding pressure 
 of the indubitably real just as the stage does. In 
 other words the fanciful element of fiction must be given 
 the appearance of reality, and there is no other way to do 
 this than by providing at least an atmosphere of indis 
 putable reality. The borderland between the two is an 
 arid marsh. Either reality or the sense of it is necessary 
 to the seriousness of any composition except, appar 
 ently, allegory of the Hawthorne type. This is why the i 
 perennial discussion of classicism, romanticism, realism, 
 is so barren and has come to seem so jejune. The names 
 indicate phases of taste rather than principles of art. 
 What abides as the necessary element of all genres of 
 fiction is reality, or the sense of it, conventionally or 
 otherwise secured. And without dealing with its ele 
 ments, how is its effect to be obtained ? The end of art, 
 in brief, is illusion, but the illusion of reality. Haw 
 thorne may be said to have conceived it as hallucination 
 in which, according to the medical definition, " there 
 are no external stimuli." 
 
 Now, however his divorce from reality and consecra 
 tion to the fanciful may have succeeded in giving him a 
 unique position and demonstrating his originality 
 however successful he may have been, that is to say, 
 from his own point of view there is one vital respect, at 
 all events, in which he almost drops out of the novelist s 
 category. There is no element in fiction at all com 
 parable in importance with its portrayal of human char 
 acter and its picture of human life. Fiction is the genre- ~7 
 painting of literature as its decorative painting is poetry. 
 
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 J But Hawthorne cared nothing for people in life and 
 made extraordinarily little of them in his books. In no 
 other fiction are the characters so little characterized as 
 in his, where in general their raison d etre is what they 
 illustrate, not what they are. In none other are they so 
 airily conceived, so slightly sketched, so imperfectly 
 defined. Mr. James points out, I think justly, that with 
 the partial exception of Donatello in "The Marble 
 Faun " there are no types among them. Elsewhere, to 
 be sure, he complains that "Holgrave is not sharply 
 enough characterized " and " is not an individual but a 
 type." The inconsistency is natural, because it is 
 natural to think of a character in fiction as either a type 
 orjan individual, and when you are considering one of 
 [ wA Hawthorne s as either, you think he must be the other, 
 
 uU* , ,;\y the truth being that he is neither. He has not enough 
 features for an individual and he has not enough repre- 
 j^sentative traits for a type. His creator evokes him in 
 pseudo-Frankenstein fashion for some purpose, sym 
 bolical, allegorical, or otherwise illustrative, and has no 
 concern for his character, apart from this function of it, 
 either for its typical value or its individual interest. He 
 cares nothing for his personality; the more real he made 
 it the more superfluous it would seem to him, since, 
 though it is a prime necessity to establish it first of all if 
 its associated actions are to have the effect of reality, the 
 effect of reality is precisely what he does not desire to 
 secure. Consequently his dramas have the air of being 
 conducted by marionettes. This is less important in the 
 short stories, of course. It may be said that of such a 
 
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 character as the minister in "The Black Veil" the 
 reader needs to be told nothing, that his character is 
 easily inferred and, anyhow, is not the point, that the 
 point is his wearing the veil and thereby presenting a 
 rueful picture illustrative of our uncleansed condition 
 from secret faults. In that case the idea is enough, and 
 a hortatory paragraph would have sufficed for it. And 
 in any case it is easy to see how immensely the idea 
 would have gained in effectiveness, in cogency, if the 
 minister had been characterized into reality if he had 
 been characterized, say, by the author of the "Ve*nus 
 d llle," a story that makes an abiding impression on 
 readers whom its significance, if it have any, wholly 
 escapes. But in sustained fiction, in novels, to neglect 
 the personality of the personages is to invite failure. 
 
 Few novelists probably realize their characters suf 
 ficiently to be able to say, with Thackeray, that they 
 "know the sound of their voices." But most of them 
 doubtless would like to. The origin of most characters, 
 indeed, in fiction of any moment is well known to be 
 such as Thackeray himself has described in speaking of 
 "a certain Costigan whom I had invented (as I suppose 
 authors invent their personages) out of scraps, heel 
 taps, odds and ends of character." Hawthorne s, it is 
 needless to say, were not thus conceived. When he 
 needed a character to illustrate one of his deeply medi 
 tated truths or one of his fanciful conceits, he invented 
 it ad hoc. His characters, indeed, are not creations, 
 but expedients. Roger Chillingworth is an expedient i 
 and as such the only flaw in "The Scarlet Letter," j 
 
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 whose impressive theme absorbed its author out of ab 
 stractions, as I have heretofore intimated, and com 
 pelled him, except in the case of Chillingworth, to create 
 the only real people of his imaginary world. In creating 
 Dimmesdale and Hester and I am quite sure Pearl, 
 also Nature herself, as Arnold says of Wordsworth, 
 "seems to take the pen out of his hand and write for 
 him." Even here, one is bound to add, the portraits 
 lack the loving touch. Hawthorne seems himself to 
 care quite as much for Feathertop as for Hester Prynne. 
 In fact, he is rather partial to Feathertop a circum 
 stance which a reader similarly disposed to the sym 
 bolical might feel justified in considering significant. 
 He has perhaps a weakness for such characters as 
 Phoebe in "The House of the Seven Gables" and Hilda 
 in "The Marble Faun." But no one would pretend to 
 say they were realized with any definition. They are 
 such generalized portraits as the fancy might paint of 
 youth and innocence in a sunbonnet or a Leghorn hat 
 passing its window in a quiet street of Concord or 
 Salem. Kenyon is certainly sculpte en bois; considering 
 the state of the art among his compatriots then in Rome 
 it was perhaps a happy stroke to give him his particular 
 profession. Hollingsworth is a caricature etched with 
 unaccountable acidity for philanthropism, than which, 
 at least in its less odious forms, one would say there were 
 worse things. Zenobia, Miriam, linger in one s mem 
 ory rather as brunettes than as women. Coverdale is 
 quite as anemic a character as Priscilla is in the physique 
 given her largely for mesmeric reasons, and the con- 
 
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 eluding announcement that he is in love with her is 
 probably an idle boast. Hawthorne particularly en 
 joyed Trollope, and he had a shrewd observation for 
 casual types in actual life. One would hardly infer it 
 from his own personages and is inclined to find in the 
 inconsistency not, or not only, the frequent contrast 
 between actual taste and artistic practice, but additional 
 evidence of his curious conception of and respect for his 
 peculiar and original " genius." 
 
 The result was that his genius took him out of the 
 novelist s field altogether. His novels are not novels. 
 They have not the reality of novels. And they elude it 
 not only in their personages but in their picture of life 
 in general. "The Scarlet Letter" itself is the postlude 
 of a passion. Just so much of the general Salem scene 
 as is necessary for the setting of the extremely concen 
 trated drama is presented and no more. Nowhere else 
 is the scene treated otherwise than atmospherically, so 
 to speak. It does not constitute a medium or even back 
 ground, but penumbra. The social picture does not 
 exist. The quiet Salem streets of "The House of the 
 Seven Gables," the community life of Blithedale, the 
 village houses and hillocks and gossip and happenings 
 of "Septimius Felton," though the War of Independence 
 is in progress and Concord fight is actually an incident, 
 contribute color, not substance, to the story. The 
 Roman ruins and churches, and studios and museums, 
 the campagna landscape and the Italian towns and 
 country, contribute even less to the drama of "The 
 Marble Faun," being distractions and digressions in 
 
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 large part, and so not only not an integral part of it but 
 even applied rather than integumental embroidery of it. 
 The action is always a skeleton. Its direct illustrative 
 function is exclusively considered. It receives no aid 
 from anything incidental or indirect, anything super 
 fluous or subsidiary, which in a certain degree is 
 absolutely necessary if the theme is to be presented 
 with the fulness and concreteness of a picture. It is 
 presented, on the contrary, with the lean explicitness of 
 the diagram. One "gets the idea" a sine qua non, 
 to be sure, of a serious fiction that is designed like Haw 
 thorne s to enforce some particular truth but the sen 
 suously (and logically) inclined must ruefully reflect 
 that if this is all that is to be had, it could be had at 
 even less expense; a statement would serve as well as a 
 story. It is like a building in which the supports and 
 buttresses should exactly, instead of superabundantly, 
 counterbalance the weights and thrusts. The insub 
 stantial effect so much admired in Hawthorne would 
 be secured, but it would hardly be satisfactory to the 
 eye or the mind, which are adjusted to the sense of sub 
 stance in the embodiment of even the ethereal. 
 
 Not that the novels have any effect of succinctness 
 corresponding to their slenderness, or of pith matching 
 their lack of luxuriance. On the contrary, at least three 
 of them are distinctly too long. But this is simply, to 
 put it brutally, because they are spun out. "The 
 Scarlet Letter" he, perhaps unfortunately, conceived 
 as a short story and, beyond doubt unfortunately, 
 pieced out with an incongruous portal. The episod- 
 
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 ical form of "The Blithedale Romance" injures its 
 evolution, which, however, its interest would hardly 
 have justified prolonging. But, if in these two works 
 he did not very well know how to continue, in "The 
 House of the Seven Gables," "The Marble Faun," and 
 "Septimius Felton" he did not at all know how to stop. 
 The first is swamped in detail over which the author 
 lingers as if mesmerized by his own daguerrotypist, and 
 unable to awake from his dream of rendering it intangi 
 ble by endless retouching. In "The Marble Faun " not 
 only is the action retarded by frequent breaks, but the 
 narrative is greatly expanded by what, as I have said, 
 is not remplissage but incrustation. In "Septimius 
 Felton " bulk is achieved by the primitive expedient of 
 pure redundancy. Its redundancy passes the prolixity 
 of Cooper in his most complacent moods, and is the 
 plain witness, the unmistakable symptom, of a sterility 
 in the subject that illusion itself could only hope to fer 
 tilize by indefatigable persistence. 
 
 The incompleteness of Hawthorne s characters, the 
 inadequacy of his social picture, the lack of romantic 
 richness in his work, have, to be sure, been attributed 
 largely to the romantic poverty of his material his 
 environment. The leanness of this social world has been 
 summed up from the romancer s point of view with the 
 explicitness of the dilettante dwelling on the disagreeable: 
 
 No State in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely 
 a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal 
 loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplo 
 matic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor 
 manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched 
 
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 houses, nor ivied ruins ; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little 
 Norman churches ; no great universities nor public schools 
 no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow ; no literature, no novels, no 
 museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class 
 no Epsom nor Ascot. 
 
 The dirge is Mr. James s not Ouida s. It is in a 
 familiar key. Nothing is more common than to hear it 
 echoed by our practitioners in all the arts. Yet, how 
 ever just his complaint of the lack of an atmosphere to 
 stimulate his initiative, develop his talent, and train his 
 taste, the artist s complaint of the meagreness of his 
 material is, speaking strictly, a loose one, for the reason 
 that art does not reside in material but in treatment. 
 All that " Alexandre the Great," as Thackeray calls him, 
 needed was, he said, "four boards, two actors, and a 
 passion." Indeed, richness of material may be as 
 much of a handicap as a help to the artist. If, as Taine 
 says, " the ugly is beautiful, but the beautiful is still more 
 beautiful," the artist who deals with it, being under 
 bonds to make it serve and not master his art, must pro 
 portionally make his art still more effective. His failure 
 to do so is the cause of the inanities which strew the path 
 of so-called academic art. But for their material, these 
 might, it is true, be positive instead of negative failures, 
 but it is only mediocrity that can really profit by the 
 adventitious. So far as regards his material, the true 
 artist s concern is not with his star but with himself. 
 Rembrandt would have found no advantage in Veronese s 
 material, and Veronese himself would interest us more 
 deeply if, like Titian and Tintoretto, he had possessed 
 the personal force to answer to the artistic demand that 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 the sumptuousness and splendor of his material made 
 more rather than less exigent. On the other hand, one 
 may well doubt if Ibsen, for example, would ever have 
 suggested Shakespeare, even to the order of ap 
 preciation to which he does suggest Shakespeare, if 
 he had had to deal with a world remotely approaching 
 Shakespeare s in richness of material. But as to Haw 
 thorne there is no possible question. His environment 
 furnished him material exactly, exquisitely, suited to A /u/J 
 his genius. His subject was the s^nl, and for the 
 enactment of the dramas of the soul Salem was as 
 apt a stage as Thebes. The New England of Haw 
 thorne s time certainly cannot be considered as a pos 
 sible theatre for the comedie humaine, but Hawthorne 
 has himself demonstrated that the New England of an 
 even blanker and bleaker period was a fit theatre for 
 the human tragedy. "The Scarlet Letter" is so exclu 
 sively a drama of the soul as to be measurably inde 
 pendent of an elaborate setting in a social picture. But 
 if Hawthorne^s other works were as well placed, as 
 firmly established, as deeply rooted in their environment, 
 they would be works of very different value. That they 
 are not is not the fault of their milieu, but of their 
 
 Something seems distinctly left out of his organization 
 that particular faculty whose function it is to make the 
 most of its fellows. In default of it he took apparently 
 the same serenely fatalistic view of himself, of his own 
 
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 genius, that he did of life in his books. This is a familiar 
 phenomenon in the sphere of character and morals. We 
 are all acquainted with the morally fatalistic character. 
 It is almost invariably of a high type; otherwise it could 
 not get along at all, since its peculiarity is that it dis 
 penses with effort. This nature, with its acceptance 
 of its own constitution as unalterable, experiencing 
 satisfaction without elation, and meeting discourage 
 ment without thought of amendment, self-centred 
 and independent, without alien support or altruistic 
 endeavor, never dreaming of regeneration or submis 
 sive to discipline, conceiving its constitution as a given 
 and constant quantity that may mould its environ 
 ment so far as it must meet it, but never be subdued to 
 what it works in, and, above all, sceptical of climbing 
 on stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things this 
 morally fatalistic temperament, which, as I say, is not 
 unfamiliar, Hawthorne undoubtedly possessed. But 
 what is more remarkable is that he possessed the mental 
 organization to match it. Back of both lay the feel 
 ing of reasonable self-satisfaction the self-satisfaction 
 which the instinct of self-preservation makes an indis 
 pensable postulate of fatalism. Though they have de 
 pressed moods, as Hawthorne certainly did, few Cal- 
 vinists doubt their own election. It is almost amusing 
 to note the old Pagan pride, having in due course of 
 evolution passed through the phase of the Christian 
 humilitasthe great mediaeval virtue partially revert 
 ing to type in the self-satisfaction of the Puritans, of 
 whom Hawthorne was a very genuine son. 
 
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 Hence, no doubt, in considerable measure, his bland 
 acceptance of his genius as something fixed rather than 
 potential, and his diversion into its particular channels of 
 the material he might otherwise, by energy and effort, 
 by study and application, have dealt with on a larger 
 scale, to profounder purpose and with more substantial 
 results. "The Scarlet Letter" is an eloquent and con 
 vincing witness against his comfortable and unfortunate 
 illusion. Yet he seems to see only its leaden casket, and 
 calls its negligible successor " more characteristic of my 
 mind and more proper and natural for me to write." 
 "In the name of the Muses, then," one feels like ex 
 claiming, "bring some pressure to bear on this sacro 
 sanct mind, and, with less regard for what is proper 
 and natural to its preferences, demonstrate by another 
 masterpiece, and still another, that its constitution is 
 not so immutable as you conceive it." 
 
 Descend into the arena, however, and contend for 
 the world s prizes in the recognized lists of literature, 
 Hawthorne could not. Of the mental constitution and 
 capacities which heredity disposed him to look upon 
 as final, environment, too, restricted the development. 
 He was, to be sure, quite out of sympathy with his time 
 and its tendencies. But New England transcendental 
 ism was too universal a movement for any one wholly to 
 escape its influences. Hawthorne s aloofness did not 
 secure his immunity. It was indeed a gospel expressly 
 designed for the isolated. Thoreau at Walden was its 
 archetype. And, though Hawthorne s solitude was less 
 express and voluntary and certainly not of an explicit 
 
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 transcendental sanction, but rather due to temperament 
 and mood, it nevertheless fostered his preoccupation 
 with the soul rather than with the mind or the senses. 
 He could think out his allegories and polish up their 
 articulation with the actual more unremittingly by him 
 self than by talking them over with Alcott. But tran 
 scendentalism was in the very air he breathed, and 
 though he had little joy in the company of its votaries, 
 he hardly changed his moral atmosphere in seques 
 trating himself from their society. 
 
 Transcendentalism was the sublimation of the gospel 
 of individuality, and may be summed up in Carlyle s 
 pronouncement that the light of one s own mind is "the 
 direct inspiration of the Almighty." Hawthorne could 
 not only perceive but satirize the eccentricities derived 
 from a literal subscription to this doctrine. But the 
 contemplation of these increased his self-concentration, 
 and the doctrine itself was as much his own as it was that 
 of the most fantastic speculators around him. Ajid as 
 a corollary of this universal belief in individual inspira 
 tion the belief in the prevalence of genius was general. 
 There has never, probably, before or since, been so 
 much "genius" abroad. The word talent does not 
 exist in the transcendental vocabulary. The profession 
 of literature presupposed genius. Every one who wrote 
 had it. Channing, Everett, even Alcott had it. Haw 
 thorne was singularly modest. His belief in his genius, 
 its peculiar character, and the propriety of considering 
 this in his writings was not in the least vainglorious. 
 His serene satisfaction with what he conceived to be its 
 
 100 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 limitations, as inevitable, as immitigable, led him in fact 
 to exaggerate them. Thus both his ancestral fatalism 
 
 f-~id his transcendental environment obscured for him . 
 ie fact that he had an extraordinary amount of talent 
 hich it behooved him to cultivate, and magnified his 
 consciousness of having a particular kind of talent which 
 it amused him to exercise. And thus he made what seems 
 to me, as I have said, the cardinal error of his career 
 an error of tragic import to American literature by 
 indulging his fancy in lieu of developing his imagination. 
 For the development of his imagination, too, his 
 own temperament was too little enthusiastic. He was 
 eminently a man of sound sense distinctly the most 
 hard-headed of our men of genius. Beyond thinking"} 
 the vague and the mysterious nearer the soul and real 
 truth than the definite and the explicit, and consequently 
 the proper content of literature, he did not go. He 
 never systematized in the least nor even speculated. 
 There is no mysticism in his philosophy. He had not 
 in fact any particular spiritual adventurousness. His 
 entire body of doctrine is traditional. What interested 
 him in the speculative sphere is to be found in the theology 
 in which he had been brought up the irreparableness 
 of sin, the necessity of expiation, the allegory of the Fall, 
 and its fast anchorage in human nature, the suffering 
 of the innocent through the guilty. The emancipation 
 of transcendentalism was as much moonshine to him as 
 was the materialization of dogma and doctrine. His 
 clear-seeing mind robbed revelation of its sanctions, 
 without in the least reconstructing its fundamental data. 
 
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AMERICAN I llOSK MASTKKS 
 
 He was not only hard-headed, he was distinctly unsenti 
 mental, if the epithet may be applied l.o a nature just, 
 kind, and devoted in (In- family relations and domestic 
 lift-. He was particularly insensitive In exterior personal 
 influences. All the enthusiasm for reform with which 
 the middle decades of his cenlnry echoed left him cold. 
 He was unmoved by their numerous agitations, from 
 questions of did to those of philosophy, from reform of 
 attire to negro emancipation. Philanthropy in general 
 he thoroughly disbelieved in. He ridicules it through 
 put the whole course of one of his few novels, and tries 
 hard to prove then- is something sinister in it, his 
 imagination having discovered a veritable mare s nest, 
 apparently, in pondering in his seclusion the adage that 
 "Charity begins at home." He says expressly, and to 
 considerably more purpose, in a letter to his sister-in- 
 law, "The good of others, like our own happiness, is not 
 to be attained by direct ell ort, but incidentally"; which 
 statement is nevertheless singularly free from the ardor 
 of illusion. Hut the ardor of illusion is exactly what he 
 never had. This is why a dis.-eniing I Yeneh critic, 
 Kmile Montegut, describes him as a "roniancicr pessi- 
 iniste" a pessimist being precisely a nature without 
 illusions. He had even less ardor than lie had illusion. 
 During what is usually, even for the unusually self- 
 possessed, a period of fervor lie writes to his aflianced: 
 "Our souls are in happiest unison, hut we must not dis 
 quiet ourselves if every tone be not re-echoed from one 
 to the other if every shade be not reflected in the al 
 ternate mirror. Our broad and general sympathy is 
 
 102 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 enough to secure our bliss, without our following it into 
 minute details." 
 
 His nature clearly was self-sustaining. He never 
 felt the need of the support that in the realm of the affec 
 tions is the reward of self-surrender, lie had no doubt 
 an ideal family life that is to say, ideal in a particular 
 way, for he had it on rather particular terms, one sus 
 pects. These were, in brief, his own terms. He was 
 worshipped, idoli/ed, canonized, and on his side it 
 probably re<|iiired small effort worthily to fill the r6le a 
 more ardent na.liire would have either merited less or 
 found more irksome. Me responded at any rate with 
 absolute, devotion. 1 1 is domestic periphery bounded 
 his vital interests. Me had a few early friends, such as 
 youth that is not abnormal or eccentric, and Hawthorne 
 certainly was neither, cannot fa.il to make, and these he 
 kept throughout life with admirable loyalty, but without 
 adding to their number. Loyalty itself is of quite a 
 different fibre from warm-heartedness. It has often 
 less than nothing t.o do with susceptibility to the attrac 
 tiveness of others. Hawthorne s loyalty to Pierce was 
 more than honorable to him, it was in every way ad 
 mirable, the trail of a man instinctively convinced that 
 there is nothing in the changes of circumstance, or even 
 of character this side of grave deterioration, to make a 
 change of real feeling in a friendship more important 
 than its conservation. With Hawthorne opinion had 
 certainly no more than its just weight, and differences 
 in it were of small account compared with fundamental 
 agreement of feeling. Of course, too, he never differed 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 greatly with Pierce in opinion. He was, after all, a 
 Democrat, though he was for his day extraordinarily 
 non-partisan. Non-partisanship, however, inter arma, 
 is itself a proof of a cool temperament when it is not 
 itself of an ardent nature, as Hawthorne s was not. He 
 was thoroughly patriotic in his sympathies, rejoiced at 
 Northern victory and despaired at Northern defeat; 
 but he stood rather aloof from the struggle, not so much 
 because he saw both sides so sympathetically as because 
 Schw drmerei in any degree was foreign to him. 
 
 He met and conversed with Lincoln, but quite missed 
 his personality, which was curious considering his eye 
 for character. For character he had the observer s, not 
 the divining eye. He was eminently an observer 
 lynx-like on occasion. He made little or no use of his 
 faculty of observation in his novels. But his note 
 books testify to an almost microscopic exercise of it. 
 He notes everything; far beyond the confines of the sig 
 nificant he is still scrutinizing. And the "Tales" and 
 "Mosses" here and there witness a searching notation of 
 the "types" of his environment, from the old apple-man 
 to the parson, from the custom-house lounger to the 
 sequestered spinster, their various characteristic traits, 
 and the various suggestions of these as they appealed to 
 his indefatigable but otiose fancy. Yet his study of 
 traits never led him to create a character, nor his reflec 
 tion on character to illustrate a moral truth with one 
 save in the exotic instance of Donatello, whose abun 
 dantly described faun-like nature is "transformed" into 
 rather characterless character. His manifest preferences 
 
 104 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 for Phoebe, Priscilla, Hilda, Pearl, among his per 
 sonages accord with his predilection for the unde 
 veloped. He observed too coolly. He lacked the ardor 
 in which the data he accumulated should fuse into some 
 general imaginative conception of real significance and 
 substantial proportions. His humor lacks mirth. He 
 has less sentiment than Irving far less. His stories do 
 not touch him. An occasional note like that of 
 of "The Gentle Boy" sounds rather plaintive than 
 pathetic, and hardly moves us as the franker feeling 
 of Irving s "Rural Funerals," for example. He is 
 not moved himself. He preserves his equilibrium a 
 little too admirably. The subject does not call for 
 reserve; it is too slight. Considered as a creative 
 artist he writes too much like a critic. His detach 
 ment is too great. 
 
 With such a character so eminent for good sense, 
 so unsentimental his much-talked-of shyness needs 
 qualification. One of those friends from whom 
 nothing saves the shyest, Dr. Loring, his fellow towns 
 man, says: "The working of his mind was so sacred 
 and mysterious to him that he was impatient of any 
 attempt at familiarity or even intimacy with the divine 
 power within him. . . . The sacredness of his genius 
 was to him like the sacredness of his love." But this 
 may easily be the transcendental way of recording an 
 occasion on which when engaged in composition he was 
 unwilling to be disturbed, even by Loring. He was less 
 shy, perhaps, than taciturn his own epithet. "Haw 
 thorne was among the most enterprising of the merry- 
 
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 makers," says Fields of a picnic occasion. In England 
 he turned out a ready and apt after-dinner orator an 
 impossibility for a thoroughly shy man. He apologizes 
 in "The Scarlet Letter" prologue for his tendency to 
 talk about himself to his readers and, as I have said, 
 this tendency was marked. He writes to Longfellow, 
 a dozen years after leaving college: "By some witch 
 craft or other for I cannot really assign any reason 
 able why or wherefore I have been carried apart 
 from the main current of life. ... I have secluded 
 myself from society; and yet I never meant any 
 such thing." That is Hawthorne s weakness. In 
 a sense he never meant anything. He drifted. In 
 his own words: "An influence beyond our control lays 
 its strong hand on everything we do and weaves its con 
 sequences into an iron tissue of necessity." He was, in 
 fact, a fatalist. No wonder that his ideality was fanci 
 ful and insubstantial, and that its glimpses of real and 
 vital truth are less frequent than they are sombre and 
 profound 
 
 VI 
 
 Thus predisposed by heredity, by environment, and 
 by constitution to work what he conceived to be his own 
 peculiar vein, and what every one around him agreed 
 was his rare and original genius, Hawthorne, for the 
 most part, as I say, supinely suffered his real gift to lie 
 fallow. What it needed was development, and for 
 development it needed not only exercise but nurture. 
 With its moral austerity it would have responded beauti- 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 fully to the influences of culture. And from such in 
 fluences he protected himself with signal perversity and 
 success. His imagination was not nurtured because his 
 mind was not enriched. His mind, in fact, contained 
 much less furniture than that usually possessed by 
 writers who are ever called great. He had no particular 
 amount of reading beyond that current at the time 
 among all so-called educated people: Dr. Johnson, Scott, 
 Byron, Tom Moore, the belles-lettres of the period then 
 closing. Instead of reading he reflected "brooded," 
 perhaps, in his pythian character. But he had very little 
 to brood over. Hence the insubstantial nature of his 
 fanciful progeny. Hence his fondness for mirage. Fa 
 miliarity with the best that has been thought and said 
 and done in the world would have diverted him from 
 his irresponsibility and not only stimulated his imagina 
 tion by enlarging its horizon but provided it with ma 
 terial dispensed him from the necessity, however dis 
 sembled as his true and native function, of spinning his 
 web of fantasticality from his own substance. Not only 
 was his imagination of just the quality to react admirably 
 under such stimulus and deal admirably with extended 
 material, but his temperament was of just the order to 
 be developed instead of paralyzed by external agencies. 
 What drove it in upon itself was not sensitiveness but 
 non-receptivity. He had the good sense, the lack of 
 enthusiasm, the disillusioned pessimism of the man of 
 the world. Only, his world was Salem and Concord 
 when it was not, indeed, the still narrower confines of 
 the custom-house and the old manse. 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 The real world was to him terra incognita, or at least 
 negligible. Europe, especially, was but a museum to 
 him. Nothing could show more levity than the de 
 tached and essentially supercilious attitude- betrayed 
 in his account of it. England, France, Italy all rubbed 
 him the wrong way. Yet he never had any suspicion 
 that the fact might be his fault. His candor is delight 
 ful; his conviction that candor is the one virtue of 
 criticism, that it "lets him out," so to speak, still more 
 so; his loyalty to his crudest conclusions, most of all. 
 English readers find him ungallant in recording his view 
 of the British matron as compound of steaks and sir 
 loins. His answer is that he loves Englishmen as much 
 as his own countrymen, but that the passage must stand 
 because the view is correct. He was beautifully honest 
 always. No doubt he would have been if he had ap 
 preciated how it made him appear, if he had realized 
 that one opinion is not as good as another; but as a 
 sensitive plant he is surely a superstition. He travelled 
 all over England, and chronicled his journeys and reflec 
 tions with the assiduous minuteness and somewhat the 
 interest of Irving s account of Columbus s voyages. 
 But he never became familiar with English life and 
 rarely met any representative Englishmen. Those of 
 his own profession he avoided with marked success. He 
 never met Thackeray, or Dickens, or Bulwer, or Disraeli. 
 George Eliot he would not go to see because there was 
 another Mrs. Lewes. He seems to have had no curi 
 osity which, of course, is the primum mobile of culture. 
 His substitute for it is the most singular interest in the 
 
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HAWTHORNE 
 
 world peculiar probably to American psychology 
 namely, that of travelling around the great world and 
 applying one s own yard-stick to the phenomena it pre 
 sents to one s virgin view. The English are more un 
 moved, more listless in their contemplation of what the 
 world has to offer. I remember in Athens, once, a party 
 of Nonconformists returning from Palestine and delayed 
 a few hours by the necessity of changing steamers at the 
 Piraeus. They were sitting around the palace square. 
 I asked their " personal conductor" why he didn t take 
 them up to the Acropolis. "I tried to," he replied, 
 "but they said they had seen ruins enough." 3 Anal 
 ogous Americans would have gone up, but would not 
 have been unduly impressed. 
 
 Art occupied a good deal of Hawthorne s thoughts 
 while he was in Italy, but it certainly did not unduly im 
 press him. He never found out what it was. The fact 
 is not so remarkable as it may seem at the present time. 
 In his day most Americans, educated or not, were in his 
 case. That art had a particular province, language, and 
 sanction of its own was not widely understood. But 
 then it was, in general, almost wholly neglected. There 
 was, however, a colony of American artists in Rome and 
 Hawthorne saw a good deal of these, and naturally came 
 to consider the subject a good deal and with his usual 
 candor. The amount of attention he paid it, yes and 
 the exceptional ill luck he had with it, make him excep 
 tional among his contemporary countrymen who, be 
 sides, were not great writers. Moreover, he made it a 
 distinct feature of "The Marble Faun." He seems 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 to have thought it was chiefly sculpture, partly perhaps 
 because Story was a sculptor, and Hawthorne was very 
 loyal to his friends; having in the case of Pierce got 
 around the question of slavery, he would naturally not 
 let a bagatelle like art handicap his good-will. He was 
 undoubtedly perfectly sincere in either instance, and the 
 latter at all events shows how lightly, morals aside, he 
 took the world which he had so long made the sport of 
 his fancy. He cannot say enough about Story s " Cleo 
 patra." She is "a terrible, dangerous woman, quiet 
 enough for the moment, but very likely to spring upon 
 you like a tigress." Her Coptic cast of countenance also 
 illustrates Story s historical accuracy in modelling a 
 Greek. It is impossible to defend him from the late 
 R. H. Hutton s charge of sprinkling "The Marble 
 Faun" with "puffs of American sculpture," which 
 shows, too, how lightly he took literature also, or, at 
 least, his own contributions to it. For painting he did 
 not greatly care. He admitted Claude, but he preferred 
 Brown preferred Brown indeed to any one, except 
 possibly Thompson. Furthermore, he seems to have 
 looked upon sculpture as essentially marble, whose 
 "purity" and transparency afforded him positive sen 
 sations of pleasure. Bronze left him cold and he would 
 not have subscribed to its current aggrandizement. 
 Perhaps he unconsciously transferred to marble some of 
 the pleasure he took in the moral spotlessness of such 
 characters as Hilda and Phoebe. 
 
 His interest in all art was indeed a specifically moral, 
 not an aesthetic one. He takes the "literary view" with 
 
 110 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 a vengeance. He terms the so-called "Beatrice Cenci" 
 the greatest picture in the world, apparently forgetting 
 that he has not seen all its rivals for such pre-eminence, 
 and finds its neighbor, the so-called "Fornarina," re 
 pulsive because the one portrait makes him think of a 
 pitiful tragedy and the other recalls the fact that the 
 painter to whom it was then ascribed had a mistress. 
 The so-called question of "the nude in art" which, so 
 far as it is a question, certainly belongs rather to the 
 police than to general criticism troubled him a good 
 deal. Mr. James finds his objection to the nude indica 
 tive of his lack of the plastic sense, which is surely to 
 consider it as a superfluity. However, another biog 
 rapher, Mr. Moncure Conway, says he was converted 
 from a position savoring of intolerance so far as to 
 declare his first views only through one of his characters 
 rather fatuously, I should say, selecting Miriam for 
 the purpose and that the honor of this partial conver 
 sion is due to Mrs. Jameson, whom doubtless he felt he 
 could trust. The choice he offers among the many 
 evidences of his aesthetic innocence is bewildering, but 
 without being quite sure I am inclined to fix on the gift 
 with which he endows Hilda as the one that demon 
 strates it most absolutely. Hilda s peculiar talent, it 
 will be remembered, consisted in a faculty of copying 
 the masterpieces of art with such penetration as to 
 bring out beauties in them unsuspected by the masters 
 themselves. It is needless to add that this power was 
 accompanied by a complete inaptitude for original work. 
 Hawthorne s fancy is here at its most characteristic. 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 Providing Hilda with an exclusively sympathetic nature, 
 he deduces from it a faculty incapable of self-expression, 
 but able to divine what the greatest artists were groping 
 for in their approximate productions. This puerile 
 degradation of art in the interest of irresponsible fancy 
 is, at all events, both a striking illustration of what Haw 
 thorne perversely preferred to the exercise of a noble 
 imagination, and a striking witness of the insufficiency 
 of his culture to save his intellectual levity from reduc 
 tion to the absurd. 
 
 With another great factor of civilization and conse 
 quently a quintessential of culture, history, namely, his 
 acquaintance was even slighter than his familiarity with 
 plastic art. The Parthenon s reputation might have 
 drawn him to the Athenian Acropolis, but that of 
 Pericles would hardly have stirred him from the palace 
 square. Prattling pleasantly of the Concord battle 
 ground, he says with that candor which so frequently 
 fringes fatuity, quite in the conventional manner of 
 pride aping humility: "For my own part, I have never 
 found my imagination much excited by this or any other 
 scene of historic celebrity." "Septimius Felton" is a 
 tale of the Revolution, but its references to it are casual 
 and reluctant. "Our story," says Hawthorne, "is an 
 internal one, dealing as little as possible with outward 
 events, and taking hold of these only where it cannot be 
 helped." In Rome itself he is quite imperturbable and 
 detached. The perpetual pageant passing before the 
 cultivated imagination hardly wins a glance from him. 
 "It is a singular fascination that Rome exercises upon 
 
 112 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 artists. There is clay elsewhere, and marble enough, 
 and heads to model," he exclaims, identifying, as usual, 
 art with sculpture and sculpture with marble. Beside 
 his "Note-Books" Baedeker reads like Gibbon. His 
 own experiences amid the paraphernalia of the past 
 largely preoccupy his pen. In the Louvre, for example, 
 he encountered Catherine de Medici s dressing-glass, 
 "in which," he records, "I saw my own face where hers 
 had been." Profound thought, no doubt, to one, part of 
 whose originality consists in the independence that can 
 cherish the banal as well as the recondite, but devoid 
 of historic sentiment. He would, however, have done 
 better to confine himself to such reflections than to 
 record such historic sentiment as he had. On the latter 
 occasions he is apt, in familiar phrase, to "get it all 
 wrong." The remains of the Forum, for example, he 
 says, "do not make that impression of antiquity upon 
 me which Gothic ruins do." They certainly should, 
 since they are antique ruins and Gothic ruins are not. 
 What, however, he means by antiquity is the sense of 
 remoteness, and it is true that classic remains seem 
 nearer to us than mediaeval. But his reason for it is 
 "because they belong to quite another system of society 
 and epoch of time, and in view of them we forget all 
 that has intervened betwixt them and us; being morally 
 unlike and disconnected with them, and not belonging 
 to the same train of thought; so that we look across a 
 gulf to the Roman ages and do not realize how wide 
 the gulf is." The nearness of antiquity to our sense 
 being due precisely to our " belonging to the same train 
 
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 of thought," nothing could be more "mixed" than 
 this except (as Macaulay would say) the passage 
 following, apropos of the Cathedral of Amiens: 
 
 It is perhaps a mark of difference between French and English 
 character, that the Revolution in the former country . . . does 
 not seem to have caused such violence to ecclesiastical monuments 
 as the Reformation and the reign of Puritanism in the latter. I 
 did not see a mutilated shrine, or even a broken-nosed image in 
 the whole Cathedral. But, probably, the very rage of the Eng 
 lish fanatics against idolatrous tokens, and their smashing blows 
 at them, were symptoms of sincerer religious faith than the French 
 were capable of. These last did not care enough about their 
 Saviour to beat down his crucified image. 
 
 Of the copious comment that each of these sentences 
 almost automatically suggests, the most pertinent 
 would, perhaps, note the singularity that such a Puritan 
 as Hawthorne should have never heard of the Hugue 
 nots, however he might be at sea about the compara 
 bility of the English Revolution in the seventeenth cen 
 tury with that of the French in the eighteenth. However, 
 it is not his speculation about, but his neglect of, history 
 that betrays a signal defect in Hawthorne s culture. If 
 he withdrew from the world around him it was not into 
 the past that he retired. He had no more the historic 
 sense than he had an ear for music or an eye for beauty 
 , save in landscape of an idyllic character or an 
 . \^ "j appreciation of art, or a love of poetry. At least, if he 
 fTl^ had them he had them in the germ. And he never cul- 
 \ tivated the germ. His books contain no evidence of an 
 interest in either science or philosophy. As he lacked 
 curiosity, he lacked also the enthusiasm that is 
 114 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 also a prerequisite of culture. He visits Shakespeare s 
 house unconscious, he says, of "the slightest emotion 
 while viewing it, nor any quickening of the imagination." 
 "It is pleasant, nevertheless," he admits, "to think that 
 I have seen the place." It helps him to visualize 
 Shakespeare. Still he has misgivings. He is "not 
 quite certain that this power of realization is altogether 
 desirable in reference to a great poet." And he pro 
 ceeds to sketch the seamy side of Shakespeare in quite 
 otherwise dark colors than Mr. Sidney Lee would coun 
 tenance, concluding illogically with the moral that such 
 things as he has just recorded anew had better not have 
 been discovered. One misses the "note" of culture in 
 his dispraise of Shakespeare as one misses it in his 
 eulogy of Pierce. Pierce, indeed, enjoyed a monopoly 
 of his enthusiasm, and, perhaps, because among our 
 public men he was rather noteworthy for evoking none 
 of it in any one else. 
 
 One field of history, however, he knew, and knew 
 thoroughly. The New England of the early Puritans 
 he had studied, if not systematically, at any rate to re- 
 pletion. He had made it his own. He understood it as 
 a phase, of civilization, an epoch, an era, in the com 
 munity life of the American people. And if any one 
 contests the value of culture, even to a writer of pure 
 romance, a complete answer is to be found in the fact 
 that Hawthorne succeeded in the main when he dealt 
 with the Puritans and almost invariably failed when he 
 did not. There, he had a background, material, and a 
 subject of substance. 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 VII 
 
 "The Scarlet Letter" is not merely a masterpiece, it 
 is a unique book. It does not belong in the populous 
 category with which its title superficially associates it, 
 and the way in which Hawthorne lifts it out of this and 
 without losing his hold of a theme that from the 
 beginnings of literature has, in the work of the greatest 
 masters as well as in that of the most sordid practitioners, 
 demonstrated its vitality and significance nevertheless, 
 conducts its development in a perfectly original way, 
 is indisputable witness of the imaginative power he pos 
 sessed but so rarely exercised. So multifariously has 
 the general theme that the scarlet letter symbolizes been 
 treated in all literatures and by all "schools" from the 
 earliest to the latest, that however its inexhaustibility 
 may be thus attested an inexhaustibility paralleled by 
 that of the perennial instinct with which it deals any 
 further treatment of it must forego, one would have said, 
 the element of novelty, at least. Hawthorne s genius is 
 thus to be credited even in this respect with a remarkable 
 triumph. But that it should not only have thus won a 
 triumph of originality by eluding instead of conquering 
 the banality of the theme by taking it in a wholly novel 
 way, that is to say but have produced, in its new de 
 parture, a masterpiece of beauty and power, is an accom 
 plishment of accumulated distinction. "The Scarlet 
 Letter," in short, is not only an original work in a field 
 where originality is the next thing to a miracle, but a 
 
 116 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 work whose originality is in no wise more marked than 
 its intrinsic substance. 
 
 It is not a story of adultery. The word does not, I 
 think, occur in the book a circumstance in itself typify 
 ing the detachment of the conception and the delicate 
 art of its execution. But in spite of its detachment and 
 delicacy, the inherent energy of the theme takes pos 
 session of the author s imagination and warms it into 
 exalted exercise, making it in consequence at once the 
 most real and the most imaginative of his works. It 
 is essentially a story neither of the sin nor of the situation 
 of illicit love presents neither its psychology nor its 
 social effects; neither excuses nor condemns nor even 
 depicts, from this specific point of view. The love of 
 Hester and Dimmesdale is a postulate, not a present 
 ment. Incidentally, of course, the sin colors the narra 
 tive, and the situation is its particular result. But,\ / < 
 essentially, the book is a story of concealment. Jis *%*^ 
 psychology is that of the concealment^ sin amid cir- GO 1 ^ 
 cumstances that make a sin of concealment itself. The 
 sin itself might, one may almost say, be almost any 
 other. And this constitutes no small part of the book s 
 formal originality. To fail to perceive this is quite to 
 misconceive it. As a story of illicit love its omissions 
 are too great, its significance is not definite enough, its 
 detail has not enough richness, the successive scenes of 
 which it is composed have not an effective enough co 
 hesion. From this point of view, but for the sacred 
 profession of the minister and the conduct this im 
 poses, it would be neither moving nor profound. Its 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 moral would not be convincing. Above all, Chilling- 
 1 worth is a mistake, or at most a wasted opportunity. 
 For he is specialized into a mere function of malignity, 
 and withdrawn from the reader s sympathies, whereas 
 what completes, if it does not constitute, the tragedy 
 of adultery, is the sharing by the innocent of the pun 
 ishment of the guilty. This inherent element of the 
 situation, absolutely necessary to a complete present 
 ment of it, the crumbling of the innocent person s 
 inner existence, is absolutely neglected in "The Scarlet 
 Letter," and the element of a malevolent persecution 
 of the culpable substituted for it. The innocent person 
 thereby becomes, as I have already said, a device, and 
 though in this way Hawthorne is enabled to vivify 
 the effect of remorse upon the minister by personifying 
 its furies, in this way, too, he sacrifices at once the com 
 pleteness of his picture and its depth of truth by disre 
 garding one of its most important elements. 
 
 He atones for this by concentration on the culpable. 
 It is their psychology alone that he exhibits. And 
 though in this way he has necessarily failed to write the 
 chef-d ceuvre of the general subject that in the field of art 
 has been classic since monogamy established itself in 
 society, he has produced a perfect masterpiece in the 
 more detached and withdrawn sphere more in harmony 
 with his genius. In narrowing his range and observing 
 its limits he has perhaps even increased the poignancy 
 of his effect. And his effect is poignant and true as 
 reality itself. In confining himself to the concealment 
 of sin rather than depicting its phenomena and its re- 
 
 118 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 suits, he has indeed brought out, as has never been done 
 elsewhere, the importance^oMhis fataLincrement _pf 
 falsity among the factors oTthewhole chaotic and un- 
 stableTmoral equiliErium. Concealment in "The Scar 
 let Letter," to be sure, is painted in very dark colors. 
 In similar cases it may be a duty, and is, at all events, 
 the mere working of a natural instinct at worst a 
 choice of the lesser evil. But surely there is no exag 
 geration or essential loss of truth in the suggestion of its 
 potentialities for torture conveyed by the agony of the 
 preacher s double life. It is true his concealment con 
 demned another to solitary obloquy. But if that be 
 un typically infrequent and also not inherent in the situa 
 tion as such, it is fairly counterbalanced by consolatory 
 thought of the exceptional havoc confession would have 
 wrought in his case. That is to say, if his remorse is 
 exceptionally acute it is also exceptionally alleviated.- 
 On the whole the potential torture of remorse for a life* 
 that is flagrantly an acted lie is not misrepresented, 
 either in truth or art, by the fate of Dimmesdale, though 
 it is treated in the heightened way appropriate to the 
 typical. 
 
 Concentration upon concealment further contributes 
 to the originality and the perfection of "The Scarlet 
 Letter" by eliminating passion. The sensuous element 
 which might have served to extenuate the offence 
 since it is of its tragic essence that nothing can excuse 
 it in anything like normal conditions or if not that 
 to render the story attractive and affecting, is rigidly 
 excluded. There is more sensuousness sighed forth by 
 
 119 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 the unhappy pair of the famous fifth canto of the "In 
 ferno" than in the whole volume. There is but a single 
 reference to the days when Hester and her lover "read 
 no further," and this, though a kindly and catholic 
 touch, is characteristically a moral one. 
 
 With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms 
 around him and pressed his head against her bosom; little car 
 ing though his cheek rested on the scarlet letter. . . . 
 
 "Never, never," whispered she. "What we did had a con 
 secration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! 
 Hast thou forgotten it?" 
 
 "Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the 
 ground. "No; I have not forgotten." 
 
 There is no sensuous, scarcely even an emotional, 
 digression from the steady conduct of the theme. The 
 chill of destiny is sensible even in the chapter called 
 almost mockingly "A Flood of Sunshine," and at the 
 end to the dying minister only doubt redeems eternity 
 itself from despair: 
 
 "Hush, Hester, hush!" said he, with tremulous solemnity. 
 "The law we broke! the sin here so awfully revealed! let these 
 alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be that when 
 we forgot our God when we violated our reverence each for the 
 other s soul it was henceforth vain to hope that we could meet 
 hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows: and 
 He is merciful." 
 
 To this New England "Faust" there is no "second 
 part." The sombre close, the scarcely alleviated gloom 
 of the whole story are in fit keeping with the theme, 
 which is the truth that, in the words of the tale itself, 
 "an evil deed invests itself with the character of 
 
 120 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 doom" and with its development through the torture 
 of concealment to the expiation of confession. 
 
 Here, for once, with Hawthorne we have allegory 
 richly justifying itself, the allegory of literature not that 
 of didacticism, of the imagination not of the fancy, alle 
 gory neither vitiated by caprice nor sterilized by moral 
 izing, but firmly grounded in reality and nature. Note 
 how, accordingly, even the ways of the wicked fairy that 
 obsessed him are made to serve him, for even the mirage 
 and symbolism so dear to his mind and so inveterate in 
 his practice, blend legitimately with the pattern of his 
 thoroughly naturalistic fabric. The fanciful element is, 
 at least, so imaginatively treated as to seem, exception 
 ally, to * belong." Hawthorne seems to have been so 
 "possessed" by his story as to have conducted the 
 development of its formal theme for once subcon 
 sciously, so to speak, and with the result of decorating 
 rather than disintegrating reality in its exposition. At 
 all events, to this "possession" (how complete it was in 
 material fact all his biographers attest) two notable and 
 wholly exceptional results are due. In the first place 
 he felt his theme, as he never felt it elsewhere, and con 
 sequently presented it with an artistic cogency he never 
 elsewhere attained. The story, in other words, is real 
 and true. If it is thought to show a bias in pushing too L 
 far the doom of evil, to ignore the whole New Testa 
 ment point of view, as it may be called, epitomized in 
 the Master s " Go and sin no more," the answer is that 
 though in this way it may lose in typical value, it gains 
 in imaginative realism, since it is a story of that Puritan 
 
 121 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 New England where it sometimes seems as if the New 
 Testament had been either suspect or unknown. Be 
 sides, there is enough demonstration of its text on the 
 hither side of what it is necessary to invoke the Puritan 
 milieu to justify. Every erring soul may not suffer the 
 extremity of Dimmesdale s agony, but it suffers enough, 
 and the inevitability of its suffering was never more con 
 vincingly exhibited than in this vivid picture, softened 
 as it is into a subdued intensity by the artist s poetized, 
 however predetermined, treatment. For, in the second 
 place, it is here alone that Hawthorne seems to have 
 felt his characters enough to feel them sympathetically 
 and so to realize them to the full. They are very real 
 and very human. What the imagination of a recluse, 
 even, can do to this end when held to its own inspiration 
 and not seduced into the realm of the fantastic, may be 
 seen in the passage where Hester pleads for the con 
 tinued custody of her child. Pearl herself is a jewel of 
 romance. Nothing more imaginatively real than this 
 sprite-like and perverse incarnation of the moral as well 
 as physical sequence of her parents sin exists in ro 
 mance. Her individuality is an inspiration deduced 
 with the logic of nature and with such happy art that her 
 symbolic quality is as incidental in appearance as it is 
 seen to be inherent on reflection. Mr. James, who 
 objects to the symbolism of "The Scarlet Letter," 
 nevertheless found her substantial enough to echo in 
 the charming but far less vivid Pansy of his "Portrait 
 of a Lady." Chillingworth, the other symbolic char 
 acter, is in contrast an embodied abstraction the one 
 
 122 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 piece of machinery of the book. But it cannot be 
 denied that he performs a needful function and, artis 
 tically, is abundantly justified. As a Puritan parallel 
 of Mephistopheles he is very well handled. "The 
 Scarlet Letter" is, in fact, the Puritan "Faust," and its 
 symbolic and allegorical element, only obtrusive in a 
 detail here and there at most, lifts it out of the ordinary 
 category of realistic romance without since nothing of 
 importance is sacrificed to it enfeebling its imaginative 
 reality. The beautiful and profound story is our chief 
 prose masterpiece and it is as difficult to overpraise it 
 as it is to avoid poignantly regretting that Hawthorne 
 failed to recognize its value and learn the lesson it 
 might have taught him. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Hawthorne s style, doubtless less original than his 
 substance, is ^nevertheless indubitably his own. It is 
 far more the general cultivated medium of writing than 
 his works are within the general lines of romance, but 
 it is that medium colored and modelled or, perhaps, 
 one should rather say, tinted and traced by his own 
 idiosyncrasy. This indeed is its importance. As style 
 it has no other. Its hue and figure are of interest as 
 their faintness and evenness mirror his personal traits. 
 These are, however, very crisply reflected by it, and a 
 study of it is useful as certifying the impressions made 
 by its substance. It is, to begin with, difficult to define, 
 and its lack of positive qualities quite exactly parallels 
 
 123 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 the insubstantiality of its subject-matter. Only by 
 a miracle, one reflects, could subject-matter of much 
 vital importance be thus habited so plainly, placidly, 
 unpretendingly presented, though in such an excep 
 tional instance as "The Scarlet Letter" the latent 
 intensity of the theme is doubtless set off by the 
 sobriety of its garb, to which also it gives a deepened 
 tone. But the harmonious, rather than contrasting, 
 services of such a style as Hawthorne s in general, could 
 be useful only for the direct expression of something 
 bordering on informing insipidity. It is above all a neat 
 /I J^yl e - I* wears no gewgaws of rhetoric and owes little or 
 <i } nothing to the figures of speech. It is saved from the 
 -V^f ^conventional mainly by the author s own interest in its 
 Jnfy^f substance, and would be prim if. itwere nojjjgrsonal. 
 But it is too sincere forany, even Puritan, affectation. 
 Its neatness is a native, not a cultivated quality. It is 
 the neatness of innocence, not of virtue. It has never 
 been assailed by the temptations of the meretricious, 
 and its avoidance of ornament is preference for the plain, 
 not distaste for the rococo. It views the purple patch 
 with the unmoved placidity of the color-blind, and the 
 staidness of its expression corresponds to the propriety 
 of its thought, whose wildest antics are decorous with 
 the consciousness that it is "all pretend." Nothing 
 shows more clearly the dilettante character of Haw 
 thorne s exercise of his fancy than this neatness, which 
 is never discomposed by fervor or thrown into disarray 
 by heat. 
 
 It is in fact the antithesis of heat, and the absence of 
 124 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 heat in Hawthorne s genius appears nowhere so mark 
 edly as in his style. His writings from beginning to end 
 do not contain an ardent, or even a fervent passage. 
 They are as empty of exaltation as of exhilaration. 
 Here, for example, is a single sentence by a fellow- 
 townsman of his descriptive of one of nature s daily 
 phenomena: "In deep ravines, under the eastern sides 
 of cliffs, Night forwardly plants her foot even at noon 
 day, and, as Day retreats, she steps into his trenches, 
 skulking from tree to tree, from fence to fence, until 
 at last she sits in his citadel and draws out her forces 
 into the plain." No one can read that without recog 
 nizing its almost incandescent quality, or compare it 
 with the most glowing period to be found in Haw 
 thorne, without distinguishing between the imaginative 
 flame that burned in Thoreau s Walden cabin and the 
 flicker of fancy that played over the embers of the 
 Old Manse hearth. Or take a few phrases inspired 
 by the little convent cemetery at Brussels, the writer 
 of which 
 
 came to this spot one summer evening of spring and saw among 
 a thousand black crosses casting their shadows across the grassy 
 slope that particular one which marked his mother s resting-place. 
 ... A thousand such hillocks lay round about, the gentle daisies 
 springing out of the grass over them, and each bearing its cross 
 and requiescat. A nun, veiled in black, was kneeling hard by at a 
 sleeping sister s bedside (so fresh-made that the spring had scarce 
 had time to spin a coverlid for it) ; beyond the cemetery walls you 
 had glimpses of life and the world and the spires and gables of the 
 city. A bird came down from a roof opposite, and lit first on a 
 cross and then on the grass below it, whence it flew away presently 
 with a leaf in its mouth: then came a sound as of chanting, from 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 the chapel of the sisters hard by. ... Might she sleep in peace 
 might she sleep in peace; and we, too, when our struggles and 
 pains are over! But the earth is the Lord s as the heaven is; 
 we are alike his creatures here and yonder. I took a little flower 
 off the hillock and kissed it, and went my way, like the bird that 
 had just lighted on the cross by me, back into the world again. 
 Silent receptacle of death, tranquil depth of calm, out of reach of 
 tempest and trouble! I felt as one who had been walking below 
 the sea, and treading amid the bones of shipwrecks. 
 
 To curtail this passage of perhaps the foremost 
 master of English prose is to mutilate it, but I have 
 transcribed enough of it to exemplify precisely the 
 quality that Hawthorne s style most conspicuously and 
 most characteristically lacks. It exemplifies perfectly 
 the exaltation of an ardent imagination constrained and 
 modulated by instinctive artistic reserve. It is as far 
 removed from the purple splendors of rhetoric as Haw 
 thorne at his simplest, but it is simplicity sublimated 
 by feeling, not expressed with placid adequacy. Imagine 
 "the rarest imagination since Shakespeare" exclaiming, 
 "The earth is the Lord s!" He has not the authority 
 requisite for such an utterance. He writes as the 
 scribes, and lacks the conviction, the assurance of his 
 vocation, the authentic literary and artistic commission 
 for exclamation or utterance with any fire or particular 
 fervor. It is simply extraordinary that so voluminous 
 a writer should care so little for writing as an art of 
 effective expression, should practise it so exclusively as 
 an exercise as mere record and statement. In "The 
 Scarlet Letter," as I have intimated, the style to a 
 certain extent reflects the greater depth and richness of 
 
 126 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 the substance. But compare its most moving passage 
 with the sentences just cited from Thackeray: 
 
 They sat down again side by side and hand clasped in hand on 
 the mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them 
 a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so 
 long been tending, and darkening ever as it stole along; and yet 
 it enclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim 
 another, and another and, after all, another moment. The forest 
 was obscure around them and creaked with a blast that was pass 
 ing through it. The boughs were tossing heavily above their 
 heads; while one solemn old tree groaned dolefully to another, 
 as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or con 
 strained to forebode evil to come 
 
 The drop in tone, in spirit and in rhythm from real 
 elevation to that "one solemn old tree" groaning 
 "dolefully" and the perpetual symbolism, is character 
 istic. It is just what the instinct for style would save 
 a writer from. And it is but a partial explanation to 
 attribute Hawthorne s lack of this instinct to his lack 
 of plastic sense. It is explained ultimately by his lack 
 of real energy, to which no doubt his lack of plastic 
 sense is itself due; though it may be said that his imagi 
 nation, cool enough in his view of life, content to contem 
 plate instead of construct, seems to lose still more heat 
 in his expression, and his style to have even less warmth 
 than his conceptions. Evidently, though these amuse, 
 they do not impose upon him, and his extremely de 
 tached treatment of them is the most convincing im 
 peachment of his "high seriousness" as a writer, how 
 ever sombre, even, his philosophy of life. 
 
 And though it is only superficially strange, it is at 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 least superficially piquant, that his style should disclose 
 his lack of ardor by its absence of restraint as well as by 
 poverty of feeling. Never was such copiousness asso 
 ciated with so little exuberance, or at any rate exuber 
 ance with so little enthusiasm. His simplicity appears 
 thus as the expression not of contained but of uncom 
 plicated substance. Simple as his style is it is never 
 severe and its quietness is not the result of reserve. 
 Just as its purity is due to the absence of sensuousness 
 rather than to spiritual elevation, its simplicity is that of 
 a map rather than that of a picture. The fertility of his 
 fancy is not matched by the subtlety of its expression. 
 He does not deal in nuances, but accumulates detail. 
 No writer was ever fonder of detail. The flood of it 
 drowns his descriptions. One cannot trace the general 
 skeleton, the grand construction. He does not even 
 subordinate the trivial, but chronicles everything that 
 occurs to him with an amused and sportive assiduity. 
 His personal taciturnity disappears as he contemplates 
 his subject and he abandons himself, with more zest 
 than he ever otherwise betrays, to a kind of quaintly 
 otiose but unmistakable garrulity. In this respect not 
 his first but his very last story written after a lifetime 
 of professional practice gives a very striking impression 
 of the amateur with a pen in his hand and endless 
 leisure before him. Our peculiar Anglo-Saxon delusion 
 of arguing inner intensity from outward composure can 
 find no support in Hawthorne s style for ascribing to 
 him any elements of energy that are indicated by re 
 straint in their expression. What his extreme copious- 
 
 128 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 ness witnesses is the diffusion instead of the concen 
 tration of his interest. His interest is extraordinarily 
 spread out over the rather narrow field that awakens 
 it at all and perhaps could not be so inclusive if it 
 centred around any cardinal foci to the disparagement 
 of the apparently negligible. 
 
 Such copiousness is, naturally, inconsistent with any 
 effective ordering of the elements of style, and Haw 
 thorne s is as unaccented periodically as it is monotonous 
 in color. But it has the great merit of ease, conjoined 
 with exactness. One without the other is not uncom 
 mon, but the combination is rare. The kind of care 
 that goes with deliberateness he undoubtedly took, 
 though he certainly took none that demanded strenuous 
 and scrupulous effort, or his result would have been 
 more distinguished instead of being purely satisfactory 
 markedly felicitous as well as adequate and correct. 
 But his ease, thus untinctured by either study or sloth, 
 and marking the free movement of a style that is not 
 only flexible but correct, was undoubtedly a natural 
 gift. He had it in the form that is both academic and 
 elastic. Hence his style has in some degree the classic 
 note. As free from eccentricity or excess as from any 
 particular pungency or color it is eminently the style of 
 literary good-breeding and images its author s personal 
 fastidiousness. Its vocabulary is that of cultivated 
 English. It is as free from the crude as from the far 
 fetched. And though often as familiar in tone as it is 
 simple in diction its smoothness never lacks dignity and 
 often attains grace. Why has it not in greater degree 
 
 129 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 the truly classic note? Why is it that after all per 
 fectly adapted as it is to the expression of its substance, 
 to the purpose of its author it lacks quality and phys 
 iognomy? Or at all events why is its quality not 
 more marked, more salient? Because it is such an 
 adequate medium for its content, for the expression of 
 a nature without enthusiasm, a mind unenriched by 
 acquisition and an imagination that is in general the 
 prey of fancy rather than the servant of the will. Haw 
 thorne should have taken himself more seriously at the 
 outset in his formative period and less so in the 
 maturity of powers whose development would have 
 produced far more important results than those achieved 
 by their leisurely exercise in tranquil neglect of their 
 evolution. 
 
 j0&?& 
 
 130 
 
EMERSON 
 
EMERSON 
 
 . 
 
 THE perspective of time, doubtless for the most part in 
 substantial alliance with equity, diminishes many im 
 posing literaiy figures, but it has already enlarged 
 Emerson s. His fame grows. More and more gen- 
 erally, and more and more distinctly, it is discerned as ^i*^- 
 our answer to the literary challenge of the world. 
 Emerson is of the company of Plato and Pascal, of 
 Shakespeare and Goethe, emulating easily their cosmic 
 inclusiveness. And he is ours absolutely and alto 
 gether our own. If he is not typically, he is peculiarly, 
 American. Xo other country could have produced 
 him. And his own may take a legitimate satisfaction 
 in the consciousness that its greatest is also one of 
 its most characteristic minds. Especially may the 
 American lover of literature joy in finding this intel 
 lectual pre-eminence illuminating the firmament of 
 letters, rather than arising in some field of activity 
 more commonly associated with our character and 
 achievements. 
 
 II 
 
 Except a childhood recollection of Lincoln speaking \ 
 from a hotel balcony on his way to his first inaugura- / 
 tion of his towering size, his energy in gesture and 
 emphasis, his extraordinary blackness, his angularity 
 
 133 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 of action, and a certain imposing sincerity of assertion, 
 the last very likely an imputation of later years I have 
 no memory of any of our public men more vivid than 
 that of hearing in early youth a lecture by Emer 
 son. Surely when Lowell called Lincoln "the first 
 American" he forgot Emerson. Or he was thinking 
 of Lincoln s representative character in, rather than 
 of, his country. Politics is "too much with us." The 
 first American both in chronology and in completeness 
 appeared in the field of letters, and if we are, as of 
 course Lowell meant, to consider personal greatness in 
 the comparison and thus exclude Cooper in the 
 efflorescence of New England culture. Naturally I do 
 not in the least recall the topic of Emerson s lecture. I 
 have an impression that it was not known at the time 
 and did not appear very distinctly in the lecture itself. 
 The public was small, attentive, even reverential. 
 The room was as austere as the chapel of a New 
 England Unitarian church would normally be in those 
 days. The Unitarians were the intellectual sect of 
 those days and, as such, suspect. Even the Unitarians, 
 though, who were the aristocratic as well as the in 
 tellectual people of the place, found the chapel benches 
 rather hard, I fancy, before the lecture was over, and I 
 recall much stirring. There was, too, a decided 
 sprinkling of scoffers among the audience, whose 
 sentiments were disclosed during the decorous exit. 
 Incomprehensibility, at that epoch generally, was the 
 great offence; it was a sort of universal charge against 
 anything uncomprehended, made in complete inno- 
 
 134 
 
EMERSON 
 
 cence of any obligation to comprehend. Nevertheless 
 the small audience was manifestly more or less spell 
 bound. Even the dissenters as in the circumstances 
 the orthodox of the day may be called were impressed. 
 It might be all over their heads, as they contempt 
 uously acknowledged, or vague, as they charged, or 
 disintegrating, as they vaguely felt. But there was 
 before them, placidly, even benignly, uttering incendia 
 rism, an extraordinarily inTeresluTg persoriality". It was 
 evening and the reflection of two little kerosene lamps, 
 one on either side of his lectern, illuminated softly the 
 serenest of conceivable countenances nobility in its 
 every lineament and a sort of irradiating detachment 
 about the whole presence suggestive of some new kind 
 of saint perhaps Unitarian. There was nothing authori 
 tative, nothing cathedral in his delivery of his message, 
 the character of which, therefore, as a message was dis 
 tinctly minimized; and if nevertheless it was somehow 
 clear that its being a message was its only justification, 
 it was in virtue of its being, so to say, blandly oracular. 
 It was to take or to leave, but its air of almost blithe 
 aloofness in no wise implied anything speculative or 
 uncertain in its substance merely, perhaps, a serene 
 equability as to your receptivity and its importance to 
 you. Communication was manifestly the last concern 
 of the lecturer. That was conspicuously not his affair. 
 If, in turning over the leaves of his manuscript, he found 
 they had been misplaced and the next page did not con 
 tinue his sentence, he proceeded unmoved, after an 
 instant s hesitation, with what it recorded. The hiatus 
 
 135 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 received but the acknowledgment of a half smile 
 very gentle, wise, and tolerant. Nothing could better 
 emphasize the complete absence of pretension about the 
 entire performance, which thus reached a pitch of 
 simplicity as effective as it was unaffected. "It makes 
 a great difference to the force of a sentence," he says 
 somewhere, " if there is a man behind it." Such lyceum 
 technic cannot be considered exemplary. But in this 
 case the most obvious fact about the lecture was that 
 there was a man behind it. Conventions of presenta 
 tion, of delivery, of all the usually imperative arts of 
 persuasion even of communication, as I say seemed 
 to lose their significance beside the personal impressive- 
 ness of the lecturer. 
 
 This, at all events, is true of the literature he pro 
 duced of his works in both prose and poetry. His 
 life, his character, his personality quite apart I mean 
 from the validity of his precepts have the potency 
 belonging to the personality of the founders of religions 
 who have left no written words. All the inconsistencies, 
 the contradictions, the paradoxes, the inconsequences, 
 even the commonplaces of his writings are absorbed and 
 transfigured by his personal rectitude and singleness. 
 One feels that what he says possesses a virtue of its 
 own in the fact of having been said by him. He has 
 limitations but no infirmities. He is no creature of 
 legend. From cradle to grave his life was known, 
 intimately known, of all men. There is a wealth of 
 recorded personal reminiscence about him and one 
 may soberly say there has been found "no fault in 
 
 136 
 
EMERSON 
 
 him." Everything testified of him explicitly attests 
 this. " I never heard of a crime which I might not have 
 committed," he says (or cites), in speaking of " Faust." 
 But this was the sportiveness of his obsessive intellect. 
 As a matter of fact he never committed any not 
 even the most venial error. Nor was his blameless- 
 ness in the least alloyed with weakness. His energy 
 was as marked as his rectitude. He had the dauntless 
 courage of the positively polarized as he might say 
 and in no wise illustrated the negative virtues of pas 
 sivity. He is of our time, of our day, he lived and 
 wrote but yesterday at Concord, Massachusetts, he 
 passed through the most stirring times, he shared, with 
 whatever spiritual aloofness, the daily life of his fellows 
 and neighbors and was part and parcel of a modern 
 American community for nearly four score years, and 
 never in any respect or in the slightest degree, in any 
 crisis or any trivial detail of humdrum existence, failed 
 to illustrate to incarnate the ideal life. Introducing 
 his lectures on "The Ideal in Art, " Taine exclaims elo 
 quently: "It seems as if the subject to which I am 
 about to invite your attention could only be treated in 
 poetry." Similarly, one feels in approaching any con 
 sideration of Emerson that his character is such as to 
 implicate a lyric strain. Criticism is exalted into pure 
 appreciation. Not only is there no weakness, no lack 
 of heroic ideality in his life and conduct, but neither 
 is there in his writings. Not only every poem, every 
 essay, but every sentence, one may almost say, is 
 fairly volatile in its aspiration toward the ideal. His 
 
 137 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 practical admonitions and considerations and his 
 works are full of these all envisage the empyrean. 
 His homeliest figures and allusions direct the mind to 
 the zenith and never stop at the horizon. And this 
 incarnation of the ideal is a Massachusetts Yankee, 
 for he was absolutely nothing else. I know of nothing 
 in the history of literature, or in history itself, more 
 piquant as an indifferent, more inspiring as a patriotic, 
 critic would say. Emerson is, as I have said, our 
 refutation of alien criticism, grossly persuaded of our 
 materialism and interestedness. To "mark the per 
 fect man " has been left to America and American litera 
 ture. 
 
 Ill 
 
 i Note moreover that Emerson s moral greatness 
 . most conspicuous of all facts about him, as I think it 
 
 is receives its essentially individual stamp, aside from 
 its perfection, from its indissoluble marriage with intel- 
 
 Xlect. When he left his church he took his pulpit with 
 him. He preached throughout his life. And he did 
 , M nothing but preach; even his poetry is preaching. Of 
 . j( course, his sermons are lay sermons. There is, I think, 
 rather a marked absence of the religious element in 
 them. But the ethical note sounds through them all. 
 He discovers the moral in the bosom of the rose, and of 
 art itself finds its chief value to be the teaching of his 
 tory. His distinction, his true originality, is missed if 
 this is not perceived. As a man of letters, an Artist, a 
 P oe ^ a philosopher, a reformer, he has limitations that 
 
 
EMERSON 
 
 it is impossible to deny. As a preacher a lay preacher 
 he is unsurpassed. Since the days of the Hebrew 
 prophets, whom temperamentally he in no wise re 
 sembled, there has been no such genius devoted to the 
 didactic. He was quite conscious of his mission. "I 
 have my own spirits in prison," he says, "spirits in 
 deeper prisons whom no man visits if I do not." Con 
 fident in his sublimated pantheism, feeling himself an 
 organic constituent of the universal substance, the 
 authenticity of his didactic title was, one may almost 
 say, more a matter of consciousness than of assumption 
 with him. His capacity was not so much representa 
 tive as original. He was not so much a delegate of 
 the divine as a part of it, and consequently scorned 
 credentials as he did exposition and spoke ex proprio 
 vigore. 
 
 His distinction as a preacher, however, is not the 
 authority with which he speaks others have spoken 
 as authoritatively but that, though preaching always, 
 his appeal is always to the mind. He never pleads, 
 adjures, warns, only illuminates. He may talk of 
 other gods, his Zeus is intellect. The hand may be 
 Isaiah s, the voice is that of the intelligence. "The 
 capital secret of the preacher s profession," he says, "is 
 to convert life into truth." These five words define 
 his own work in the world with precision. And his 
 instrument, his alembic, for this conversion was the 
 intellect. Treating moral questions, or questions which 
 by extension are to be so called, almost exclusively, he 
 treats them without reference to any criterion but that 
 
 139 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 of reason. Pure intellect has never received such 
 homage as he pays it. Its sufficiency has never seemed 
 so absolute to any other thinker. "See that you hold 
 yourself fast," by the heart, the soul, the will ? No, 
 "by the intellect," is the climax of one of his earliest 
 and most eloquent preachments. The strain is recur 
 rent throughout his works. "Goethe can never be 
 dear to men," he says, with his extraordinary penetra 
 tion. "His is not even the devotion to pure truth: 
 but to truth for the sake of culture." He would have 
 blandly scouted Lessing s famous preference for the 
 pursuit over the possession of truth, and was far from 
 "bowing humbly to the left hand" of the Almighty and 
 saying, "Father, forgive: pure truth is for Thee alone." 
 He never pursued truth or anything. He simply 
 uttered it, with perfect modesty but also with absolute 
 conclusiveness. He never pretended to completeness, 
 to the possession of all truth. "Be content with a little 
 light, so it be your own," he counsels the youthful 
 "scholar." He was imperturbably content with his; 
 it was indubitably his own, and he trusted it implicitly. 
 To increase one s store of light he prescribes a "position 
 of perpetual inquiry" and commends not study but 
 examination, exclaiming eloquently, "Explore, and 
 explore!" What with? Under whose guidance ? That 
 of your intellect of course. He is in essential agree 
 ment with Carlyle, in calling the light of the mind " the 
 direct inspiration of the Almighty" except that he 
 would have substituted Nature for the Almighty, to 
 whom his references are as few as Carlyle s are frequent. 
 
 140 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Moreover it was the pure, as distinguished from the 
 practical, intellect that he worshipped. Naturally, since it 
 was this that he possessed. He himself admits, or rather 
 proclaims, that his "reasoning faculty is proportionally 
 weak." Logic was apparently discovered by Aristotle 
 and Emerson is a pure Platonist. He cites the Stagirite 
 when it serves his Platonist purpose for example, 
 the beautifully Platonist definition of art as " the reason 
 of things without their substance" but he has no native 
 sympathy with him. He is in fact Plato redivivus in 
 his assumption that coj^ej^^n^^ and 
 
 prove themselves; or rather, that all kinds of proof are 
 
 M. " _ - "" """" * 
 
 impertinent. Logic7Tnaeed, has been superstitiously 
 overvalued. It has been responsible for an enormous 
 amount of absolutely artificial error, as one need go no 
 farther than to remember Aristotle s despotic rule 
 during the Middle Ages still persisting in both Roman 
 and Protestant ecclesiasticism to recall. fSl the sani 
 \ time, quite apart from its pretensions as a science, it h 
 1 the supreme value of being the only test which we ma 
 * apply to the verification of our otherwise unestablish 
 intuitions.] TheroTe^of verification, however, is alto 
 gether too humble to win respect from such an Olympian 
 spirit as Emerson. He speaks always as little like the 
 logicians as the scribes. Not only his practice which 
 others have shared but his theory, in which he is unique 
 among the serious philosophers of the modern world, 
 is quite definitely that of the seer. However blandly, 
 however shrewdly, he unfolds his message, he has con 
 sciously and explicitly as well as inferentially the at- 
 
 141 
 
 
 Qfl 
 Jr 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 titude of merely transmitting it. More far more 
 than that, for with his inveterate didacticism he in 
 sists that this attitude be universal. Abstract yourself 
 sufficiently, he seems to say to his audience, and let 
 the god speak through you. Then all will be well. To 
 what purpose ? Well, to no purpose, except the end of 
 the formulation of truth. Truth he viewed almost as 
 a commodity. If you could but get enough life con 
 verted into truth, there would be nothing left to ask for. 
 That would be the legitimate end and conclusion of 
 effort, because though of course he never stooped to 
 assign any reason for assuming the all-sufficiency of 
 truth since error is blindness, once perceived it won t 
 be followed. He is, I confess, a little exasperating in 
 his airy avoidance of this "conclusion of the whole 
 matter." Even artistic completeness for which, how 
 ever, he had no sense seems to require it. Logic also; 
 axiomatically the highest good is goodness. But doubt 
 less there are plenty of people to draw conclusions. 
 Emerson was concerned mainly with premises even 
 major premises. The utilities he in general abhorred. 
 There were in effect too many people to attend to them; 
 to say nothing of the notorious fact that they would 
 take care of themselves. The important thing was, as 
 one may say, to illustrate Tennyson s exquisite image, 
 
 " Now lies the earth all Danae to the stars," 
 
 and let the divine interpenetrate and fecundate human 
 deliverances on any subject as little alloyed as possible 
 with any ratiocination or other obstruction of pure 
 
 142 
 
EMERSON 
 
 transmission. In Emerson s case we know who the god 
 was even his name and address. His utterances are 
 too highly differentiated for mistake. The divine voice ClVy rp>- 
 is of course one. All things are one to Emerson. But 
 the one in this instance seems sufficiently distinguished 
 from its other articulatenesses to involve a polytheistic 
 rather than a generally immanent explanation. To us 
 the god is inescapably Emerson himself; it is at least 
 excusable, practically, to identify what you find in no 
 other conjunction. Naturally the inference is that we 
 are all gods, and no doubt Emerson would willingly have 
 adopted, with whatever modifications, the current " pan- 
 entheism " which unites his pantheism with theism, for 
 though he never lost sight of the existence of the many 
 he always saw them as ultimately resident in the one. 
 In this case we have only to say that Emerson was a 
 most superior kind of god, or in other words hardly 
 more specific perhaps, but more in accord with current 
 parlance that he was a man of genius. However, 
 genius too has its privileges, whether divine in the /v fr> 
 transcendental or in the merely literary sense. And 
 one of them is notoriously independence of logic. Of 
 this practical privilege he took the amplest advantage. 
 "Wejcaanot_ spend the day in explanation," he says 
 theocratically. There is no syllogism in all his essays 
 not even, I fancy, a " therefore." There is no attempt 
 to argue, to demonstrate even statements and positions 
 that almost seem to cry out for such treatment. It is all 
 distinctly facultative, but all instinct with the authority 
 of the Hebrew prophets, the ex cathedra tone of the 
 
 143 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 inspired or even the possessed. As I have intimated, 
 the contrast between this tone this assumption and 
 the frequently homely, workaday, Yankee expression 
 of it is particularly picturesque. In general the 
 prophets are in the distance enwrapped in the mists 
 of legend or enlarged in the mirage of remoteness. 
 
 Naturally, thus, his inconsistencies are striking even 
 glaring but they are not as significant as superficially 
 they may be esteemed. They are in the first place 
 often superficial in themselves, and anyone who takes 
 the trouble as, in his lofty way, Emerson would have 
 scorned, did in fact scorn, to do can reconcile them by 
 the exercise of attentive discrimination and, above all, 
 of cordial good faith. I say "cordial," because good 
 will is needful to illuminate even essential perspicacity 
 when on the surface of things the case might so easily 
 be adversely adjudicated. In reading over the Essays 
 recently I must confess I have been extraordinarily 
 impressed by the frequency of these apparent inconsist 
 encies. One grows tired of noting them. Cumula 
 tively they convey the impression of irresponsibility. 
 Consistency, one says vainly to oneself, is the vice 
 of feeble minds; indulged to this extent, it almost 
 suggests the spoBtiveness of literary bohemia. But, 
 after a time an apprenticeship one may say you 
 J perceive that inconsistency is inseparable from Emer- 
 son>s metn d. If a record had been kept of the 
 oracles of Delphi, would they have been found to 
 hang together? Besides, the Pythia, however ab 
 stractly, dealt with the concrete. She was not con- 
 
 144 
 
EMERSON 
 
 signed, like Emerson, to the oracular in general, so 
 to speak the oracular apropos of every imaginable 
 abstract consideration. On the whole it seems too 
 much to ask that the oracular should also be con 
 sistent. Too much ingenuity would be requisite to 
 make it so, and the association of ingenuity with 
 oracle involves a contradiction in terms. The mouth 
 piece of the god is not concerned about matching its 
 inspirations. If ever there existed a seer whose mental 
 activity was in a perpetual state of ferment, Emerson 
 was such a one. Yet he conceived of himself as a 
 passive medium of transmission for divine messages 
 to humanity. He conceived thus of everyone worth 
 attention at all in the intellectual world, and even 
 commended the attitude to the humblest of his audi 
 ences. Why not, indeed, if the farmer to whom he 
 lent a volume of Plato returned it with the reassuring 
 remark/ He seems to have a good many of my idees" ? 
 We speak of a mercurial temperament, but really 
 temperament is a constant quantity compared with the 
 intellect, pure and simple, unbalanced by, unweighted 
 with, its steady pull and pressure. Logic itself hardly 
 takes its place as a check on the irresponsible and the 
 experimental. And, as I say, Emerson eschewed logic. 
 Obviously either logic or feeling is requisite for the 
 control of intellectual caprice a phenomenon mainly 
 noticeable in the unsentimental and the active-minded: 
 precisely Emerson s category. And the thinker who 
 frames a system or even compasses a coherent body of 
 doctrine is probably indebted even more than to his 
 
 145 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 logic to those general appetences that make up a tem 
 peramental personality. Left to itself, without concern 
 for consequences either to logic or predilection, the 
 intellect is tremendously adventurous, and as hospitable 
 to the strange and the subversive as the nomad or the 
 outlaw. Emerson had a splendid scorn for the conse 
 quences of any of his thinking. His thinking was in 
 truth a series of perceptions, so directly visible to his 
 mind undirected by any bent, unsteadied by any 
 controlling prejudice, so unselected temperamentally 
 that is to say as to need no matching or comparison, 
 no holding in abeyance, no tentative consideration 
 preliminary to complete adoption. With him modifica 
 tion means a new view, more light, still another percep 
 tion. Philosophically thus, and constitutionally, this 
 preacher of individuality is himself the most impersonal 
 of individuals. Everyone in his entourage, everyone 
 who came in contact with him, noted, in the measure 
 of his powers of analysis, the absence in him of the 
 element of personality the element par excellence that 
 centralizes, unifies, and renders communicable any set 
 of ideas, or even any particular point of view. Mile. 
 Dugard says of him very truly: "II realise avec 
 sere nite le type de 1 objectif dont Tame est une forme 
 vide que traverse 1 influx divin." He is himself as 
 elusive as his philosophy is fluid. His own introspec 
 tion, busy enough with his mind and seeing the universe 
 in as well as through it, pauses at the threshold of his 
 nature and, instinctively shrinking from looking for 
 fixity in anything so subtly undetermined, even pro- 
 
 146 
 
EMERSON 
 
 fesses ignorance of its constitution. The matter, how 
 ever, was probably simpler than with his mystic turn 
 he was ready to admit. His nature was flooded with 
 light, but it lacked heat. It had animation without 
 ardor, exaltation without ecstasy. 
 
 His deification of intellect, indeed, inevitably in 
 volves a corresponding deficiency in susceptibility, and 
 defective sympathies are accordingly and were as a 
 matter of fact with him as characteristic of Emerson s 
 order of moral elevation as is this one enthusiasm to 
 which his susceptibility limited him. Distinctly he 
 lacked temperament. His was a genial but hardly a 
 cordial nature in personal relations, indeed, more 
 amiable even than genial. As he says, "the intellect 
 searches out the absolute order of things as they stand 
 in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection." 
 "Something is wanting to science until it has been 
 humanized," he asserts, but by humanization he means 
 "union with intellect and will" quite formally neglect 
 ing the susceptibility, the necessary transition between 
 the two. Will comes next to intellect in his esteem 
 he praises action on occasion but it is a distant second. 
 Virtue itself, he says, "is vitiated by too much will." 
 He was poise personified, and both will and feeling 
 impair equilibrium. The ether that he breathed habit 
 ually was too rarefied a medium for the affections to 
 thrive in. He was in love only with the ideal and the 
 ideal as he conceived it, that is, "the absolute order of 
 things." In all human relations, even the closest, a 
 certain aloofness marks his feeling. As to this the 
 
 147 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 testimony is unanimous. It was far from being shyness 
 in the sense of diffidence. He did not know what 
 diffidence was. On the contrary, it proceeded from an 
 acute sense of self-respect. Mr. Cabot s Memoir con 
 tains a delicious letter to Margaret Fuller, who sighed 
 for more reciprocity in him. Plainly he was to be 
 neither wheedled nor bullied into intimacy. He was 
 himself quite conscious of his innate unresponsiveness 
 as indeed what was there that escaped his all-em 
 bracing, all-mirroring consciousness? He was twice 
 married, and received his life long the deferential devo 
 tion of family and friends. But he undoubtedly felt 
 that "my Father s business" or his equivalent for it 
 had claims upon his preoccupation superior to theirs. 
 The essence of love is self-abandonment, and such an 
 attitude is quite foreign to him. It was in fact incon 
 sistent with his idea of the dignity and importance of 
 his own individuality, which he cherished with a single 
 ness quite exactly comparable with the saint s subordi 
 nation of all earthly to divine affection. He did not 
 care enough for his friends to discriminate between 
 them which I imagine is the real reason for the ex 
 traordinary estimate of Alcott that has puzzled so many 
 of his devotees. Aloofness is no respecter of persons. 
 Seen from a sufficient height ordinary differences tend 
 to equalization. He shrank even from having fol 
 lowers and all his friends felt his detachment. He 
 was silent for the most part in company not con 
 strained, not abstracted, just resting, one fancies, in a 
 temporary surcease of meditative activity. And at 
 
 148 
 
EMERSON 
 
 home, he says, " Most of the persons I see in my own 
 house I see across a gulf." 
 
 Such temperamental composure it is perhaps that 
 saves him from the fanaticism regnant around him 
 through much of his life, and more or less directly 
 derived from the disintegration of conservatism whose 
 elements he had himself set free. We owe him our 
 intellectual emancipation in all of its results, no doubt. 
 But he himself never lost his equilibrium. His enthusi 
 asms did not enthrall him, nor did he ever become the 
 slave even of his own ideas. Of theories he had prac- f JL 
 tically none. And his lack of fixity was not only too 
 integral for fanatical determination but too frigid for 
 volcanic disturbance. Common sense of the rec- "It evd*^ 
 ognizably Yankee variety was less his balance-wheel 
 than a component part of his nature, and gives to his 
 intellect its marked turn for wisdom rather than specula 
 tion. It is this element in his writings that prevents 
 his oracular manner from arousing distrust and makes 
 his paradoxical color seem merely the poetizing of the 
 literal. On all sorts of practical things he says the 
 last word the last as well as the fin mot. With the 
 eloquence and enthusiasm of youth no writer is so 
 perennially young he had the coolness of age; and this 
 coolness is as marked in his earliest as in his latest 
 writings, which indeed show increased mellowness and 
 a winning kind of circumspect geniality. But, to adopt 
 the terms he himself would have sanctioned, if not em 
 ployed, his susceptibility was really stirred by the reason 
 alone the self-knower, the organ of immediate-behold- 
 
 149 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 ing and was in no wise responsive, even in dealing 
 with the most practical matters, to the conclusions of the 
 understanding, or the report of the senses. "There is 
 no doctrine of the Reason," he exclaims with tender 
 fervor, " which will bear to be taught by the Under 
 standing." Being thus stimulated in the main by only 
 
 portion (to speak anciently again) of his beloved 
 intellect, his feelings really glowed, one may say, within 
 extraordinarily narrow limits. When he could exercise 
 his Vernunft in complete neglect of his Verstand he 
 reached the acme of his exaltation. The direct per 
 ception of truth meaning, of course, moral truth 
 suffused him with something as near the ecstasy he so 
 often seems to aspire to without ever quite reaching, as 
 his extremely self-possessed temperament would suffer. 
 " God, or pure mind," is one of his phrases, incidental 
 but abundantly defining his conception of Deity, and it 
 is this central conception that colors his philosophy and 
 on its religious side makes it so strictly ethical. 
 
 Professor Woodberry whose "Life of Emerson" is 
 in my judgment not only a masterly study of a difficult 
 subject but one of our few rounded and distinct literary 
 masterpieces maintains that Emerson is essentially 
 religious. I cannot myself see it. Perhaps it is a ques 
 tion of definition, but surely it is an accepted idea that 
 religion is a matter of the heart, and one is confident 
 that no religious or other emotion ever seriously dis 
 turbed the placid alternation of systole and diastole in 
 Emerson s. It is fortunate probably that it is so little 
 a matter of the intellect; otherwise the mass of mankind 
 
 150 
 
EMERSON 
 
 whom it guides and consoles in one way or another, 
 tant bien que mat, would distinctly be losers. The wise 
 and prudent themselves, as a matter of fact, to which 
 class Emerson eminently belonged, have mainly mani 
 fested a susceptibility to it in virtue of that side of their 
 nature which they share with the babes to whom it has 
 been revealed. What the unaided intellect has ever 
 done for it, except by way of occasionally divesting it 
 of the theology it had previously encumbered it with, is 
 difficult to see. Certainly no secular writer, even, ever 
 cared less about it, however defined unless it be relig 
 ious to aggrandize the moral sentiment and insist on it 
 as the summum bonum and the supremo, lex of life than 
 Emerson. Matthew Arnold called it " the most lovable 
 of things," though in describing it as " morality touched 
 by emotion " he seemed to many to eliminate its divine and 
 therefore most characteristic sanction. With Emerson 
 neither morality nor anything else is " touched by emo 
 tion " in any other sense than that of exaltation. He coun 
 sels the "scholar" to be "cold and true." And though 
 on the other hand he is in constant communication 
 with the divine element in nature, what he understands 
 by this is not the power that makes for righteousness, 
 but mind universal mind, whose sole manifestation is 
 not goodness, or beauty, but truth, of which goodness is 
 altogether a concomitant, and beauty a mere manifesta 
 tion. " No law can be sacred to me but that of my own 
 nature. Good and bad are but names very readily 
 transferable to this or that; the only right is what is after 
 my constitution, the only wrong what is against it." 
 
 151 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 IV 
 
 It would, indeed, be hardly too fanciful to find 
 Emerson s philosophy very considerably derived from 
 the natural man in him using the terms in the "ortho 
 dox" theological sense and not in his nor in Rousseau s. 
 Bland angel as he was, he very much wanted his own 
 way. One is tempted to say that he invented or elected 
 his philosophy in order to get it. At all events it 
 exactly suited him. He had no sentimental needs. It 
 satisfies none. He had, to an inordinate degree as 
 how should he not have? the pride of intellect. It 
 magnifies mind. He was assailed by no temptations, 
 knew no " law of the members." It contemplates none. 
 He was impatient of constraint. It exalts freedom. 
 He suffered from the pressure of traditional supersti 
 tion. It lauds the leading of individual light. He felt 
 acutely, with an extraordinary and concentrated inten 
 sity, the value, the importance, the dignity of his own 
 soul. It invents the "over soul" surely an exercise 
 in terminology! to authenticate it. The natural man, 
 however understood, is the undisciplined man. And 
 discipline is precisely the lacking element in his philo 
 sophy. The philosophers are very impatient with it. 
 One of them, certainly one of the most instinctive, eru 
 dite and expert of American members of the guild 
 practitioners of the art, I was about to say informs me 
 that " no one who has worshipped in the shrine of Kant 
 can put up with that loose sort of practical philosophy ." 
 "Practical" in his view is manifestly not a laudatory 
 
 152 
 
EMERSON 
 
 epithet for philosophy Carlyle s "moonshine" indeed, 
 more so. But so far as Emerson himself was con 
 cerned I suspect that it is an exact one; for him it 
 was extremely practical, even essential. In the silver 
 shimmer of his "moonshine" the whole moral world 
 lay argently if not effulgently illuminated, and if ob 
 jective truths were not revealed in their completeness, 
 they were essentially defined with a shadow both sharper 
 in outline and fuller of suggestiveness than sunlight 
 secures or permits. Logic has been said not very 
 scientifically, it is true to be a justification of one s 
 instincts. But vigorously and indeed airily eschewing 
 logic as it does, Emerson s philosophy may nevertheless 
 be called the justification of his intuitions to himself in 
 more or less obscure logical fashion; concatenated in 
 tuitions involve a kind of deductive logic. Essentially 
 novel his ideas cannot be called though it should be 
 said that he never claims novelty for them, merely 
 advancing them, in serene independence, and disregard 
 of their to him doubtless "secondary sources," as 
 drawn from the fountain of truth. "Fragments of old 
 thought that have been long in the world, like boulders 
 left by the primeval streams of man s intellect," Pro 
 fessor Woodberry picturesquely if rather hardly calls 
 them. Even the theory of Nature, perhaps his most 
 personal philosophic contribution is, he continues, 
 "not without copious illustrations in mystical writers." 
 But however strictly he had inherited them, Emer 
 son had undoubtedly, in Goethe s famous phrase, 
 "reconquered" them for himself. And out of them 
 
 153 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 he had composed what for him was an eminently 
 practical working hypothesis which it pleased him to 
 regard as the constitution of the universe.- Is there 
 as a matter of fact any " over soul " ? one may ask. 
 As a matter of fact there was for Emerson. But I 
 imagine that he did not reach it by the revelation of 
 intuition but by the convenient road of inferential if 
 not rigorous logic, proceeding from postulates particu 
 larly agreeable to his own very peremptory predilec 
 tions. Indeed it is when he abandons his intuitions 
 or attempts to give the order of sequence to their 
 succession that his genius, which is ineradically frag 
 mentary abandons him. An unoriginal philosophy 
 of shreds and patches may be welded into effective 
 coherence by systematic logic alone. And Emerson s 
 so far from being rigorous was thoroughly fanciful. 
 All his metaphysic is fanciful. When he differen 
 tiates his philosophy and diversifies its structure 
 into a semblance of metaphysical system, it becomes, 
 I think, as nearly insipid as the functioning of a 
 really great mind can be. His love of mystery, the 
 poetic element in his thinking, is manifested in mys 
 tification, and his "circles" and "polarity" and "com 
 pensation" and differentiated "oneness" and "over 
 soul" and so on wear less the aspect of august Laws 
 than of the elementary varied by the trivial having 
 their genesis, too, in a demand as superfluous as the 
 supply is essentially supposititious. Certainly they add 
 less than nothing to the literary value of his writings, 
 which since the philosophers will have none of him 
 
 154 
 
EMERSON 
 
 is after all the important matter. They make even les 
 ponderable what is already on the verge of volatility. 
 
 Nevertheless if much of its fioritura, as his more per 
 sonal contributions to it may be called, was, thus, more 
 or less obscurely deduced since man is after all a 
 reasoning animal, as well as inspired by " Reason" in 
 the Hegelian sense his philosophy was in substance 
 and practically altogether intuitional; and, as such, as 
 sound as traditional authority could make it. That is 
 to say, it was good for the general use as well for his 
 own. Any kind of "ontology" will serve so long as its 
 associated philosophy is sound, and however an in 
 tuitional philosophy may be depreciated, it has this 
 in its favor that the mind itself recognizes its central 
 postulate as its own habitual process. It has con 
 sciousness "the light of all our seeing" on its side. 
 Whatever the ultimate origin of ideas, in other words, 
 introspection empirically attests them as at any rate not 
 immediately proceeding from experience. Otherwise the 
 world, given over to introspection for so many ages, 
 would have anticipated Locke even before Bacon. 
 Ideas "swim into our ken" and it is quite impossible 
 for consciousness to derive them from what has evoked 
 them. The nexus escapes it. We conceive as unex 
 pectedly as we perceive. That is to say, even if Newton 
 really inferred gravitation from the fall of the apple 
 as so many had failed to do ! what filled his conscious 
 ness at the instant was not inference but cognition. It 
 is this that makes Emerson s philosophy so generally 
 attractive its harmonious accord with the report of the 
 
 155 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 general consciousness of even the unreflective and the 
 inexpert. It preaches what common experience ap 
 proves. On the other hand of course the way in which 
 ideas reach the mind or are revealed within it having 
 nothing whatever to do with their validity, Emerson s 
 implicit trust in them unexampled, in the immense and 
 varied use he made of it, since Aristotle s discovery of 
 their need of testing has in him its naive, and in his 
 disciples its incontestably fatuous, side. But if he mis 
 took guesses at, for glimpses of, truth on occasion, it 
 cannot be denied that, given his intense love of it in 
 itself the most powerful clarifier of mental vision 
 and his altogether remarkable good sense inherited 
 perhaps from generations of intellectual ancestors who 
 knew not whim his own extraordinarily gifted intel 
 ligence worked with a minimum of insecurity, as it 
 undoubtedly worked in its freest, its happiest and 
 its most congenial possible way, within the elastic frame- 
 A work of an intuitional philosophy, and would have 
 k een strangled by an empirical one. His philosophy 
 an y ra * e as ^ sa ^ J sinte d him. It fostered the ex- 
 P ans i n f m s native genius and fructified as any 
 thing other would have sterilized, the luxuriant efflores 
 cence of his meditation. Without it, without the cer 
 tainty his direct vision enabled him to feel, his wisdom 
 would have far less authority and would have suffered 
 from the inevitable enfeeblement of speculation. In 
 duction is impertinent to the seer. "Without the 
 vision" he loses his office quite as inevitably as "the 
 people perish." 
 
 156 
 
 V K\ 
 t ^ 
 
EMERSON 
 
 His philosophy also suited the time and environment 
 of which he was in turn a product as well as a prophet. 
 Elusive as he is, Emerson was of the essence of New 
 England, and the New England of the early nineteenth 
 century. Generations of militant Protestantism neces 
 sarily intensified the essence of non-conformity without, 
 of course, necessarily transmitting its traditional ex 
 pression. It is of course the type that persists, and the 
 type is not a set of opinions, however rigid, but the 
 attitude of mind in which they are held. Emerson s 
 catholicity extends to indifference rather than to toler 
 ance, and in itself is distinctly intellectual rather than 
 sympathetic or voluntary. He is constitutionally less 
 a descendant of Erasmus than of Luther. His protest 
 against titular Protestantism, against dogma in gen 
 eral, is identical in nature with the Reformers pro 
 test against specific dogmas. Its expression is in scope 
 chiefly an evolution, though in temper a miraculous 
 variation from type. It allows him, to be sure, an oc 
 casional return to the Puritan luxury of oppugnation 
 and excess, as in his remark that John Brown had 
 made the gallows as glorious as the Cross, or in an 
 ironical reference to history or culture or "Europe," 
 or tart censure of the "Oriental" way in which "the 
 good Jesus" has been deified instead perhaps of being 
 "ground into paint" for more specific use, as he says 
 was the fate to which Plato subjected his relations. 
 But in general it is needless to say he has retained the 
 mental attitude of Puritanism purged of its polemic and 
 contentious temper. And this attitude is illustrated 
 
 157 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 in the two chief objects of his consecration indi 
 vidualism and the ideal. Nowhere else could the 
 preacher of this conjoint gospel into which all Emer 
 son may be run up have been developed in Emersonian 
 perfection outside the New England of his day. in 
 dividualism is confined to Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, 
 and in English nonconformity the ideal is of neces 
 sity obscured by the practical difficulty of sustaining 
 life and flowering amid obstacles instead of fostering 
 favor. 
 
 On the other hand exactly what the soil that had 
 produced this gospel needed was the enrichment of 
 renewal. In a new embodiment Emerson furnished 
 this. Modified and adapted to new conditions and new 
 occasions subsequent phases inevitably, with time, 
 become as static as those they themselves supplanted 
 above all, tinged with poetry, vital with eloquence and 
 softened into suavity, the old Protestant gospel of the 
 individual and the ideal responded accurately to the 
 actual need of his country in his time. The period of 
 colonial growth had been succeeded by that of national 
 condensation and aggrandizement, and in the pressing 
 interest of its quite indispensable aims its society had 
 come to tyrannize the individual, and material progress 
 to obscure the ideal life. Undoubtedly too much has 
 been said of the alleged pusillanimity of this period of 
 our history, and cruel injustice has been done to the 
 patriots who but for the fanatics might have held the 
 nation together by the cement of compromise instead of 
 that of blood. Professor Burgess has made it difficult 
 
 158 
 
EMERSON 
 
 longer to refuse them their meed of just praise. At the 
 same time the general peril naturally produced the 
 situation which Emerson quite truly as well as solemnly 
 characterized in one of his earliest utterances, declaring, 
 This country has not fulfilled what seemed the reason 
 able expectation of mankind." If it has in greater de 
 gree done so since it is largely due to the self-reliance 
 and the ideality with which his dauntless clairvoyance 
 inspired it, and made to appear rational as well as at 
 tractive. It has at least presented his career to man 
 kind and mankind in profiting by it can hardly fail to 
 acknowledge that in one respect at least his country 
 has more than fulfilled its reasonable expectation. 
 
 Specifically one of his greatest services both to us and 
 to mankind chary as he was of specific service : 
 
 "He that feeds men serveth few; 
 He serves all who dares be true," 
 
 and subtly as this one is rendered, being in fact rather 
 an implication of his writings than anywhere explicit 
 in them is w^at_ j may,_be^called the rationalization of 
 democracy through the ideal development of the indi 
 vidual. His defective sympathies qualify his own 
 democracy which thus rests wholly on an intellectual 
 basis, and for this reason his service to it will perhaps 
 some day be perceived as one of the greatest that have 
 been rendered to this greatest of modern causes. Too 
 modest to conceive his mission as otherwise benevolent 
 than is involved in the conversion of life into truth, 
 too fastidious to respond to the elementary appeal of 
 
 159 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 philanthropy, he was yet bold enough and detached 
 enough to recognize the injustice of privilege, and the 
 claims of every human potentiality for development into 
 power. Besides, his philosophy of the identity of mind 
 and his gospel of individualism imposed democracy 
 upon him. The very fact that he was no respecter of 
 persons protected him from illusions as to classes, and 
 the finality of feudalism was alone enough to lead his 
 revolutionary and independent spirit to see it as an ar 
 rest of development and not an ideal. Association with 
 God and his own higher self naturally induced contempt 
 of artificial human distinctions, and a theologian who 
 did not divide mankind even into sheep and goats 
 had no disposition to fix them in categories of com 
 plicated interdependence, where to preach to them his 
 favorite doctrine of self-reliance would be derision. If 
 his emotional nature lacked warmth, what eminently it 
 possessed was an exquisite refinement, and a constituent 
 of his refinement was an instinctive antipathy to ideas of 
 dominance, dictation, patronage, caste and material su 
 periority whose essential grossness repelled him and whose 
 ultimate origin in contemptuousness probably the one 
 moral state except cravenness that chiefly he deemed 
 contemptible was plain enough to his penetration. 
 
 He hated the mob, and shrank from the vulgar. No 
 doubt Tiberius Gracchus did. "Enormous popula 
 tions," he exclaims, "if they be beggars, are disgusting, 
 like moving cheese, like hills of ants, or of fleas the 
 more, the worse." He certainly could not echo St. 
 Francis s: "My brother, the ass." But if his democ- 
 
 160 
 
EMERSON 
 
 racy was not founded on sentiment, it was perhaps all 
 the more firmly established in principle by penetrating 
 vision, and, as I have intimated, perhaps it is only in this 
 way that democracy will be able to complete its conquest 
 of the human spirit, that is to say by convincing the 
 mind; the heart of mankind has often been persuaded 
 even to ecstasy, but pure sentiment is subject to striking, 
 not to say, tragic, reaction. From the democratic point 
 of view, I know of no finer spectacle than that furnished 
 by the procession of Emerson s lecturing years. All 
 over the North and West of the country, as well as in his 
 own New England, "the people" there were no others 
 gathered in cities and villages and in substantial 
 numbers to listen to the suave delivery of his serene 
 message, to enjoy each one after his capacity, the hon 
 eyed extract of his assimilated culture, the fruit of his 
 claustral meditation, on various phases of all sorts of 
 topics, but always the Ideal. However much or little 
 they comprehended, they at least savored it, and 
 their eagerness to breathe its rarefied air and ex 
 perience its elusive stimulus, witnesses a correspond 
 ing idealism in his public. His public was no doubt 
 as eminently naive as he was subtle, but they met on 
 the common ground of the dignity of the individual 
 and his indefinitely great capacity for development 
 through divine illumination. Truly a different social 
 phenomenon altogether from that of the University 
 Extension movement, say, whether or no as valuable 
 measured by its fruits. 
 
 Measured by its fruits, Emersonian doctrine must 
 161 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 certainly be, and it cannot be contested that some of 
 these have not been fair. There can be no doubt of the 
 preponderance of beneficence in his influence, and 
 rightly apprehended it can have no other quality. His 
 every understanding reader must receive from him a 
 spiritual quickening that combines moral earnestness 
 with intellectual exhilaration, a purified sense of the 
 pricelessness at once and the attainability of the very 
 best, and a corresponding disregard for the second-rate. 
 He shrivels mediocrity for us as no other writer does. 
 His exaction is almost exorbitant, but the courage and 
 the consciousness of capacity he stimulates echo "the 
 youth" who in his own famous line unparalleled in 
 literature, I think, for its tonic effect " replies, I 
 can. " But he has not always been rightly appre 
 hended, and where he has not where, against his re 
 peated protest, he has been accepted literally and 
 formally as a guide rather than as a stimulus his ex 
 treme non-conformity has been disintegrating. The 
 disposition to execute ideas instead of keeping them in 
 reserve for general purposes of illumination and edifica 
 tion a disposition which, it need not be said, Emerson 
 himself, who held them in solution as it were, did not 
 share has resulted in many quarters in a flagrant 
 individualism that is but a caricature of that which 
 Emerson preached. All the same it is to be charged to 
 his account, I think. Doubtless he never realized that 
 a philosophy born of protest could become so positive, 
 and indeed in its way ultramontane, as to have its own 
 rigidities and restrictions. We may almost say that 
 
 162 
 
EMERSON 
 
 what now passes strictly for Emersonianism is the 
 antithesis of the flux in which he joyed to see the uni 
 verse whirl. Emptied of imagination, Emerson s phi 
 losophy is infallibly transformed. Almost all the 
 "perky" people one knows are Emersonians, and in 
 cruel truth, a numerous progeny of pedants may claim 
 descent at least by, the sinister hand from a parent 
 to whom above all things pedantry was an offence. 
 Just at present multitudes of those who are caught up in 
 the contemporary current that is drifting away from 
 materialism and in whom the discovery of spiritual 
 forces produces the same enthusiasm it doubtless did 
 in the primitive man feed or at least browse upon a 
 literature that curiously caricatures Emerson. Every 
 one would agree that the crying, the notorious defect 
 of these zealots is lack of culture. Culture and 
 nothing but culture is precisely the cure for the men 
 tal condition illustrated in these and other eccentric 
 ities of the spirit of nonconformity. And when one 
 sees the excess to which Emerson s central doctrine of 
 self-reliance is capable of being carried, even more im 
 portant than that one should "be content with one s 
 own light" seems the result desired by Mrs. Shelley 
 who had had an experience quite otherwise illuminating 
 than was attainable at Concord! for her son: "Teach 
 him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him 
 rather to think like other people!" When Emerson 
 affirms " Whoso would be a man must be a nonconform 
 ist," it is permitted to wish, thinking of some of his dis 
 ciples, that he had spent at least one day in explanation. 
 
 163 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 V 
 
 Culture, however, did not enter into Emerson s phi 
 losophy. His philosophy, indeed, following his instinct 
 does not so much neglect as positively impeach 
 it. There is no denying the fact, which is vaunted 
 rather than dissembled. He has a hard word for it 
 always. Culture means on the one hand discipline, 
 which irked him, and on the other acquisition, which 
 to him could only have a disciplinary function. In 
 either aspect it involves effort and effort lay quite out 
 side his ideal of surrender to intuition and impulse. "I 
 would not degrade myself," he says, "by casting about 
 for a thought nor by waiting for one." And it is far 
 less a transient than a prevailing mood in which he 
 affirms, "I would write on the lintels of the door-post, 
 Whim." And this spirit informs not only his intellec 
 tual but his morv 1 ! philosophy, so far as these are separ 
 able. What he h~>lds in reserve in the one case is the 
 "explanation" in vhich he "cannot spend the day," 
 and in the other the postulate that impulse should of 
 course be pure and good. His own being angelic, he 
 assumes integrity in that of the world in general. "Our 
 moral nature," he insists, "is vitiated by any inter 
 ference of our will." The curbing, directing, develop 
 ing of instinct and impulse by the effort involved in dis 
 ciplinary culture is to him as superfluous as it is held 
 by the Perfectionist and the Antinomian. He would 
 either have controverted Froude s comparison of the 
 moral life of man to the flight of a bird in the air 
 
 164 
 
EMERSON 
 
 which sustains itself only by effort, or have contended 
 that the exertion on whose cessation man falls should 
 be as instinctive and unconscious as the sky-lark s up 
 ward winging. 
 
 But even for culture that involves a minimum of 
 effort, he feels no particular friendliness. Although it 
 is at the least the other side of the shield of self-reliance, 
 it is one of the few that he rarely turns around. " Obey 
 thyself/ "Trust thyself," are adjurations he never 
 qualifies. Bishop Wilson s caution, after saying "Act 
 in accordance with the best light that you have," 
 namely, "be sure that your light is not darkness," is 
 one he never adds. He establishes egoism on a basis 
 of practicable infallibility. Everything external, in 
 fact, is valued so strictly for what it educes and evokes 
 as to minimize its importance as augmentation and even 
 illumination. Education is of course essentially as 
 well as etymologically thus to be conceived. But even 
 thus conceived culture is its complement, and the edu 
 cation of others may advantageously correct, modify 
 and enrich, as well as stimulate the mind increase its 
 store as well as strengthen its powers. Knowledge is 
 power as well as a source of it. It is only emphasis 
 doubtless that saves the distinction from barrenness, 
 but in such a matter emphasis is everything. 
 
 Emerson s whole stress and accent belittle culture in 
 both its aspects, but especially in its aspect as acquisi 
 tion. The essay on "History" is certainly not designed 
 merely to state the trite truth that education is educa 
 tive, but to deny that it is anything else. Yet in main- 
 
 165 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 taining so rigidly that the educative is the sole function 
 of history, he is really belittling this function itself. 
 It is eminently not the kind of education he can con 
 sistently prize, since, even considered in the least 
 material, and therefore to him most congenial, way as 
 " philosophy teaching by examples," his philosophy 
 eschews "examples" as the fleeting phenomena they 
 no doubt are compared with Nature s "eterne," though 
 surely less coherent and articulate, undertakings. 
 How he really feels is shown in such a passage as the 
 following in which if it be pedantic to note flippancy 
 one may surely remark the absence of the historic sense : 
 
 The professor interrogates Sylvina in the history class about 
 Odoacer and Alaric. Sylvina can t remember, but suggests that 
 Odoacer was defeated; and the professor tartly replies: "No, 
 he defeated the Romans." But tis plain to the visitor, that tis 
 of no importance at all about Odoacer, and it is a great deal of 
 importance about Sylvina; and if she says he was defeated, why 
 he had better a great deal have been defeated than give her a 
 moment s annoy. Odoacer, if there was a particle of the gentle 
 man in him, would have said, " Let me be defeated a thousand 
 times." 
 
 It is perhaps fortunate for the visitor that it is of no im 
 portance to him about Odoacer. The history seems a 
 little mixed. And though in general so far as any equip 
 ment he may need is concerned Emerson illustrates cult 
 ure nearly as much as bien a son aise! he depreciates 
 it, it is no doubt in his lack of the historic sense that he 
 illustrates it least. " Representative Men" is critically 
 penetrating, but the treatment is characteristically sum 
 mary because it stops with what is to the critic himself 
 
 166 
 
EMERSON 
 
 generally provocative and suggestive; especially char 
 acteristic is the title of the introduction : " Uses of 
 Great Men." One follows easily the trend of his pre 
 dilection : Art in his view, for instance, is chiefly valuable 
 as recording history; history is of value so strictly as 
 fuel for his own intellectual combustion that it is of 
 small importance in even this regard; his mind in its 
 creative and not its acquisitive aspect is his central 
 concern ; and in this aspect is tinder to which any spark 
 suffices. No doubt occasionally and impulsively he 
 forgot that many of his "own spirits in prison" were 
 less happily constituted. 
 
 His neglect of the furniture of the mind, the material 
 it has to work with hardly less important than the con 
 dition of its muscles, so to speak , his peremptory 
 rejection of all that is not plainly addressed grist for 
 the individual s own mill, appears elsewhere as plainly 
 as in his view of history. It appears in his literary 
 prejudices, certainly the most whimsical that could be 
 predicated of a really great mind, whatever its tempera 
 mental defects. "He could see nothing," Mr. Cabot 
 records, "in Shelley, Aristophanes, Don Quixote, Dick 
 ens." Dante whom he conventionally celebrates in 
 verse, he called obscurely "another Zerah Colburn" 
 described in the dictionaries as a youthful mathematical 
 prodigy of the day. He finds that Landor, Coleridge, 
 Carlyle, Wordsworth all lack the intuition of religious 
 truth, adding: "They have no idea of that species of 
 moral truth [identifying religious with moral/ one 
 perceives incidentally] that I call the first philosophy." 
 
 167 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 His race prejudices are also plain, as appears especially 
 in "English Traits" a work distrusted by the English 
 themselves almost as much as "Our Old Home" is 
 disesteemed, and though surprisingly full of instructive 
 data as well as distinctly entertaining, distinctly less 
 penetrating and sound than it might have been had 
 he had even a touch of cosmopolitanism wherewith to 
 modify its rather loose panegyric. He knew German 
 and Germany of course. His philosophy issued thence 
 on its way from Plato, though he caught a good deal of 
 it in rebound from Coleridge; his positive preference 
 for translations is well known. But one may almost 
 say that he appears never to have heard of France, 
 except as an appanage of Napoleon, of whom he had 
 a curious and curiously enlightened appreciation. So 
 cial questions also left him cold. "I have no social 
 talent," he says of himself and might with equal truth 
 have added, no social interests. Culture prescribes an 
 interest in the present and future of mankind as well 
 as in its past. But mankind, as such, interested him 
 very superficially. Unlike his ally Nature he is careless 
 of the type and though it is his individuality that chiefly 
 he cares for in the individual he certainly emphasizes 
 this in a way that minimizes all the relations of fellow 
 ship. His social sense, in a word, has always been 
 found by his critics even more defective than his historic, 
 and attests even more plainly to the present time his 
 deficiency in culture, which alone could have modified 
 his instinctive individualism and to which in an essen 
 tial respect therefore his philosophy appears provincial 
 
 168 
 
EMERSON 
 
 and, however vital, barbaric. Individualism is currently, 
 it need not be said, a waning force in all "practical" 
 philosophy, in whose domain on the contrary the social 
 sense has strongly entrenched itself. 
 
 It has done so in no small degree in virtue of its sub 
 stantial accord with what culture recognizes as the sur 
 vival in society of the spirit of fraternity, which Chris 
 tianity inherited perhaps from Stoicism and, enriched 
 with its own emotional opulence and elevation, trans 
 mitted to the modern world one of its latest embodi 
 ments being in fact expressly labelled " Christian social 
 ism/ And Emerson, to go one step further, whether or 
 no his devotion to the "moral sentiment" be exactly 
 characterized as religious or as merely ethical, is as dis 
 tinctly un-Christian as he is unsocial. The orthodox 
 of his day followed a sure instinct in distrusting him, 
 however pusillanimous the form the feeling took on 
 occasion. The orthodox distrust of him has largely 
 passed away, partly through its own transformation, 
 partly through the extreme winningness of his eloquence 
 and his personal saintliness, partly through its failure 
 to perceive that his variety of idealism is as hostile 
 to the essence as to the ecclesiasticism of Christianity. 
 From the point of view of culture Christianity, denuded 
 of its ecclesiastical sanctions, is still more to be explained 
 as a force, a factor in evolution, an element of progress. 
 It is impossible not to reckon with its principles, its 
 discoveries, its modifications and deflections of the 
 Pagan current of tendency and constitution of moral 
 attitude. Goethe, for example, passes with the ortho- 
 
 169 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 dox for a Pagan in virtue of his culture. But culture 
 includes the orthodox and Goethe s web of life lost no 
 single thread furnished by Christianity. The profound 
 contribution to the philosophy of existence made in the 
 utterance "He that loveth his life shall lose it" finds its 
 echo across the dissonances of twenty ages in 
 
 " Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren! " 
 
 the keynote of the greatest modern poem. 
 
 Goethe, however, was in the full current of the stream 
 of culture not as Emerson, a complacent spectator 
 on its banks, intelligently interested in the chips that 
 floated by on its surface, but really preoccupied with 
 truth. He had never been extruded from conformity 
 by a doubt as to whether he had a right to administer 
 the Lord s Supper to a Unitarian congregation. Self- 
 assertion even of the serenest sort never occurred to 
 him. He was engaged in doing things that is, writing 
 things that had relations to their before and after 
 congeners, not in contemplating the importance of his 
 individuality. Hence he felt the force and pressure of 
 the things that had been done and written before 
 him, and applied himself to building another chamber 
 in the nautilus-shell of culture that culture to which 
 Emerson penetratingly accuses him of sacrificing truth. 
 What has Emerson added to that? The answer is 
 capital in any consideration of him, though it in no wise 
 obscures his undoubted invigoration of the sinews of the 
 soul. The two achievements are, however, far from 
 identical and it cannot be too clearly perceived that 
 
 170 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Emerson and culture are at war. That is to say, he is 
 at war with the greatest force in the modern world he 
 who passes in general for the most modern of men. He 
 is modern, however, in virtue of his wonderful catholicity 
 of appreciation, not because of his temperamental sym 
 pathy with the way the world is going. It is going in 
 quite the contrary direction from that which he indi 
 cated to it; the individual is withering and the world 
 is becoming more and more, in virtue at least of 
 a growing sense that whatever is individual is neces 
 sarily partial and lacks the authority of synthetic 
 co-operation. 
 
 The gospel of self-assertion, therefore, which is but 
 another name for Emerson s stirring "self-reliance," has 
 less virtue to-day than in a period of traditional tyranny 
 especially blind to the ideal. Its virtue is incontestable, 
 but it is already practically relegated to the category of 
 "subsumed" and presupposed principia of all thought 
 and conduct. His optimism, accordingly, remains tonic, 
 but it is no longer daily food. It is marked rather by 
 elevation than depth; and his philosophy, taken as a 
 whole, which it pervades and indeed unifies, is thus 
 marked. In its concentration on the ideal and its cor 
 responding neglect of the actual, it is not philosophically 
 central and complete. It stimulates aspiration, but 
 does not sustain realization. It would be shallow to 
 describe it as superficial. Nothing in Emerson is super 
 ficial. And to the sense that marks his lack of depth, 
 his elevation is quite as clear if not wholly compensatory. 
 Moreover, his lack of depth is always felt as a tempera- 
 
 171 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 mental coldness, never, it need hardly be said, as intel 
 lectual aridity. There is nothing of which he fails to 
 take account, but his accent and stress an immense 
 matfer are not dictated by feeling, and consequently 
 have the less weight. The ascription of optimism to him 
 in the Pangloss sense would be absurd. A view of the 
 actual as the best possible world can hardly be ascribed 
 to a revolutionary and reformatory spirit, always and 
 systematically a critic of the established order a 
 writer whose work is full of allusions to the inepti 
 tudes of human imbecility (not an infrequent word 
 with him) and who asserts that "a person seldom falls 
 sick but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope 
 that he will die." "We live," he maintains, "in a very 
 low state of the world," and, in his excessive way, as 
 severates, " The highest virtue is always against the law." 
 In fact his whole work originated and continued in a pro 
 test against institutional circumstance, as he experienced 
 it in his own environment and perceived it in the world 
 at large, historic and actual. His optimism consists 
 in his confidence in the natural constitution of things, 
 in the exhilaration its contemplation gives him, in 
 his persuasion that Nature is the best possible Nature, 
 and that man though "fallen," has infinite potentiali 
 ties, his perfectibility being dependent only on the 
 transformation of "masses" into individuals, on ignor 
 ing the cultivation of his garden and, not to put too fine 
 a point upon it, brushing up his wits. With intellectual 
 illumination thus obtained his salvation is secure. 
 Moreover, he understands man as "fallen" in the sense 
 
 172 
 
EMERSON 
 
 of fallen from his native estate more in the Rousseau 
 and not at all in the theological sense, except of course 
 that Rousseau s view is, so to speak, historical and 
 Emerson s naturally purely ideal. Had Pangloss heard 
 of this variety of optimism, far more subtile but also far 
 less vulnerable than his own, it is not unlikely that he 
 would have consented to adopt it as a wholly acceptable 
 compromise; in which event literature would have lost 
 "Candide." There is no way of impeaching the view 
 that there exists an order of Nature "an absolute order 
 of things as they stand in the mind of God" which 
 "the intellect searches out without the colors of affec 
 tion," and which is a harmony coestablished with the 
 perverse order known to experience, quite as absolutely 
 real though wholly ideal, and needing only to be per 
 ceived by the mind whose vision penetrates the veils of 
 material phenomena. Just as to Kant the moral law 
 was as real as the starry heavens. Only, to hold this 
 view with enthusiasm is to be an optimist, and an 
 optimist far otherwise convinced and inveterate than 
 either the genial or the cynical type of indifferentist. 
 Besides, ex m termini the revolutionist is an optimist. 
 It is the conservative temperamental or purely philo 
 sophic who is the pessimist, as being less content than 
 timorous. 
 
 Fear, however, is as fundamental as courage in the 
 constitution of the universe. It is at least the salutary 
 complement of courage of the adventurous order, which 
 is rather the instrument of crises. It is the fear of the 
 Lord that is the beginning of wisdom. It is fear that 
 
 173 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 conserves and guides and shields from peril and destruc 
 tion, and fosters growth and protects from error, and 
 whose service is over only when perfect love hath cast 
 it out and the child is reassured in the arms of its 
 mother and the weary soul at rest in the bosom of God. 
 The fact that fear is rational is what makes fortitude 
 divine. Emerson s optimism as to the constitution of 
 the universe essentially unmodified, as I have said, 
 by his asperity toward both human kind and human 
 institutions is too blithe, too bland, too confident. His 
 ideal of independence and non-conformity is easily 
 made to sanction guerilla skirmishing in the conflict of 
 life, which is serious enough for a concerted campaign. 
 It undervalues the enemy s strength. Doubtless one 
 can so station the camera of his mind as to catch the 
 universe at Emerson s angle and identify his "percep 
 tion" of positive good everywhere with negative evil 
 as an insubstantial and illusory shadow "captive ill 
 attending captain good." The youthful Goethe, aged 
 six, at the time of the Lisbon earthquake did so, and 
 reported his vision of the truth that a mortal accident 
 cannot affect an immortal spirit. But it is difficult to 
 "hold the position" which requires a dervish tension 
 and its accompanying insensibility. The slightest shift 
 ing of even the purely intellectual point of view discloses 
 the old panorama. Pain hurts, poverty pinches, bereave 
 ment is bitter, injustice cruel, remorse torture. If evil 
 is but the shadow of good, its blackness leaves any 
 but an invincibly optimistic temperament sadder still 
 by minimizing the moral order in rendering it less sub- 
 
 174 
 
EMERSON 
 
 stantial and therefore less apt a field for calculable 
 conflict. Moreover, how explain sin the choice of 
 evil? To call sin "good in the making," to ascribe it 
 to some "circle" or other in following which the "ways 
 of the wicked" are made to serve the harmony of the 
 spheres, is to minimize its gravity and "wither" the 
 individual with a vengeance. But Emerson is always 
 minimizing when he is not magnifying the individual 
 an inevitable alternation, perhaps, in an intellectual 
 philosophy that ignores conscience, and considers 
 potentialities to the exclusion of responsibilities. As a 
 part of the universe, you are a veritable mouche de 
 coche, and whatever you do is muted in the celes 
 tial symphony. As an individual, consciousness it 
 self gives a glowing, an almost incredible account 
 of your capacities. Conscience, however, is another 
 matter. 
 
 Emerson was "all his days," says Henry James, Sr., 
 "an arch-traitor to our existing civilized regimen, inas 
 much as he unconsciously managed to set aside its 
 fundamental principle, in doing without conscience. 
 . . . He had no conscience, in fact, and lived by per 
 ception, which is an altogether lower or less spiritual 
 faculty." His neglect of conscience is undoubtedly due 
 in large measure to his personal immunity from its 
 mordant functioning. Unlike the youth tenderly nur 
 tured in the lap of Calvinism who expressed surprise 
 at hearing of an approving one, his own must have been 
 radiantly commending. It was easy for him to affirm 
 that "no man can afford to waste his moments in 
 
 175 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 compunction." Personal blamelessness conjoined with 
 modesty, which in Emerson was correspondingly 
 marked, naturally induce optimism. There is nothing 
 like sin to give one a gloomy view of the universe. It is 
 the ally and often the parent of cynicism, doubtless, 
 and its natural tendency is to impair philosophic integ 
 rity since its concomitant is suffering and suffering of 
 any sort deflects and distorts. But culture as well as 
 experience feels the lack of depth in any philosophy that 
 ignores conscience. This is a far more essential differ 
 ence between Emerson and Carlyle than the greater 
 suavity of the former by which, aptly coupling them as 
 exponents of "personal idealism," Professor Eucken 
 the latest German authority on philosophy distin 
 guishes the two. Carlyle surely has more depth. Nor 
 with all his arrogance did he have less humility. It is 
 impossible to have less. In the sense in which the word 
 that epitomizes Epictetus is fortitude, Marcus Aurelius 
 resignation, early Christianity renouncement, the " ages 
 of faith" humilitas, the Renaissance emancipation, the 
 eighteenth century enlightenment Emerson is summed 
 up in confidence. He is as much outside the current of 
 ethical evolution as of Newman s trend of doctrinal devel 
 opment. He has the pride which Meredith aptly called 
 Pagan. He is not arrogant in spirit but autocratic in 
 attitude. The attitude of " The Problem " is even exult 
 ant. He has not the defiant note of Henley s " Invictus " 
 or the insouciance of Stevenson s gaudium certaminis. 
 But his confidence indubitably recalls writers of this 
 slightly aggressive order, rather than the deeper notes 
 
 176 
 
EMERSON 
 
 of the masters who interpret life with more deference, 
 if not with a greater sense of dependence on, than of 
 unison with, the divine. No wonder Nietzsche habitu 
 ally carried one of his volumes in his pocket. If 
 Socrates is "terribly at ease in Zion," Emerson is 
 elate there. And only those for whom elevated ela 
 tion is an equivalent of depth, will find in a philoso 
 phy of intellectual pride and moral confidence the 
 soundness and substance for which culture as well 
 as conscience calls. In this regard those on whose 
 hearts at the present day the sentences of, for example, 
 the "General Confession" of the Anglican ritual no 
 longer 
 
 "Fall like sweet strains " 
 
 will echo more spontaneously than the elation of 
 Emerson s confidence, the deeper solemnity of such a 
 passage as this of Fitzjames Stephen s: 
 
 We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and 
 blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of 
 paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still, we shall be 
 frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed 
 to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right 
 one. What must we do? "Be strong and of a good courage. * 
 Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. If 
 death ends all, we cannot meet it better. If not, let us enter 
 whatever may be the next scene like honest men, w^th no sophis- . 
 try in our mouths and no masks on our faces, y $* * n i 
 
 A*^ ^ 
 
 c >A*> 
 
 AX 
 
 fpr 
 
 ^ 
 & 
 
 "y 
 *%&*&* 
 
 *. 
 
 "^oxr;) 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 VI 
 
 Its genesis naturally furnishes the key to Emerson s 
 style. It is that of the pulpit modified by the lyceum, 
 and the forensic element struggles in it with the literary. 
 Its ideal is eloquence^ not exposition, and it is more than 
 likely that this ideal affected his thought as well 
 manner so marked inevitably reacting on matter. 
 Now-a-days it is an effort to recall this ideal of but a 
 generation ago, in the light of which however it some 
 times seems as if our current literature were quite 
 content, so far as style is concerned, to be thoroughly 
 second rate so long as it is simple and clear. Style in 
 deed, properly so called, may be said not to have sur 
 vived Spencer s philosophy of it. But a few decades 
 ago, in New England at least, it was very generally 
 esteemed an essential element of writing, and no 
 doubt to its detriment in a certain degree inextricably 
 associated with eloquence. How it sounded was hardly 
 less important than how it read, in the consideration 
 of a composition even of an exclusively literary char 
 acter. Oratory was still studied and practised, and 
 imposed its criteria outside its own confines. In early 
 days I do not myself recall that Plato or Thucydides 
 was ever signalized as a master of style, though the 
 simplicity of the one and the compression of the other 
 were of course noted and commended. The models set 
 before youth, at least as late as Emerson s prime, were 
 Demosthenes, Isocrates, Cicero, Burke, Webster. In 
 point of style no purely literary influence exerted over 
 
 178 " 
 
EMERSON 
 
 the youth of that day was more marked than that of 
 Phillips. And certainly I have never encountered since, 
 in whatever field of activity, any artistic expression 
 that produced the effect of perfection at once more 
 singly and more fully than one of his lectures did. We 
 went to his lectures in preference to the theatre. His 
 reserve and dignity; his concentrated power exhibited 
 in grace, and intensity manifested in suavity; his serenity 
 which simulated elevation and the courtliness with 
 which it clothed absolute venom every trait of his 
 technic was the acme of that taste which Emerson 
 identifies with the love of beauty and which realized 
 for his hearers their purest ideals of eloquence as an 
 art. It was small wonder that for so many of them the 
 distinction between oral and written expression even as 
 an ideal was only disclosed later, by wider and different 
 experiences, and that exclusively literary prescriptions 
 should have seemed to lack vitality in the presence of a 
 living model of such commanding quality. 
 
 A similar influence, during his formative period, was 
 undoubtedly exercised over Emerson by Everett. In 
 early days he admired Everett to a degree which, since 
 the episode of Everett s overshadowing at Gettysburg, 
 perhaps, has been popularly incomprehensible. He 
 testifies that "the word that he spoke, in the manner 
 in which he spoke it, became current and classical in 
 New England." "Not a sentence," he continues, "was 
 written in academic exercises, not a declamation at 
 tempted in the college chapel, but showed the omnipres 
 ence of his genius to youthful heads." Everett and 
 
 179 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 Emerson it is hard to think of a more incongruous 
 association! The connecting link is the ideal of elo 
 quence. Like many more important writers, Everett 
 is no longer read. But Emerson s eulogy of his style 
 is specific and convincing. There are many echoes in 
 this panegyric of his own procedure: "He had great 
 talent for collecting facts, and for bringing those he 
 had to bear with ingenious felicity on the moment. 
 . . . All his learning was available for the purposes 
 of the hour. ... It was so coldly and weightily 
 communicated from so commanding a platform as if 
 in the consciousness and consideration of all history 
 and all learning adorned with so many simple and 
 austere beauties of expression, and enriched with so 
 many excellent digressions and significant quotations 
 . . . All his auditors felt the extreme beauty and dig 
 nity of the manner, and even the coarsest were con 
 tented to go punctually to listen, for the manner, 
 when they had found out that the matter was not for 
 them . . . He abounded in sentences." I have quoted 
 so much because it is all so strikingly applicable to 
 Emerson himself. In the matter of style a writer never 
 fully recovers from his early admirations; they are such, 
 doubtless, because his nature responds to them. And 
 perhaps the seven preachers of his ancestry had trans 
 mitted to Emerson the taste and the talent for treating 
 the written as if it were the spoken word and pre 
 disposed him to admire, and later to emulate, the 
 orator i ca l manner of which Everett was with what- 
 ever reservations in respect of artificiality, unappre- 
 
 180 
 
EMERSON 
 
 ciated by his youthful adorer the most admirable 
 exponent in his day. 
 
 To the present generation it is almost needful to pro 
 test that eloquence and oratory are not, normally, 
 varieties of tasteless inflation and tropical excess, that 
 they are not of necessity alloyed with the meretricious. 
 At all events in Emerson s case, his early ideals and his 
 subsequent practice in the lyceum pulpit, are undoubt 
 edly largely responsible for what is the salient merit of 
 his style for the fact that what he wrote has the vitality 
 of the spoken word. Every sentence is addressed to 
 the mind directly. It has a complete value in itself, 
 and is not merely contributory to any general cumulative 
 effect. So far, accordingly, as the prevailing blandness 
 of his nature permits, it is decidedly a sententious style. 
 But blandness is also an obvious element of it and 
 bridges the absence of transitions, or at least softens it, 
 so that while your attention receives really a constant 
 succession of stimuli, they almost blend in the equiva 
 lence of tendency. As there is no reasoning there is no 
 appeal to the reasoning faculties and you turn the pages 
 even more submissively than you follow an orator, con 
 scious only of a series of apprehensions. And each 
 paragraph, each sentence sometimes nearly every 
 word is instinct with individual effectiveness, often 
 conceived with a wonderful intuitive sense of beauty 
 and fitness, always chosen with a wonderful felicity of 
 selection, incisive, apt, illuminating and on occasion 
 fairly vibrant with charm. His vocabulary is a marvel 
 of eclecticism drawn from all fields, from poetry to 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 science, from the country of the imagination to that of 
 every day existence, ranging from the most exotic to 
 the most familiar, the most ornate to the most ordinary, 
 \ and excluding nothing but the pedantic and the medi 
 
 ocre. No writer ever possessed a more distinguished 
 verbal instinct, or indulged it with more delight. He 
 fairly caresses his words and phrases and shows in 
 his treatment of them a pleasure nearer sensuousness, 
 perhaps, than any other he manifests. Everywhere his 
 diction is penetrated with these essential traits of elo 
 quence traits enduing mere expression with values of 
 force, of weight, of heightened and intensified vigor, 
 that in Emerson combine to weave the garment of 
 vitality itself. 
 
 On the other hand, the lack of continuity is obvious. 
 His inconsequences of expression image his inconsecu- 
 tiveness of thought with even more than the natural 
 closeness. They increased in the transformation of his 
 lectures into essays, which with him, owing precisely 
 to his sense for form in the restricted degree in which 
 he possessed it, was a process rather of pruning than 
 development. The lectures that became essays were 
 fastidiously and relentlessly compressed instead of 
 expanded and the method is another demonstration of 
 his individuality the usual method being the extension 
 of notes into fuller and rounder completeness. At 
 times the effect of his page is that of a series of ejacula 
 tions, so exaggeratedly episodic, indeed, as to be more 
 comparable with the aphoristic style of La Rochefou 
 cauld or Vauvenargues than with that of even La 
 
 182 
 
EMERSON 
 
 Bruyere, and when he sinks below his level, not without 
 suggestions of what he himself, I think, somewhere 
 speaks of as the style of the almanac. Sometimes, 
 indeed, this manner acts with him as a kind of auto- 
 infection, owing to his very sensitiveness to nuances of 
 the kind, and you feel pelted with particles rather than 
 presented with any whole whatever not to speak of 
 organic completeness. But it is to be borne in mind 
 that the lack of continuity in Emerson s style in gen 
 eral does not exclude passages of such substantial extent 
 as really to count as periods. And such passages so 
 count in virtue not only of extent, but of character; 
 they are in construction and rythmic sentiment truly 
 periodic. His eloquence is not merely pointed, but on 
 occasion when in fact he indulges the weakness of 
 lingering over a thought instead of uttering another 
 sustained. It is needless to say this is a disposition he 
 does not abuse. Nevertheless his habitual and pre 
 vailing elevation of mind and mood is such that in the 
 kind of passage to which I refer, hardly any prose is 
 richer than his. No writer ever had in more opulent 
 measure the unusual power of maintaining throughout 
 varied thematic modulation a single tone, a central 
 thought, until the expression of its strict implications 
 was complete, and one after another of its phrasings 
 apt for echo in eloquent unison. Eloquence, in fact, 
 either of word, phrase or passage, pervades his style as 
 a flavor; it is present as a distinct, and, indeed, domi 
 nant element and governs the entire technic, already 
 germinant in its inspiration. 
 
 183 
 
f t^t AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 What his style lacks is art in the larger sense. It is 
 distinctly the style of a writer who is artistic, but not 
 an artist to apply to himself the useful distinction he 
 applied to Goethe. He had no sense of composition; 
 his compositions are not composed. They do not con 
 stitute objective creations. They have no construction, 
 no organic quality no evolution. He is above the 
 "degradation" of resort to the elementary, but in some 
 guise or other fundamental, machinery of rhetorical 
 presentation the succession of exordium, theme, con 
 clusion. His essays often begin happily with an arousing, 
 stimulant utterance, but there is no graded approach to 
 any distinguishable middle, followed in turn by some 
 end; they do not terminate, but cease. His sense of 
 form exquisite where purity and simplicity are con 
 cerned disappears in the presence of complexity and 
 elaboration. The impressiveness of a work of art re 
 sides largely in the relations between its larger values, 
 but Emerson has no larger values. The details them 
 selves often, as I say, beautiful, and caressingly bur 
 nished are not grouped in active interdependence, 
 and consequently do not constitute parts. A Jortiori 
 there is no whole, and as a rule, the essays do not leave 
 a very definite single impression, so far as the rein 
 forcement of the theme by the treatment is concerned. 
 You get the idea that "self-reliance" is a fine thing, but 
 not how, or why, or with what qualifications. The de 
 tail of such essays as "Power," "Success," " Greatness," 
 is almost interchangeable. His way of working, com 
 bined with his depreciation of effort, made this inevi- 
 
 184 
 
EMERSON 
 
 table. He read, walked and meditated eight or nine 
 hours a day, thus accumulating golden nuggets of 
 thought, but without the direction of the will his 
 meditation was of necessity desultory, and when sub 
 sequently he subtracted from his accumulation of nug 
 gets enough for a lecture or an essay their classifica 
 tion was perforce rather arbitrary. It is only nature 
 that can be trusted to work thus at hap-hazard, 
 and even Pactolus was a stream, not a moraine. For 
 man s creation art is rigorously requisite. And art in 
 the constructive sense found no echo in Emerson s 
 nature. 
 
 In general terms, to be sure, he says the most search 
 ing things about it. About what subject of human 
 concern, indeed, does he fail to? There is no witness 
 of his wisdom, of the wide embracing character of his 
 intellect, more striking than some of his deliverances 
 about its character and scope largely considered, for, 
 being temperamentally without sensuous strain, he 
 looked through things rather than at them. It is true 
 that any writer coming after Goethe, has small excuse 
 for error as to essential and constitutional aesthetic 
 principles. And in part no doubt, he owes his felicity 
 in dealing with these to the culture he depreciates, to 
 his having read Goethe. But he read him with sym 
 pathetic comprehension and the preparedness due to 
 his own extraordinarily unerring intuition. Sentences 
 such as these occur in his earliest book: "The love of 
 beauty is taste," "The creation of beauty is art," 
 "Thus is art, a nature passed through the alembic of 
 
 185 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 man," "The integrity of impression made by manifold 
 natural objects," " There is no object so foul that in 
 tense light will not make it beautiful," "The sensual 
 man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms 
 things to his thoughts," "The charming landscape I saw 
 this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty 
 or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, 
 and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them 
 owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon 
 which no man has, but he whose eye can integrate all 
 the parts, the poet." If he had here taken one step 
 further and added that the artist is he who can 
 express this integration, unfold this involution, he 
 would have established the exact category of art. 
 This step, however, undoubtedly implies even with 
 Claude the effort he disesteemed. He never took 
 it himself, nor did he value the results of others in 
 taking it. 
 
 His remark of Goethe, just referred to, that "this 
 law-giver of art is not an artist" is far more applicable 
 to himself, though his perception of the lack of art in 
 Goethe s works is creditably paradoxical in him. One 
 argues that its absence in Goethe is perceived and not 
 felt by him more suo; if to acuteness of perception 
 were added the sincerity of feeling, he would have been 
 less sweeping. Is not the first part of " Faust" artistic ? 
 And are not Goethe s classical productions correct to 
 the point of coldness? In his own case, at any rate, 
 what he betrays in his attitude toward art is sapience, 
 not sensitiveness. The fact considering the New 
 
 186 
 
EMERSON 
 
 England of his day is still another, and not the least 
 significant, evidence of his powers of intellectual divi 
 nation. As to these one is constantly tempted to ask 
 oneself in reading him, if .after all intellect enough is not 
 all-sufficient. But when we come to his own apprecia 
 tion of art in the concrete, we realize how little it meant 
 to him. He could, as in the case of Goethe, recognize, 
 and even regret, its absence, but actively and positively 
 it was quite indifferent to him. The real and funda 
 mental reason for this I suspect to be that he was, so 
 to speak, his own artist, and had as little need of or use 
 for others, in other realms of practice, as in his own. 
 Perhaps, by his favorite law of compensation, his aloof 
 ness and independence were balanced by a correspond 
 ing self-sufficingness, which established his equipoise 
 by developing the extraordinary though of course far 
 from vain-glorious egoism that is so marked in one 
 nevertheless so serenely unassuming. What he de 
 lights in is nature, and in nature for what it says, not 
 what it shows, to him. He can perhaps make his own 
 synthesis his own picture. He was inexhaustibly 
 synthetic and hardly functioned otherwise. He knows 
 precisely, as I have said, what constitutes the picture. 
 But whether he can or not, he is not enough interested 
 in it to communicate it, and when some one else paints 
 it, it is not his, and therefore it fails to interest him at all. 
 Nor does he take art quite seriously enough to compre 
 hend what may be called its physiology, academically 
 alive as he is to its essential principles. When he first 
 saw the old masters, he was surprised at their sim- 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 plicity, which approves his penetration the philistine 
 note simply never appears in Emerson but it is plain 
 that he deemed this end easily attained by them, and 
 ascriptible to the direct vision of genius. His maxim 
 is that one does best what is easiest for him to do 
 surely a transcendental view of art, aside from the 
 notorious truth that what one does easily is not worth 
 doing, unless indeed one has done it before with diffi 
 culty. He did not linger among the aforesaid old 
 masters, moreover. Mr. Henry James records that on 
 walking with him through the galleries of the Louvre 
 and the Vatican, "his perception of the objects con 
 tained in those collections was of the most general 
 order " doubtless not an overstatement. Europe, in 
 deed, said little to him in any way. Its chief interest 
 for Americans is probably its monuments and museums. 
 And for him these treasures were negligible as having 
 served their purpose a purpose in the nature of things, 
 according to his philosophy, needing ceaseless renewal, 
 continuous change. Anything static tends to impede 
 the flux that was his ideal. Doubtless he took his 
 world the kingdom of his mind with him on each of 
 his two visits abroad, but one fancies him glad to be at 
 home again, where the concrete forced itself less on the 
 attention. At Concord, certainly, so far as art is con 
 cerned, he could escape it altogether cultivate his 
 cherished propensity for whim, and listen to Alcott, 
 and call Dante " another Zerah Colburn " at his ease. 
 
 188 
 
EMERSON 
 
 VII 
 
 It is the absence of art, too, that is the most obvious /^ 
 weakness of his poetry, . where it is of much more 
 moment. Imaginative art is precisely what his poetry 
 lacks to give it classic color and substance. The 
 Poems, taken as a whole, constitute an expression 
 altogether inferior to that of the Essays, of which they 
 are, indeed, a kind of intimate reverberation. They are 
 largely Emerson s communion with himself, as the Es 
 says are his communication with the world. And since, 
 so far as form goes certainly, even communication was not 
 a matter on which he "wasted the day," he is naturally 
 more esoteric and elusive in what one is inclined to call, 
 for the most part, merely articulate meditation. Poetry 
 was distinctly an avocation with him. "The rhyming 
 fit seldom comes to me," he acknowledged. He wrote it 
 to please himself overflowed tricklingly in verse often 
 more careless even than awkward, cadenced to measures 
 that could have gratified only a tuneless ear, and con 
 stituting an exercise rather than an expression. I do 
 not mean that he did not take it seriously. On the con 
 trary he labored it now and then, revised, rewrote, sup 
 pressed on occasion. I fancy, however, that he did this 
 with very little expenditure of the effort that he so de 
 preciated, and precisely in the spirit of revising an exer 
 cise rather than by the more arduous process of " taking 
 thought" which, indeed, had he taken the Muse seri 
 ously enough he might easily have found quite as "de 
 grading" in verse as in his truly native expression. It 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 can t be said that he materially bettered what he changed. 
 Taken in the mass, the Poems have precisely the ex 
 perimental, tentative, adventurous air with which this 
 afterthought order of treatment in the case of a few 
 wholly accords. It is a surprise to find that this was 
 certainly not his own view, and the fact argues the in 
 sufficiency of his poetic ideal as well as performance. 
 His verse has assuredly high qualities, and in elevation 
 and eloquence ranks with his prose qualities that carry 
 their own justification with them, and need to be but 
 tressed by no illusions as to the native felicity of their 
 vehicle of expression. He insisted that he was a born 
 poet, "of inferior rank, no doubt, but all the same a 
 poet," by " nature and vocation," and maintained that 
 everything in him proceeded from that. But he was 
 mistaken. In the exact sense in which he called Goethe 
 artistic, but not an artist, we may say of him (what in 
 deed also he precisely says of Shelley) that he was 
 poetic oh! distinctly but not a poet. It is not a 
 little significant that in the appreciative and really monu 
 mental work Mile. Dugard has recently published 
 "Emerson: Sa Vie et Son GEuvre" there is scarcely a 
 reference to the Poems. And if, considering their highly 
 idiosyncratic quality, one could hardly count on their 
 passing the border of another tongue, the strictures of 
 Swinburne and the cool estimate of Arnold have at 
 least the weight that competence and comprehension 
 carry. In this country the elect consensus would per 
 haps rank Emerson with the greatest of English poets. 
 But this is one of the literary estimates that the pres- 
 
 190 
 
EMERSON 
 
 ent generation has inherited from Emerson s own, in 
 which the more exclusively intellectual ideals imposed 
 themselves rather imperiously. Such an estimate will 
 infallibly be revised when it is realized that, quint 
 essential an element as intellect is in poetry of a high 
 order, it is not the characterizing element of poetry at 
 all when in fact we either produce more poetry that is 
 distinctively poetry or come to have a deeper and more 
 exacting sense of it. 
 
 It is idle to maintain that a true poet, a poet, that is, 
 to whom verse is his native medium, would have written 
 so much indifferent and so little real poetry as Emerson. 
 The conclusion from the obvious data is irresistible that 
 his extremely exceptional achievements proceed from an 
 equally exceptional inspiration. This is to say that a 
 writer of unimpeachable genius, whose native medium 
 is prose, may occasionally receive from the high gods the 
 impulse and the capacity to transmute into the gold of 
 perfect and beautiful musical expression the silver of his 
 habitual elevated and eloquent substance. It is not at 
 all to say that he is a great poet. Nor, of course, on the 
 other hand, is it to say that he is incapable of great 
 poetry. But the aim of criticism is correct characteri 
 zation, and to characterize as essentially a poet a writer 
 whose greatness is almost invariably apparent in his 
 prose, and only occasionally in his verse, is mislead 
 ing. Professor Woodberry, a poet himself, maintains 
 that Emerson was "fundamentally a poet with an im 
 perfect faculty of expression." One differs with so good 
 a judge with diffidence. But as a matter of fact wher- 
 
 191 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 ever Emerson shows himself a poet at all, his faculty 
 of expression is perfection. "When Emerson s line is 
 good," says Mr. Gilder another expert and practi 
 tioner "it is unsurpassably good having a beauty not 
 merely of cadence, but of inner, intense, birdlike sound: 
 the vowels, the consonants, the syllables, are exquisitely 
 musical." The adverbs are enthusiastic, but the de 
 scription is just; just and extremely accurate. The 
 difficulty is that his line so rarely is good, or at 
 any rate, that his goodness, from the point of view 
 of poetry, is so generally confined to his "line." 
 And as I say it is the "mass" that county, here as 
 elsewhere. 
 
 So slight is the proportion of admirable to negligible 
 verse in the Poems that one feels like saying that he can 
 repeat all of Emerson s poetry that repays reading. 
 It is true that of the poetry one knows by heart, the 
 proportion of Emerson s to that of other poets is more 
 considerable. At least this is true in America, partly 
 no doubt because, as with Lowell, patriotism and 
 nature particularly our variety of each, one may say 
 are the twin inspirations of his muse. The "embattled 
 farmers" lines or " Muscatequit " would naturally be 
 less popular in England. But the popularity of some 
 of his lines with us contradicts Arnold s contention that 
 Emerson fails to answer this elementary but essential 
 test. Almost any lover of poetry among us can repeat 
 "Brahma" and "The Problem" and "Terminus"; 
 and a substantial number of more isolated "lines" than 
 those aggregated under these titles, is as familiar to 
 
 192 
 
EMERSON 
 
 most of us as the instances of household words given 
 
 by Arnold: 
 
 "Things are in the saddle, 
 And ride mankind," 
 
 for example, as familiar as 
 
 "Patience on a monument, smiling at grief." 
 
 Emerson s aptness in aphorism, so marked in his 
 prose, naturally serves him to the same good purpose 
 in verse. He can pack his thought so close that when 
 it is exceptionally elevated in idea, it almost falls of 
 itself into lyric expression. When it is not, the compact 
 ness itself remains attractive, as in the lines just quoted, 
 while the poetry evaporates. As poetry of course one 
 can only contrast these with Shakespeare s charming 
 image. And though other collocations more favorable 
 to Emerson might readily be made, this answers as well 
 as any to indicate the distinction between Emerson s 
 verse in general and such imaginative art as that of 
 the poet to whom poetry is a native expression, who 
 sees truth in images rather than in propositions and 
 whose imaginative faculty is at home in construction 
 rather than exclusively in statement artistic or other. 
 Mr. Gilder says Emerson is "preeminent in his power 
 to put a moral idea into artistic form," and perhaps 
 reading "eminent" for "preeminent" very truly, I 
 think. But not often in imaginative form. The noble 
 figure he cites of the Departing Day silent and scornful 
 "under her solemn fillet" has almost too few congeners 
 to be called characteristic. In any case a great poem is 
 
 193 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 composed not of a moral idea but of many moral ideas, 
 however single the central motive. The poem is a con 
 struction of their interrelations imaginatively treated. 
 For imaginative construction, however, Emerson natur 
 ally had as little faculty as for the more mechanical 
 analogous requirement of mere rhetoric. The seer is 
 not constructive. He is the instrument of inspiration, 
 the exponent of intuition, the channel of celestial wis 
 dom, not the artificer that, equally with the artist on 
 any plane, the poet the maker must be. 
 
 The poet thus parallels the ideal and abstract world 
 by an imaginative counterpart of his own creation. He 
 does not interpret it in verbal terms, rhythmic or other, 
 of merely energetic and illuminating, or even beautiful, 
 rational exposition. He must create rather than merely 
 convey, and to create he must know not merely to 
 "sing" but "to build the lofty rhyme." So impera 
 tive is construction in poetry indeed that what we feel 
 in the Essays as mere lack of continuity we note in the 
 Poems as positive f ragmen tarin ess. Emerson s genius 
 has not the opulence that is profitably compressed by 
 poetic form. His thought needs no condensation nor 
 confinement and in metrical order acquires no energy 
 as substance that is rich and full so often does. The 
 constructive imagination is replaced in him by no 
 small degree of fancy, but whereas the material of 
 the former is the concrete, fancy, in Emerson at least, 
 revels in the abstract and frolics to use one of his 
 favorite words in the realm of the inner not the 
 outer sense. Even in nature it is not the concrete 
 
 194 
 
EMERSON 
 
 that attracts him. Consider these lovely lines the 
 oasis of "Woodnotes:" 
 
 "Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 
 Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
 But it carves the bow of beauty there, 
 And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." 
 
 Even here the poet is not so much noting the beauty of 
 the phenomena he records, as inviting our attention to 
 the law underlying them, apparent to the fancy of the 
 inner sense, and declared not without a truly poetic but 
 distinct tinge of the didactic. It is the poetry of the 
 poetic seer. And the lines are exceptional in Emerson s 
 verse in which, in general, significance excludes all 
 sensuous alloy; whereas the poetic ideal insists on the 
 fusion of sensuousness with significance. The latter 
 element in fact can, by definition at least, be better 
 spared than the former. No one doubts for example 
 the titular claims of Swinburne s verse. The claims 
 of the sensuous element in poetry are unimpeachable 
 since the concrete is its corollary and blindness to the 
 concrete is as fatal to poetry as to plastic art. It is 
 the concrete, in fact, that makes poetry an art. Of 
 course it is the abstract in art as well as elsewhere 
 that supplies significance, and all art that surpasses the 
 merely sensuous is a statement, as well as an image, of 
 truth. For that matter, philosophically speaking, every 
 thing constructed ought, of course, equally with every 
 thing existent to mirror the macrocosm as Emerson 
 would, and probably does somewhere, insist. But art 
 is a magic mirror that contributes as well as reflects, 
 
 195 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 and if it does not count in, as well as for, expression, if 
 in other words it lacks or even dilutes the concrete, it 
 loses its characteristic sanction. 
 
 But Emerson not only has no sensuous strain. He 
 is deficient in sentiment. Of love, as understood by the 
 poets and the mass of mankind he had his habit 
 ual intellectual and not emotionally enlightened con 
 ception. He quite comprehended its physiology. To 
 the question once addressed to him: "Do you believe 
 in Platonic friendships between the sexes?" he replied 
 with quaint sapience: "Yes, but Hands off ." Surely 
 wisdom is justified of her children! He had, however, 
 no sense of the feeling, and of the two great instincts 
 from which all the rest that actuate humanity are 
 derived it is extraordinary how exclusively he was 
 possessed by that of self-preservation. Emotional 
 expansion or even concentration was plainly not a 
 need of his ethereal nature, but of all directions 
 in which soul or sense expands that of romantic love 
 was the most foreign to his constitution. Rather 
 striking confirmation of this, were any needed, is fur 
 nished by his own blindness to the fact almost the 
 only instance in which he betrays blindness of any 
 kind. "I have been told," he says, "that in some pub 
 lic discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect 
 has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations." 
 And he protests with gentle but not convincing fervor. 
 We owe him the charming phrase: "All mankind love 
 a lover." But the kind of lover he means is he who 
 feels warmly "when he hears applause of his engaged 
 
 196 
 
EMERSON 
 
 maiden." " Engaged" is charming, too; it connotes 
 Concord and its regularity in essentials whatever its 
 theological heresies. Yet Emerson s Muse herself never 
 shows any such sense of the universal passion as, to 
 take almost the first instance that comes to mind, is 
 evinced in the lines: 
 
 "Then there were sighs, the deeper for suppression, 
 
 And stolen glances, sweeter for the theft, 
 And burning blushes though for no transgression, 
 Tremblings when met, and restlessness when left." 
 
 His nearest approach to this is where, in describing 
 with penetrating frigidity the disillusionment of finding 
 "that several things which were not the charm have 
 more reality than the charm itself which embalmed 
 them" he speaks finely of the lover s youth "when he 
 became all eye when one was present, and all memory 
 when one was gone." But given any theme he could 
 be eloquent upon it. He is less himself in his figure 
 than in the remark that precedes it. The latter savors 
 more of the "new and true" to which in this sphere as 
 elsewhere, in the main, he consecrated his expression. 
 The passions are too primitive for him. He moves 
 more freely amid higher differentiations. "There, that 
 is done" one can fancy him exclaim, in finishing his 
 essay on "Love," which, however, agreeably avoids 
 the commonplace a genuine distinction for a "cosmic" 
 writer. But Emerson achieves this distinction too 
 easily, too readily. Beautifully wise things he oc 
 casionally utters about love. "Do you love me, means 
 do you see the same truth," for example, records 
 
 107 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 exquisitely the lover s longing for spiritual fusion. But 
 even here a part stands for the whole and we gather 
 that a negative reply would merely lead the inquirer, 
 not too disconsolately, to seek elsewhere his other self. 
 Had it been he, one is persuaded that he never would 
 have pleaded for "a last ride together," and at most 
 would have proposed a walk. Such an admonition as 
 "we must not contend against love or" what he seems 
 to imply is the same thing " deny the substantial exist 
 ence of other people," certainly witnesses no tempera 
 mental ardor. 
 
 And for the pathos as well as for the passion of love 
 his emotional equability is too perfect to suffer any real 
 concern. Neither passion nor pathos, nor indeed any 
 depth of feeling properly to be called human fell in 
 with Emerson s scheme of things. His idealism was 
 essentially intellectual and his optimistic philosophy 
 excluded emotional elements so distracting to serenity 
 and so menacing to what he probably conceived as true 
 spiritual success. One may almost say that he shrinks 
 from feeling, and when it seems imminent swiftly sub 
 stitutes an idea. It is true that the world is passably 
 familiar with the contrary practice and that here as 
 elsewhere he eludes the conventional. As another 
 American poet observes: 
 
 "If love alone would save from hell, 
 Then few would fail of heaven." 
 
 Without distinction, thus commensurable with his 
 genius in art, in imaginative construction, in concrete 
 
 198 
 
EMERSON 
 
 imagery, in sensuousness or in sentiment, Emerson s 
 poetry is, like his philosophy, very largely an affair of 
 the intellect. And even as such it is fragmentary, in 
 conclusive, and only now and then lighted by felicities, 
 mainly of "line" and rarely long enough to satisfy the 
 sense they stimulate, though within their narrow limits 
 they are felicities of a penetrating, thrilling pungency, 
 inspired by a peculiar spiritual elevation, which have 
 been never perhaps surpassed, and certainly never quite 
 matched. But, save f ragmen tarily, the intellect unaided 
 will not produce great poetry. Browning s poetry is 
 great poetry and no one will deny that it is intellectual 
 poetry. Its secret, however, is disclosed in Browning s 
 expressed conviction, "Little else is worth study save 
 the development of a soul" a statement of which all 
 three terms are distinctly un-Emersonian : study, de 
 velopment, and in Browning s sense the soul. The 
 heights Emerson sometimes attains never, I think, the 
 depths he sounds cause his missing true greatness in 
 poetry to arouse a sense of frustration. He seems to 
 have rented a lodge on the slopes of Parnassus and 
 never to have taken the fee of it, and his home is 
 elsewhere. Well, then, on Olympus, perhaps? Cer 
 tainly of the two, yes. Even so, he should have left 
 some masterpiece, whereas in no one of the formal 
 categories of poetry can he be enrolled as a master. 
 His place is with Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Mon 
 taigne, Rabelais, Pascal, Sir Thomas Browne 
 with the wisdom writers of the world, not with 
 the poets. And just as, had he been a great writer, 
 
 199 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 his essays would have been constructed by toil how 
 ever "degrading," some at least of his poetry, had 
 he been a great poet, would have had a monumental 
 character whereas his whole work, his oeuvre, is 
 rather a cairn than a structure, with of course dire loss 
 from a monumental point of view. Of all the short 
 comings of his poetry, indeed, the greatest, I think, is 
 this lack of any architectonic quality commensurate 
 with his vision and vitality. A great poet who never 
 Wote a great poem is an anomaly. One who never 
 tried to is not fundamentally a poet, however poetic 
 the angle from which he viewed the universe and 
 whatever the radiance that plays about it in the inter 
 pretation he essayed. Emerson s real greatness appears 
 in the Essays in which, of course, as I have said, im 
 aginative art is less essential and which his poetic fancy 
 lifts as much above "Proverbs" as his formal poetry 
 falls below "Job." 
 
 VIII 
 
 The Essays are the scriptures of thought, the Vir- 
 gilian Lots of modern literature. To open anywhere 
 any of the volumes (including "Representative Men," 
 which very strictly belongs with the Essays) is to be at 
 once in the world of thought in a very particular sense. 
 The abruptness of the transition is a part of the sensa 
 tion like that of landing from a steamer, or leaving 
 a city train at a country station with the landscape 
 stretching out green and smiling in the morning sun 
 shine. The completeness of the contrast deepens as 
 
 200 
 
EMERSON 
 
 you go forward with Emerson into the day, and surrender 
 yourself to his influence in the spirit of his surrender to 
 his inspiration. This is the mood in which to read him 
 the one, that is, in which he wrote. Soon you are 
 thinking almost in his diction. Any approach to the 
 contentious spirit you feel would affront opportunity 
 and denounce your denseness to the benignity around 
 you. Even the critical spirit with its scrupulousnesses 
 is far behind, its most delicately balanced scales a rude 
 apparatus, and the thought of weighing, an impertinent 
 blindness to the imponderable iridescence that shim 
 mers in the atmosphere, electric with uplift and as 
 piration. For it is the world of moral thought that 
 you are in. The phenomena around you lose their 
 usual aspect and individual meaning, and what you are 
 beholding is their relations in principle and law, now 
 clear, now confused, now co-ordinate, now conflicting, 
 but always significant and superior to "mere understand 
 ing and the senses." 
 
 It is this that most saliently characterizes the Es 
 says the way in which in spite of lacuna of rhetorical 
 connection the relations of things are elicited, their re 
 lations to each other, to the cosmos, to the individual. 
 Every statement stimulates thought because it is sug 
 gestive as well as expressive. Everything means some 
 thing additional. To take it in you must go beyond it. 
 The very appreciation of an essay automatically con 
 structs a web of thought in the weaving of which the 
 reader shares. All its facts are illustrative, all its data 
 examples. The world of phenomena is lifted to the 
 
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 plane of principle, where if it loses the material sub 
 stance with which, through the imagination, art and 
 poetry deal, it is the object of a classifying vision that 
 distributes and arranges it in accordance with mutual 
 affinities and general laws, and in this way draws out 
 its utilities for the mind. Every thought is pollent 
 rather than purely reflective. And if Emerson does 
 not preach action and ignores emotion, the state of 
 mind he induces is of an energetic and exhilarated 
 character, out of which such emotion as aspiration may 
 be called and such action as resolve may implicate issue 
 of themselves. He stimulates a mood at all events, in 
 which effort seems needless, compunction useless, con 
 science superfluous, logic a fetter, consistency negligible, 
 fear contemptible, courage instinctive, culture exotic 
 and what normally we recognize as unattainable within 
 easy reach of one s hand a mood, that is to say, that 
 dissipates all possible criticism of him. To those who 
 can convert such a mood into a permanent state of 
 mind and habit of thought, or even make it occasionally 
 the springs of conduct and performance, the Essays 
 are a priceless possession. Those who cannot can 
 hardly fail to find it exhilarating that instead of walk 
 ing crowned with inward glory and finding merely his 
 own content in meditation, he should have walked and 
 meditated his daily stint out of reach of the working 
 world and out of touch with its concerns beholding 
 them in the wise candor of perspective and should 
 nevertheless have had the naivete* or the sapience 
 which is it? to take this exceptional, this unique ex- 
 
 202 
 
EMERSON 
 
 perience and procedure as normal enough to be preached 
 practically and commended confidently to weary and 
 struggling mankind. 
 
 And scarcely less notable than the method that gives 
 it such vitality is the material of the Essays. Emerson s 
 mind is as spacious as it is active, and as stored as it is 
 spacious. Not a scholar in any strict sense, he read 
 as much as he reflected and, owing to his extremely 
 catholic appreciativeness, as widely. His extraordinary 
 power of assimilation and conversion somewhat ob 
 scures the opulence of his spoils. Whatever his de 
 preciation of culture and its results to his philosophy, 
 the tapestry of the Essays is wonderfully figured with 
 it. Dr. Holmes gives the number of citations they 
 contain as 3,393, taken from 868 writers. And the 
 abundance of this harvest of his reading is less impres 
 sive than the aptness and fecundity of everything 
 everything quoted. One almost sees it in its process 
 of transformation into the proverbial manifold enrich 
 ment of good seed, and views as seed the grain but 
 freshly reaped from the ripest fields of the world s 
 thought. He dips into the bins of every store-house 
 and draws on all treasuries, though with an eclecticism 
 so personal and a usage so prompt that one fairly 
 loses sight of the origin of the material with which he 
 sows and builds. It is there nevertheless an encyclo 
 paedia of others thought, however combined, devel 
 oped, refined, and utilized by, as well as embedded in, 
 his own. And the lessons of experience he drew from 
 every source, from the most familiar as well as the 
 
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 most recondite. As he said of Plato he kept "the 
 two vases, one of ether and one of pigment, at his 
 side" and illustrated his own assertion: "Things used 
 as language are inexhaustibly attractive." Consider 
 merely the titles of the ten volumes of Essays. They 
 form a catalogue raisonne of wisdom, of wisdom di 
 vined and wisdom garnered, and the whole beauti 
 fully and winningly as well as pungently alembicated 
 by an indisputably great mind. And if the Essays 
 are, as they seemed to the wisest English critic of the 
 nineteenth century, the most important work in Eng 
 lish prose of that century, it is because they are the 
 work of the master genius of wisdom among the 
 writers of his time. 
 
 304 
 
POE 
 
FOE 
 
 THERE is no more effective way of realizing the dis 
 tinction of Foe s genius than by imagining American 
 literature without him. One is tempted to add there 
 is no other way. It is in the historic rather than in 
 the critical estimate that his eminence appears. It 
 owes more to its isolation than to its quality. He was 
 extremely individual, the entire character of his mind 
 and nature is acutely, almost painfully, certainly per 
 versely, personal; but his originality appears chiefly 
 in relief against the background of his environment. 
 If he did not feel intensely, he thought energetically, 
 but to a purport more familiar in older societies than 
 in our own. His figure acquires outline and edge from 
 its contrast with the prevailing Philistine screen which 
 he sedulously kept behind it and on which he made it 
 the business of his life to cast the sharpest possible 
 shadow. He was from the first in complete disaccord 
 with his environment and lived in a perpetual state 
 of warfare with it. His parentage was bohemian, his 
 childhood and youth dependent, his associations in 
 the half savage, half aristocratic society of his boy 
 hood expressly favorable to the development of the 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 
 imperious beneficiary whose sense of his own powers 
 and of his lack of claims brought him through a rather 
 irregular and not very grateful adolescence to the 
 threshold of a manhood of revolt. There is a whole 
 literature of revolt in older countries. Our only Ish- 
 mael is Poe. But if not unprecedented in the history 
 of letters he was sufficiently salient among us, and the 
 fact that so generally his hand was against every man 
 accentuated his individuality in the natural course of 
 apology and polemic. 
 
 The established was with us still the moral and the 
 didactic. Poe s antagonism instinctively inclined him 
 to art. He is in fact the solitary artist of our elder liter 
 ature. This is his distinction and will remain such. 
 Hawthorne is in a degree a rival, but in form rather 
 than in fond as his addiction to allegory attests and 
 in any case his puritan preoccupation with the moral 
 forces invalidates his purely aesthetic appeal. Poe s 
 art was unalloyed. It was scrupulously devoid, at any 
 rate, of any aim except that of producing an effect and 
 often overspread if only occasionally clothed with the 
 integument of beauty. As such it was in America 
 at the time an exotic. His great service to his country 
 is in a word the domesticationTof the exotic. Color, 
 rhythm, space, strangeness, were his " reals;" they 
 fascinated his mind anoTtook possession of his else 
 unoccupied soul. In the large sense thus his art is 
 in strictness to be called exotic rather than original. 
 French, German, English romanticism had preceded 
 him. He pillaged and plagiarized freely. In the 
 
 208 
 
POE 
 
 matter of literary phase, his most convinced admirer 
 and most thorough-going apologist observes that he 
 came at the close of an epoch, he did not introduce one. 
 But in his hands the method and even the material 
 that he adopted resulted in a very striking body of 
 work, which still has the compactness and definition of 
 a monument. And if he contributed little he passed 
 on the torch. Incarnated in the vivid forms his pro 
 nounced individuality imagined, illustrated by the 
 energy of his genius, the spirit of romantic art entered 
 the portals of our literature and illuminated its staid 
 precincts to the end of variety at the very least. What 
 ever her responsibility for the subsequent riot there, 
 her vivifying influence is clear, and for it we are in 
 debted to Poe. 
 
 .. . 
 
 The artist, by definition, exercises his activity in 
 exclusive concentration upon his effect. In so far as 
 his attention swerves from that he modifies his dis 
 tinctive attitude. He may, of course, soar as well as 
 sink in so doing. He may, for instance, forget his 
 Affect in the rapture of expression and rise to poetry. 
 But unless, in so doing, his sub-consciousness at least 
 keeps its hold on his effect as, for example, Tenny 
 son s always did he pretermits his purely artistic 
 function. Thia^is why, in a L jvorld of imperfections. 
 the most nearly perfect art is so often the least satisf ac- 
 tory assumEg^tJ&FpoeHclo be thFufiimate standard ; 
 why the perfection of Vermeer fades before the ir- 
 
 209 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 regularities of Rembrandt; why we turn from Veronese 
 to Tintoretto; why in only an occasional miracle of 
 genius like Raphael at his best do we find a stable 
 fusion of spirit and statement; why to descend from 
 august illustration readers more sensitive to art than 
 to poetry are deceived by the poetic disguise of that 
 arrant artist, Walt Whitman, who achieved a fairly 
 radiant degree of perfection in never yawping his com 
 monplaces off the key, in spite of the variety of their 
 modulations. Like Whitman s, Poe s attention never 
 wandered a moment from his effect even in his poetry. 
 Now the effect in poetry, as in any fine art, is largely a 
 matter of technic, and a great deal of poetry is natu 
 rally over-valued, because it answers the technical test, 
 because in short it sounds well. 
 
 In the first place its technic is so difficult that, when 
 it is achieved with any distinction, it is rewarded with 
 at least the temporary appreciation that inevitably re 
 wards the tour de force. The technical test has in truth 
 a good deal to say for itself practically. Winckelmann 
 objected to artists criticism of art that it naturally made 
 difficulty overcome the test of achievement. But as a 
 matter of fact, one may ask, is not this at least one test, 
 since it is clearly one source of the superiority of the 
 superior artist, whose laurels, without it, would be worn 
 equally by the mute and the inglorious, not to say the 
 manifestly incompetent ? What one can say is that it is in 
 no sense the test of the artist s inspiration, and that this 
 is, after all, the main thing. The prodigious difficulties 
 of the art of poetry, at any rate, are sufficiently attested 
 
 210 
 
POE 
 
 by the abounding surplusage of unsuccessful attempts 
 to surmount them. Everyone accordingly except ap 
 parently the deluded practitioner is struck by the 
 exceptional victory when he encounters it, and apt 
 unconsciously to ascribe to inspiration the effect really 
 due to energy and skill, forgetting that even inspired 
 skill is not poetic inspiration. Much of the admiration 
 of Foe s poetry is of this kind. Much of his poetry it 
 self can be admired in no other way. 
 
 Moreover, the technic of poetry is so multifarious, so 
 full of possibilities, so capable of producing pleasure 
 by mere rhyme and rhythm that with many readers at 
 all times and with all readers at some times its content 
 is lost sight of. English literature has a wonderful ex 
 ample of this in the poetry of Swinburne. Swinburne is 
 incomparable, but Poe has something a tithe of the 
 same richness of rhythmic resource, though his num 
 bers are artificial at times and at times tenuous to a 
 degree that removes them from even superficial classifi 
 cation with the opulent spontaneity and splendor of the 
 English poet s diction. They are, too, though less 
 richly, more exclusively, technical, leaning thus all 
 the more heavily on technic. And his technic, being 
 thus the main factor of his verse, lacks a little the native 
 felicity only to be secured by keeping it in its true 
 relative position. Forced out of its proper subordina 
 tion it loses its grace as a contributing element of a 
 larger entity. It, instead of the subject, being the 
 poet s main concern, its theoretic quality becomes 
 obvious. It acquires a positively notional air with 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 Poe at times the air of illustrating the notions of his 
 negligible "Philosophy of Composition" and "The 
 Poetic Principle." Its resources seem devices. Every 
 effect seems due to an expedient. The repetend and 
 the refrain are reliances with him not instrumental, 
 but thematic. At least they constitute rather than 
 create the effect which has therefore something 
 otiose and perfunctory about it. 
 
 Technic of all sorts interested Poe tremendously. 
 He had what might be called the technical tempera 
 ment a variety perhaps more familiar than widely 
 recognized. It is the temperament that delights in 
 terminology, labels, little boxes and drawers, definitions, 
 catalogues, categories, all ingeniously, that is to say 
 mechanically, apposite and perfectly rigid. It illus 
 trates the passion for order run to seed activity of 
 mind avoiding the drudgery of thought by definiteness 
 of classification. Manner being more susceptible of 
 classification than matter, how the thing is done interests 
 it more than the thing itself. Such a temperament on 
 larger lines than common, with a certain sweep as well 
 as system, Poe possessed. It rose to the pitch of posi 
 tive genius with him. He pondered, himself, and 
 lectured his contemporaries on how literature should be 
 written, how a tale should be presented, how a poem 
 should be built up. His criticism is largely, almost 
 exclusively, technical. He pursued it quite in the de 
 tective spirit. His review of "Barnaby Rudge," of 
 which to Dickens s amazement he divined the dnoue- 
 ment, is worthy of M. Dupin and is historic. His long 
 
 212 
 
POE 
 
 criticisms of Cooper and Hawthorne are craftsman s 
 criticism. And as such they are extraordinarily good. 
 They contrast refreshingly with the general run of 
 literary praise and blame in his day and in ours in 
 being specific, pointed and competent and avoiding 
 the vague, the sentimental and the commonplaces of 
 moralizing, though of course they have none of the over 
 tones, so to say, of either culture or philosophic depth 
 that enrich criticism as well as give it a creative value. 
 His own craftsmanship considered strictly as such is 
 excellent. He proceeds with perfect self-possession 
 and deliberation; and there is this to be said for his 
 philosophizings about it, that at least they disclosed his 
 own method and show conclusively that his art was an 
 art of calculation and not the spontaneous expression 
 of a weird and gruesome genius that it seems to so many 
 upon whom it produces its carefully prepared effect. 
 
 His theory of poetry is stated within his account of 
 the composition of "The Raven," which is as a whole 
 probably in no better faith than the anonymously pub 
 lished editorial reference to the poem that accom 
 panied it on its appearance. Both are mystifications 
 which if "The Raven" were finer would tend to vul 
 garize it, and are only saved by being possibly derisory 
 from being actually as risible as Mrs. Browning found 
 the poem itself. But the theory advocated and illus 
 trated by Poe is undoubtedly as sincere as his perverse 
 pursuit of originality at any cost, and his temperamental 
 revolt against what is staple and standard, not to speak 
 of what is classic, would permit. It is briefly that poetry 
 
 213 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 has absolutely nothing to do with truth, (to which he 
 had an intellectual repugnance) that it is concerned 
 solely with beauty (which he does not define, but as 
 sumes, in opposition to more conventional opinion from 
 Plato to Keats, to be absolutely divorced from truth), 
 and that its highest expression is the note of sadness 
 the sadder the better. Of these notions only the last 
 need arrest attention. It is true that the most perfect 
 beauty has often the note of sadness. The reason 
 probably resides rather in its effect than in its consti 
 tution, being largely the recipient s subjective ap 
 preciation reacting even in, or especially in, the pres 
 ence of perfection which contrasts so bitterly with 
 
 " the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world." 
 
 But it is not true that this is always the case. Who 
 is to decide, for example, between the "Ode to a 
 Nightingale" and the "Ode on Immortality"? Poe s 
 theory, however, and its elaborate working out, in 
 volve the inference that "The Raven" is a finer poem 
 than either, since Wordsworth s ode is actually joyous, 
 and the idea of "The Raven" on the other hand sadder 
 than anything in Keats s. He proves it by a plus b : 
 Of all melancholy topics, he says, death is the most 
 melancholy ; it is most poetical when it allies itself with 
 beauty; "the death then of a beautiful woman is un 
 questionably the most poetical topic in the world." 
 
 Any force his theory might abstractly be supposed to 
 have, assuredly evaporates in his illustrative exposition 
 
 214 
 
POE 
 
 of it and "The Raven" is certainly superior to either. 
 But two things are made perfectly clear by such theoriz 
 ing one, that the theorist is primarily not a poet but 
 an artist concerned less with expression than with 
 effect, that is to say; and, the other, that he is not a 
 natural but an eccentric artist, since sadness voluntary 
 and predetermined is artificial and morbid. The poem 
 itself undoubtedly Poe s star performance confirms 
 these inductions. It is not a moving poem. It has, as 
 Mrs. Browning herself admitted, a certain power, but 
 it is such power as may be possessed by the incurable 
 dilettante coldly caressing a morbid mood. To be 
 moving melancholy must be temperamental. Even a 
 mood will not suffice. Whatever injustice is done its 
 real genesis by Poe s farrago about it, "The Raven" is 
 in conception and execution exceptionally cold-blooded 
 poetry. But, distinctly on the plane of artifice, it is 
 admirable art. Less remarkable as a pure tour de force 
 in linguistic luxuriance than the extraordinary "Bells," 
 which in its way is quite unparalleled, it is nevertheless 
 a noteworthy technical achievement. Its rhythms and 
 rhymes are more than clever and together with the re 
 current accent of the refrain already used by Lowell 
 combine in the production of a sustained tone and 
 effect of totality, which may almost be said to epito 
 mize Poe s genius. 
 
 Both "The Raven" and "The Bells" have enjoyed 
 an enormous popularity among readers impressionable 
 by effects and insensitive to distinctions, and their poetic 
 strain has not saved them from being the natural prey 
 
 215 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 of the professional elocutionist also an elaborate 
 technician in his more or less humble fashion, Poe s 
 more personal verse has less interest. Some of it de 
 serves Stoddard s verdict of "doggerel," for where his 
 own work, verse or prose, was concerned he had no 
 standard. The lines "For Helen" written when he 
 was a boy are not only astonishingly precocious but 
 charming, far better than those "For Annie" written 
 when he had matured and for the most part overlaid 
 his inspiration with artistry and encrusted it with 
 technic. The idea and inspiration of "The Haunted 
 Palace," however, amply sustain the happy technical 
 art that expresses them with not only admirable musical 
 aptness, but with a beautiful fusion of restraint born of 
 taste and ease springing from fulness that makes it an 
 indisputable masterpiece. Its reserve, indeed, secures 
 an objectivity that is exceptional in Poe and, since 
 his art was fundamentally more genuine than his in 
 spiration, exceptionally moving. For once he got him 
 self out of the way and let his genius guide him to 
 complete success. "The Conqueror Worm" is less suc 
 cessful, I think, in being more a tour de force. It shares 
 a little the "staginess" of the donnee and his taste 
 shows its fickleness by deserting him, though it is 
 certainly a spirited piece of voulu pessimism and no 
 slight praise the last two lines are among the classics 
 of the "catching." On the other hand in "Ulalume" 
 one feels the sincerity latent in the most artificial and 
 abnormal natures though a sincerity that throws into 
 sharper relief than usual the element of artifice in 
 
 216 
 
POE 
 
 Poe s art and seems itself in the shadow that per 
 haps befits remorse, behind the apparatus of repe- 
 tend and empty assonance that tries the reader s 
 nerves. Even here one feels the aptness of Emerson s 
 bland reference to him (in conversation with Mr. How- 
 ells) as the " jingle man," and notes the artist rather than 
 the poet and the technician rather than the artist. In 
 any case the volume of his verse is so slight as to confine 
 his claim to its quality, and its quality is, in general, 
 hardly such as to place him very high up on the fairly 
 populous slopes of Parnassus where there is more 
 competition than he met with in his lifetime.- Compe 
 tition is fatal to Poe. His cue was distinctly to function 
 outside of it, and he was wise to cultivate originality at 
 any price. 
 
 Ill 
 
 As a technician his most noteworthy success is the 
 /-completeness of his effect. He understood to perfection 
 the value of tone in a composition, and tone is an ele 
 ment that is almost invaluable. In this respect he has 
 no American and few foreign rivals. All of his writings 
 attest his supreme comprehension of it prose as well 
 as poetry, the ablest and the most abject. Such rub 
 bish as "The Due de POmelette" with its galvanic 
 rictus of false but sustained gaiety; such elaborate and 
 hollow solemnity as the parable "Shadow," which ends, 
 however, on a note of real pith and dignity; such a 
 crazy-quilt of tinsel as "The Assignation," all have this 
 unifying quality which makes art of them. His very 
 
 217 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 deficiency in the qualities usually present in the ro 
 mance-writer and absolutely vital in romance of a high 
 order, enabled him to cultivate his own special excel 
 lences the more exclusively. Many of the tales are 
 tone and nothing else not even tone of any particular 
 character but a reticulation of relations merely in 
 admirable unison. The false note is the one falsity he 
 eschewed. Tinkling feet on a tufted carpet is nonsense, 
 but it is not a false note in the verbal harmony of the 
 artificial " Raven." In "The Cask of Amontillado" 
 the tone is like the click of malignant castanets. And 
 in "The Fall of the House of Usher" it reaches Poe s 
 N climax of power a diapason of gloom, wholly voluntary, 
 nd ending none too soon perhaps, but maintained to 
 y the end with the success of a veritable tour de force. 
 What on the other hand he did not understand was 
 modulation. He has no variety. Probably he realized 
 this limitation and confined himself almost wholly in 
 prose to the short story, grotesquely prescribing, too, 
 one hundred lines as the limit of a poem. A novel 
 by Poe is inconceivable, and would be even if he had 
 had the feeling for character and the human interest 
 that the novel demands. This is partly because he 
 lacked sustained power, and the larger art of organiza 
 tion and dynamic development, but it is also due to the 
 monotony that results probably from the predomi 
 nance and prolongation of the mood, which makes it so 
 easy for him to secure tone. 
 
 Thus he achieves atmosphere but an atmosphere 
 which is less the envelope than the content of his work, 
 
 218 
 
POE 
 
 and which so enwraps the detail as to blend its ac 
 cents and minimize the force of such variety as it has. 
 Nothing takes place in "The Fall of the House of 
 Usher" that is not trivial and inconclusive compared 
 with its successful monotone, its atmosphere of lurid 
 murk and disintegrating gloom. And as a consequence 
 of this inversion of the normal artistic relations of con 
 tent and envelope I must say I think that even here, 
 where we have Poe at his best, he refuses us all satis 
 faction that lies beyond the scope of purely scenic art. 
 In this one respect " The Cask of Amontillado " is better. 
 It, too, is most remarkable artistically for its tone, the 
 cascade of brilliant chatter that sustains its suspense. 
 But it contains some psychology, devilish rather than 
 human, to be sure, and therefore as usual ringing false, 
 yet imaginatively thrilling in its malignity, though its 
 rnonstrousness is rendered somewhat insipid by the 
 perversity and characteristic inadequacy of its motive. 
 And it has a situation both moral and material and a 
 rapidly conducted, however meagre, action. But even 
 these two tales as they stand do not take their author 
 out of the rank of the purely scenic artist, compara 
 tively high as they may place him within it. The 
 truth is that no writer of anything approaching Poe s 
 ability has b^" nnntenUo remain in this rank. 
 
 There is unquestionable power in his best tales, but 
 it is a repellent power. Its manifestations are either 
 unsympathetic or repulsive unsympathetic where suc 
 cessful because they make their effect by attacking 
 instead of charming the sensibilities, repulsive where 
 
 219 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 they fail because nothing but success can excuse such 
 sinister assault. The complaisant mental attitude of 
 the reader who co-operates with a writer so systemati 
 cally bent on his conquest instead of on his captivation 
 is singularly innocent. And I do not think the experi 
 enced share it. Mainly, I imagine, Foe s stories are 
 read in youth and rarely returned to except by patriotic 
 critics of a tendency to dithyramb, and too solicitous 
 to magnify the salient figures of our literature to recon 
 sider their own early evaluations. A mature judgment 
 must discern, and a mature susceptibility resent, the 
 writer s manifest motive. In fact his most character 
 istic limitation as an artist is the limited character of 
 the pleasure he gives. He has a perverse instinct for 
 restricting it to that produced by pain. Pain and 
 pleasure have no doubt an equivalent aesthetic sanction. 
 Metaphysically they are sometimes, indeed, difficult to 
 distinguish; desire, for example, which superficially 
 classes itself as pleasure being probably pain in reality. 
 The discussion of such a question would have delighted 
 Poe; but it is unnecessary to quarrel with the legiti 
 macy of painful effects in art in which as in life 
 no doubt, as Mrs. Browning declared, "pain is not 
 the fruit of pain" in order to appreciate the per 
 versity of Poe s practice in this regard. The pro 
 duction of pain is with him an end, not a means to the 
 production of pleasure. His design is, crassly, to wring 
 the withers of our sensoriums. Such a design is the 
 delight of the degenerate. Decadents, such as Baude 
 laire, discern it readily and naturally or unnaturally, 
 
 220 
 
POE 
 
 as one chooses savor it and enjoy to the full "the 
 generous pleasure of praising" it. The naive and 
 hearty and good natured and uncritical with a weakness 
 for the romantic at any price, such as Gautier, fail to 
 note it and admire its results as revolutionary simply. 
 Doubtless Poe did not himself realize this perversity in 
 its fulness. Doubtless nothing would have surprised 
 him more, and more evoked his scorn, than the assertion 
 that such a foe to philistinism as himself lacked ideality. 
 He had ideality but it was exclusively artistic. It was 
 entirely consistent with unscrupulousness. No doubt 
 the most loathsome subjects are susceptible of artistic 
 treatment and may serve the ends of beauty. But a 
 preference for them in the artist raises a presumption 
 against his competence in the circumstances a pre 
 sumption amply justified in Poe s case. Not what 
 soever things are lovely and of good report, but what 
 soever things are effective were his preoccupation. _In- 
 tensity of effect was accordingly his. end, and artifice his 
 means? And" fine things are not thus^produceHT~~The 
 law of the universe in virtue of which the beautiful, the 
 true, and the good are inextricably interrelated forbids 
 it. Matthew Arnold maintained that it was "lost 
 labor" to inquire into a writer s motive. Undoubtedly 
 errors have been made by allowing the real or supposed 
 springs of a writer s production to color one s apprecia 
 tion of them. Thackeray s view of Sterne, for example, 
 is rather summary. But with Poe the case is different. 
 The only reason for its being lost labor to inquire into 
 his motive is the fact that his motive is in plain sight. 
 
 221 
 
/ 
 
 AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 And to neglect it would be to neglect what not only 
 colors, but is the constituent element of a large portion 
 a large proportion indeed of his writings. 
 
 In the most characteristic this motive is exactly that 
 ! of the fat boy in "Pickwick" who announced to his 
 r easily thrilled auditors that he was going to make their 
 flesh creep. To accomplish this result, however, is 
 more difficult than to announce it, unless one deals with 
 an altogether higher order of material than Poe s, and 
 is possessed of an altogether different order of powers. 
 The element of awe is not, of course, in question, and 
 there is no need to cite more august examples than that 
 r of Victor Hugo, for instance, to remind ourselves by 
 
 contrast of the difference between the flesh-creeping 
 effects produced by a master and those obtained by 
 a charlatan who addresses not in the least the mind, but 
 exclusively the nerves. In fact the comparison of any 
 great writer to Poe, it may be incidentally remarked, 
 results in the sense of contrast, and would undoubtedly 
 instinctively be called unfair by his admirers, many of 
 whom "do not," as the phrase is, "know very well 
 what they want." His success in accomplishing his 
 desired effect at all events is fatally compromised, 
 usually, in two ways: his motive is too plain and his 
 means are too primitive. He makes his motive so 
 plain, not only by its constant undisguised and obvious 
 recurrence, but by actual profession (see "The Phi 
 losophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle," 
 for example) as to defeat its own end. It is impossi 
 ble to meet halfway an artist whose efforts to sur- 
 
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POE 
 
 prise, shock, startle you are all the while in full sight. 
 He must perforce forego the unconscious reciprocity 
 of concern that is the essence of appreciation. A 
 writer who declares at every turn, as the inveteracy of 
 Poe s practice, his constant harping on the string of 
 "horror," declares, that he is "going to make your 
 flesh creep " can hardly succeed in doing so. In the 
 face of such an announcement any flesh at all jaded by 
 the extravagances of romanticism remains stationary. 
 In the case of some of Foe s stories, in fact, positive 
 paralysis ensues in the face of almost hysterical efforts 
 on his part at galvanism; "The Pest" for instance. 
 For this carnomaniac purpose, too, his means are as 
 primitive as his motive is plain. He can certainly pro 
 duce his effect when the material he treats is of a nature 
 to produce it in anyone s hands. The subject itself of 
 "The Premature Burial" is full of horror, and can be 
 trusted to come home to the imagination of the reader 
 under any treatment of it. So with the idea of being 
 walled up alive as presented in "The Cask of Amon 
 tillado." So also with the situation in "The Pit and 
 The Pendulum." But in most instances it may cer 
 tainly be said that one does not get enough pain out Q 
 Poe to receive any great amount of pleasure from him. \ 
 He carries his " unscrupulousness " very far indeed J[ 
 much farther than even in Arnold s estimation King- 
 lake could be said to! In fact, if throughout his work 
 you feel the artist, you also feel the artistic liar. He is 
 the avatar of the type a type tolerably well known in 
 a multitude of examples from Mandeville to Miin- 
 
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 chausen and establishing perhaps through its mere 
 existence, if anything could, the absence of any neces 
 sary connection between art and truth. Truth stood 
 between him and originality. It irked him equally in 
 pursuing the egregious, in which he delighted, and in 
 eluding the commonplace, which he abhorred. The 
 esoteric attracted, and the ecumenical repelled him. 
 He was fascinated by the false as Hawthorne was by 
 the fanciful. He was, as Henri Martin said of the 
 Celt, "always in revolt against the despotism of fact." 
 He was an artist in whom the great purpose of art, 
 making the unreal appear real, became the end of 
 making the false _appsar true. At this flagitious game 
 he evinced the superior cleverness of the children of 
 this world. Nowhere is his skill more noteworthy than 
 in securing verisimilitude for the improbable, the in 
 credible, one of the most obvious of his expedients 
 being the auto-biographical form, for which he shows 
 the notorious partiality of the so-called habitual liar. I 
 have not made the calculation, but I should think there 
 were not a half dozen of his sixty-eight tales in which 
 this form is not employed, and these are not among 
 his comparatively few successes; when the material is 
 extraordinary this personal presentation of it gives it 
 great plausibility in the esteem of the credulous, though 
 it is to be said that it arouses a corresponding distrust 
 in the sceptical. The same fondness for the false ap 
 pears in his occasional inversion of the process, whereby 
 the truth is made to seem incredible marvellous be 
 yond belief, "too good to be true," in a word, but true 
 
 224 
 
POE 
 
 all the same. Here of course the falsity of effect, 
 merely takes the place of falsity of material. It was 
 all one to Poe, provided he satisfied his passion for 
 mystification. The shortest road to producing the 
 sensational effect that alone he sought is to contro 
 vert the established order and for that road apart from 
 its being the line of least resistance he had a native 
 affinity. The. key-note indeed of his nature is revolt. 
 
 In instinctive recalcitrancy to the general constitu 
 tion of things he passed his life in kicking against its 
 pricks and produced his literature in the process. 
 Inevitably the false, the ugly and the wrong attracted 
 him, since the established standard is of the good, 
 the beautiful and the true. But as the established 
 is the only conceivable standard he was naturally 
 forced to treat the former trinity in conjunction with, 
 if not in terms of, the latter. The effect he aimed at 
 being exclusively a sensational effect, he could best se 
 cure it by falsifying his material, and thus circumvent 
 ing the reader s tranquillity of expectation. The fact 
 that such sensation is valueless was of no concern to a 
 philosopher who attached value to sensation as such 
 and to sensation only. Hence he devoted the powers 
 of an extraordinary intellect to producing what is to 
 the intellect of next to no interest. The abnormal, in 
 its various manifestations, the sinister, the diseased, the 
 deflected, even the disgusting were his natural theme. 
 He could not conceive the normal save as the common 
 place for which he had apparently the "horror" he 
 would have liked to inspire in others by the presentation 
 
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 of the eccentric. Dread of the commonplace, as was 
 pointed out centuries ago by a far otherwise penetrating 
 critic than Poe, is fatal to the sublime. And there is 
 assuredly no sublimity in Poe. 
 
 Yet the tales of horror and those of the weird and the 
 fantastic probably stand in the widest popular estimate 
 as especially characteristic. And it is true that it is 
 of these one thinks when one speaks of a Poe story. 
 They have, many of them, the evil eminence that wilful 
 morbidity lends to the production of its votaries of 
 genius, and except for the effect on the nerves which a 
 few of them are able to produce on "suggestible" sen- 
 soriums, they hold their place among other writings of 
 a similar sort there are none precisely like them, be 
 cause of their meagreness chiefly on account of their 
 scenic quality. More has been claimed for the "tales 
 of ratiocination" as they are called. Writers before 
 Poe have "grovelled in the ghastly and wallowed in the 
 weird " with considerable effect if with an art inferior to 
 his. But he has been called the inventor of the de 
 tective story, and thus decorated with a badge of unique 
 distinction in the hierarchy of literature. It is always 
 difficult to assign with certainty to any individual the 
 invention of a literary or plastic genre. "Doubtless 
 Homer had his Homer," remarks Thoreau. M. Dupin 
 was certainly preceded by Zadig, and Voltaire is said 
 to have invented "Zadig" after reading an Oriental 
 prototype. And even ascribing to Poe the invention 
 of the detective story, the lover of literature may justly 
 exclaim, "la belle affaire!" and feel disposed rather to 
 
 226 
 
POE 
 
 charge than to credit him with it. However, to start 
 or even accelerate a literary current of magnitude, what 
 ever its merit, is an accomplishment so rare as to be 
 noteworthy on that account alone. And though it is, 
 no doubt, the detective story that is most indebted to 
 him in this respect, it is by no means the only fruit of 
 his remarkable inventiveness. "No man," says a 
 writer in the London Spectator, "struck out so many 
 new lines in the region of romance," and he proceeds 
 to derive Jules Verne s stories from "Hans Pfall," 
 "She" from "A. Gordon Pym," "Treasure Island" 
 from "The Gold Bug," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" 
 from "William Wilson," Zola s, Flaubert s and even 
 Mr. H. G. Wells s realism from Foe s minute detail, etc. 
 This does not of course modify his own conclusion that 
 " it is an inhuman and perverse judgment that finds in 
 Poe the springs of truly great writing;" and it should 
 also be pointed out that there is a considerable element 
 of fancifulness the fancifulness of the literal in such 
 romantic etymology. It is quite conceivable that neither 
 Jules Verne nor Stevenson, nor Mr. Rider Haggard 
 nor any of the other writers in question was conscious of 
 any specific or general indebtedness to Poe, whom also 
 in the different genres in question, save perhaps that of 
 "The Gold Bug," they one and all altogether surpassed. 
 Mr. Wells, for example, might excusably prefer to de 
 rive his mystification from the minute detail of Swift. 
 Nevertheless, such analogies are eloquent witness of 
 Poe s inventive genius characterize, in fact, his genius 
 as inventive rather than imaginative. 
 
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 For that reason he seems to me, as I began by saying, 
 more personal than truly original in the higher literary 
 sense, since, though he was extremely idiosyncratic, 
 nevertheless what he originated lay definitely in the 
 sphere of invention. His imaginative writing is far 
 less original. Having the imaginative in mind we may 
 say that originality consists in taking a fresh view, 
 originating a new conspectus, a new synthesis, of life 
 and the world turning objective material around a 
 little and exhibiting it with a different silhouette. It 
 is in this way that real contributions to literature are 
 made, and it is thus that the really great writer serves 
 literature as the savant advances science. There is 
 nothing of this kind to be looked for in Poe. The true 
 material of literature he left precisely where he found 
 it, for all his fantastic stirring of it and uneasy striving 
 with it. On the lower plane of invention, his mechan 
 ical and mathematical turn, his fecundity in ideas, con 
 ceptions, experimental notions certainly devised new 
 modes, new fashions as it were, in fiction which, 
 indeed, was precisely what he himself understood by 
 the originality he pursued and declared universally at 
 tainable. And in this field "ratiocination" is distinctly 
 his forte. Here he excelled if he did not, narrowly 
 speaking, invent; or rather, broadly speaking, excelled as 
 well as invented. In this respect "The Gold Bug" is 
 probably an unsurpassed masterpiece; a masterpiece, 
 at any rate which is no doubt eulogy enough, though 
 M. Lemaitre s characterization of Maupassant as "a 
 peu pres irre*prochable dans un genre qui ne Test pas," 
 
 228 
 
POE 
 
 is certainly applicable to it. So in a less degree is "The 
 Murders in the Rue Morgue. " " The Purloined Letter" 
 is decidedly inferior and "The Mystery of Marie 
 Roget" quite unworthy the inventor of the detective 
 story. In "The Purloined Letter" the effect of M. 
 Dupin s con temp tuousn ess dominates that of his skill, 
 and in "The Mystery of Marie Rogt" the arrogance 
 of the author is destructive of all interest in a tale that is 
 also otherwise tedious. When Poe s personality comes 
 to the surface the effect is always unpleasant, and it is 
 the absence of temperamental color that gives an 
 agreeable relief to such exhibitions of his purely intel 
 lectual activity as "The Gold Bug" and "The Murders 
 in the Rue Morgue;" just as among his weird and fan 
 tastic tales the best are those in which there are the 
 most evidences of his art and the fewest of his disposi 
 tion. 
 
 However, the extraordinary disproportion of inferior 
 work in his prose does not obscure the fact that he was 
 essentially an artist. The fact that there are hardly a 
 dozen good ones among his sixty-eight tales is not due 
 to any deflection of his artistic attitude. He had no 
 other attitude save that of necessity involved in his 
 contentious exposition of artistic principles and his 
 temperamental reprobation of practitioners of a dif 
 ferent turn. Polemically he certainly shows little of the 
 detachment so often prescribed to the artist. But even 
 in polemic whenever he is in the least impersonal and 
 disinterested it is the artistic for which he is contending. 
 He is not averse to "abusing the plaintiff s attorney," 
 
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 but the plaintiff s case he attacks on artistic grounds. 
 Even in his poorer work, even in his poorest, the work 
 manship is always the best element. It is poor enough 
 in some of it, but in such tales as "Four Beasts in 
 One," "Loss of Breath," "The Man that was Used 
 Up," "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," in fact al 
 most all the "tales of extravaganza and caprice," there 
 is assuredly nothing else. In such inexplicable "ex 
 travaganzas" as "The Due de POmelette" and "Lion 
 izing" its stark salience gets on one s nerves. The ex 
 cessive predominance of this kind of thing in his tales 
 is due obviously to failure in inspiration. But more 
 obscurely it is undoubtedly due to alcohol. "Bon- 
 Bon," for example, seems definitely characteristic of 
 inebriety. The effect of alcohol is well known to be the 
 relief of that tension which the maintenance of equilib 
 rium imposes so painfully on such organizations as 
 Poe s, and a consequence of excessive indulgence in it is 
 therefore the loss of that balance of the faculties which 
 secures correct judgments. It is impossible to account 
 for much of Poe s writing except on the theory that both 
 in conception and in execution it was in this way 
 transfigured to his mind and sense. He saw it through 
 the mist of mental congestion and saw in its incoher 
 ence the significance that escapes sobriety. Even his 
 egotism would be insufficient otherwise to explain it. 
 The effects of opium in stimulating and coloring the 
 poetic imagination as in Coleridge s case are familiar. 
 But those of alcohol are pathologically quite different 
 and quite inferior, and it does not seem to have been 
 
 230 
 
POE 
 
 sufficiently remarked that in Poe s case they were un 
 doubtedly responsible for the deterioration of his 
 literary productions as well as for the pathetic dis 
 integration of his life. It is a generous instinct that 
 shrinks from dwelling on the latter, but the naivete* 
 that ignores the obvious origin of much of his tl extrava 
 ganza and caprice" is less generous than blind and 
 above all slightly ridiculous. The explanation at all 
 events seems to reduce ad dbsurdum the sanction of 
 being "thrilled" for the "thrill s" sake. 
 
 IV 
 
 The truth is it is idle to endeavor to make a great 
 writer of Poe because whatever his merits as a literary 
 artist his writings lack the elements not only of great, 
 but of real, literature. They lack substance. Litera 
 ture is more than an art. It is art in an extended sense 
 of the term. Since it is the art that deals with life 
 rather than with appearances it is the art par excel 
 lence that is art plus something else plus substance. 
 Its interest is immensely narrowed when it can only 
 be considered plastically narrowed to the point of 
 inanity, of insignificance. Poe was certainly an artist, 
 but the fact that he was exclusively an artist and an 
 artist in an extremely restricted sense, of itself mini 
 mizes the literature he produced. Shakespeare, for 
 example, is neither exclusively nor supremely an 
 artist. M. Jules Lemaitre informs us how much better 
 in some respects in artistic respects Racine would 
 
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 have written "Hamlet." Every art of course, has its 
 conventions. It rearranges them from time to time, 
 it is subject to the law of evolution, but it depends on 
 them always. And in so far as literature is an art it, 
 too, leans upon them. It has its schools, its phases, 
 its successive points of view, its academic perfections, its 
 solecisms. But the fact that it deals with life itself 
 rather than exclusively with appearances which may 
 be arranged, organized, systematized, controlled far 
 more easily through their greater preliminary simplifi 
 cation gives it so much more range, so much greater 
 freedom, such an infinitely greater miscellaneity of mate 
 rial of so much more significance and vitality, that it 
 is comparatively independent of conventions, and 
 finds its supreme justification in giving anyhow, in 
 any way, well or ill one may almost say, the effect of 
 life, the phenomena and significance of life which con 
 stitute its substance. Thus it is that in literature sub 
 stance counts so much more than it counts in any other 
 art, however much any other may also be in its degree 
 "a criticism of life." Mr. Henry James has curiously 
 illustrated the principle in later years. Beginning as 
 pre-eminently or at least conspicuously an artist he has 
 become so overwhelmed by the prodigious wealth 
 and miscellaneity of his material that is to say, the 
 phases of life which his prodigious penetration has re 
 vealed to him that his art has been submerged by it. 
 The trees have obliterated the forest. All the more 
 important is it, one may argue, to cling to conventions 
 of treatment, that your picture of life may be definite, 
 
 232 
 
POE 
 
 coherent and effective. Yes, but one of these con 
 ventions is a certain correspondence with reality. Life 
 being the subject of literature more fully and directly 
 than it is of any purely plastic art that deals with ap 
 pearances which are necessarily more ordered and 
 adaptable and in a sense art themselves, or a stage of 
 it being indeed the substance as well as the subject 
 of literature, this correspondence with reality is exacted 
 by it of any treatment of it that is, even as art, to have 
 any interest or value. The doctrine of art for art s 
 sake applied to literature is apt to have particularly 
 insipid results. 
 
 In short, however extravagant and capricious, any 
 work of art is necessarily subject to its material and the 
 hand of every artist must like the dyer s be subdued to 
 what it works in. But a literary composition, espe 
 cially, cannot be conceived and executed in vacuo. 
 The warp must be "given", however wholly the woof 
 may be invented, or the web will be insubstantial and 
 the pattern incoherent. Poe could transact his imagin 
 ings in environments of the purest fancy, in no-man s 
 land, in the country of nowhere, and fill these with 
 "tarns" and morasses and "ragged mountains" and 
 shrieking water-lilies, flood them with ghastly moon 
 light and aerate them with "rank miasmas." Never 
 theless, he could only avoid the flatness of pure phantas 
 magoria by peopling them with humanity. His land 
 scape might embody extravagance and his atmosphere 
 enshroud caprice, his figures demanded to be made 
 human. The overwhelming interest of fiction is its 
 
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 human interest. Since it is peopled with human 
 figures neglect of its population is a contradiction in 
 terms. Even in the fiction of adventure, in which the 
 personages are minimized and the incidents the main 
 concern, even in fiction in which plot figures as the 
 protagonist of the drama, plot and incident would be 
 sterile but for the characters that figure in them. How 
 ever subordinate and undifferentiated these may be, 
 they must make some intrinsic appeal, or we should not 
 care what happened to them. The game even as a 
 game is not one that can be played with counters. Yet, 
 that is precisely the way in which Poe played it. And 
 his stories have no human interest because humanity 
 did not in the least interest him. Neither man nor 
 woman delighted him enough to occupy his genius 
 even incidentally. His tales contain, of course, no 
 " character " that prime essential, and most exacting 
 raison-d etre of normal fiction. But what is surprising 
 is the absolute inhumanity of the personages he is com 
 pelled to incarnate and the absolutely inhuman way in 
 which he sets them forth. In almost every case of 
 importance, as I have said, the chief personage is the 
 narrator and perhaps a little from this substantially 
 unvaried practice, though mainly, I think, because of 
 the real resemblance the narrator suggests Poe him 
 self. Each is very baldly the centre of his universe. 
 The two take pretty much the same view an astonish 
 ingly external one so far as human nature is concerned. 
 The illusion of the story is subserved, but of the story 
 quite apart from the personages. What it gains in 
 
 234 
 
POE 
 
 illusion, it loses in significance. Indeed, so great is the 
 importance of human character to a story that deals with 
 it at all that I think those of Poe s tales in which the 
 personages are the least shadowy, the least like alge 
 braic symbols, the least characteristic, that is to say, 
 are greatly helped by the fact. The stories in which he 
 figures gain greatly from M. Dupin, who has a pedantic 
 and censorious temperament, though his differentiation 
 is as inferior to that of his successor, M. Lecocq, as the 
 meagre and mathematical medium in which he exists 
 is to the varied and entertaining field of activity, full 
 of character and crowded with incident, that Gaboriau 
 furnished for the latter without, however, reaching 
 eminence as a "world-author" in the process. "The 
 Fall of the House of Usher" gains greatly from the 
 characters therein, though these are merely sketches 
 for the reader s imagination to fill out. One thinks 
 of "Wuthering Heights" and of the place in literature 
 that would have been assigned to Emily Bronte by 
 Poe admirers, had she had the good fortune to be born 
 an American. "The Pit and The Pendulum," one 
 of the best of the tales, it seems to me, owes much to 
 its exceptional "psychology" as an imaginative study 
 of real torture to which ingenuity gives real point instead 
 of merely displaying itself as ingenuity. It is helped, 
 too, I think, by being localized in real time and space; 
 by the fact that there was such an institution as the 
 Inquisition, a fabric also quite otherwise " thrilling" than 
 any of Poe s imagination, and that the victim s rescuers 
 had an actual and the correct nationality, though I fear 
 
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 these considerations would seem philistine indeed to the 
 true Poe worshipper. Furthermore, "The Murders 
 in the Rue Morgue" forfeits a large part of its interest, 
 the moment it appears that the murderer is an ape and 
 not a human malefactor. Ce n est que ca, one feels like 
 exclaiming and repeating even when William Wilson s 
 double dissolves into his conscience, though of course 
 allegorically that is the point of the story, as well as 
 being very cleverly, very ingeniously, managed. Finally 
 one of the tales "The System of Dr. Tarr and Dr. 
 Fether" has an exceptional interest because it is an 
 intelligent, though it does not pretend to be a profound, 
 study of a phase of mind and character under certain 
 conditions and in a certain environment, executed 
 with a wholly unaccustomed lightness of touch and an 
 aspect of gayety. The scene, however, it will be re 
 membered, is a maison de sante and the personages are 
 its inmates. And nothing is more characteristic of 
 Poe s perversity than that his most normal fiction should 
 be the representation of the abnormal. The abnormal 
 was essential to him, and he only varied his practice of 
 achieving it in his treatment by securing it in his mate 
 rial. Taken with the whim of depicting human nature 
 he could at least select its deflected types. Even here, 
 however, his interest is clearly in treating his material 
 in a rather ghastly vein of contrasting and contra- 
 indicated bouffe. He cares nothing for his "types," 
 and his real success, such as it is, is incidental. 
 
 Similarly with his preoccupation with crime almost 
 an obsession with him. He is never concerned with sin, 
 
 236 
 
POE 
 
 which is too integrally human an element of life to 
 interest him. Crime on the contrary is in comparison 
 of an artificial nature, and of however frequent still of 
 exceptional occurrence. Undoubtedly it furnishes ap 
 posite material to the novelist of character as well as to 
 the portraitist of manners, and is a personal as well as a 
 social factor in human life. But this aspect of it Poe, 
 whose criminals are only criminals, completely ignores. 
 He uses it not naturalistically but conventionally. It 
 is his conventional machinery for his story. Like Mme. 
 Tussaud and Mrs. Jarley he finds in it the readiest in 
 strument of his most cherished effects. And so far as 
 he "psychologizes" it he increases its inherent arti 
 ficiality by treating it with morbid imaginativeness, 
 endeavoring after his favorite method to give the il 
 lusion of reality to its abnormal repellency, and not at 
 all concerned about demonstrating its real character. 
 Here he is measurably successful in such a tale as "The 
 Imp of the Perverse" where he utilizes the well known 
 tendency of the criminal to confess, and totally fails 
 in such absurdity as "The Black Cat," a story that 
 could hardly have "thrilled" Ichabod Crane; but one 
 illustrates his lack of human feeling as well as the other. 
 And of almost all the stories into which the element of 
 humanity enters perforce, it may be said, finally, that 
 the residuum is not so much worth while as to earn ne 
 glect of his shortcomings in a respect normally vital 
 to the kind of thing he is doing. In a word the "Poe" 
 in his stories could only be moving and effective, if this 
 element were oresent also. 
 
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 For the only thing that can give any significance, any 
 vital interest, any value, in a word, to the weird and the 
 fantastic themselves is to establish them somehow in 
 some human relationship as Hoffmann does. Other 
 wise they are simply phenomena that appeal strictly 
 to the nerves. Poe s treatment of them negatives their 
 sole sanction. "He can thrill you as no one else can," 
 says one of his admirers. As to that there are several 
 things to be said. In the first place it depends a good 
 deal on who you are whether you are "thrilled" or not. 
 In the next place how are you "thrilled ?" As you are 
 by the knocking at the door in Macbeth, or as you are 
 by a bad dream or a gruesome sight in actual life? 
 Thirdly, are you thus affected because the story is 
 thrilling, or because, as I have already noted, your 
 own imagination is set at work as to how you would be 
 affected by experiencing what you are reading of 
 "The Premature Burial" for example forgetful of 
 the fact that personal application, than which nothing 
 is more common, notoriously vitiates any objective judg 
 ment. Finally of what value after all is "gooseflesh" 
 as a guide to correct estimates in art? Is this hyper- 
 sesthetic reaction a trustworthy measure of real aesthetic 
 merit? To ask these questions is of course to answer 
 them. But even accepting this effect on the nerves as 
 evidence of Poe s power, even of his unique power for 
 I think no other writer ever essayed it so baldly its 
 essential insignificance must be admitted because it is 
 wholly divorced from any element of interest outside of 
 itself. Instead of itself being an element in a composi- 
 
 238 
 
POE 
 
 tion, as with Hoffmann, Poe s weirdness is the whole 
 thing. An occasional discord has its uses in a work of 
 harmony, but the scrannel shriek of a locomotive per 
 forms no function but that of irritation, though it may 
 " thrill " or even deafen a listener. It is certainly more 
 important to be moved than to be moved pleasantly, 
 but to be moved to no purpose, to be agitated aimlessly 
 in no direction, is an unsatisfactory experience. 
 
 It is needless to specify instances among Poe s tales 
 that illustrate this exclusive appeal to the nerves. It 
 would be difficult to find any among those of the weird 
 class that do not. Besides, in them it was his theory, 
 his "scheme," to create this precise effect and no other. 
 The particularly crass one of "Berenice," however, 
 shows his method in particular relief. It is that prod 
 uct of his genius in which a madman recounts his 
 fascination by the beautiful teeth of his mistress and 
 his exhumation of her remains for the purpose of ex 
 tracting them as a last exercise of his faculties before 
 losing these completely. Poe sometimes went too far 
 and did so in this instance, naively admits one of his 
 earlier editors! As if it mattered where along that line 
 one stopped. The partly ridiculous, partly repulsive, 
 wholly inept quality of the performance is stamped as 
 such at the start. The serious workmanship only em 
 phasizes the fact that the personages are lay figures, the 
 motif insane, the story incredible. As a ship-shape and 
 coherent account of incoherent horror it may contain a 
 "thrill" for the predisposed, but it is fully as fitted to 
 wake a smile as a shudder and there is obviously no 
 
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 standard by which to admeasure this sort of thing 
 except that of technical execution. Any reader of 
 "Berenice" not a neurasthenic must inevitably ask, 
 "What of it?" Having no import it has no import 
 ance. 
 
 "Berenice" epitomizes very well Poe s lack of sub 
 stance, and the insignificance of the fantastic element 
 in his work which this lack of substance involves. It 
 also illustrates the aridity of his imagination. Imagina 
 tion is, in the view of most of his admirers, probably his 
 most striking, his most salient possession. But it is 
 darkening counsel to stop with this mere ascription as 
 if imagination were an invariable rather than a protean 
 faculty. Foe s imagination was of a peculiarly per 
 sonal kind. It intensified his divining powers, but 
 never extended his range of thought. It was thoroughly, 
 integrally, analytic. His "Tales of Conscience," as 
 they have been called, deal mechanically so far as they 
 do not deal conventionally with conscience. There is 
 no largely imaginative treatment of it. They summar 
 ize phenomena deduced from remorse and fear as 
 forces and, confined to crime as they are, involve little 
 imaginative psychology. His imaginings are largely 
 inventive, and important as the imagination is to the 
 inventor, the tendency to invention is apt to imply an 
 inferior order of it. The poets are sadly lacking in the 
 inventive faculty. It is essentially logical, concaten 
 ated, mechanical. It has no spiritual and no sensuous 
 
 240 
 
POE 
 
 side. Foe s inventiveness is his chief mental trait and 
 his imagination was its servant. He is perhaps at his 
 best in "The Gold Bug" to Foe s partisans a miracle 
 of imaginative invention but only to his partisans any 
 thing else. His spiritual side is illustrated by his 
 "Ligeias," " Eleonoras " and "Morellas" which meas 
 ured by a serious standard are scarcely more than mor 
 bid moonings. The ingenuity of his one spiritual tale, 
 "William Wilson" is far more in evidence than its 
 imaginativeness. It is an extremely artistic piece of 
 workmanship and shows what Foe s art could do in 
 the service of truth instead of mystification. But only 
 up to the point when you perceive it is mystification 
 after all. Curiously, then the effect deliquesces when 
 its meaning appears with the entrance of avowed 
 allegory. The whole thing becomes insubstantial be 
 cause his imagination is unequal to conducting his fine 
 conception to its conclusion without destroying his 
 illusion. His sensuousness is distinctly rudimentary, 
 all glitter and tinsel, ebony and silver. His consecra 
 tion to beauty seems a little ironical in the light of his 
 too frequent conception of it. Witness "The Assign 
 ation," with its "mingled and conflicting perfumes, 
 reeking up from strange convolute censers, together 
 with multitudinous flaring and flickering tongues of 
 emerald and violet fire" its "thousand reflections from 
 curtains which rolled from their cornices like cataracts 
 of molten silver," its "beams of natural glory" which 
 " mingled at length fitfully with the artificial light and lay 
 weltering in subdued masses upon a carpet of rich, liquid- 
 
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 looking cloth of Chili gold" all of which "richesse de 
 cafe," as Balzac would call it, suggests Thackeray 
 caricaturing Disraeli and Bulwer combined those 
 twin sources of Foe s style according to his latest editors, 
 who, however, must have been thinking only of its 
 extravagances, as his style in general is admirable. 
 
 In any case such writing is not sensuous but scenic. 
 And Poe had no more the sensuous than the sensual 
 strain. The sensual as commonly understood does not 
 exist for him, apparently, as it is apt not to in persons 
 of his variety of nervous organization, and his writings 
 it is to be pointed out have this signal negative merit. 
 But he perhaps pays for it in some degree by an ex 
 traordinary aridity in the whole sensuous sphere. When 
 he enters this he is either perfectly insignificant or else 
 his taste deserts him. He is too insincere to succeed in 
 it. His nature requires the element of the artificial 
 which distinguishes the scenic. His genius was cer 
 tainly a striking one and if he was a charlatan he cer 
 tainly had a genius for charlatanry. He revelled in 
 the specious. The vivid aspect of reality he gave to his 
 creations is due to his skill in its use, for he never felt 
 reality and was impervious to its appeal as the true con 
 stitution of the universe, moral and material. What he 
 desired was to be striking. He says so in so many 
 words in one of his disingenuous (or merely perverse, 
 who knows ?) argumentations, contending that any one 
 can be original if he will. And his usual means of 
 accomplishing it was by giving through speciousness the 
 semblance of reality to the unreal and incredible. He 
 
 242 
 
POE 
 
 relied on this far more than even on his scenic imagin 
 ation, though his scenic imagination gave him great 
 power of vivid material realization ; his landscapes are 
 stereoscopic. The scenic, however, demands scale. 
 With Poe the scale is too small. His stage is lilliputian. 
 He is so fond of the lime-light in itself that he floods his 
 picture with it. But for the proper play of this illumin- 
 ant more time and space are needed than his cabinet 
 canvas contains. His imagination is not rich enough 
 to engender extension, endue it with continuity and 
 crowd it with action. His action is always meagre and, 
 one may say, deduced from, rather than largely illustra 
 tive of, his idea. Or else it is conventional, as in the 
 "Adventures of A. Gordon Pym" which is the acme of 
 stereotyped " adventure," imitating even the religious 
 out-givings of "Robinson Crusoe" with grotesquely me 
 chanical effect. 
 
 On the other hand he was full of ideas. If he lacked 
 the visualizing moral power of the image-making 
 faculty, if his action and incidents are meagre and gain 
 their aspect of reality through a specious art of pres 
 entation rather than by the actual incarnation of ar 
 tistic vision, what eminently he did not lack was fer 
 tility in intellectual conception. Sixty-eight stories, 
 whatever their average quality, are a good many. 
 His picture might be vague, but it never lacked subject. 
 He cannot be said to have lived in the world of ideas, in 
 the accepted sense of the phrase, for he had but a 
 smattering acquaintance with its established consensus. 
 Predeterminedly original, however, he created his own. 
 
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 Artist as he was, he was nevertheless far more predis 
 posed to the abstract than to the concrete, except in the 
 purely material sphere; he began with principle and 
 proceeded to phenomena, in irreproachably deductive 
 fashion. Analytical as he was, he conducted his analy 
 sis deductively; he had a passion for ratiocination, but 
 he argues synthetically. His conclusion is always his 
 own point of departure artistically withheld till the 
 climax is reached in the verification of hypothesis. This 
 is the difference between M. Dupin and the inductive 
 Zadig, for example. He was tremendously concerned 
 with theory, a circumstance that gives point to his criti 
 cism and coherence to his tales, however it may devita 
 lize his poetry. His mind was highly speculative, in 
 quiring, even inquisitional. He had a prodigious 
 interest in problems, puzzles, rebuses an interest that 
 to those who do not share it is apt to seem inept. He 
 was in a way a conjurer in literature. He delighted in 
 mystification which is as much as to say he had no 
 other interest in mystery. He was less of a mystic 
 than any writer who has ever dealt with the mysterious. 
 He had vastly more affinity with Cagliostro than with 
 Hoffmann from whom inexplicably he is so often said 
 to derive. Without the vanity he had the conceit and 
 enjoyed the complacence of the prestidigitator. 
 
 In his early studies, mathematics, and in his later 
 reading, science in general, attracted him most genuinely. 
 With all his gift for language it interested him mainly 
 as syntax, and his knowledge of languages was as 
 superficial as his care for letters. His French for ex- 
 
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POE 
 
 ample which is not infrequent is what he would cen 
 sure in another as culpably ignorant. He may be said, 
 indeed, to have indulged his mathematical turn in 
 his philosophy of life or whatever may serve to 
 pass for it with him; of course as such he had no 
 philosophy of life. His interest in ideas did not extend 
 to moral ones, of which he had none. The whole world 
 of morals was a terra incognita to him not at all the 
 same thing as saying, which is also true, that he had 
 no morals. Coleridge, for example, has been said to 
 have had none, but he was immensely concerned with 
 their philosophy. Poe s personal egotism accentuated 
 by his indulgence freed him from a sense of personal re 
 sponsibility no doubt, but the singular thing about him as 
 a writer is that man s moral nature made no appeal to 
 his imagination. Morbid psychology, to be sure, was 
 a part of his material, but he used it almost altogether 
 as a means mainly mechanical to the production of a 
 dramatic effect. And even here his general ideas have 
 not the scope and freedom they have in the purely 
 intellectual sphere, but evince the succinct specific quality 
 that marks the " notation" of phenomena. So that 
 even his determination to the abnormal does not in the 
 unfamiliar moral sphere remark any law of general im 
 portexcept such commonplaces as the tendency of 
 the criminal to confession already noted. And of course, 
 as regards morals in the extended sense, he had, about 
 man s habits and customs, around which the imagina 
 tion of the normal literary artist plays perpetually, no 
 ideas at all, either general or otherwise. 
 
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 In brief, his lack of moral imagination accounts for the 
 vacuity of his writings. A writer s product is character 
 ized in great part by what he lacks as well as by what he 
 possesses, by his defects as well as by his qualities. It is 
 no reproach to a theological writer to be ignorant of the 
 fine-arts unless he refers to them. On the other hand 
 it would be an insufficient characterization of a land 
 scape painter to say that he could paint clouds if he 
 could not paint trees, though certainly if he painted 
 clouds extraordinarily well, that would be the most 
 important thing to say about him, as it would signalize 
 his contribution to landscape art, besides which his 
 failure in any respect would be more negligible. The 
 theory of criticism, however, which holds that the ex 
 cellences of a performance are alone worth attention, 
 that it is, unlike a rope, to be judged only by its strong 
 est part, and that the function of criticism is really the 
 judicial dispensing of rewards of merit, is unsatisfactory 
 and provincial. The whole work is there calling for 
 critical account and, due attention paid to the matter 
 of emphasis and accent, its sins both of commission and 
 omission are germane to critical consideration. In 
 practice the other theory leads to notorious confusion 
 and as Americans at least must be constantly reminded 
 the distinction between good and bad is obscured by 
 mechanically ascribing to a failure the characteristics 
 of a performer s successes. At all events it is pertinently 
 illuminating to find a writer of tales, criticism and 
 poetry deficient in the philosophy of life, letters and 
 feeling, not only because this at once ranks his product 
 
 246 
 
POE 
 
 and measures its value, but on account of the light it 
 throws on his productive faculty itself his imagination. 
 It is a just reproach to Hawthorne that he suffered the 
 genius that produced The Scarlet Letter" to produce 
 little or nothing else comparable with it. But the case 
 is quite different with Poe, because tales, criticism and 
 poetry of real value cannot be written or can only 
 occasionally be written with Poe s equipment. The 
 wonder is not that he did not succeed oftener, but that 
 he succeeded at all, as assuredly he did in his own way 
 one can hardly say his own genre, since he had no con 
 geners. 
 
 It is a mistake to try to classify him. He is very 
 strictly sui generis. So appalling an egoist could 
 hardly fail to be. No more superficial association was 
 ever made than in relating him to Hoffmann, in whom 
 the weird and the fantastic are always in close and 
 generally in affectionate companionship with sentiment 
 and humor. "Where form dominates" says Balzac, 
 "sentiment disappears," and in the temperament of the 
 technician humor has as little place as sentiment. 
 Notoriously Poe had none of either. He was an artist 
 with a controlling bent toward artifice, exaggeratedly 
 theoretic, convinced that the beautiful is the strange 
 and the sad the poetic, and exercising his imagination 
 through every expedient of ingenious invention, to the 
 end of producing effects of strangeness to the point of 
 abnormality and of sadness to the point of horror. 
 Compact of neurotic sensationalism and saturated with 
 the specious, Poe s "thrilling" tales taken in the mass 
 
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 illustrate the most detestable misuse of imaginative 
 powers within the limits of serious literature, and only 
 fall within these limits by the intellectual vigor which 
 oftenest they argue rather than evince. "It s a weary 
 feast," says Thackeray "that banquet of wit where no 
 love is." And Poe s banquet is as bereft of wit as it is 
 destitute of love. He lacked humor and he lacked heart. 
 
 VI 
 
 If even his imagination was thus limited it was per 
 haps partly because the field of its exercise was naturally 
 limited by his lack of culture. He had no culture prop 
 erly so called. He applied the schoolmaster s rod to 
 others with the gusto of pretentiousness, but discipline 
 is precisely and par excellence what he lacked himself. 
 He is the notablest example to be found among men of 
 letters of a writer living exclusively in the realm of 
 the intellect without developing or enriching his own. 
 His first work is as good as his last. He read much but 
 without purpose. In this single respect his editors have 
 perhaps done him somewhat less than justice in saying 
 "His sources were, at first, books of which Disraeli s 
 Curiosities of Literature is a type, and in science some 
 elementary works; generally he seems to have read 
 books only for review, as they came under his notice 
 at random, but he paid much attention to the magazines, 
 home and foreign, throughout his life." Desultory as 
 his reading was it was not indolent and hap-hazard. 
 Devoid of sentiment, he eschewed "trash." And with- 
 
 248 
 
POE 
 
 out any spirit of suite, or any persistent amassing of 
 knowledge, still less with any ordered and philosophic 
 acquisition, his purely intellectual organization led him 
 into the realm of learning, where he was distinctly at 
 home without, however, possessing the moral purpose 
 to benefit by his stay. He satisfied his curiosity, follow 
 ing an indubitable natural bent, without engaging his 
 responsibility or really increasing his knowledge. There 
 is no such absurd fatras in literature as the absurd " Eu 
 reka." He found his practical account in these excur 
 sions. All was grist that came to his mill. Just as he 
 read the current product for journalistic ends, he pursued 
 in literature out-of-the-way paths in search of the odd and 
 the unfamiliar with a similar motive at least with a 
 similar result. What he found there served to decorate 
 his own writing with the unconventional and the rec 
 ondite. His writing is bedizened with the frippery of 
 learning often, but one suspects that most of the goods, 
 in familiar phrase, are in the shop-window. And his 
 etalage of learning is that of the literary charlatan an 
 arsenal of the occult and the obscure, the abstruse and 
 the exotic, above all the esoteric and the technical, the 
 whole chosen and calculated to impose on the credulous 
 and mesmerize the impressionable. 
 
 But it is doubtful if any one of his circle had as much 
 reading. In this respect he belonged rather in the New 
 England that he constantly jeered at as provincial and 
 hated with a genuine and sometimes clairvoyant hatred. 
 The weaknesses of Isaac are apparent enough to Ish- 
 mael and though his railing at them may seem Bedouin 
 
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 to the Brahmin, it is not to be called Boeotian. There 
 was probably no one within the purview of Trans 
 cendentalism capable of writing the following : " Sculpt 
 ure, although in its nature rigorously poetical, was too 
 limited in its extent and consequence to have occupied, 
 at any time, much of his attention." Possibly Poe was 
 not and got it from Goethe, as almost certainly he did 
 the remark on the next page of "The Domain of Arn- 
 heim:" "No such paradises are to be found in reality 
 as have glowed on the canvas of Claude" a landscape 
 by whom he had probably never seen. It is difficult to 
 determine the true inventory of the predatory, but ap 
 preciation of Goethe s sestheticism is in itself a distinc 
 tion for Poe s time. Nor is he to be called bohemian. 
 His habits were irregular enough, but the bohemian has 
 no intellectual curiosity, and Poe was made of it. The 
 bohemian is content "merely to bask and ripen." Poe 
 was a worker. His irregularities have obscured for us 
 his exceptional industry. They interfered sadly with 
 his accomplishment, but with its amount far less than 
 with its character. In spite of them he kept at work 
 or at least returned to work when he could. His indi 
 gence and the heavy pressure of it on the two beings he 
 cared for were a constant stimulus to a nature that, 
 whatever its faults, knew not supineness. With even 
 less urgent need he would have worked as hard 
 perhaps even, considering the instability of his nervous 
 organization, to better purpose, since he would have 
 been less harried by the cormorant care. He had the 
 disposition of the fighter, and his failings did not mine 
 
 250 
 
POE 
 
 his fortitude nor his failures discourage, however they 
 might transiently deject him. He was not an idler or 
 a dreamer. His mental activity was constantly in 
 formed with purpose, and directed with assiduity. He 
 was always full of energy when he was not hamstrung 
 by exhaustion. No bohemian produces ten volumes. 
 When his ambitious and sometimes arrogant plans met 
 shipwreck, owing in general no doubt to his own evil 
 genius, he made new ones. Never handicapped by 
 modesty or even the prudences of self-distrust, he was 
 undeterred by obstacles and undismayed by misfortune. 
 If he did not have a proud soul, at least his egotism 
 conserved his identity unimpaired, even in the disin 
 tegration of his faculties, and to the last made the most 
 of what his errors had left him. Next to his art it is 
 his energy that by demonstrating his capacity distin 
 guishes him and makes him a marked figure in our 
 literature. 
 
 He had an English experience in impressionable 
 school-boy days which served him to real purpose in 
 "William Wilson," probably the solidest of his tales. 
 But he never travelled, and in this respect he inevitably 
 seems limited, even boyish, in comparison with many 
 of his contemporaries. It is hardly necessary to say that 
 this was a limitation he did not himself feel. But if his 
 egotism amounted even to bumptiousness, as it did, it 
 was naturally associated with great independence. He 
 did his own thinking. He was constantly "sizing up" 
 everything, especially others, and could on this account 
 alone hardly have been popular, even among the lowly 
 
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 spirited to whom arrogance and imperiousness, or even 
 the caricature of those vices, seem not defects but 
 qualities. They were especially evident, along with 
 more amiable ones, in his criticism, which forms several 
 volumes of his complete works, which he wrote more 
 incisively, not to say more successfully, on the whole 
 than any of his few contemporary competitors, and for 
 which he certainly showed the aptitudes of real pene 
 tration and a philosophic stand-point. He lacks, to be 
 sure one of the chief qualifications of the critic, the 
 critical temper. It is in his criticism that his "journal 
 ism" appears most obviously. And his journalism 
 was that of his day, the farthest possible removed from 
 the critical temper. It has instead the polemic temper. 
 And his polemic was extremely personal. Its tone is 
 often extremely contemptuous. The lining, as the 
 French say, of his praise is sometimes abuse of those 
 who differ with him. His praise of Hawthorne is 
 highly spiced with contempt for the neglect of Haw 
 thorne that he charged upon New England. He felt 
 the sectionalism of New England as of course no writer, 
 not himself a New Englander, could fail to do. But he 
 treats it with a self-answering excess in his references to 
 "the Emersons and Alcotts and Fullers." His treat 
 ment of Longfellow is another instance. Longfellow 
 is something of a quack himself, he says, but his repu 
 tation is what mainly strikes him, and this he thinks al 
 most altogether due to the quackery of Longfellow s 
 friendly environment. He makes elaborate accusations 
 of plagiarism against him, and then at the conclusion of 
 
 252 
 
POE 
 
 his philippic takes it all back or at all events whittles it 
 down to a negligible point, with the obvious result, of 
 course, of making his own article negligible. Perhaps 
 he had not enough purpose to be called malevolent. 
 He was rather irritable than imperious, perhaps, in his 
 lack of any feeling of responsibility, in which case he 
 must be acquitted of more malign motive than that of 
 the strutting and consciously clever Ishmael bent on 
 self assertion. To call Carlyle an "ass" and Emerson 
 his imitator was but a way like another of calling at 
 tention to himself. So, possibly, were his equally ex 
 travagant eulogies. Such primitive "methods" were 
 certainly more in vogue in his day than in ours. The 
 journalism to which his work formally belonged or with 
 which it had notable affiliations bristled with "person 
 alities," so-called. But Poe has claims inconsistent 
 with the cloaking of his faults by the mantle of his time, 
 and certainly no writer of his time, even, of anything 
 like his powers wrote criticism of this particular order 
 of simplicity. If it had been as prevalent as it was 
 primitive we may be sure he would have avoided it in 
 his consecration to "originality" and aversion to custom 
 and the common. 
 
 Cavilling came naturally to him. He began it early. 
 It was perhaps the edge of his adolescent cleverness. 
 "I never heard him speak in terms of praise of any 
 English writer living or dead" says a fellow cadet at 
 West Point testimony to a natural bent, at least. As 
 he matured and began to write he necessarily modified 
 it, but never beyond clear recognition. He was in 
 
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 fact, rather better in its practice than when he varied 
 it with eulogy. There is more truth, for example, in his 
 remark about Carlyle, whom he did not in the least ap 
 preciate, that his manner "is conventional with him 
 self," than in his characterization of Tennyson, whom 
 he adored, as "the greatest of all poets living or dead." 
 His laudation of the galaxy of female poets whose 
 praises he sang so enthusiastically is ascribed by 
 Stedman to his chivalry an admission that he did not 
 take either the sex or his function very seriously. And 
 in truth his various judgments, favorable or other, are 
 less trustworthy than those of any other critic of his 
 general eminence. He could not have learned much 
 from his contemporaries here if, as he says, " Our most 
 analytic if not altogether our best critic (Mr. Whipple, 
 perhaps, excepted) is Mr. William A. Jones." And in 
 fact, in his day criticism among us and measurably in 
 England had even closer relations than it has to-day 
 with the function discharged by professors of rhetoric 
 and was rather elementary and of a hole and corner 
 character. On the whole, it may be said that in spite 
 of his penetration, which was keen within narrow 
 enough limits, he indulged his propensity to personal 
 irresponsibility rather more than less in his criticism than 
 in his tales and naturally much more than in his 
 poems; yet that on the other hand his criticism shows 
 incidentally the same alert mental activity and intel 
 lectual curiosity. 
 
 His mental activity was indeed extraordinary so 
 much so as apparently to be deemed by him almost an 
 
 254 
 
POE 
 
 end in itself. To what purpose or upon what sub 
 stance his mind was engaged was of small moment so 
 long as it functioned. But to the fact that it did func 
 tion so actively is probably due the specific excellence, 
 as his penetration is the specific quality, of his criticism, 
 namely, that like much of his fiction it is ratiocinative 
 and neither canonical as so much past, nor impression 
 ist as so much current, criticism is. He was dogmatic 
 enough, and absurdly autocratic, but his dogmas 
 were not conventions. On the other hand he had ideas 
 about the matter in hand and did not "recount the 
 adventures of his soul among masterpieces" though 
 it is to be said that acknowledged masterpieces did not 
 greatly interest his soul to which they doubtless afforded 
 too little polemic material. His ideas were often mere 
 notions. With his theoretic bent they could hardly 
 be otherwise. But in form, at least, they were con 
 spicuously rationalized. Reasons with him were as 
 plenty as blackberries. He delighted, in French phrase, 
 to remuer them fussily, perhaps, rather than pro 
 foundly and largely, no doubt, by way of what he him 
 self calls "kicking up a bobbery," but energetically 
 and unceasingly. And though whistling as one goes 
 even from excess instead of want of thought is still only 
 whistling, nevertheless the phenomena of so much 
 mental activity occupied with something quite other 
 than Transcendentalism, exalting beauty to the point of 
 declaring its incompatibility with truth, must have 
 been interesting in his day. In fact it still has a certain 
 piquancy. But his reasons were not the fruit of inquiry. 
 
 255 
 
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 They were " immediately beheld " justifications of his pref 
 erences, and his mental furniture was not rich enough 
 for the production of any a priori reflections of range 
 and moment. He never speculated as Balzac, in similar 
 case, observing: " There must be a cause for this 
 singularity." He was only too pleased to rest in the 
 singularity, to establish and flaunt it. He was much 
 impressed by the saying he cites more than once from 
 "Lord Verulam:" " There is no exquisite beauty which 
 has not some strangeness in its proportion," but he 
 does not press the matter further, and is too content to 
 get authority for "strangeness" which was precisely 
 his affair to appreciate that its service as an accent does 
 not involve its value as an element even, to say nothing 
 of his own practice of enforcing its predominance as a 
 factor. The portion of his reasoning that naturally 
 has most interest is that concerned with linguistic tech- 
 nic. He would have made a stimulating professor of 
 prosody, in spite of his " crotchets," as Stedman calls 
 them, and his extravagance is in this field altogether 
 more suggestive than in any other. 
 
 VII 
 
 He had, in short, a fine mind which he neither dis 
 ciplined, nor stored, nor developed; the unusual ac 
 tivity of which was stimulated and guided by intel 
 lectual curiosity ; of which invention and logic were more 
 marked traits than imagination and poetic feeling; and 
 of which he made effective but unscrupulous usage 
 
 256 
 
POE 
 
 to no particular purpose. There is nothing very 
 sinister in Poe, except the desire to produce sinister 
 effects. And since these, as I have said, are apt to fail 
 through the obviousness of their motive and the crudity 
 of their means, they leave a merely disagreeable and 
 not a sinister, a morbid and perverse not at all a satanic, 
 impression of the genius they express, though it is un 
 deniable that a good many of the tales recall Emerson s 
 description of Mephistopheles : "pure intellect ap 
 plied as always there is a tendency to the service of 
 the senses." His literary and artistic far exceeded his 
 personal temperament, and he had appetites rather 
 than passions. His lack of sensuousness was agreeably 
 accompanied by an apparently complete emancipation 
 from the sensual. There is simply no sex in his writings, 
 and was not in his life till he went completely to pieces. 
 His unscrupulousness and indelicacies with regard to 
 ways and means, to be sure, began early, but his attitude 
 toward them, if it betrayed a ferocious egotism, showed 
 also the distinctly unmoral nature the shallower side 
 of the instinct for self-preservation, not its perversion. 
 If he was a charlatan he never saw any harm in being 
 one. The candor of his duplicity emulates sincerity. 
 And he looked on literature as the adventurer views his 
 field of operation, not as the enthusiast his cause or the 
 regularly enlisted his profession a fact wholly germane 
 to any consideration of his success in it, quite apart from its 
 bearing on the character of the man behind his writings. 
 His legend has grown curiously since his death. The 
 reasons for it are of course largely romantic, personal 
 
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 rather than literary. He is distinctly so much the most, 
 as to be almost the only, romantic figure of our literature; 
 and his romantic interest has greatly influenced the 
 critical estimate of his work. In the first place it has 
 led to the production of an unusual amount of criticism 
 of this. And this criticism has been increasingly 
 favorable. His contemporaries took a much less 
 extravagant view of it. For them there was less mystery 
 about Poe himself and they entertained none of the il 
 lusions that time, instead of destroying, as usual, in 
 Poe s case seems to have multiplied. Then, too, the 
 appreciation of literary art has greatly increased with us 
 to an excess, at present, I think, that fairly matches 
 our earlier provincialism. Moreover, the spirit of 
 literary generosity, particularly abounding in America 
 toward our own authors our own sommites in all 
 fields touched by the hard fate and possible injustice 
 which Poe endured and from which his personal repu 
 tation suffered in the eyes of his contemporaries and 
 the succeeding generation, has tended to exalt his liter 
 ary reputation, with no doubt the instinct that its ex 
 altation may serve to excuse or at least obscure his 
 infirmities. To his contemporaries Poe was a man 
 and a writer like another, to be measured by his per 
 formance. To subsequent critics he gradually came 
 to appear as unique in a literature especially in need of 
 the element he represents. And now it is difficult to 
 judge him in the interests of truth without a melancholy 
 consciousness of disloyalty to tradition. To recall 
 once more Sainte-Beuve s serviceable remark to Arnold 
 
 258 
 
POE 
 
 about Lamartine; "he was important to us." A spot 
 of scarlet in a monotone of subdued hues, he naturally, 
 as we got further and further away from his time, came 
 more and more to rivet the attention which on closer 
 scrutiny it appears he does not repay. 
 
 His reputation among us has notoriously been greatly 
 increased by foreign recognition of his writings. If, 
 say his admirers, we ourselves esteem him because he 
 is an American writer, this cannot be true of his foreign 
 estimation; quite the contrary. This is certainly 
 plausible. But foreign recognition sets such traps for 
 our naivete that it is prudent to be a little on our guard in 
 the presence of it. The theory that the foreign esti 
 mate previsages posterity s is open to some question 
 aside from the fact that posterity itself may make mis 
 takes; Aldrich, for example, acutely argued from Brown 
 ing s obscurity the probable injustice of posterity, 
 preoccupied with obscurities of its own, to his incontes 
 table merits. But foreign recognition in the nature of 
 the case rewards to a disproportionate extent the merits 
 that especially appeal to foreigners. If, as Arnold 
 held, Sainte-Beuve could regard Lamartine as im 
 portant to the French without implying a positive 
 in this relative importance, it is equally true that an 
 exotic may make an appeal out of all proportion to its 
 intrinsic value and interest. In any event we ought 
 to distinguish between foreign recognition of those of 
 our writers who are classifiable with foreign ones and 
 this recognition when it rewards with its irresponsible 
 applause the exceptional and extravagant which ap- 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 peal to its interest in the novel and the foreign per 
 se. As a matter of fact foreign recognition has been 
 most generous with regard to many of our, to us, least 
 indispensable writers. To put the matter crudely, 
 the appreciative foreigner has admirable writers 
 of his own; what he most appreciates in our litera 
 ture is the queer, the odd, the qualities from whose 
 associated defects he feels an entire detachment. For 
 eign recognition therefore in the case of Poe s extrava 
 ganzas and caprices is not necessarily an imprimatur 
 of the same authority as it is in such instances as those 
 of Cooper and Longfellow, for example. It attests not 
 the merit but the extraordinariness of his writings, and 
 a little, no doubt, the extraordinariness of their being 
 produced in America. Gautier s reference to him, 
 besides classing him with Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" 
 Lewis, is chiefly depreciation of his environment. And 
 in France, at least, his sponsors were not, as in the case 
 of Cooper, Balzac, and Sainte-Beuve, the foremost of 
 Continental authorities at the time, one may say, but 
 the genial and good natured Gautier, who was preach 
 ing the gospel of romanticism a entrance, and Baude 
 laire, as to whose authority Swinburne s praise and 
 the current rediscovery of him by the dilettanti, mainly 
 of Swinburne s speech, are disconcertingly at vari 
 ance with his treatment by the austere Scherer, our 
 own catholic Henry James, and the trenchant but 
 impartial Faguet, perhaps the first of living French 
 critics, in whose admirable "Literary History of France" 
 his name does not appear. It is also worth bearing in 
 
 260 
 
POE 
 
 mind since prudence in such a matter is, as I say, 
 commendable that Baudelaire, whom Mr. James 
 cruelly calls Poe s inferior both as a charlatan and as a 
 genius, had nevertheless an even greater purely lin 
 guistic genius than Foe s and that the beauty of his 
 translation, in itself celebrated, has been an appreciable 
 element in Poe s Continental vogue. In France, in fact, 
 our "world-author s" stories appear as a part of 
 Baudelaire s complete works. 
 
 Besides the foreign appreciation, Poe s fame has been 
 forwarded by enjoying the favor of those who take what 
 may be called the professional or perhaps one may 
 say more definitely now-a-days the professorial view 
 of letters. This is somewhat different from that of the 
 disinterested lover of literature, who is less concerned 
 about classification. Tracing the tendencies and re 
 cording the phases of literary evolution, especially in 
 a society so uniform, and with a history so short as ours, 
 is a work in which accents of any sharpness must, one 
 would say, be so acceptable as to be magnified out of 
 sheer gratitude. The pleasures of classification are 
 simpler, as well as less arduous, than those of charac 
 terization, and any intensification of their pursuit must 
 be particularly welcome. A crisp note, a vivid patch 
 of color, a definite point de repere in American literary 
 history can but be so prized by the literary historian as 
 to acquire in his treatment a relief somewhat independ 
 ent of its intrinsic quality. Poe is the nucleus of 
 romanticism in American letters, and in addition to his 
 indubitable importance thus in supplying a "note" we 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 might otherwise have lacked, he has in consequence 
 acquired from the literary historians and the critics who 
 take their cue from them, an adventitious aspect of 
 real and intrinsic importance as well. And this verdict 
 has naturally been relied on by the extremely unpro 
 fessional many who possess those "primitive tastes" 
 to which, says Mr. Henry James decidedly our most 
 competent critical authority in such a matter Poe 
 particularly appeals. After the edition of his writings 
 by the late Mr. Stedman and Professor Woodberry, one 
 can hardly see how they could do otherwise. This piece 
 of editing is one of the most distinguished examples 
 of its art and a monument in which American letters 
 has excellent reason for taking a genuine satisfaction. 
 There is an adequate "Memoir" condensed with ad 
 ditions by Professor Woodberry from his admirable 
 "Life." There are three "introductions" to the 
 tales, the criticism, and the poems, respectively beauti 
 fully written by the elder editor, marked and catholic 
 contributions to American critical literature, not quite 
 convincing, I am of course bound to think, but of far 
 finer flavor than is often to be found in the rather 
 Barmecide banquet they preface; yet for this feast 
 every scrap of Poe s writings has been collected, col 
 lated, and commented with an opulence of apparatus 
 unsurpassed by that arranged for Shakespeare by Fur- 
 ness, for Bacon by Spedding, or for Milton by Masson. 
 The cult of Poe is not in the interests of literature, 
 since as literature his writings are essentially valueless. 
 The interests of literature occasionally call for restraint 
 
 262 
 
POE 
 
 in the indulgence of Swinburne s " generous pleasure 
 of praising " not for the purpose quite as frequent 
 with Swinburne of alternating with it the delights 
 of censure and reprehension, but in order to main 
 tain unobscured and unimpaired the standards of 
 literature itself. Literature has a stronger claim than 
 any of its practitioners, and generously or ungenerously 
 to exalt these at its expense is to belittle and betray it. 
 Hardly any cause is nobler and treason to few so flagrant 
 or since the pleasure of praising is, like most pro 
 digalities perhaps, a generous one so frequent. But 
 there is a particular irrationality in American over 
 praise of Poe. It is this : unlike foreign literatures and 
 English literature as a whole, American literature as it 
 is, perhaps fatuously but nevertheless conveniently, 
 not to say inevitably, called has no background. Its 
 figures do not form part of a pageant relieved against a 
 rich and varied scenic setting, but stand in silhouette 
 before the black "drop" that isolates rather than sup 
 ports them and focuses attention on their individualities, 
 from the stately lyceum lecturer like Emerson to the 
 genial "song and dance artist," in all strictness too 
 numerous to mention. Lacking within our own ex 
 clusively American ranks, I repeat ancestors and 
 traditions, we are without the restrictive influences of a 
 "stream of tendency," an orderly evolution, without 
 that subconscious education which saves conscious in 
 telligence so much unintelligent performance. Our 
 protestant and innovating temperaments have really 
 nothing to protest against, nothing to break away from, 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 no routine to vivify. More than that, we have com 
 paratively speaking, nothing to maintain, nothing to 
 keep in mind, no standards in a word. Such a romanti 
 cist as Gautier with the whole heritage of the noble 
 seventeenth and the enlightened eighteenth century 
 French literature in his literary blood could safely 
 practise and preach the literary freedom which with 
 us means license and consequent insignificance. No 
 romantic artist can do more than "pad round" the 
 skeleton he must have derived from his predecessors 
 at least in our day, the human imagination on which he 
 leans having been so long at work. Our realists are in 
 better case nature being inexhaustible. Hence our 
 disposition to magnify our extravagant and capricious 
 writers such as Poe and Whitman is destructive 
 of our holds on the standards which it is of the last im 
 portance for us consciously to keep in mind since so 
 only can we have them in mind at all. Only an older 
 society than ours can with impunity cherish and coddle 
 les jeunes," who with us are merely out of the ranks, 
 however bravely we may imagine them at the head of 
 the procession. 
 
 It is true that the cult of Poe is, as I have said, largely 
 dependent for its persistence on the Poe legend, and the 
 legend is concerned with his life which was romance it 
 self and not his writings which are considerably its 
 caricature. But his life was quite as abnormal as his 
 writings. Beyond doubt it is largely to be charged 
 with the failures and shortcomings of these, as well as, 
 like them, lacking itself, however pitiful and pathetic, 
 
 264 
 
POE 
 
 the elements of permanent interest. " Through the 
 storms and tempests of his furious mind" says Thack 
 eray of Swift in a memorable passage "the stars of re 
 ligion and love break out in the blue, shining serenely 
 though hidden by the driving clouds and maddened 
 hurricane of his life." We cannot write of Poe in this 
 vein. His powers were of a surety not comparable 
 with Swift s, but what prevents his tragedy from being 
 relatively as impressive is its fatal lack of dignity. 
 And its lack of dignity is due not to his errors and 
 the payment they exacted but to himself. There is 
 a tragic pathos in the ruin wrought by the empire 
 of anodyne over the victim of an abnormal nervous 
 organization, that couples it not unworthily with mad 
 ness itself. But it is not Foe s gloomy life and its 
 ghastly conclusion, apt extinction of a genius already 
 honeycombed with demoralization, that robs his 
 figure of dignity and alloys the awfulness of his fate. 
 It is his own character his own predetermined organi 
 zation, if one chooses. In spite of his personal charm, 
 his was a baleful spirit. For him the stars of religion 
 and love do not break out in the blue. Spiritually, he 
 lacked ideality. His indignatio is not saeva, but fret 
 ful, jealous, egotist. He had no religion, in which re 
 spect he is marked among poets and romancers. Of 
 course I do not refer to theology, but he had no sense of 
 awe. The sense of awe was a plaything with him. It 
 never mastered him. He used it as one of the tools of 
 his trade to create his effects, to harrow his readers 
 nerves. His attitude toward awe in fact is essentially 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 blasphemous ; he does not mock it, but he is impervious 
 to its influence and handles it with the impunity of 
 moral insulation. "My whole nature," he affirms, 
 "utterly revolts at the idea that there is any being in 
 the Universe superior to myself." Like a soulless 
 Undine he is on this account quite outside of our in 
 stinctive, and appeals only to our imaginative, sym 
 pathies. 
 
 It is people s imagination that has made him what 
 popularly he seems something quite other than the 
 reality. The star of love did gleam fitfully for him 
 in the frigid ether that was his sky. His love for 
 Virginia was his one external stimulus, the only magnet 
 of his errant course, the sole unselfish indulgence of a 
 nature otherwise in galling bondage to egotism. His 
 devotion to her, however, signal as it is in contrast to 
 his habitual self-concentration, was apparently chival 
 rous rather than passionate. Mrs. Clemm shared 
 it in large measure, as her own adoring affection and 
 practical care richly entitled her to do. And essential 
 element of every relation as chivalry is, it is not ideally 
 adequate in the sphere of the affections where it needs 
 the supplement of self-surrender. In Poe s case, too, 
 as the days became darker and darker it suffered some 
 strain, as "Ulalume" perhaps attests. If so, though 
 the most hauntingly mournful of any of his poems, its 
 burden is characteristically un remorseful. Compare 
 it with the passionate regrets of Carlyle s "Reminiscen 
 ces," the wild contrition of a far from loving nature. 
 And it may aptly be remembered with regard to the 
 
 266 
 
POE 
 
 various " affairs" of Poe s last years that he had already 
 added opium to alcohol, and was the prey of vagrom 
 impulses rather than of any profound and sincere, how 
 ever transient, passion. This is at once their superficial 
 excuse and their fundamental indictment, but in any 
 event they serve to deepen one s sense of his lack of 
 resource and illumination in love as well as in that gen 
 eral spiritual aspiration we call religion. The lack of 
 dignity in his career from its beginning to its close, 
 in spite of his pretensions, his arrogance and his abound 
 ing egotism, estranges sympathy as well as admiration 
 and prevents the gloom of his wretchedness from ob 
 scuring in any effective way the comparative valueless- 
 ness of his work. His errors and misfortunes are only 
 to be understood probably from the point of view of 
 pathology. From this point of view they must arouse 
 a deep compassion and one intelligent enough to ascribe 
 the futility of much of his work to the fated frustration 
 of his extraordinary powers. But it is the tragedy 
 of American letters that the one absolute artist of our 
 elder literature should, in any marked degree, require a 
 chivalrous, rather than requite a critical, justification. 
 
 267 
 
LOWELL 
 
LOWELL 
 
 I 
 
 I REMEMBER hearing Lowell on two occasions. One 
 was that of the address on "The Independent in Poli 
 tics." The substance was rather discouraged as any 
 one may verify by referring to it in his works. He 
 took it very seriously and spoke in a prophetic strain 
 and with the prophetic manner. But he seemed rather 
 a jaunty Jeremiah, and one could not feel that the 
 country of which he was such a genuine product could 
 be in hopeless estate. The other occasion was a dinner 
 in aid of the American School at Athens, when he 
 spoke extempore and must have been at his best. It 
 was on occasions, great or small, in spoken or written 
 poetry or prose production, that he was, I imagine, at 
 his best. His speech was the happiest, easiest, most 
 graceful conceivable, with just the right proportion of 
 play to seriousness, the ideal combination of ingredients 
 for a post-prandial confection. I recall an anecdote 
 with which he began. He had been present at a large 
 political meeting in England somewhere, Manchester 
 perhaps, where Gladstone was to speak. The hall was 
 packed and the air stifling. For some reason it was 
 impossible to open the windows, which were very high, 
 and one had to be broken. It was feared that the noise 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 would startle the audience and the Mayor stepped for 
 ward to explain what was proposed. The audience, 
 however, had not assembled to listen to the Mayor and 
 overwhelmed him with cries of " Gladstone," "Glad 
 stone!" At last the misconceived and infuriated official 
 restored silence by shouting at the top of his lungs: 
 "I m not going to make a speech; I ve got something 
 to say !" Lowell had something to say; and it was not 
 merely the announcement of a gift to the Athens 
 school or some such practical matter, to which his 
 exordium referred. He had a great deal to say always 
 on such occasions at least for such occasions. He 
 was pithy without baldness and full without prolixity. 
 He never said too much, or said what he had to say with 
 too much gravity. His manner, in short, was perfection ; 
 but the real substance that his felicity of presentation 
 clothed counted for still more. Curtis was perhaps a 
 rival, though I think Curtis was a shade forensic for 
 the genre, but Lowell had no others among his country 
 men and in his own day, I am quite sure. And in 
 England his unexampled popularity was very largely 
 due to this gift. During his official residence in Lon 
 don he was in prodigious demand on all occasions that 
 afforded an opportunity for its exercise. His literary 
 reputation, the piquancy of pardoning "The Biglow 
 Papers," even his personal charm and tact in more inti 
 mate intercourse probably counted for less. 
 
 It is a great gift particularly rare in first-class men, 
 perhaps, and yet to be found in its perfection in first- 
 class men alone. Hence, Lowell s distinction in its 
 
 272 
 
LOWELL 
 
 possession and exercise. Both branches of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race have the oratorical tradition and with them 
 at all events the post-prandial phase is the latest in the 
 evolution of eloquence as an art. At the present day 
 set speeches are surely less savored. And no other art 
 is surer of instant and enthusiastic appreciation. It is 
 so popular that its exercise has become epidemic and 
 there are already signs of its decadence in its decline 
 into the perfunctory and its vulgarization by the in 
 expert. So soon as the practice of any art becomes 
 universal this decline inevitably ensues. When everyone 
 practises it, the mass of its production must be com 
 mon; and commonness in excess is a solvent that sets 
 free the elements of energy for new combinations. But 
 whatever forebodings we may have as to its future, there 
 can be no gainsaying that, taken with its extension and 
 congener of the occasional performance of all kinds, 
 this is an art not only of integral dignity but of unique 
 character and satisfactions. Not the most important, 
 but the most characteristic achievement of an artist 
 is the best guide to the essential elements of his person 
 ality. And if Lowell was in general at his best in 
 improvization if in a word his occasional performance 
 in prose and poetry, was, in general, more unrivalled 
 than, in general, his other productions, and the fore 
 most American man of letters was also the first after- 
 dinner orator of his time, it was in virtue of two or 
 three cardinal facts of his constitutional make-up. 
 
 273 
 
AFRICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 II 
 
 Of these the chief I take to have been a certain 
 representative rather than individual turn of mind. 
 He illustrated on occasions of all kinds what he himself 
 says the public asks of the poet, namely, to express for 
 it its own feelings. It is not perhaps a comprehensive 
 or exacting demand to make of the poet at least of the 
 poet of a different strain from Lowell s but it is pre 
 cisely the one made of the public speaker. Lowell an 
 swered it amply. He felt as others do, only more 
 consciously more categorically. He expressed what 
 others think, but with more energy. He was not an 
 original but an independent thinker. He had the kind 
 of independence which even in reflecting it makes its 
 own the general consensus. He did his own thinking, 
 but its results were as recognizably reasonable as its 
 processes were placid. In other words, his idiosyn 
 crasy lay not in his mind but in his character. His 
 reference to himself in "A Fable for Critics" as ad 
 dicted to "isms" and eccentricities is a complete mis 
 conception cleverly misleading, it might be called, 
 in view of the anonymity of the book, but for the fact 
 of his lack of self-consciousness. Such self-conscious 
 ness as he had was at least not self-scrutiny. It was 
 certainly never paralyzing nor even disconcerting. It 
 was clothed in the complacence born of the most re 
 assuring conviction in the world, that of being in es 
 sential harmony with others. He beamed and ex 
 panded in a confidence free from the fear of confutation 
 
 274 
 
LOWELL 
 
 or even contradiction. The rare controversial note in his 
 writings is always superficially perverse and piquant, 
 not fundamentally argumentative. He does not in fact 
 argue, but enounces. He is never either stimulated 
 or embarrassed by "the other side." There was for 
 him in general no "other side," and indeed oftenest 
 in his case there is not, for even when he is most polemic 
 he is fired by those sure convictions attending little else 
 so infallibly as the slaying of the slain. The function 
 is a most important one, since nothing is more undesir 
 able than their resurrection, to which there is always a 
 tendency. But the inclination for it is a didactic and 
 conservative one, quite inconsistent with the exploring 
 instinct of the iconoclast. 
 
 Lowell s "radicalism" in politics, in social matters, 
 on subjects theological, historical and literary, was 
 practically and personally conservative, since it was the 
 established attitude of his sufficing and self-sufficing 
 circle. To be an abolitionist, a "rationalist," a theo 
 retical romanticist, was for him almost a consequence of 
 ancestry, tradition and circumstance. Following a 
 legitimated radical programme is not uncongenial to the 
 whig temperament. Of the extravagances due to the 
 temperamentally radical with which every New Eng- 
 lander in Lowell s youth and early manhood was famil 
 iar, no one has said sharper and saner things than he. 
 He was himself eminently sane and sound. His poise, 
 indeed, is his chief distinction, and it is a great one. He 
 liked whatever was sure and wholesome and eulogized 
 it on all occasions with the zest of the discoverer. He 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 might make a willing concession now and then to the 
 popular demand for the idiosyncratic in the way of per 
 sonal aspect or attire, just as he frolicked and sported 
 with quips and puns in his writing, but otherwise than 
 superficially he was even in his youth a very sedate 
 enfant terrible. The fundamental quality of his mind 
 is as practical and conservative as its lighter moods are 
 playful. It seems to have absolutely no adventurous 
 or interrogative side, and irresponsible as are many of its 
 expressions, they are but the sparkle and ripple on a 
 very staidly flowing current. Even his irresponsibili 
 ties and looseness, his superlatives and sweeping state 
 ments are due to limitation, rather than to enterprise, 
 of thought. One can hardly "place" him in the same 
 environment with Emerson. His passions, too, may be 
 summed up in patriotism, books and nature, in which 
 there is as little that deflects as there is that is dif 
 ferentiating. And probably the residence of a man s 
 real passions in the realm of the abstract is rather a 
 bond than a bar between him and his fellows, even 
 those who reserve that region for their ideal ones alone 
 on the principle, perhaps, that the priest wins more 
 confidence than the practitioner. Add to these vari 
 ous elements fostering intellectual commerce, to this 
 representative turn of mind, a sterling character that 
 gives it body and substance and a remarkable faculty 
 of expression that gives it definition, and one can con 
 ceive no better equipment and instrument for the ad 
 mirable art of telling people on any special occasion, on 
 a high plane and in an elevated, an exquisite or an 
 
 276 
 
LOWELL 
 
 energetic way, as may be required, precisely what they 
 wish to hear. 
 
 Other auxiliary qualities to this end were Lowell s 
 ingrained cleverness and his extraordinary personal 
 charm. Cleverness and personal charm are qualities 
 that are perhaps ominously extremely attractive to 
 contemporary appreciation. Nothing is more envied 
 in the living. Nothing finds prompter interment with 
 their bones. Cleverness cloys too quickly to be an 
 element of abiding satisfaction in their " works." And 
 personal charm is almost inseparable from personal 
 presence. The writers who like Lamb and Thack 
 eray establish it in their writings as a vital and pre 
 servative force, are very few. Lowell was immensely 
 clever. "A Fable for Critics" is a youthful master 
 piece youthful enough in some of its criticism, but 
 an extraordinary jeu d esprit and so individual as to 
 remain, with parts of "The Biglow Papers," his most 
 characteristic, as the "Commemoration Ode" is his 
 most consummate, production. He was always ex 
 traordinarily ready. Whether the occasion were grave 
 or gay, serious or sportive, it never found him at fault. 
 To unveil a monument, or respond to a toast, or conse 
 crate a festival, or cap an epigram, and each in ideal 
 fashion, he was equally prepared. Cleverness was the 
 state in which habitually his faculties dwelt, not a 
 mental exercise or phase. And it found its most con 
 genial expression in pleasantry and playfulness. It 
 was not quite, perhaps, what Schiller had in mind in as 
 serting that " the last perfection of our qualities is when 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 their activity, without ceasing to be sure and earnest, 
 becomes sport." In Lowell, one is tempted rather to 
 say, such was the inveteracy of his cleverness, the last 
 perfection of his qualities was when their activity with 
 out ceasing to be sport became sure and earnest. For 
 his cleverness, though extreme and even at times ex 
 cessive, is never sophisticated, rarely even subtle. It is 
 always frank and generally gay. He began with high 
 spirits and his youthful buoyancy stood by him to the 
 end. His biographers record periods of gloom, even 
 thoughts of suicide, and Mr. Greenslet finds grounds 
 for the belief that he had a "dual nature" in this as 
 in other respects. It is not unlikely. Most people 
 have. But it is difficult to make a mystic out of Lowell. 
 One may as easily fancy St. Francis in Fanueil Hall. 
 He had his seasons of melancholy, but normally and 
 for tragically abundant cause. There is no more the 
 mystic, than there is a morbid, note in his composition. 
 Everything of the kind is instinctively antipathetic to 
 him. Apparently with all his reading he never read, 
 at least sympathetically, the Scriptures of any people. 
 He never cites the Bible. His good sense sufficed to 
 assure him that 
 
 " you ve gut to git up airly 
 Ef you want to take in God," 
 
 and the apocalyptic was superfluous to him. 
 
 At all events, no writer of anything resembling his 
 bookish and scholarly turn ever possessed high spirits 
 in any such degree, as no writer ever so cordially con- 
 
 278 
 
LOWELL 
 
 joined the study and out-of-doors. Among writers 
 of distinction we should have to go, not I think to Mark 
 Twain and Aristophanes (the coupling is Lowell s own), 
 who mix things less, but to Dickens for a parallel to 
 his irruptive and casual gayeties in grave context. 
 Certainly if his high spirits are not marked by the 
 usual exuberance, they sometimes show as unmistakably 
 in whimsicality and extravagance, however exhibited 
 in playful rather than in boisterous guise. They do 
 not lead him astray, but they are constantly taking him 
 aside. He is not their slave, but they are his plaything. 
 When they are constrained and directed to an artistic 
 2nd, as in "A Fable for Critics" or "The Biglow 
 Papers" in the prefaces to which indeed they become 
 sedate enough, even solemn, one may remark without 
 fear of flippancy they serve as excellent stimulus to 
 sustained effort. But when, as is sometimes the case, 
 they are the desultory and yet deliberate accentuation 
 of his gayety, his general enjoue manner, they are less 
 to the purpose. "Nothing," he says rather hardly 
 apropos of Fletcher, "grows mouldy so soon as mere 
 fun, the product of animal spirits." And we should be 
 tempted to call some of Lowell s sallies "mere fun" if 
 the high spirits from which they spring were not rather 
 mental than animal, and if they were not so clearly 
 stamped with his indisputable cleverness. They may 
 be strained, of inappropriate tone, of doubtful taste, 
 distracting rather than contributory or even decorative; 
 there is none, it would be safe to wager, that is not truly 
 however studiedly clever, though sometimes, it is true, 
 
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 what one feels impelled to call demonstrably so. But 
 cleverness is largely a matter of expression, and expres 
 sion is but one element of style, which though no doubt 
 the great preservative of thought is in turn reciprocally 
 dependent upon it for its own endurance and vitality. 
 Take for example this delightful sentence: "In what 
 may be given me to say I shall be obliged to trust chiefly 
 to a memory which at my time of life is gradually becom 
 ing one of her own reminiscences, and is forced to com 
 pound as best she may with her inexorable creditor, 
 Oblivion." That is Lowell s cleverness at its best, clev 
 erness with the addition of poetic and personal charm. 
 But if one has only ten pages for an appreciation of 
 Coleridge, it may be said to sacrifice, so far as it goes, 
 the permanent to the occasional note. What gives 
 the address value is the excellent characterization of 
 Coleridge s picturesqueness, and then, too, it gains, I 
 think, from the necessity of making it rapid "generali 
 zation," as Lowell calls it, pertinent to the unveiling 
 of a bust in Westminster. Take on the other hand the 
 rather elaborate essay by no means "occasionally" 
 evoked on the now forgotten poet Percival, which leans 
 entirely for support and even countenance on the es 
 sayist s cleverness. Among us when Percival wrote, 
 he says, "to write a hundred blank verses was to be 
 immortal, till somebody else wrote a hundred and fifty 
 blanker ones. . . . Unhappily Percival took it all 
 quite seriously. There was no praise too ample for the 
 easy elasticity of his swallow," etc. Of cleverness of 
 this sort, in which Lowell abounds, the interest evapo- 
 
 280 
 
LOWELL 
 
 rates with the outwearing of the subject if not with the 
 occasion itself. 
 
 It was, however, a constituent probably rather than 
 merely an ally of his great personal charm, which is 
 universally attested. Mr. Howells has borne affection 
 ate as well as discriminating testimony to it, and Mr. 
 James s essay on him is eloquent witness to its power 
 to color and even gild the appreciation of a critical 
 faculty far otherwise penetrating than Lowell s own. 
 To have inspired this remarkable portrait the sitter must 
 have been richly endowed with qualities that the reader, 
 familiar only with his writings, can only infer. Evi 
 dently he was the best of company and in the best of com 
 pany. His sincerity and dignity of character, his accom 
 plished scholarship, his frankness and optimism, his 
 good sense and appreciation, his wit and extraordinary 
 powers of expression, must have made intimacy with 
 him ideal and mere acquaintance a delight. He was 
 literally but not overpoweringly a brilliant conversa 
 tionalist, and if he "did most of the talking," others- 
 Thackeray, Longfellow, Clough, and Edmund Quincy 
 on one recorded occasion were more than content to 
 listen. One certainly argues a considerable egoism from 
 his writings, but no one seems ever to have minded or 
 even marked it in his talk, and even in his books it never 
 excludes the most altruistic admirations. He was 
 geniality itself, and though undoubtedly what used to 
 be called a Brahmin at least by the Pariahs of the 
 period his sympathies were undoubtedly, in a human 
 if not in an intellectual sense, catholic and active. His 
 
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 circle, however, was not large and those outside it 
 could more easily perceive, perhaps, than those within 
 it, that what, together with his cleverness, constituted 
 for these latter an essential part of his personal charm 
 was his clearly defined possession of the temperament 
 of the dilettante. Mr. James states the fact, with 
 extraordinary searchingness, though with, of course, 
 the slightly august tone of the memorial "tribute." He 
 regards his career "as in the last analysis a tribute to 
 the dominion of style. This is the idea," he continues, 
 " that to my sense his name most promptly evokes. He 
 carried style the style of literature into regions in 
 which we rarely look for it : into politics, of all places in 
 the world, into diplomacy, into stammering, civic din 
 ners, and ponderous anniversaries, into letters and notes 
 and telegrams, into every turn of the hour absolutely 
 into conversation, where indeed it freely disguised itself 
 as intensely colloquial wit." One could not better 
 describe the activities of the true dilettante tempera 
 ment. 
 
 Its conjunction in Lowell with his incontestable 
 and even salient Americanism, is decidedly piquant. 
 There is not an exotic tinge in his nature, and if he is 
 not representatively national in the sense in which he 
 himself called Lincoln "new birth of our new soil, the 
 first American," it is not because in being even more 
 sectional he is less native. Yet one would say off-hand 
 that the American genius was incompatible with the 
 dilettante temperament. But really Lowell was pre 
 cisely the product reflection would predicate of its 
 
 282 
 
LOWELL 
 
 American modification. The dilettante is not a type 
 especially distinguished by originality, it is true, and 
 ordinarily originality is an essential and predominant 
 element of what we think we are, of what more opti 
 mistically perhaps than discriminatingly we mean in 
 calling anything characteristically American. But it 
 is in the solution of new problems that our very striking 
 originality is mainly developed. Like the "new 
 duties" taught, in Lowell s phrase, by "new occasions," 
 it is the product of necessity and opportunity, prob 
 ably, rather than due to the climate or the predilection 
 of Providence. We have other characteristics that we 
 share with no other people, but originality is not one of 
 them; our invention has the same mother. It is not 
 remarkable, therefore, except superficially, that Lowell 
 should have been so genuine an American and so gen 
 uinely a dilettante. But we may say that the paradox 
 has the interest of novelty and that, though no more 
 originality than the dilettante type calls for is either 
 usually to be expected in the field of letters of the 
 American genius, or to be found in Lowell, he was a 
 dilettante of an original type in being so thoroughly 
 American. He had the disinterested delight in the de 
 lectable that characterizes the dilettante as distinguished 
 from the artist, to whom the delectable is material. His 
 singularity as a dilettante, not as an American con 
 sists in his being attracted by the elementary quite as 
 much as by the differentiated. His milieu which was 
 really, in the large sense, the lack of any imposed this 
 upon him to a certain extent, of course. In such a society 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 as ours, without variety of type and without background, 
 without the many elements that Mr. James has scrupu 
 lously catalogued in his life of Hawthorne, the role of 
 the dilettante can only be sincerely played and sin 
 cerity was one of Lowell s cardinal qualities by a 
 nature in which confidence, eagerness, ardor, gener 
 osity, and optimism replace the sentimental, sensitive, 
 and fastidious instincts, the divining and discriminating 
 faculties that are less disposed to see sermons in stones 
 and good in everything than to select and exclude. The 
 fact that he carried " style" into some of the regions 
 enumerated by Mr. James in some of which certainly 
 his " style" savored more of the amateur than of the 
 connoisseur both denotes and defines his tempera 
 ment, shows at once its inveteracy and its limitations. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Of his own particular environment, to which he was 
 profoundly attached and in which he throve, he could 
 nevertheless take a properly objective view. Whatever 
 the limitations of his temperament, his mind, which was 
 alertness itself, instantly apprehended the suggestions 
 of culture, though his own culture, which was eminent, 
 was as idiosyncratic quite as idiosyncratic as his 
 personality. "How narrow Boston was!" he exclaims. 
 "How scant a pasture it offered to the imagination." 
 He speaks of Allston, "who perished slowly of inani 
 tion over yonder in Cambridgeport," and adds: "That 
 unfinished Belshazzar of his was a bitter sarcasm on 
 
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LOWELL 
 
 our self-conceit. Among us it was unfinishable." The 
 implication of the italicized " us " is candid, courageous, 
 and correct. Lowell himself never experienced any 
 such difficulty. His work could be produced and fin 
 ished to its last potential perfection in this same atmos 
 phere, in which he found something intimately conge 
 nial. He even took it with him on his travels, and was, 
 even in Europe, surrounded with the Massachusetts 
 aura. He had his books and he had his public. It 
 is probable that he was conscious of no other needs. 
 His acquisitiveness was among the most preponderant 
 of his mental traits, but books satisfied its cravings 
 which does not seem so singular when we remember 
 his enormous consumption of them. They and the 
 society of Cambridge and Boston, in which "Allston 
 perished slowly of inanition," sufficed to evoke and 
 polish in him those qualities that make the perfect man 
 of the world; so that when he went officially to Spain 
 and England he was as much at home in a cosmopoli 
 tan society as he was in Cambridge. His own extreme 
 personal charm and innate dignity counted largely, of 
 course, in the distinguished impression he made abroad. 
 But, every allowance made for these, it is particu 
 larly and to his countrymen it must remain satisfac 
 torily notable that he should have had such a striking 
 European success with such an exclusively American 
 equipment. 
 
 Books, apparently, can accomplish a great deal; 
 books in sufficient quantity, the best books. And even 
 books that come more or less strictly under the head of 
 
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 belles-lettres. For if Lowell had any other equipment as 
 a man of letters than belles-lettres, taken in the wider 
 extension of the term, the fact does not appear in his 
 writings. Science, theology, art, philosophy, history, 
 apparently interested him in a very subsidiary degree. 
 Never was such conspicuous culture so exclusively 
 belletristic. Mr. James says: " He knew his Paris as he 
 knew all his subjects. The history of a thing was what 
 he first saw in it." If so, they never passed beyond the 
 states of seeing and knowing into feeling; and his 
 "subjects * were altogether literary "things." Neither 
 his knowledge of Paris nor his expertness in Old French 
 gave him any independent appreciation of France or 
 things French, at any rate, with reference to which he 
 always utters the traditional British commonplaces. 
 Tennyson hardly phrased them in more sharply stereo 
 typed smugness. The great facts of French history are 
 still for him the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the 
 atrocities of the Revolution. "He should have fought 
 with Nelson," as Arnold remarked of some fanatic an 
 Englishman, however. And of any special acquaint 
 ance with English history there is insufficient trace in his 
 books to account for Mr. James s further statement: 
 "He had studied English history for forty years in the 
 texts, and at last [on becoming minister to England] he 
 could study it in the pieces themselves, could handle 
 and verify the relics." The "texts" Mr. James has 
 in mind are perhaps literary texts. In other words, 
 Lowell had studied English literature; he was now to 
 "check" it by a stud" of English life. Possibly so 
 
 286 
 
LOWELL 
 
 omnivorous and indefatigable a reader had read Free 
 man and Stubbs and Gardiner as well as Macaulay and 
 Froude, Hume and Green. But certainly neither 
 English history nor Continental, ancient, mediaeval, 
 nor modern, deeply interested him except from an 
 extension of the belletristic point of view. And even 
 from this point of view, of course, far less than it did 
 Macaulay, Carlyle, or Arnold, not to speak of such 
 writers as Taine, Scherer, and Sainte-Beuve, of the value 
 of whose " detective method" in criticism, indeed, he 
 expresses doubts. Less even, one may surely say, than 
 Thackeray. For, in spite of his special studies of 
 early New England, if there is a passage in his works 
 resembling the impressive and illuminating picture of 
 Europe in the early eighteenth century in the lecture 
 on George I, beginning with " The landscape is awful " 
 I have not remarked it. 
 
 Mr. James speaks of him as " steeped in history and 
 literature" and "redolent, intellectually speaking," of 
 Italy and Spain. But what he means appears in his 
 next sentence: "He had lived in long intimacy with 
 Dante and Cervantes and Calderon." That is to say, 
 he was steeped not in history and literature, but in 
 literary history and literature nowadays, at all events, 
 an unsatisfactory infusion for producing the best of even 
 literary effects. He relied, indeed, even for the illumina 
 tion of literature not so much on life as on linguistics, 
 and the literary and linguistic pages of history, which is 
 life recorded, monopolized his attention. "As Dante 
 tells us," he says, "St. Francis took poverty for his 
 
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 bride." He does indeed. So does Francis himself. 
 So for that matter does Giotto. It is, in fact, a cir 
 cumstance decidedly not divulged by Dante. Such a 
 phrase in itself implicitly glosses Mr. James s assertion 
 that Lowell was "steeped in history." But his own 
 words are explicit. In one of his political essays there 
 are several pages of express depreciation of the value of 
 history much in the vein of Colonel Esmond s senti 
 mentally sceptical old age, except in being more sys 
 tematic. In his essay on Dante he says that "one al 
 most gets to feel as if the chief value of contemporary 
 Italian history had been to furnish the Divine Comedy* 
 with explanatory foot-notes." Indeed he quite "gets 
 to feel" so when the momentum of hero-worship carries 
 him on to the statement: "For Italy, Dante is the 
 thirteenth century." One thinks of what, besides, the 
 thirteenth century the century of Frederic II, and 
 Innocent III, and Giotto, and St. Francis really was 
 for Italy, "the most interesting," as it has been called, 
 in the history of Christianity after its primitive age, 
 "more interesting than even the century of the Reforma 
 tion"; and owing not to Dante but to Francis. Else 
 where, too, Lowell speaks of Dante as having been 
 "produced" by the fourteenth century. In strict 
 accuracy, of course, he would have done better to have 
 had the thirteenth produce him and let him be for 
 Italy the fourteenth. And nothing could be more 
 definite than Lowell s association of history with the 
 Dismal Science in his admirable and elevated address 
 on the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Harvard 
 
 288 
 
LOWELL 
 
 College. "Give," he says, "give to History, give to 
 Political Economy that ample verge the times demand, 
 but with no detriment to those liberal Arts which have 
 formed open-minded men and good citizens in the past, 
 nor have lost the skill to form them." 
 
 As a philosophia ultima of literary phenomena, that 
 popularly associated with Taine and Spencer is perhaps 
 discredited in so far as genius escapes its explanations. 
 And it is at once a mark of distinction and of naivete 
 in Lowell that, in criticism, he occupied himself mainly 
 with genius. As a subject, one may say in racy cur 
 rent phrase of which he was fond, the best was good 
 enough for him. But however it be with the explana 
 tion, for the illumination, the appreciation, of genius the 
 historical method is invaluable. Between genius thus 
 illuminated and genius just merely accepted as an un- 
 differentiated prodigy, there is a prodigious difference 
 in mere appreciation. Genius itself, in fact, has come 
 to be looked at a little more narrowly than heretofore. 
 There is commonly felt, to begin with, that there is less 
 of it. I remember Mr. Winslow Homer, who certainly 
 should know, once remarking : " Genius is so rare there 
 is no use talking about it." Lowell was particularly 
 fond of talking about it, and rehearsing the accepted 
 views about its essential difference from talent. Cer 
 tainly such a difference exists and we shall never know 
 what precisely it is. But the Germans may be relied 
 upon never to let us forget that its character is mystic. 
 And a writer like Lowell, in whose temperament there 
 is so little mysticism, becomes conventional and super- 
 
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 ficial when he presses the matter no further than he 
 does. His hearty and insistent adoration of Shake 
 speare, at every opportunity of mentioning whose name 
 that he encounters or can contrive he performs a little 
 act of genial genuflexion, ends by fatiguing us. He has 
 certainly said some very interesting things, in detail, 
 about him, without, however, fixing them very securely 
 in one s memory, but his admiration takes on, finally, 
 an aspect of adulation. One recalls Voltaire s ex 
 clamation of a greater even than Shakespeare: "I 
 pray you never let me hear that man s name again!" 
 It is always genuine, but Lowell had a "genius" for 
 being perfunctory and genuine at the same time such 
 was his zest for the sure and sound. It is true that 
 "others abide our question" and Shakespeare does not, 
 but other than lecture-room purposes do not demand 
 constant iteration of what is best condensed in a sonnet. 
 In all Lowell s references to or formal consideration of 
 Shakespeare nothing so illuminating is to be found as 
 Arnold s: "There is but one name for such writing as 
 that [citing a couple of lines] if Shakespeare had signed 
 it a thousand times it is detestable. And it is too fre 
 quent in Shakespeare." Or his statement: "He is the 
 richest, the most wonderful, the most powerful, the 
 most delightful of poets : he is not altogether, nor even 
 eminently, an artist." Even Carlyle s humorous defini 
 tion of "superiority of intellect" as "on the whole" 
 Shakespeare s "distinguishing characteristic" gets us 
 nearer a satisfactory answer of "our question" than 
 repeated obeisances to his "genius." 
 
 290 
 
LOWELL 
 
 It is extraordinary at first to an Anglo-Saxon reader 
 to note how little reference to genius there is in French 
 criticism, how exclusively a writer s "talent" is con 
 sidered in it. And extraordinary, a little later per 
 haps, to observe how satisfactorily " talent" answers 
 the purpose in most cases. Undoubtedly this is due 
 to the presence in the French critic s mind of the penum 
 bra as well as the shadow of his subject, of the life as 
 well as the books of a people or a period, of circum 
 stances as well as essence, and in the consideration 
 of the classic, of such themes as, so greatly to his credit, 
 Lowell s were of history as well as literature, of trans 
 actions as well as texts. Against a visualized background 
 of time and space, any one figure seems less exceptional 
 and inexplicable than genius is by definition required 
 to be; more familiarity with their history, for example, 
 would have prevented Lowell from asserting that "the 
 genius of Motley has revealed to us " the distinction of 
 the Dutch. But apparently he never read any French 
 to much purpose, except Old French, and this but con 
 firmed him in his concentration upon linguistics. For 
 the great movements, migrations, vicissitudes of the 
 march of mankind its transformations, enterprises, 
 and achievements the grandiose drama of war and 
 peace, the rise and fall of tyranny and freedom, faith 
 and philosophy, the birth, development, and decay of 
 institutions social, political, and religious the spec 
 tacle foreshortened in time, in a word, of general human 
 activity caught and fixed in the multifariously embroid 
 ered web of history, he cared less, to judge from its 
 
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 reflection and echo in his works, than any other writer 
 of his indisputably high rank that one could readily 
 name. The service rendered criticism by this its 
 connotation and collateral re-enforcement is, as I have 
 said, incontestable. The work of every important 
 modern critic relies on it to an extent that gives its 
 absence in Lowell a slightly old-fashioned air for works 
 on so high a plane of scholarship and intelligence. His 
 essays, in a word, are not historically enriched nor the 
 product of a mind thus enriched. They have a very 
 particular, a very bookish, and in consequence a rather 
 restricted quality, for all their humanity, their elevated 
 bonhomie and unaffected cordiality. 
 
 The matter is not one of erudition at all, but of culture. 
 Lowell s erudition was great even conspicuous, being, 
 though always assimilated, always comfortably if not 
 complacently displayed. Mr. Greenslet, his latest biog 
 rapher, whose Life is, critically, a work of altogether 
 unusual distinction, asserts that his scholarship was 
 not up to current standards. One understands what 
 is meant, but is a little impatient at having this sense 
 of the term scholarship taken for granted. Lovers of 
 literature would gladly have it remain esoteric a little 
 longer, and instinctively shrink from the time when 
 "we shall all go into the drab." One would gladly 
 postpone yet for a brief season the era of specialism, 
 and views with misgiving the no doubt inevitable in 
 vasion of barbarian hordes from without the confines 
 of the empire of letters. The province of history has 
 already been overrun and the expert is established within 
 
 292 
 
LOWELL 
 
 its stronghold, haughtier than Alaric or Attila in his 
 contempt for the superficialities and shallownesses pow 
 erless to resist him. Belles-lettres may, however, hold 
 out a little longer before it is transformed into scientific 
 feudalism or declines in Byzantine decadence. The 
 scholar should be an authority upon, as well as accom 
 plished in his subject. Inspiration by its spirit will not 
 atone for ignorance of its letter. True; alas! there is 
 no possibility of robbing an ideal of so reasonable a re 
 quirement. But there are practical difficulties. Por- 
 son on his deathbed sighed ruefully that he should have 
 confined himself to the dative case. Had he done so, 
 however, scholarship would have lost something. 
 Mere count of heads shows that there are not enough 
 Persons to go around when the number of dative case 
 equivalents is considered. Furthermore, he never could 
 have learned much about the dative case itself by con 
 fining himself to it. No man, says Arnold, knows even 
 his Bible who knows only it. And Professor James 
 sets it down as "a common platitude " that "a complete 
 acquaintance with anything, however small, would re 
 quire a knowledge of the entire universe " " that tempt 
 ing range of relevancies," as George Eliot calls it. But 
 even a knowledge of the entire universe would not ob 
 viate the greater obstacle in the path to literary dis 
 tinction of the expert in literature. He would still 
 need what Bacon prescribes for the portraitist who 
 would enhance nature "a kind of felicity," namely. 
 Bentley s scholarship will hardly be impugned, though 
 he might perhaps judiciously have restricted its range. 
 
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 But even had he done so, no amount of concentration 
 could have prevented the perpetration of his revised 
 text of " Paradise Lost" a veritable pharos erected 
 on the rocks of learning to warn the voyaging expert 
 through yet "undiscovered deeps of time." 
 
 Lowell certainly did not resemble the Casaubons of 
 former, or their brisk analogues of present, times. No 
 one would have been readier than he to disclaim expert 
 pretensions; quite destitute of deference as a coloring 
 characteristic of his nature, such an attitude as he as 
 sumes toward Professor Child, for example, about 
 Chaucer, is witness enough of this. His temper was 
 as little authoritative as it was conspicuously com 
 placent. But in Old French, as to a certain extent in 
 linguistics more generally, he was an authority; and 
 though quicquid agunt homines (within his own field) 
 interested him too vivaciously to permit him to pursue 
 to its documentary fastnesses other game that he never 
 theless delighted to hunt, it is misleading to lay any 
 stress on the deficiencies of his scholarship or to im 
 peach the genuineness of his truly scholarly tastes. He 
 was at least a scholar in the tested and traditional sense. 
 That his "results" were not more important from the 
 standpoint of the specialist does not make it the less 
 erroneous to obscure his scholarship, which was re 
 markable, by emphasizing his culture, which in certain 
 respects was restricted. He was a distinguished ex 
 ample of what he himself calls " liberal scholarship" 
 a term with as definite and laudable a meaning as that 
 of the liberal arts. His learning was great and varied. 
 
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LOWELL 
 
 His reading was enormous. He read as Chinese candi 
 dates read their classics and commentaries all his life 
 long, usually for many hours at a stretch, often for more 
 than the day-laborer toils. And he read because he 
 liked to not, as a rule, one guesses, as specific prepara 
 tion for work of his own. When he did it did not always 
 bring him good luck. He says that he expressly read 
 over again, seriatim, all of Thoreau s works before 
 writing of him, and certainly he did so to small purpose. 
 As a rule, we may be sure, he read to satisfy his curiosity 
 the curiosity of the scholar as well as that of the dilet 
 tante. However desultory, too, his reading may ap 
 pear to pedantry, it was, owing to his curiosity, thor 
 oughgoing if not systematic. He was as persistent, as 
 patient, in it as is possible only to a man who is follow 
 ing his bent. There is no other explanation of ten con 
 secutive hours devoted to "Barbour s Brus"! His 
 energy, his high spirits, his debonair possession of a 
 reasonably thick integument to shield his nerves and 
 allay irritability, all contributed to the inveteracy of 
 his favorite pursuit. He read everything except the 
 inept and negligible; and everything, ancient and 
 modern, in its own tongue. Dulness itself had no ter 
 rors for him. He read Gower as well as Chaucer, Joel 
 Barlow as well as Homer. He delighted as much in 
 his "Library of Old Authors" a formidable array! 
 as in the less recondite and better-remembered books 
 that filled his ample shelves. Not a scholar! Le moyen, 
 as the French say, for such a tremendous bookman not 
 to be. 
 
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 But the truth is that Lowell s eminently scholarly 
 tastes were wholly directed by his temperamental pre 
 dilections, and he followed these, I think, with an en 
 thusiastic docility that limited his culture to a degree 
 unfortunate for the importance and endurance of much 
 of his work in prose. His preferences despotically 
 dictated his preoccupation, which was rather exclusively 
 with linguistics, taking the term of course in its widest ex 
 tension. "His linguistic sense," Mr. James says truly, 
 " is perhaps the thing his reputation may best be trusted 
 to rest upon." And he accounts for this admirably in 
 saying further, "He had no experimental sympathies 
 and no part of him was traitor to the rest," and that 
 "this temper drove the principle of subtlety in his in 
 telligence ... to take refuge in one particular . . . 
 corner," linguistics, namely. One could not more deli 
 cately suggest limitations or better indicate the quality 
 of mind of the true dilettante innocent of the artist s 
 constructional purpose, though the dilettante in thor 
 oughly American disguise robust, genial, confident, and 
 masculine, without "experimental sympathies." 
 
 To his lack of experimental sympathies, too, must be 
 ascribed his apparent insensitiveness to the plastic arts. 
 Of course I do not mean that he was blind to their 
 beauty, feeling sure as I do that the poetic strain is the 
 dominant one in his equipment. But he did not take 
 them in the least seriously. There is extraordinarily 
 little reference to them in his works, which fact, how 
 ever, is less indicative than the conjoined freedom and 
 fatuity of such reference as there is. It did not occur 
 
 296 
 
LOWELL 
 
 to him, probably, that they have a point of view of their 
 own. He did not set them off in his mind from other 
 intellectual pursuits and appreciate their self-justifi 
 cation as indeed how should he, expanding in an 
 environment that stifled Allston, resthetically modified 
 only by an occasional reading of Ruskin, who never 
 appreciated this very keenly himself ? The great artists 
 probably did not figure in his selected list of great 
 men, which besides was further contracted to include 
 mainly the poets the poets and Abraham Lincoln, one 
 might say. He is not even at the pains to keep their 
 nationality in mind and in "On a Certain ,Conde- 
 scension in Foreigners" makes Holbein and Rubens 
 fellow-countrymen of Rembrandt. Ravenna for him is 
 merely the site of Dante s tomb, which, he says, "is 
 now the chief magnet which draws foreigners and their 
 gold" thither Ravenna being actually, of course, for 
 art and measurably for history, what Carlyle called 
 Gibbon, "that splendid bridge between the Old World 
 and the New," and Dante s tomb, 
 
 "A little cupola, more neat than solemn," 
 
 being for the generally cultivated, if not for the ex 
 clusively belletristic, gold-bearing foreigner, the least 
 of her monuments. He has misgivings about Michael 
 Angelo perhaps, as he says, "bitten with the Anglo- 
 Saxon gadfly that drives us all to disenchant artifice," 
 perhaps because in a strange land it behooves one 
 to be cautious about appearances. "Michael Angelo 
 seems to me," he writes, "in his angry reaction 
 
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 against sentimental beauty to have mistaken bulk and 
 brawn for the antithesis of feebleness. He is the 
 apostle of the exaggerated, the Victor Hugo of paint 
 ing and sculpture." (Encore, is it necessary to paren 
 thesize his view of Victor Hugo!) "I have a feeling," 
 he continues, abandoned altogether by what Mr. James 
 calls "the principle of subtlety in his intelligence/ 
 "I have a feeling that rivalry was a more powerful 
 motive with him than love of Art, that he had the 
 conscious intention to be original, which seldom leads 
 to anything better than being extravagant. The show 
 of muscle proves strength not power." But he does 
 not wish to be "niggardly toward one in whom you can 
 not help feeling there was so vast a possibility." The 
 whole series of observations illustrates his independ 
 ence certainly, and perhaps should modify one s im 
 pression of his lack of originality. Originality, at any 
 rate, cannot be denied to some architectural remarks 
 further on in "A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic." "I 
 doubt about domes," he observes, with a tentativeness 
 charming in Lowell. "In Rome they are so much 
 the fashion that I felt that they were the goitre of archi 
 tecture. Generally they look heavy. Those on St. 
 Mark s in Venice are the only light ones I saw, and 
 they look almost airy, like tents puffed out with wind. 
 I suppose one must be satisfied with the interior effect, 
 which is certainly noble in St. Peter s. But for impres- 
 siveness both within and without there is nothing like 
 a Gothic cathedral for me, nothing that crowns a city 
 so nobly, or makes such an island of twilight silence in 
 
 298 
 
LOWELL 
 
 the midst of its noonday clamors." The poet s touch 
 recalls us to Lowell again, and him to a more congenial 
 subject. We are as relieved as our guide at the next 
 sentence: "Now as to what. one sees in the streets, the 
 beggars are/ etc., etc. We are back on firm ground 
 once more, and our doubts about Michael Angelo and 
 about "domes" become as insubstantial and "airy" as 
 those of San Marco or their ancestral Turcoman 
 kibitkas. 
 
 IV 
 
 It is not impertinent to regret the restrictedness of 
 culture in the critic s equipment that is implied in 
 neglect of such a splendid and such an illuminating 
 expression of the genius and mind of man as the plastic 
 arts constitute. It is regrettable in the case of Arnold, 
 of English critics generally. It is regrettable in the 
 case of Sainte-Beuve; one may resent the peevishness 
 of the Goncourts or even sympathize with Champ- 
 fleury s designation of them as "ces cocodettes de la lit- 
 terature" and all the more deplore the ground there 
 was for their impatience with the eminent literary 
 critic s artistic deficiencies and his ignorance of them. 
 Without their knowledge of and devotion to the plastic 
 arts the works of not merely such critics as Pater and 
 Symonds, but even Taine even Goethe himself would 
 have far less value. More than any other critic of his 
 eminence Lowell would have profited by an acquaintance 
 with them. An acquaintance with them would have 
 broadened his view in detail, at all events of his 
 
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 special and particular field of consideration, of belles- 
 lettres; and it would perhaps have given his treatment 
 of it the element that conspicuously it lacks, the ele 
 ment of construction and presentation. Arnold, Sainte- 
 Beuve, needed it far less as well as possessing it far 
 more. They were not exclusively concerned with 
 belles-lettres. And they were, as Lowell certainly was 
 not, saturated with history. Accordingly, when we 
 come to consider Lowell as a critic we may almost de 
 duce the detail of his criticism from his personality 
 and his equipment. As I have said, he had a solid and 
 independent character, with a turn of mind representa 
 tively sound and conservative rather than markedly 
 individual, and a temperament disinterestedly enthusi 
 astic without being sensitively discriminating or specu 
 lative. And his equipment, that is to say, his culture, 
 was an extraordinarily bookish one, and, though in this 
 sense thorough and scholarly, exclusively literary and, 
 for an exclusively literary culture, singularly independ 
 ent of the two great allies and supports of literary 
 culture history and aesthetics. It is evident before 
 hand that Chatterton will escape him, that Wordsworth 
 will bore him, that Pope will displease and Byron dis 
 gust him, that he will delight in Gray and Dryden, 
 and that he will never tire of singing the praises of 
 the indisputably great, such as Shakespeare and Dante, 
 Chaucer, Spenser, Calderon, and Cervantes. It is evi 
 dent, too, that his critical work will be at its best in 
 appreciation, that it will excel more in finding new 
 beauties in the actual than in discovering new require- 
 
 300 
 
LOWELL 
 
 merits in the ideal, that it will consider personalities 
 as fixed and final, and not in their origin, tendencies, or 
 relations, that while being perfectly candid and genuine 
 it will be tinctured with that order of partisanship which 
 proceeds from dwelling on the justice of its feelings 
 rather than on the truth of its ideas, that it will be de 
 void of any defined philosophic drift or suggestiveness, 
 and that its felicities will be felicities of detail rather 
 than of general view. 
 
 His criticism clearly grew out of his reading habit, 
 not out of his reflective tendencies. He read pencil in 
 hand, and as he read he annotated. His criticism is 
 therefore largely comment, and, its original destina 
 tion being often the lecture-room, its tone is largely 
 conversational. He collected and sifted his marginalia, 
 expanded them, wrote context (multifarious and spir 
 ited) for them, supplied them with introductions (ex 
 tremely artificial in general), and presented them to the 
 public, having first, in many instances, presented them 
 to his pupils. They have thus an intimate and familiar 
 quality and suggest the lecture-room, or at most the 
 lyceum, more vividly than the forum or the library. 
 They are on a high plane, the high plane on which 
 habitually Lowell lived and thought, but their glance 
 is de haul en bos, and such traits as unexplained allusions 
 and untranslated quotations and recondite references 
 a kind of fatras of bookish reticulation with which they 
 are overspread do not disguise a certain complacence 
 not wholly foreign to genial condescension. Then there 
 are the jokes, the puns, the witticisms generally of a 
 
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 high order and, though sometimes "naked to laughter" 
 rather than provocative of it in the reader, very compre 
 hensibly the Attic salt of the class-room. What could 
 be wittier or more incisive than, speaking of "the aver 
 age Briton" in America, "not a Bull of them all but he 
 is persuaded he bears Europe on his back"? On the 
 other hand, such a title for such a grave political es 
 say as "The Pickens-and-Stealin s Administration" 
 amuses the reader distant in time and place and spirit 
 less, probably, than the undergraduate under the 
 personal charm of the author presupposes, in fact, a 
 sympathetic relation. Similarly the reference in the 
 "Thoreau" to the "maggots" of which New England 
 brains were full in the 40 s and which "must at times 
 have found pitiably short commons." And a score, a 
 hundred, others easily cited. Quite so, one imagines, 
 or rather we know, he must have lectured to his students, 
 of whom it is surprising and discreditable to university 
 youth that he had so few. It is less surprising, how 
 ever, that his readers at the present time should not 
 be more numerous. His essays are criticism made easy 
 for the critic, that is to say, the learned and book- 
 loving critic, and as correspondingly hard for the reader 
 as Sheridan declared all easy writing to be. The 
 reader is at a disadvantage. He can only envy the ex 
 perience Mr. James records in describing how he "on 
 dusky winter afternoons escaped with irresponsible zeal 
 into the glow of Mr. Lowell s learned lamp-light, the 
 particular incidents of which in the small, still lecture- 
 room, and the illumination of his head and hands, I re- 
 
 302 
 
LOWELL 
 
 call," he says, " with extreme vividness. " The illumina 
 tion of the printed page is our sole resource. And with 
 this, as I have intimated, I do not think quite sufficient 
 pains have been taken to fit it for going out into the 
 world alone, as it were, and taking its place in the com 
 pany it really belongs in. 
 
 To begin with, the critical essays are distinctly art 
 less in both the literal and the derived sense of the 
 word. And in the essay, as elsewhere, art is indis 
 pensable to real effectiveness and permanent interest. 
 It is surely not the one form of literary expression that 
 is exempt from this necessity. A critical essay is not 
 a cairn of comment, but an organic composition. An 
 organism is a whole of which the parts are mutually 
 dependent and each essential to the whole. An ar 
 tistic organism is one whose structure is expressive 
 rather than expressed its means answerable to analy 
 sis, its effect sensible in aspect. An essay of Lowell s 
 has this quality no more than one of Emerson s has. 
 It is not a quality that either of them sought. It is 
 a quality, indeed, probably without special appeal to 
 either the professor or the prophet, and Lowell was a 
 little of a prophet just as Emerson has something of 
 the professor. Neither is actuated by the motive of the 
 artist, the desire to please. This desire is as much that 
 of the artist in criticism as it is that of the designer 
 of a cathedral. It is because rhetoric is an art that 
 Aristotle defined its end as not conviction but persua 
 sion. Lowell never tried to persuade any one in his life, 
 his strong strain of didacticism showing itself rather in 
 
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 confirming the accepted than in commending the over 
 looked. The "Biglow Papers" themselves do not 
 proselytize, but merely pronounce. And it probably 
 comes about quite naturally, quite normally, therefore 
 apart from its desultory class-room origin in many 
 instances that whatever else a critical essay by him 
 may be, however penetrating, instructive, valuable for 
 admonition, reproof, or enlightenment, it is certainly 
 not in any satisfactory sense an artistic performance. 
 Consequently his criticism has less currency, I think, 
 than its substance deserves. You have an active, even 
 a vivid sense that he knows what he is talking about, but 
 you are less considerably less stirred by what he says. 
 One receives impressions from it, which he remembers 
 or not, as it may happen, but they are not central or 
 complete impressions. They are not informed by an 
 idea of the subject, but are rather of points of detail, 
 often so casual as to have almost an obiter effect. 
 
 It is easy to seem pedantic in insisting on organic 
 quality as an essential of effective and agreeable com 
 position of any kind, and so on. To do so is merely 
 to rehearse a commonplace of elementary rhetoric. Of 
 course, a literal exemplification of the principle would, 
 if on a scale of any size larger than that of a sonnet or 
 triolet, say incur imminent risk of becoming an ex 
 tremely wooden affair. A writer who should undertake 
 to make a composition impeccably organic must either 
 attempt a very insignificant composition or achieve a 
 mosaic rather than the living result that precisely, in 
 art as in nature, an organism is and a mosaic is not. 
 
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 But to paraphrase the ethical ideal of the first great 
 literary critic, there is reason in all things. As a matter 
 of fact there is only one way, probably, of attaining this 
 result of unity in any various work of art, and that is 
 to keep the ensemble in mind. Now to do this one 
 must first have in mind an ensemble. The literary or 
 other artist is no freer from this necessity than the sculp 
 tor, to whom it is almost a physical impossibility suc 
 cessfully to model a detail of anything in the round 
 without constant "reference to the profile." Some 
 central conception is similarly necessary for the suc 
 cessful conduct of any composition. If it is an essay on 
 Rousseau or Keats or Dante a full-length portrait, 
 a half-length, or a head any feature or phase of his pro 
 ductions, his place in literature, his influence on man 
 kind, or whatever, or all these together a necessary pre 
 liminary will be the establishment of some general idea 
 of the subject. The essay will be the expression in 
 detail of this conception in proportion to its com 
 plexity the elaborate expression of it. Reading and 
 general undirected reflection serve merely as agencies 
 formative of the conception itself. This is the undoubted 
 process of all the great critics, however various their 
 tendencies, points of view, and technical expression. 
 Whatever may be said for the superiority of the much- 
 vaunted historical method over the intuitive must be 
 based on the superiority of induction in forming this 
 central conception, and cannot apply to the evolution 
 of the detail, which must inexorably be deduced or the 
 practical result is heterogeneity. Arnold s reply to 
 
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 Scherer s contention that "out of the writer s character 
 and the study of his age there spontaneously issues the 
 right understanding of his work," namely, "in a mind 
 qualified in a certain way it will not in all minds," is 
 unimpeachable. To be qualified to express energeti 
 cally and effectively any understanding at all of a writ 
 er s work, however, whether correct or not, involves the 
 preliminary synthesis of a general conception. That 
 at least is an artistic necessity involved, as a matter of 
 fact, in the laws of thought, if one cared to go into that. 
 To say that Lowell s criticism lacks this initial cen 
 tral conception would be to say that it is written at 
 random. But, indeed, it often has precisely the ap 
 pearance of being written at random, and precisely be 
 cause his central conception is vague. Erasmus s 
 witty and apt complaint that " every definition is a mis 
 fortune" related to the abstractions of doctrine and 
 dogma. In art the concrete reigns supreme and noth 
 ing can be too definite even if, or perhaps especially if, 
 it is to express the abstract. The essay on Dante Low 
 ell says is the result of twenty years of study. One may 
 easily believe it taking the statement somewhat 
 loosely, as of course he intended it. It is packed with 
 interesting and illuminating detail, and has been called 
 his ablest performance in criticism. In Dante s case, 
 more than in most others, to admire is to comprehend. 
 Lowell s admiration is limitless and one feels that he 
 understood his subject. But his expression of it is only 
 less inartistic than it is uncritical. His twenty years of 
 study have resulted in his comprehension of his theme, 
 
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 but not in reducing it to any definite proportions or 
 giving it any sharpness of outline. There is nothing 
 about it he does not know and perhaps one may say 
 nothing in it that he does not appreciate. But he does 
 not communicate because he does not express his general 
 conception of Dante and he does not because he has 
 not himself, one feels sure, thought it out into definition. 
 He is interested in ranking his poet, not describing him. 
 Dante is next to Shakespeare, next to Homer, above all 
 others, and so on. Think of him in connection with 
 Byron! "Our nineteenth century," he says, "made an 
 idol of the noble lord who broke his heart in verse once 
 every six months, but the fourteenth was lucky enough 
 to produce and not make an idol of that rarest earthly 
 phenomenon, a man of genius who could hold heart 
 break at bay for twenty years, and " but no one can care 
 for the conclusion of such a sentence as that. Lowell 
 himself has been less fortunate than he says the four 
 teenth century was, but his idolatry merely consecrates 
 the looseness that mars his admirably sympathetic essay. 
 For just as the artlessness, the formlessness, which 
 his essays betray and which Mr. Greenslet illustrates 
 by an amusing analysis of the "Lessing" is a conse 
 quence of his lack of a central and unified conception 
 of his subject, so this lack is itself a consequence of the 
 absence in his brilliant equipment of the critical spirit, 
 the critical temperament. The possession of this spirit 
 would have perturbed him out of his Capuan dalliance 
 with detail and spurred him to the capture of the capital, 
 on which for life, as well as order, all the provinces of 
 
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 detail depend. The critical temperament is a reflective 
 one. Criticism is not the product of reading, but of 
 thought. To produce vital and useful criticism it is 
 necessary to think, think, think, and then, when tired 
 of thinking, to think more. Lowell s temperament is 
 not unfairly to be inferred from a playful but indicative 
 passage in "A Moosehead Journal." "It is curious," 
 he says, "how tyrannical the habit of reading is and what 
 shifts are made to escape thinking. There is no bore we 
 dread being left alone with so much as our own minds." 
 Hence the predominance in his essays of desultory over 
 consecutive thought, as well as of detail over ensemble 
 in their form. Hence, too, his hospitable harboring 
 of the partisan spirit. And as his representative turn 
 of mind dominated his individuality, the partisan spirit 
 blurred or, if one chooses, gilded his perceptions, 
 and dulled, or at least deflected, his penetration. From 
 the great endeavor of contemporary criticism, if it be 
 "to see the object as in itself it really is," he is con 
 stitutionally disassociated. 
 
 Accordingly, it discloses a fine trait in his character 
 that his essays should be, in general, so compact of 
 eulogy. Choosing, as I have said, the best of subjects, 
 by the natural selection of an aristocratic intellect, he 
 was here, to be sure, in the main on safe ground. It 
 would certainly be a task almost not quite as idle as 
 ungracious to attempt to pick flaws in or seriously 
 to controvert the larger proportion of his eulogiums. 
 They constitute a veritable literary monument, with the 
 traditional epitaph inspiration, and might be entitled 
 
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LOWELL 
 
 "The Praise of Great Writers," being sometimes, too, 
 almost lyrical enough in spirit to be called poems in 
 prose. Of his dispraise one easily feels less certain. 
 In the nature of things ^-there being notoriously no 
 standard of the false, the ugly, and the wrong censure 
 exacts more qualifications in the critic than eulogy. 
 But the critical spirit may be as clearly absent from 
 sound praise as from unjust censure, and it is only the 
 critical spirit that can preserve criticism from that 
 oblivion which swallows all at last but which is indeco 
 rously hungry for the partial and the partisan. Mr. 
 Greenslet says Lowell s essays are read in colleges. As 
 if that were any augury of immortality! 
 
 There is no qualification to his praise to give it per 
 suasiveness, to say nothing of permanence. The 
 Dante essay (to recur to this representative example) is 
 all patently partisan patently therefore, in the sixth 
 century of Dante criticism, either unsound or super 
 fluous; the day of discrimination is never over, but 
 wholesale consideration reaches finally its term. Low 
 ell is, like all the temperamentally energetic but reflect 
 ively indolent, particularly fond of superlatives. Sir 
 Thomas Browne s is the greatest imagination in English 
 literature since Shakespeare. Hawthorne is " the rarest 
 creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some 
 ideal respects since Shakespeare." Milton is "the most 
 impressive figure in our literary history." Donne 
 "wrote more profound verses than any other English 
 poet save one only." Dante is "the most masculine of 
 poets " ; French " the most feminine of tongues." Mar- 
 
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 veil s "Horatian Ode" is "the most truly classic in our 
 language." " Nothing in all poetry approaches the 
 imaginative grandeur" of Dante s vision at the end of 
 the " Paradise." Chaucer is "the greatest of English 
 poets save one." The secret password of all poetry 
 "with the most haunting memory" is a distich he cites 
 from a Spanish ballad needing its context, too, to be 
 "haunting" at all. English is "a better literary medi 
 um than any modern tongue." He has the tone of an 
 official conferring decorations or degrees. 
 
 Superlatives may be just, but they do not define. 
 Obviously they state the known in terms of the un 
 known a in terms of x, as Lowell might say; clearly 
 the converse of the critical order. The general atmos 
 phere of idolatry that they create is unfortunate because 
 it is plainly "too good to be true," and in a world of 
 imperfections the result is bound to lack verisimilitude. 
 Dante in Lowell s pages ceases to be credible; or if ab 
 stractly credible is concretely very difficult to conceive as 
 a mediaeval Florentine, as well as a very different per 
 sonage from the Dante of other commentators. Miss 
 Rossetti, for example, whose interpretation Lowell 
 praises so highly as to say that he shall only endeavor 
 to supplement it by the "side-lights" of his own pro 
 longed study Miss Rossetti acknowledges that after 
 Beatrice s death Dante gave himself up "more or less to 
 sensual gratification and earthly aim." On this Lowell 
 remarks: "The earthly aim we in a certain sense ad 
 mit; the sensual gratification we reject as utterly in 
 consistent, not only with Dante s principles, but with his 
 
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 character and indefatigable industry." What it is not 
 inconsistent with is the known, or at all events, 
 universally credited, facts of his life. "Let us dismiss 
 at once and forever all the idle tales of Dante s amours/ 
 exclaims Lowell, with extraordinary finality. But the 
 reader is bound to reflect that all the "tales" are not 
 "idle." Some of them deserve philosophic treatment 
 for instance, one may say, those on which, in the pas 
 sage of the "Purgatorio" where she reproves him for 
 his backslidings, Beatrice probably based her rebuke. 
 Such treatment is this sentence by Arnold, who cer 
 tainly had not devoted twenty years of study to Dante, 
 which is unparalleled for penetration by anything in 
 Lowell s essay or, in fact, in Lowell anywhere: "We 
 know," he says, " how the followers of the spiritual life 
 tend to be antinomian in what belongs to the outward 
 life; they do not attach much importance to such ir 
 regularity themselves; it is their fault as complete men 
 that they do not; it is the fault of the spiritual life as 
 a complete life that it allows this tendency; by dint of 
 despising the outward life it loses control of this life, 
 and of itself when in contact with it." Boccaccio, who 
 is one of the arch-offenders Lowell would "dismiss at 
 once and forever," would have smiled assent to this. 
 But I have cited it, as one is constantly tempted to cite 
 Arnold in contrast to Lowell as a critic, because it 
 shows how the definition which is lost by looseness is se 
 cured by discrimination. 
 
 Another remark of Arnold s which illustrates the 
 same thing is: "Perhaps in Sophocles the thinking 
 
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 power a little overbalances the religious sense, just as 
 in Dante the religious sense overbalances the thinking 
 power." That is a critical and illuminating statement. 
 Having, inevitably, to compare Dante with the Greek 
 drama, Lowell puts the matter in his conventional 
 and figurative way, maintaining that the Greek drama 
 satisfies "our highest conception of form," but "its 
 circle of motives was essentially limited," it "is pri 
 marily Greek and secondarily human," whereas "the 
 Christian idea has to do with the human soul, which 
 Christianity may almost be said to have invented," and 
 the "Divine Comedy" is "no pagan temple enshrining a 
 type of the human made divine by triumph of corporeal 
 beauty," but a cathedral whose " leading thought is that 
 of aspiration," or, in fact, a Christian basilica: "there 
 is first," he concludes, "the ethnic forecourt, then the 
 purgatorial middle space, and last the holy of holies, 
 dedicated to the eternal presence of the mediatorial 
 God." No doubt there is justice in the general con 
 tention. No doubt, in a sense, Christianity invented 
 or one would prefer to say discovered the human soul. 
 But it is just this sense that the critic would seek to de 
 termine precisely what, in fact, Arnold s sentence 
 hints at. Lowell s dithyramb is partisanship. He is 
 always a partisan in allusions to the Greeks. He 
 yields them supremacy in form with the readiness of 
 a formless writer to whom form is "even now sour" 
 or else unessential. But he has absolutely no sym 
 pathy with Greek substance. The best pages of his 
 essay on Shakespeare discuss the difference between 
 
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LOWELL 
 
 Shakespeare and the Greek drama in that Shakespeare s 
 characters incur, and those of the Greek dramatists 
 suffer, their fate. But he treats the subject with didac 
 tic finality, as if the insoluble question of determination 
 were absolutely settled, and not at all as a critic, so that 
 what he has to say is really of only exegetical value. The 
 critic would say as Arnold does in effect merely that 
 in the Greek drama the element of conscience is less de 
 veloped than in the Christian. The conscience of Soc 
 rates enabled him to be " terribly at ease in Zion "; that 
 of Dante permitted him a similar tranquillity, perhaps, 
 only in putting his enemies in hell. The subject is too 
 large for passing treatment. My only point is that 
 Lowell treats it in frankly partisan fashion and that 
 the partisan rather than the critical inspiration marks 
 his philosophic treatment in general. 
 
 This being the case, it would no doubt be fortunate 
 that in general there is so little philosophy in his essays, 
 if it were not for the fact that the philosophic spirit is 
 the life, as the critical instinct is the inspiration, of criti 
 cism. The two, indeed, are hardly to be discriminated; 
 and as the absence of the latter in Lowell is attested by 
 the lack of centrality of conception responsible for his 
 formlessness, so it, in turn, implies the absence of that 
 interest in ideas as such, in and of themselves, which 
 marks that side of the critical temperament, approxi 
 mately at least, to be called philosophic. For this there 
 is absolutely no adequate substitute in criticism. With 
 it the critic may lack almost everything else. Stendhal, 
 for example, one of the great figures in criticism, de- 
 
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 pends upon it almost wholly. He had, it is true, one or 
 two saving lines of thought which he held to with a pas 
 sionate fixity unknown in Cambridge and which gave 
 all his work a consistent tendency. But nothing can 
 be more formless than the " Promenades dans Rome" 
 or the "Histoire de la peinture en Italic," and they will 
 never accordingly enjoy currency. They are also full of 
 extravagances extravagance being precisely one of 
 Beyle s lignes directrices. What stamps him as a 
 stimulating and perennially interesting critic is his de 
 votion to ideas. Exiled in Civita Vecchia he longed 
 for Paris, by no means for patriotic reasons, but be 
 cause he could get the four or five cubic feet of ideas 
 which he said he needed for daily consumption as much 
 as a steamboat needs coal. Of ideas in this sense Low 
 ell s consumption was comparatively small, altogether 
 disproportionate to the volumes of often picturesquely 
 wreathed smoke into which the alembic of his extraor 
 dinary faculty for expression converted such as he 
 consumed. So far as luxuriance may be predicated of 
 them, his ideas were in general the conceits, notions, 
 fancies, of the true poet, of the observant rather than 
 the reflective order. Of philosophic ideas, general 
 ideas, there is in his many volumes a dearth that only 
 ceases to be surprising when one recalls Mr. James s 
 remark that he "had no speculative side" or his own 
 reference, indeed, to "speculation s windy waste." 
 Macaulay, in comparison, is alive with them. 
 
 They certainly can be overworked. M. Faguet has 
 a charming passage about them in this sense. "It is 
 
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LOWELL 
 
 impossible," he says, " to be quite ignorant of any 
 thing without systematizing it a great deal or to know 
 anything without systematizing it a little; so that one 
 cannot escape general ideas even by virtue and effort, and 
 learning itself only serves to enable us to avoid them in 
 excess." A certain order of truisms aside, Lowell s 
 general intellectual superiority, his admirable culture, 
 saved him from the mediocrity thus satirized, of dealing 
 with general ideas by main strength and a tout propos. 
 Also his unspeculative temperament. And as I say, they 
 are infrequent in his pages. An occasional distinction, 
 that between the poetic temperament and the poetic 
 faculty, in his "Percival," for instance, is vouchsafed 
 us; but, on the other hand, when he deals with ideas 
 of a general nature he is apt to recall Mr. Howells s re 
 mark about an eminent publicist accustomed "to do 
 his boldest thinking along the safest lines." His 
 normal attitude is very well indicated in his signalizing 
 as "an important and even profound truth" Webster s 
 assertion that a coward cannot be an honest man, and 
 calling it an example of the "metaphysical apothegms" 
 of which he says only Chapman was fonder than Web 
 ster. Ideas are certainly, if succintly expressed, "meta 
 physical apothegms," but to think of them as such is to 
 take rather an unfriendly view of them. 
 
 Consequently, in his criticism one feels the lack of the 
 element that gives it at its best what it has been said 
 even a biography should have, namely, "a life of its 
 own apart from the subject." Of his own general con 
 ception of life and art, we get very little. He had 
 
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 apparently no particular philosophic view to advocate 
 or express and his essays have no general philosophic 
 derivation. His critical work as a whole lacks the 
 unity of a body of doctrine or even a personal point of 
 view. It does not discuss principles. Its chief value 
 is exegetical. This is why he is at his best in his " Dante" 
 his " Chaucer," his "Dryden," his " Shakespeare," 
 and the Elizabethans generally. For as exegesis is 
 the strongest part of his criticism, linguistics are the 
 strongest part of his exegesis and he is even better in 
 discussing the language than in explaining the substance 
 of the poets. For language he had the instinct to be 
 expected of such a master of expression, and of archaic, 
 recondite, or foreign language he was an admirable 
 interpreter being both a poet and a precisian. In 
 this field it would be difficult to overpraise him. 
 
 His style lacks continuity which is to say that it 
 lacks style. That is the first, and I think the final, 
 impression left by any prolonged consecutive reading of 
 his prose. One feels the lack of continuity of presenta 
 tion consequent upon the lack of sustained thought, the 
 sense of which, also, is thus considerably accentuated. 
 The appearance of vagrom annotation which the es 
 says often have is enhanced by the absence of distri 
 bution and organization in the design, or rather, by 
 the absence of design itself. I think it is also enhanced 
 by the brilliancy of the detail. Lowell had an extraor- 
 
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LOWELL 
 
 dinary, a wonderful gift of expression a faculty per 
 haps as often fatal as favorable to the achievement of 
 style. He could, as the phrase is, say anything he liked. 
 He could follow the turns and shadings of his lively fancy 
 into all sorts of recesses of refinement, and with the 
 greatest ease. This sense of ease is the greatest charm 
 of his style. The reader savors it when he can ab 
 stract it from its associated phenomena with the satis 
 faction always aroused by the untrammelled function 
 ing of any truly native and effective faculty. And 
 often it evokes the additional enjoyment of a fine 
 faculty at play, revelling in its own effortless activities. 
 Often, too, it must be said, it falls into the clutches of 
 excess, of which it is, of course, the natural prey, un 
 wary as the bird blind to the fascination of the serpent; 
 often the sense of effortless ease shades into that of a 
 kind of decorous riot, which would be distressing if it 
 were not tinctured by a genial self-satisfaction that 
 renders it insipid instead. But at its best, Lowell s 
 gift of expression vivifies his prose immensely. It makes 
 an occasional stretch, now and then substantially long 
 reaches, of his essays especially those in familiar 
 vein, like the "Moosehead Journal" and the " Conde 
 scension in Foreigners" a succession of what are 
 known as "good things." He was himself extremely 
 partial to both the phrase and the fact of "good things." 
 Reflection with him no doubt frequently took the form 
 of preparing them, and one can predicate in fancy 
 the petillant way in which preliminarily his mind ticked 
 them off whether in a coupe going to a public dinner 
 
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 or in his library at Elmwood, a wide-margined " Cer 
 vantes " on his lap and nicotian spirals from his con 
 templative pipe doubtless half veiling 
 
 " a statue by Powers or a picture by Page" 
 
 that must have been among its Lares. These "good 
 things" are also really good and not the counterfeits 
 that so frequently impose on a lazy and loose apprecia 
 tive sense. They will all parse according to the strictest 
 syntax of the grammar of excellence. They have no 
 meretricious ring. They are not said for effect, but 
 from inspiration. They are free from the taint of 
 " rhetoric " that compound of charlatanry and con 
 vention. At least their only defect is the occasional 
 error in taste, and this is due to either excess or energy. 
 Measure and reserve are not essential traits of the 
 "good thing," which may sin against both and still 
 merely fail, negatively, to be an even better thing. 
 
 And Lowell s good things are curiously sui generis. 
 They are not rarely the good things of the poet who is 
 touched as well as enlightened by the truths he dis 
 covers or rather feels with personal stress and states, 
 accordingly, in figurative fashion ; for example, " Style, 
 the handmaid of talent, the helpmeet of genius." 
 They are as a rule, however, curiously devoid of epigram 
 matic quality, as that quality is displayed in the most 
 eminent examples of epigram; a fact which proceeds, 
 I suppose, from his constitutional neglect of the field of 
 "general ideas." Often extremely witty, their wit is not 
 pure wit, any more than it is pure humor, but a kind of 
 
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LOWELL 
 
 combination of the two wit, let us say, with the inspira 
 tion of humor. It is, like his mind, sensible and sound 
 and unspeculative. It neither flashes nor glows, but 
 sparkles. It does not illumine a subject with a chance 
 light, a sudden turn, a wilful refraction, a half truth, 
 but plays about it sportively leaving it, besides, pretty 
 much as it found it. No one would call his wit search 
 ing. Lowell possessed too little deference as well 
 as too little malice to be distinctly penetrating. It has 
 a very persistent judicious side, infallibly provocative 
 in the end of grief in the judicious. For nothing will 
 save a succession of good things considered as the web of 
 a sustained literary production but the spice of paradox. 
 Paradox is the only variant of the inevitable monotony. 
 It is the life of Stendhal s essays, one may almost say, 
 to cite again an example of formlessness paralleling 
 Lowell s. But it never occurs in Lowell. He can, on oc 
 casion, be trivial, even flippant, wilful, even wrong- 
 headed, but never paradoxical. One gets tired finally 
 of the undisputed thing said in such a witty way. 
 Nay, one must also admit fatigue with what he himself 
 would call the perfect concinnity of all this brilliant and 
 desultory detail and itches to cast his oyster-shell 
 against this impeccable Aristides of expression. 
 
 But from the point of view of style its defect is 
 that it is detail, and so accentuated as to nullify the en 
 semble, on which style inexorably depends. For, how 
 ever one define it, style implies a sustained flight. Lowell 
 achieves it in his poetry sometimes splendidly, superbly; 
 which renders it at first thought unaccountable that his 
 
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 prose should be so desert of it. Other poets have never 
 so conspicuously fallen down in this respect on alighting 
 from their Pegasus. But no doubt the reason is that 
 whereas he was not habituated to sustained thought, 
 and shrank recalcitrant from its concatenation, he 
 delighted in sustained emotion the simpler the better, 
 too. " Style," says Buff on and one cannot too often 
 cite the remark in explanation of his much misunder 
 stood "le style, c est I homme" " style is nothing other 
 than the order and movement which we put into our 
 thoughts." In Lowell s prose either there is no order 
 and movement or it exists only in passages. And these 
 passages not only count as detail like the good things 
 but they are less noteworthy because they are less, far 
 less, individual. There are places, says Mr. James, in 
 which " he sounds like a younger brother of Bacon and 
 of Milton." Precisely. But one could wish for more 
 such sentences as Mr. James quotes in support of his 
 remark: "Oblivion looks in the face of the Grecian 
 Muse only to forget her errand." They are far from 
 unwelcome punctuation of the prose in which, in Mr. 
 James s words again, "he sounds like no one but his 
 inveterately felicitous self," even such of it as this 
 sentence, also illustratively adduced by Mr. James, from 
 the address on Wordsworth : "Too of ten . . . he seems 
 diligently intent on producing fire by the primitive 
 method of rubbing the dry sticks of his blank verse one 
 against the other, while we stand in shivering expecta 
 tion of the flame that never comes." There are times, 
 one feels, when Lowell s inspiration is that of Pe*richole s 
 
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LOWELL 
 
 "Oui, bonnes gens, sautez dessus," and when, I think, 
 his style is subtly injured by his rather primitive trucu 
 lent inclinations at the expense of the obviously "par 
 trop bele." But his opera bouffe is as Mr. James says, 
 " inveterately felicitous," and perhaps it is pedantry to 
 object to Offenbachian treatment of Wordsworth and at 
 the same time quarrel with the obviousness of its rel 
 evancy. 
 
 "Inveterately felicitous," in fact, is not an inexact 
 epithet for Lowell s figures in general. And of both 
 the good things and the elevated passages of his prose 
 the figure is an unfailing characteristic. His poetic 
 faculty follows him even into argumentation and gilds 
 his rhetoric with fancy. His figures are of course vari 
 ably, however inveterately, felicitous, but they are al 
 ways favorites with him, one feels, over the substance it 
 is their formal function to illuminate or adorn. The 
 logical path through one of his essays, or such semblance 
 of one as he follows, is fringed with figures that count 
 really as digressions, so much do they absorb his zest and 
 so thoroughly does he explore and exploit them. The 
 reader more easily surfeited with straying might find 
 these loops and excursions too frequent, but for the fact 
 that they are not rarely quite as entertaining as the 
 highroad of his thought] from which, besides, they 
 diverge without abruptness and to which they always 
 return, for though they vary in felicity, his figures are 
 simply never inapt. A page opened at random, for 
 example, says of the Elizabethans : " But though fortu 
 nate in being able to gather their language with the 
 
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 dew still on it, as herbs must be gathered for use in 
 certain incantations, we are not to suppose that our 
 elders used it indiscriminately, or tumbled out their 
 words as they would dice, trusting that luck or chance 
 would send them a happy turn." Indeed we are not 
 to, and probably we should not. So that the warning 
 to us not to think of the age of verbal concetti as lin 
 guistically happy-go-lucky is less impressive than the 
 beautiful figure about the language with the dew still 
 on it. The passage could be paralleled every few 
 pages throughout the six volumes of essays. It is 
 characteristic, too, not only in the superiority of figure 
 to idea, but in the pursuit of the figure and its trans 
 formation, like the pursuit of the genie by the princess in 
 the Second Calendar s tale. This fecundity of fancy 
 and comparative continence of thought varies in 
 felicity, however, as I have said. "The nameless eagle 
 of the tree Ygdrasil was about to sit at last, and wild- 
 eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, each eager to 
 thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which 
 the new and fairer Creation was to be hatched in due 
 time," is more in the bouffe vein again, though graphic. 
 And Lowell s fecundity in figure by no means precludes 
 terseness though I think it is oftener piquant, like 
 his wit in general. There is nothing loose about his 
 lavishness with it and his metaphorical plethora is often 
 a succession of pointed petards. And though his fond 
 ness for it becomes infatuation at times, its aptness and 
 polish command his intelligent effort. No great prose 
 writer ever wrote, probably, such a sentence as the 
 
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LOWELL 
 
 following: "Bran had its prophets and the presartorial 
 simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu 
 from the tar-pot by incensed neighbors and sent forth 
 to illustrate the feathered Mercury as defined by Web 
 ster and Worcester," but it is impossible not to discern 
 painstaking in.its composition. A good deal of Lowell s 
 prose, indeed, has the piquancy of Pegasus in harness. 
 But at lea^st it is never prose poetry. It is masculine, 
 direct, flexible, and energetic prose. Whatever ir 
 responsibilities of taste he might have, however ad 
 dicted to a kind of racy and idiomatic order of con 
 cetti and overfond of figure he might be, however lack 
 ing his writing in the larger rhythm of style and the or 
 ganic order of composition, his essays are admirably 
 written from the point of view of adequate, accurate, 
 and scholarly prose expression. His poetic faculty is 
 an aid, not an embarrassment, to him and when he had 
 poetry to write he wrote it in verse. His trained sense 
 and sound instinct secured him against the mediocrity 
 of inflated periods and ungoverned emotionality. He 
 aimed at no meretricious " effects." He was quite with 
 out inferiority of any kind, though his partisanship in 
 both reprehension and idolatry robs his writing now and 
 then of that positive perfume of sensitive intellectual re 
 finement in which self-respect and consideration seem 
 magically fused; as in Emerson, for example. With 
 out a tinge of austerity, despite his concetti, and despite, 
 too, his wealth of literary allusion, his writing is ad 
 mirably simple ; so far at least as clearness is concerned 
 it is simplicity itself. His vocabulary is extremely exten- 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 sive, and often extremely personal, but I think he never 
 exploits it. He had no pedantries. He even belittled 
 rather than paraded his Old French. He was fond of 
 unusual words, no doubt, but for their expressive value, 
 and never used them inaptly or as decoration, though 
 never restrained from taking advantage of their concise 
 and epitomizing quality by awe of philistine resentment 
 at the unfamiliar. When he said such a thing would 
 have "arrided" Lamb, he was using Lamb s own word, 
 and when he speaks of "the hermetic gift of buckling 
 wings to the feet of their verse" he is but pardonably 
 mercurial. At all events, if he was now and then 
 linguistically precious he was far oftener linguistically 
 instructive, and always quite without display. His 
 allusions are often recondite, like Carlyle s, though not, 
 like Carlyle s, bizarre; he lacked the edge as well as the 
 irritability of extravagance in its intenser forms, the 
 relief as well as the rudeness of the eccentric save in 
 the matter of taste, his offences against which fringe 
 the commonplace and are not so eccentric as it is eccen 
 tric to commit them. His peculiarity of never ex 
 plaining his allusions is not affectation. He had none. 
 He is too bland, too broad, too complacent. It is 
 merely bookish. It does not in the least modify the 
 general effect of his essays as lectures to students or a 
 lyceum public of docile and deferential quality, though 
 perhaps of a rather special sort. On the contrary, it 
 adds to their air of the academic close, peopled not by 
 representatives of the reading world at large, nor even 
 by the generally cultivated, but by the matriculate and 
 
 324 
 
LOWELL 
 
 the novice. Nor does their style, spite of the admirable 
 qualities enumerated, quite take them out of this cate 
 gory. They will doubtless continue to be indispensable 
 in the college courses referred to by Mr. Greenslet, and 
 certainly every one should read them for the instruction 
 they contain, for their literary saturation. But the 
 larger public so free, so fickle, so entirely irresponsible 
 but also so responsive to what is really addressed to it 
 will increasingly, I think, turn to his poetry as Lowell s 
 more interesting and more admirable achievement and 
 his more genuinely native form of self-expression. 
 
 VI 
 
 The qualities to be found in his prose exist, of course, 
 in his poetry, but they make a very different thing of it. 
 It is not to be regretted that, unlike Tennyson, for 
 example, he did not confine himself to poetry. Not 
 only did he write a great deal of admirable and dis 
 tinguished prose, not only may we say, indeed, that 
 there is very little of his prose that is not worth while, 
 but he wrote a good deal too much verse; and verse 
 that misses the mark has less to fall back upon than 
 errant or superfluous prose. If he had consecrated 
 himself completely to the service of the Muse, we should 
 have lost more than we should have gained, and have 
 gained little properly to be called indispensable, 
 since the proportion of his poetry that can be so called 
 is small. But a great deal of it is very fine, very noble 
 and at times very beautiful, and it discloses the dis- 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 tinctly poetic faculty of which rhythmic and figurative 
 is native expression. It is impressionable rather than 
 imaginative in the larger sense; it is felicitous in detail 
 rather than in design; and of a general rather than 
 individual, a representative rather than original, in 
 spiration. There is a field of poetry, assuredly not 
 the highest, but ample and admirable in which these 
 qualities, more or less unsatisfactory in prose, are 
 legitimately and fruitfully exercised. All poetry is in 
 the realm of feeling, and thus less exclusively dependent 
 on the thought that is the sole reliance of prose. Being 
 genuine poetry, Lowell s profits by this advantage. 
 Feeling is fitly, genuinely, its inspiration. Its range 
 and limitations correspond to the character of his sus 
 ceptibility as those of his prose do to that of his thought. 
 The fusion of the two in the crucible of the imagination 
 is infrequent with him, because with him sense impres 
 sions are more vivacious than the imagination is luxuri 
 ant and highly developed. Without, of course, Emer 
 son s fragmentariness, it nevertheless, cannot be claimed 
 that for the architectonics of poetry he had notably 
 the requisite reach and grasp, the comprehensive and 
 constructing vision. Few of his compositions have any 
 large design or effective interdependent proportions. 
 In a technical way an exception should be noted in his 
 skilful building of the ode a form in which he was 
 extremely successful and for which he evidently had 
 a native aptitude. His sonnets are less happy some 
 of them, in fact, curiously routine and mechanical for 
 so energetic a spirit. But the ode is a comparatively 
 
 326 
 
LOWELL 
 
 loose construction witness the unrivalled success in it 
 of the author of "the slipshod Endymion, " as Keats 
 agrees with his reviewer in calling it, and the frag 
 mentary "Hyperion." Of such a poem as the "In 
 Memoriam" or "Evangeline," or even "Snow Bound," 
 Lowell is incapable. The " Legend of Brittany " is full 
 of charming and touching poetry, but it has far less 
 structure, less definition and coherence, less movement 
 and evolution, than the "Isabella and the Pot of Basil," 
 in which Keats has been charged with drowning all 
 the crispness of Boccaccio. Keats, however, loses his 
 structure in a surfeit of imaginative surplusage. In 
 Lowell it is the imagination itself that is lacking, 
 though in nearly every stanza his impressionability 
 makes a brave struggle to cover its defection with genu 
 ine felicities. 
 
 The " Legend is an extremely characteristic poem. 
 Like the "Vision of Sir Launfal," with its charming 
 nature detail, it not only fails in design, failing to bring 
 out effectively the design supplied by the legend itself, 
 but it fails in characterization; the figures are not alive; 
 in spite of considerable elaboration they are not even 
 distinct. A sort of couche of moralizing oddly un- 
 Breton overlays the poem, while, singularly, there is 
 not enough intensity in the treatment to make the 
 tragedy stern. Intensity, in fact, is wholly foreign to 
 Lowell s temperament, and his poetry suffers accord 
 ingly in this respect more than in almost any other. 
 His lack of passion almost droll in so convinced a 
 partisan is so pronounced as to amount well-nigh to 
 
 327 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 dispassionateness. Naturally, the entire gamut of 
 emotions excluded by a rectitude of feeling paralleling 
 his regularity of thought is without his range and he 
 could not be expected to " break his heart in verse every 
 six months." But even where his feeling is lofty it is 
 rarely exalted, and where it is profound it is not intense. 
 The "lyric cry" is not to be heard in his poetic domin 
 ions, where the curfew of calm replaces it with its placid 
 toll. Sentiment, in a word, replaces passion in quite 
 eighteenth-century fashion one would be tempted to say 
 but for its conspicuous genuineness and often truly 
 Wordsworthian melody. Cowper s and Cowley s at 
 least one may call its congeners, rather than the in- 
 tenser strain of nineteenth-century verse at its flood. 
 "Auf Wiedersehen," for example, is a charming poem, 
 but compare it with the stanzas " In Switzerland " con 
 cluding with 
 
 "The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea." 
 Its best, its most characteristic line is the admirable one, 
 "The turf that silences the lane," 
 
 in which nature asserts her primacy in the poet s re 
 flections and inspires him with a felicity his mistress 
 cannot evoke. "The First Snowfall," too, is exquisite, 
 but it does not strive nor cry. It expresses bereave 
 ment touchingly. But it is on the natural picture with 
 
 "The stiff rails softened to swan s-down" 
 
 that the poetic stress falls. 
 
 328 
 
LOWELL 
 
 For nature, however, Lowell did have a feeling justly 
 to be called passion. His passions, as I have said, may 
 be summed up in nature, books, and patriotism, and it 
 is precisely the first and. the last of these that provide 
 motives for song which in their in tensest expression re 
 tain still something of the abstract and impersonal, and 
 in their loftier and broader statement express the uni 
 versal rather than the particular. No one is a stranger 
 to the meaning, however he may be to the experiences, 
 of patriotism. And poetry at the present day can say 
 little to him to whom nature says nothing. These two 
 sources of poetic inspiration are therefore especially 
 germane to the genius of a poet like Lowell, who had 
 no general point of view of his own, no personal "mes 
 sage" to deliver, but whose gift of expression was fully 
 exercised, in all its rich luxuriance, in expressing the 
 thoughts and feelings of his fellow-men. To sing one s 
 country and its landscape, one does not need a "specu 
 lative side." And impressionability as sensitive as 
 Lowell s does duty here very efficiently for the imagina 
 tion. He was extremely sensitive to all out-of-door 
 aspects and influences. If he did not read Words 
 worth s pantheism into nature s phenomena, he ob 
 served them with a loving sentiment that eliminates all 
 traces of vagueness and gives a crisp and definite report 
 of them guaranteeing its own genuineness and forming 
 an authentic basis for the delight with which they filled 
 him and which flowers in indubitably poetic characteri 
 zation. His ingrained predilection for the figurative 
 in language, so excessive in his prose, stands him in good 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 stead here. In verse his figures add to their invariable 
 aptness a truly poetic charm. He carries his beloved 
 Shakespeare out-of-doors with him and speaks thus of 
 the treachery of spring, in lines which have more style 
 than all his prose contains, and which, like the lion on 
 the flag of the Persian poet, " move and march " in the 
 sustained souffle that style is : 
 
 "And winter suddenly, like crazy Lear, 
 Reels back and brings the dead May in his arms, 
 Her budding breasts and wan dislustred front 
 With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard 
 All overblown/ 
 
 "What is so rare as a day in June"? Such poetry 
 about it as this: 
 
 "The little bird sits at his door in the sun, 
 Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, 
 And lets his illumined being o errun, 
 With the deluge of summer it receives." 
 
 Nature is usually animate with him. The birds sing 
 in the branches. Sunshine vivifies the fields and 
 thrills the woods it filters through. The breeze blows. 
 Life and motion are everywhere. Shelley and Words 
 worth have not more worthily immortalized the sky 
 lark than Lowell has the bobolink, its New England 
 congener. Who that has ever seen this embodiment of 
 sportiveness at play in the zephyrs can forget the lines : 
 
 "Half-hid on tip-top apple-blooms he swings, 
 Or climbs against the breeze with quiverin wings, 
 Or, givin way to t in a mock despair, 
 Runs down, a brook o laughter, thru the air"? 
 
 330 
 
LOWELL 
 
 Joy is the sentiment that chiefly nature inspires in him. 
 It is the birch-tree, not the weeping-willow that he 
 celebrates, and that might almost be taken as the symbol 
 of his nature poetry, with its crispness, its delicacy, its 
 New England color and substance, its alert grace, its 
 antitropical allure, its independence and breezy self- 
 sufficiency. With the awful, the majestic, the solemn 
 and sublime aspects of nature, her immensities of 
 space and stillness and the drama of her storms and 
 wilder moods, he is less in touch. Her more familiar 
 and more benign aspects appeal to him as the New 
 England poet which he was and being without a trace 
 of affectation was necessarily. The huckleberry-bush 
 has not quite the same suggestiveness as the laurel, the 
 vine, and the fig-tree, but it has indefeasibly its own 
 poetic potentialities, and these and their kindred found 
 in Lowell an exquisite as well as an eloquent, a sensitive 
 as well as a veridical, expositor. Lowell s constitutes, 
 on the whole, the most admirable American contri 
 bution to the nature poetry of English literature far 
 beyond that of Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, I think, 
 and only occasionally matched here and there by the 
 magic touch of Emerson, who had a " speculative side." 
 And his patriotic poetry is altogether unmatched 
 even unrivalled. It is the loftiest expression of the 
 American muse singing America, and in virtue of it she 
 stands shoulder to shoulder with her English sister in 
 her most inspired moments. Shakespeare s 
 
 "This precious stone set in the silver sea, 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England " 
 
 331 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 is no better than some of the lines some entire strophes 
 even of the "Commemoration Ode," either as patriot 
 ism or as poetry. The ode is too long, its evolution is 
 defective, it contains verbiage, it preaches. But pas 
 sages of it the most famous having characteristically 
 been interpolated after its delivery are equal to any 
 thing of the kind. The temptation to quote from it is 
 hard to withstand. It is the cap-sheaf of Lowell s 
 achievement. The Agassiz Ode perhaps deserves a 
 proximate place friendship was a harmonious in 
 spiration for Lowell; and the "Biglow Papers" are 
 doubtless more nearly unique are unique, in fact, as 
 well as highly characteristic; as characteristic as the ex 
 traordinary tour de force, the sustained jeu d esprit of 
 his youth, "A Fable for Critics," the boufie rhymes in 
 which are as good nearly as Byron s, and which in a 
 certain opulence of spirit he never surpassed. But the 
 "Biglow Papers" equal the " Commemoration Ode" 
 neither as poetry nor as patriotism. They contain some 
 very beautiful poetry, as well as a sufficient amount of 
 rather light doggerel. They are a treasury of both wit 
 and humor, though now and then the humor is over 
 done. The idea was a trouvaille, but it is overworked. 
 The second series justifies itself amply, but it has less 
 spontaneity than the first; and it is not only oc 
 casionally labored, but it is frankly and loosely partisan, 
 the scales not being held with anything like the steadi 
 ness that they are in "The Bridge and the Moniment," 
 for example. With all his Americanism Lowell was 
 scarcely less essentially, than he was as he was fond 
 
 332 
 
LOWELL 
 
 of insisting ancestrally, English. New England was 
 not so named for nothing. And if it has been our best 
 section as in the literary sense it certainly has been 
 it has certainly also been, even in the literary sense, the 
 most sectional. The "Biglow Papers" contain some 
 very incisive criticisms of England, but they are not 
 bitter or unjust, and when their author became min 
 ister to England Englishmen found it easy to ad 
 mire their sometime censor, assured that fundamen 
 tally he returned their admiration. The quarrel was 
 a family one. On the other hand, his own fellow-coun 
 trymen south of Mason and Dixon s line were even 
 more bitterly than incisively satirized in the "Biglow 
 Papers." They were in the political articles which fill 
 a volume of his complete works and which, save the 
 paper on Lincoln, are only of historic interest, having 
 only a temporary value. They contain enough "good 
 things" perhaps to explain his wish to perpetuate them 
 though even these are apt to run speedily to seed; 
 witness the extraordinary play upon the name of John 
 Bell, the Tennessee statesman, kept up for a page and 
 a half. Otherwise they are quite negligible as the 
 thoroughly partisan polemic of the journalist, or at 
 most the pamphleteer, rather than the publicist, and 
 saturated with the sectional spirit. And it was, in part 
 at least, precisely the absence of this spirit in Lincoln, 
 for example, that led Lowell to characterize him as " the 
 first American." Lowell s patriotism has undoubtedly 
 this restriction. 
 
 His democracy is similarly restricted. He said some 
 333 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 admirable things about democracy in his famous ad 
 dress to a public instinctively devoted to the principle 
 of caste; he could hardly fail to call their attention to 
 points they notoriously overlooked. But he was him 
 self a Brahmin throughout, whereas the American demo 
 cratic ideal is Brahminism in manners and tastes, not in 
 sympathies and ideas. From the democratic point of 
 view, either philosophic or enthusiastic, his convic 
 tions about its being "the duty of the intelligent to 
 govern the less intelligent," and about popular govern 
 ment being "no better than any other form except as 
 the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so," etc., 
 must seem rather flat, I think. It is like the defenders 
 of the spoils system objecting to civil service examina 
 tions and insisting on the old idea of "appointing only 
 good men to office." He had very much the political 
 philosophy of Halifax or Macaulay plus a belief in the 
 New England town meeting, which admirable insti 
 tution unhappily has its limitations of application. 
 But when his patriotism abandoned polemic and soared 
 into the loftier regions of emotion, with only the broader 
 and simpler of our truths and triumphs for a basis, he 
 was superb. Who associates the stately measures and 
 noble figures of "The Present Crisis" with the Mex 
 ican War? And in the "Commemoration Ode" he 
 reaches, if he does not throughout maintain, his own 
 " clear-ethered height, " and his verse has the elevation 
 of ecstasy and the splendor of the sublime. 
 
 "O Beautiful! My Country! ours once more! 
 Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair 
 
 334 
 
LOWELL 
 
 O er such sweet brows as never other wore, 
 And letting thy set lips, 
 Freed from wrath s pale eclipse, 
 
 The rosy edges of their smile lay bare." 
 
 We can ask the world to match that. If Lowell had no 
 personal " message " to deliver, in this magnificent 
 poem he phrases ours to the world, and in the most ex 
 plicit and authentic terms of beautiful and moving 
 poetry. He will doubtless cease to be one of our 
 superstitions, but he will always remain one of our chief 
 glories. 
 
 335 
 
HENEY JAMES 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 j . . , , 
 
 IF any career can be called happy before it is closed, 
 that of Mr. Henry James may certainly be so called. 
 It has been a long one much longer already than the 
 space of time allotted to a generation. It has been quite 
 free from any kind of mistake : there is probably nothing 
 in it he would change if he could, except what he has 
 been abundantly able to by a careful revision of his 
 fiction for the definitive New York Edition, in which he 
 has made it quite as he would have it. His career has 
 been an honorable one in a very special way and to a 
 very marked degree. Hehas scrupulously followed 
 his ideal. Neither necessity nor opportunity has pre 
 vented him from doing, apparently, just what he wanted. 
 He has never, at any rate, yielded to the temptation to 
 give the public what it wanted. The rewards of so do 
 ing are very great. Most writers in belittling them would 
 be justly suspected of affectation. They include, for ex 
 ample, the pleasure of being read, and this is a pleasure 
 usually so difficult to forego when it is attainable that 
 Mr. James s indifference to it is striking. And what is 
 still more striking he has never, as he himself expresses 
 it somewhere in characterization of some other writer, 
 who must, however, have been his own inferior in this 
 
 339 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 respect, he has never "saved for his next book." Of 
 his special order of talent fecundity is not what one 
 would naturally have predicted, and though he has 
 amply demonstrated his possession of it, he must have 
 long given us his best before he could have been at all 
 sure that he could count on matching his best to an in 
 definite extent. Into the frame of every book he has 
 packed, not only the substance called for by the subject, 
 but a substance as remarkable for containing all he could 
 himself bring to it, as for compression. At least, if his 
 substance has sometimes been thin, it has always been 
 j considered ; however fine-spun its texture, it has always 
 been composed of thought. And his expression, tenuous 
 as it may sometimes appear, is (especially, indeed, 
 when its tenuity is greatest) so often dependent for its 
 comprehension on what it suggests rather than on what 
 it states as to compel the inference that it is incomplete 
 expression, after all, of the amount of thought behind it. 
 So that he never leaves the impression of super 
 ficiality. His material, even his result, may be as slight 
 as his own insistent predetermination can make it; it 
 is impossible not to feel that it is the work of an artist 
 who is not only serious, but profound, feehind his 
 sketch you feel the careful and elaborate preliminary 
 study;) back of his triviality you feel the man of reflec 
 tion. And this is not at all because his triviality to 
 call it such is significant in itself. It often is, and the 
 trifling feature, incident, movement, or phrase often 
 has a typical value that makes it in effect but the ex 
 pression of a larger thing than it embodies. But often, 
 
 340 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 on the other hand, it is difficult to assign any strikingly 
 interpretative or illustrative value to the insubstantial 
 phenomena that he is at the pains of observing so nar 
 rowly and recording so .copiously. And yet it can occur 
 to no sensitive and candid intelligence to refer to the 
 capacity of the recorder this flimsiness of the record. 
 One has the sense in the treatment, the technic, of a 
 firm and vigorous hand such as is, in general, perhaps, 
 needed for the carving of "e*maux et came es." And 
 still more in the substance one perceives, as well as 
 argues, the solidity and dignity underlying the super 
 ficial and apparently insignificant details with which 
 " wonderfully "to use a favorite word of Mr. James 
 they are occupied. The sense of contrast is indeed often 
 piquant. Cuvier lecturing on a single bone and recon 
 structing the entire skeleton from it is naturally im 
 pressive, but Mr. James often presents the spectacle of 
 a Cuvier absorbed in the positive fascinations of the 
 single bone itself, yet plainly preserving the effect of a 
 Cuvier the while. If, in a word, his work sometimes 
 seems superficial, it never seems the work of a super 
 ficial personality; and the exasperation of some of his 
 unfriendly critics proceeds from wondering, not so 
 much how a writer who has produced such substantial, 
 can also produce such trifling, work, as how the writer 
 whose very treatment of triviality shows him to be 
 serious can be so interested in the superficial. 
 
 The explanation, I think, is that to Mr. James him 
 self life, considered as artistic material, is so serious 
 and so significant that nothing it contains seems trivial 
 
 341 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 to him. And as artistic material is, in fact, the only way 
 in which he appears to consider it at all. In spite of 
 his elaborations on occasion, there is no padding in his 
 books, no filling in of general ideas or other interesting 
 distention. His parentheses are, it is true, apt to be 
 cognate digressions rather than nuances of the matter 
 in hand. But that is a question of style, and in any 
 case addiction to parentheses is apt to proceed from 
 an unwillingness to stray very far from the matter in 
 hand, to let go one s hold of it. And save for his 
 parentheses, Mr. James holds his reader to the mat 
 ter or the absence of matter in hand rather re 
 morselessly. One would like more space, more air. 
 His copiousness, too, is the result of his seriousness. If 
 he eschews the foreign, he revels in the pertinent; and, 
 f pertinence being his sole standard of_gxclusion, he 
 is bound to include much that isjriyjal. We have the 
 paradox of an art attitude that is immaculate with an 
 art product that is ineffective. It is as crowded with 
 detail and as tight as a pre-Raphaelite picture, because 
 there are no salutary sacrifices. It is not because he is 
 a man, but because he is an artist, that nothing human 
 is foreign to him. No rectitude was ever less partial or 
 more passionless. No novelist ever evinced more pro 
 found respect for his material as material, or conformed 
 his art more rigorously to its characteristic expression. 
 Thus it is due to his seriousness that a good deal of his 
 substance seems less significant to his readers than to 
 him, both in itself and because (out of his own deep 
 respect for it, doubtless) he does little or nothing to en- 
 
 342 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 hance its interest and importance. It is not commonly 
 appreciated that his work is, after all, the quintessence 
 of realism. 
 
 II 
 
 The successive three " manners" of the painters have 
 been found in it. Mr. James has had, at any rate, two. 
 There is a noteworthy difference between his earlier 
 and his later fiction, though the period of transition be 
 tween them is not very definite as a period. Perhaps 
 "The Tragic Muse" comprises it. He has, however, 
 thrown himself so devotedly into his latest phase as to 
 make everything preceding it appear as the stages of an 
 evolution. Tendencies, nevertheless, in his earlier work, 
 marked enough to individualize it sharply, have de 
 veloped until they have subdued all other character 
 istics, and have made of him perhaps the most individual 
 novelist of his day, who at the same time is also in the 
 current of its tendency, Meredith (except, should one 
 say, in regard to Woman?) standing quite apart from 
 this in eminent isolation. It is through these tendencies, 
 developed as they have been, that in virtue of originality 
 as well as of excellence he has won his particular place 
 in the hierarchy of fiction. He has created a genre of his 
 own. He has the distinction that makes the scientist 
 a savant; he has contributed something to the sum, the 
 common stock. His distinction has really a scientific as 
 pect, independent, that is to say, of quality, of intrinsic 
 merit. If it should be asserted that Meredith has done 
 the same thing, in a way, too, not so very differently, 
 
 343 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 it can be replied that he has done so by weakening the 
 correspondence of fiction to life, whereas Mr. James has 
 striven hard for its intensification; it is not the con 
 struction of the scientific toy, however interesting it 
 may be, and however much science there may be in it, 
 that makes the savant. This flowering of Mr. James s 
 tendencies has, in fact, been precisely what he conceives 
 to be the achievement of a more and more intimate and 
 exquisite correspondence with life in his art. This at 
 least has been his conscious, his professed aim. His 
 observation, always his master faculty, has grown more 
 and more acute, his concentration upon the apprehensi 
 ble phenomena of the actual world of men and women 
 and children closer, his interest in producing his il 
 lusion by reproducing these in as nearly as possible their 
 actual essence and actual relations, far more absorbing 
 and complete. Indeed, he has been so interested in 
 producing his illusion in precisely this way, that he has 
 decidedly compromised, I think, the certainty of pro 
 ducing it at all. 
 
 He has parted, then, with his past, the past, let us 
 say, of "The Portrait of a Lady," in the pursuit of a 
 more complete illusion of nature than he could feel that 
 he achieved on his old lines, the old lines, let us add, 
 observed in the masterpieces of fiction hitherto. It is 
 true that his observation has been from the first so 
 clearly his distinguishing faculty that his present practice 
 may superficially seem to differ from his former merely 
 in degree. But a little more closely considered, it is a 
 matter rather of development than of augmentation. 
 
 344 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 In the course of its exercise his talent has been trans 
 formed. He has reversed the relation between his ob 
 servation and his imagination, and instead of using the 
 former to supply material for the latter, has enlisted 
 the latter very expressly oh! sometimes, indeed, 
 worked it very hard in the service of his observation. 
 Of what he might have achieved by pursuing a different 
 course, I cannot myself think without regret. But in 
 stead of seeking that equilibrium of one s powers which 
 seems particularly pertinent to the expression of pre 
 cisely such an organization as his, instead of, to that 
 end, curbing his curiosity and cultivating his construc 
 tive, his reflective, his imaginative side, the one being 
 already markedly preponderant and the other com 
 paratively slender, he has followed the path of tem 
 peramental preference and developed his natural bent. 
 The result is his present eminence, which is, in conse 
 quence, undeniably more nearly unique, but which 
 is not for that reason necessarily more distinguished. 
 His art has thus become, one is inclined to say, the 
 ordered exploitation of his experiences. The change 
 from his earlier manner is so great that it constitutes, as 
 I say, a transformation. It is somewhat as if a tran- 
 scendentalist philosopher should become so enamored 
 of truth as, rinding it inexhaustibly manifested in every 
 thing, to fall in love with phenomena and gradually 
 acquire an absolutely a posteriori point of view. Simi 
 larly, Mr. James may be said to have renounced the 
 vision for the pursuit. 
 
 The most delicate, the most refined and elegant of 
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 contemporary romancers has thus become the most 
 thoroughgoing realist of even current fiction. It is but 
 a popular error to confound realism with grossness, and 
 it is his complete exclusion of idealism and preoccupa 
 tion with the objective that I have in mind in speaking of 
 his realism as so marked; though of recent years he has 
 annexed the field of grossness also, cultivating it, of 
 course, with particular circumspection, and thus 
 rounded out his domain. It must be granted that his 
 realism does not leave a very vivid impression of reality, 
 on the one hand, and that, on the other, it does not al 
 ways produce the effect of a very close correspondence 
 to actual life and character. "The Spoils of Poynton," 
 with its inadequate motive and aspiration after the 
 tragic; "The Other House," with its attempt to domes 
 ticate melodrama; "In the Cage," with its exclusion 
 of all the surrounding data, needed to give authenticity 
 to an even robuster theme; "The Awkward Age," with 
 its impossible cleverness of stupid people, are, as pict 
 ures of life, neither very lifelike nor very much alive. 
 But that is a matter of artistic result. The attitude of 
 the artist is plainly, uncompromisingly realistic. It is 
 the real with which his fancy, his imaginativeness, is 
 exclusively preoccupied. To discover new and unsus 
 pected phenomena in its psychology is the aim of his 
 divination as well as of his scrutiny. The ideal counter 
 part of the real and the actual which even such realists 
 as Thackeray and George Eliot have constantly, how 
 ever unconsciously, in mind, and the image of which, 
 whether or no as universal as the Platonic philosophy 
 
 346 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 pretends, is at least part of the material of the imagina 
 tive artist, furnishing more or less vaguely the stand 
 ard by which he admeasures both his own creation and 
 its model, when he has one, this ideal counterpart, so 
 to speak, is curiously absent from Mr. James s con 
 templation. Given a character with certain traits, sug 
 gested, no doubt, by certain specific experiences, its 
 action is not deduced by ideal logic, but arrived at 
 through induction from the artist s entire stock of per 
 tinent general experience, and modelled by its insistent 
 pressure. "What conduct does my rather unusual 
 experience lead me to expect of a personage constituted 
 thus and so, in such and such circumstances?" one 
 may imagine Mr. James reflecting. 
 
 Categories like realism and idealism are but con 
 venient, and not exact, and in the practice of any artist 
 both inspirations must be alternately present in the 
 execution of detail, though one of them is surely apt to 
 preponderate in the general conception and in the ar 
 tist s attitude. But it is certainly true that what may 
 be called the ideal of realism has never been held more 
 devoutly not even by Zola than it is by Mr. James. 
 All his subtlety, his refinement, his extreme plasticity, 
 his acquaintance with the academic as well as the 
 actual, are at the service of truth, and that order of 
 truth which is to be discovered rather than divined. 
 Long ago, in speaking of George Sand s idealism, 
 which he admitted to be "very beautiful," he observed: 
 " Something even better in a novelist is that tender ap 
 preciation of actuality which makes even the applica- 
 
 347 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 tion of a single coat of rose-color seem an act of vio 
 lence." The inspiration is a little different from 
 Thackeray s "If truth is not always pleasant, at least 
 it is best." It is more " artistic," perhaps, certainly 
 more disinterested. And at the present day Mr. James 
 would no doubt go farther, omit the word " tender," 
 and for "rose-color" substitute simply "any color at 
 all." It is an unselfish creed, one may remark in pass 
 ing. Color is a variety of form, and it is a commonplace 
 that form is the only passport to posterity. Moreover, 
 as Mr. James concedes, even idealism at times is " very 
 beautiful," and to be compelled to forego beauty in 
 "appreciation of the actual" (for its actuality, that is 
 to say, rather than its beauty) must for an artist be a 
 rigorous renunciation. 
 
 Mr. James has renounced it for the most part with 
 admirable consistency, and his latest works are, in effort 
 and inspiration at least, the very apotheosis of the actual 
 however their absence of color or other elements of 
 form and the encumbrances of their style (the distinc 
 tion is his own) may fail to secure the desired effect of 
 actuality for them. What Maisie knew, for example, 
 may seem to have been learned by a preternaturally 
 precocious child, so that her actuality has not, perhaps, 
 the relief desired by her author. But she can have no 
 other raison d etre for the supposition that even in 
 cidentally she is designed to illustrate the charm of the 
 flower on the dunghill can be at best but a mere guess, 
 so colorlessly is the assumed actuality of her precocity 
 and extraordinary situation exhibited. The book, in- 
 
 348 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 deed, in this respect is a masterpiece of reserve. It is 
 conspicuously free from any taint of rose-color. And 
 in its suppression of the superfluous such as even the 
 remotest recognition of the pathos of Maisie s situation 
 it is an excellent illustration of an order of art that 
 must be radically theoretic, since it could not be the 
 instinctive and spontaneous expression of a normally 
 humane motive. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The truth is that our fiction is in a period of transition, 
 which perhaps is necessarily hostile to spontaneity and 
 favorable to the artificial. We speculate so much as 
 to whether fiction is "a finer art" as practised by the lit 
 tle, than it was in the day of the great, masters, that the 
 present time may fairly be called the reign of theory in 
 fiction as indeed it is in art of any kind. And Mr. 
 James s art is in nothing more modern than in being 
 theoretic. Whatever it is not, it is that. Difficult as, 
 in many respects, it is to characterize, it is plainly what 
 it is by precise intention, by system. Difficult as his 
 theory is to define, it is perfectly clear that his art is the 
 product of it. It is, in a word, a critical product. And 
 it is so because his temperament is the critical tempera 
 ment. Now, whatever may be said of the compatibility 
 or incompatibility of the critical and the creative tem 
 peraments, it is evident that in the matter of creating 
 fiction the critical genius will be a different kind of a 
 practitioner from the creative genius. The latter may 
 be considered to produce the "criticism of life," but 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 the former will be likely to produce such criticism at 
 one remove with? in a word, theory interposed. Even 
 supposing the creator to be also a critic, if his creative 
 imagination preponderates, his theory will be a theory 
 of life, whereas the theory of the writer in whom the 
 critical bent preponderates will be a theory of art. We 
 are said to suffer nowadays from a dearth of the creative 
 imagination. Science, the great, the most nearly uni 
 versal of the interests of the present time, is perhaps 
 thought to be hostile to its entertainment, its develop 
 ment. But science, strictly so called, with its own 
 speedy determination toward specialism is probably 
 less fatal to the imagination than is generally presumed. 
 On the contrary, within its own range, its many ranges, 
 it doubtless stimulates and fosters it. On the other 
 hand, one of its incidental phases has undoubtedly been 
 a wholly cognate intensification of the spirit of scrutiny 
 in fields which, while not strictly scientific, nevertheless 
 invite inquiry and reward research. And the decline 
 of the creative imagination in literature, in poetry, 
 and in fiction, is, no doubt, more or less distinctly 
 traceable to the consequent unexampled development 
 of the philosophic and critical spirit and its inevitable 
 invasion of the field of creative activity, the field, that 
 is to say, of art. The contemporary artist, if he thinks at 
 all, is compelled to think critically, to philosophize more 
 expressly and specifically than the classic artist was. 
 Consequently, even the creative imagination pure and 
 simple is nowadays more rarely to be encountered than 
 this imagination in combination with critical reflection. 
 
 350 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 But with Mr. James the case is far simpler. It would 
 be idle to deny to the author of a shelf-full of novels and 
 a thousand or more characters the possession of the 
 creative imagination, however concentrated upon actu 
 ality and inspired by experience. Yet it is particularly 
 true of him among the writers of even our own time that 
 his critical faculty is eminently preponderant that 
 he has, as I say, essentially the critical temperament. 
 He has never devoted himself very formally to criticism, 
 never squared his elbows and settled down to the busi 
 ness of it. It has always been somewhat incidental and 
 secondary with him. His essays have been limited 
 to belles-lettres in range, and they have rarely been the 
 rounded, complete, and final characterization of the 
 subject from a central point of view. Such as, for ex 
 ample, Arnold s. They have been instead, perhaps, a 
 little agglutinate rather than synthetic, one may say, 
 not very attentively distributed or organized. But 
 this may very well be because they have more than 
 eschewed pedantry. And certainly they have been 
 felicity itself; each a series of penetrating remarks, an 
 agglomeration of light but telling touches, immensely 
 discriminating, and absolutely free from traditional or 
 temperamental deflection, marked by a taste at once 
 fastidiously academic, and at the same time sensitively 
 impressionable. The two volumes " French Poets and 
 Novelists " and " Partial Portraits " stand at the head of 
 American literary criticism and " Essays in London and 
 Elsewhere" next them. The "Life of Hawthorne" is, as a 
 piece of criticism, altogether unexcelled and for the most 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 part unrivalled in the voluminous English Men of Let 
 ters series to which all the eminent English critics have 
 contributed. One may feel that his view of the general 
 is, in this work, too elevated to permit him always cor 
 rectly to judge the specific leads him to characterize, 
 for instance, Hawthorne s environment as a handicap 
 to him, whereas it was an opportunity. But to this 
 same broad and academic view, which measures the in 
 dividual by the standard of the type (and how few there 
 are to whom this standard does not equitably apply 1), 
 we owe the most searching thing ever said about Haw 
 thorne: " Man s conscience was his theme, but he saw 
 it in the light of a creative fancy which added out of its 
 own substance an interest, and I may almost say, an 
 importance." The genius itself of criticism is in the 
 application to Tennyson s 
 
 " Tis better to have loved and lost 
 Than never to have loved at all," 
 
 of the epithets "curt" and " reserved" by comparison 
 with Musset s " Letter to Lamartine." The essay on 
 Maupassant is an unsurpassed critical performance. 
 That on Emerson is, besides being subtly critical, of a 
 curiously combined elegance and elevation with a re 
 sultant impression of a piece of art at once exquisite and 
 noble. That on Fanny Kemble is a notable piece of sym 
 pathetic appreciation, and in places quite in the grand 
 style itself; for instance: "A prouder nature never 
 affronted the long humiliation of life." In "Daniel 
 Deronda: a Conversation," there are more penetrating 
 
 352 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 things said about George Eliot, one is tempted to say, 
 than in all else that has been written about her. And Mr. 
 James s penetration is uniformly based on good sense. 
 It is perhaps ominously never fanciful. He writes of 
 Musset and George Sand, of Balzac and Trollope, with 
 a disinterested discrimination absolutely judicial. His 
 fondness for Daudet, for Turge nieff, for Stevenson, is 
 nothing in comparison with his interest in the art they 
 practise, the art of which he is apt to consider all its 
 practitioners somewhat too exclusively merely as its ex 
 ponents. If he has a passion, it is for the art of fiction 
 itself. 
 
 This is the theme, indeed, on which his criticism has 
 centred, and the fact is extremely significant. It is 
 almost exact to say that he has no other. He is actively 
 preoccupied by it, even in the composition of his own 
 fictions, as the Prefaces to the New York Edition 
 copiously attest. That is what I mean by calling his art 
 theoretic. It carefully, explicitly, with conviction, illus 
 trates his theory. He has an essay expressly devoted 
 to the topic, but he has many in which it is more or less 
 incidentally considered, and the aforesaid Prefaces, 
 taken together, quite constitute a critical cyclopaedia 
 of it. In "The Art of Fiction" he says, "It is an in 
 cident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting 
 on a table and look out at you in a certain way," and 
 that " the degree of interest" such an incident has "will 
 depend upon the skill of the painter," meaning the 
 author. In his essay on Daudet he says: "The appear 
 ance of things is constantly more complicated as the 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 world grows older, and it needs a more and more pa 
 tient art, a closer notation, to divide it into its parts;" 
 "Life is, immensely, a matter of surface, and if our 
 emotions in general are interesting, the form of those 
 emotions has the merit of being the most definite thing 
 about them;" "Putting people into books is what the 
 novelist lives on ; " " It is the real the transmuted real 
 that he gives us fcest; the fruit of a process that adds 
 to observation what a kiss adds to a greeting. The joy, 
 the excitement of recognition, are keen, even when the 
 object recognized is dismal." 
 
 Each of these sentences and many more might be 
 cited is a key to his own fiction. The last is particu 
 larly indicative. The joy of recognition is what ap 
 parently he aims at exciting in his readers; what cer 
 tainly he often succeeds in exciting to the exclusion 
 of other emotions, though the kiss he adds to his greet 
 ing to adopt his charming figure is oftenest, perhaps, 
 an extremely chaste salute. It must be admitted that 
 the pleasure we take in his characters largely depends 
 on whether or no we have encountered them. If we 
 have not, we are sometimes a little at sea as to the 
 source of even his own interest in them, which, though 
 certainly never profoundly personal, is often extremely 
 prolonged. If we have, we experience the delight of 
 the aficionado in the virtuosity with which what is al 
 ready more or less vaguely familiar is unfolded to our 
 recognition. But even in this case the recognition is 
 something quite different from that with which we re 
 alize the actualitv of a largely imaginative character. 
 
 354 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 We recognize Daisy Miller, for example, differently from 
 Becky Sharp. 
 
 For one thing, we are not so anxious to meet her again. 
 I know of nothing that attests so plainly the preponder 
 ance of virtuosity in Mr. James s art as the indisposition 
 of his readers to re-read his books. This would not be 
 so true if this element of his work frankly appeared. If 
 he himself accepted it as such, he would make more 
 of it in the traditional way, give it more form, express it 
 more attentively, harmonize its character and statement 
 more explicitly. There is no difficulty in re-reading 
 Anatole France. But Mr. James s virtuosity is not a 
 matter of treatment, of expression, of " process," as he 
 would say. It is an integral part of the very fabric of his 
 conception. It is engaged and involved in the substance 
 of his works. The substance suffers accordingly. In 
 stead of "a closer and more intimate correspondence 
 with life," the result of his critical theorizing about the 
 what and the how of fiction is a confusion of life and art, 
 which are normally as distinct as subject and statement. 
 Virtuosity of technic is legitimate enough, but virtuosity 
 of vision is quite another thing. And it is to this that 
 Mr. James s study and practice of the art for which he 
 has quite as much of a passion as a penchant have finally 
 brought him. "The Sacred Fount," "The Turn of the 
 Screw," are marked instances of it. But all the later 
 books show the tendency, a tendency all the more 
 marked for the virility and elevation with which it is 
 accompanied, and perhaps inevitable in the product of 
 an overmastering critical faculty exercised in philoso- 
 
 355 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 phizing about, even in the process of practising, an 
 eminently constructive art. 
 
 IV 
 
 When we predicate elusiveness of Mr. James s fiction 
 we mean much more than that his meaning is occasion 
 ally obscure. We mean that he himself always eludes 
 us. The completeness with which he does so, it is per 
 haps possible to consider the measure of his success. The 
 famous theory that prescribes disinterestedness in art 
 may be invoked in favor of this view. Every one is fa 
 miliar with this theory, so brilliantly expounded by Taine, 
 so cordially approved by Maupassant, so favorably 
 viewed by Mr. James himself. Any one to whom Aris 
 totle s dictum that virtue resides in a mean seems es 
 pecially applicable to art theories, must find it difficult 
 to accept this prescription even in theory. Even in 
 theory it seems possible to have too little as well as too 
 much of the artist himself in any work of art. The 
 presence of the personality of the artist, indeed, may be 
 called the constituting element of a work of art. It is 
 even the element that makes one scientific demonstra 
 tion what the scientists themselves call more "beauti 
 ful " than another. But in practice one may surely say 
 that in some instances or on some occasions we do not 
 feel the artist enough in his work. Just as on others 
 we are altogether too conscious of him. 
 
 It is the latter difficulty that has been the more fre 
 quent in fiction up to the present age, perhaps, and in 
 
 356 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 English fiction perhaps up to the present day. And very 
 ikely it is this circumstance that has led to the generali 
 zation, and the present popularity of the generalization, 
 which insists on the attitude of disinterested curiosity 
 as the only properly artistic attitude. Even in criticism, 
 so much had been endured from the other attitude, Ar 
 nold whose practice, to be sure, was quite different 
 observed that the great art was " to get oneself out of the 
 way and let humanity judge." We have had so much 
 partisanship that we have proscribed personality. 
 
 Disinterested curiosity is, however, itself a very per 
 sonal matter. Carried to the extent to which it is carried 
 by Mr. James, at least, it becomes very sensible, a very 
 appreciable element of a work of art. It is forced upon 
 one s notice as much as an aggressive and intrusive per 
 sonal element could be. To say that if you set the pieces 
 of a work of art in a certain relative position they will 
 automatically, as it were, generate the effect >to be pro 
 duced is to be tremendously sanguine of their intrinsic 
 interest and force. Even then the artist s presence is only 
 minimized, not excluded, one may logically observe; the 
 pieces must be set together in a certain way, and this 
 way will depend on the idiosyncrasy of the artist and 
 not upon the inherent affinity of the pieces. They may 
 have a law of combination, but to prepare them for its 
 operation the law must be perceived by the artist as a 
 force to illustrate rather than merely to "notate," if the 
 result is to have an artistic rather than a scientific in 
 terest. As Mr. James himself has aptly said, "Art is 
 merely a point of view, and genius mainly a way of 
 
 357 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 looking at things." And specifically as to fiction M. 
 Bourget reports him as agreeing with him that the truest 
 definition of a novel is "a personal view of life." How 
 is the " point of view," above all the "personal" point 
 of view, to be perceived, if the artist himself eludes us 
 completely ? What is it we are looking at the phenom 
 ena he is recording, or his view of the phenomena? 
 But the phenomena should of themselves show his 
 view, it may be contended. If they do, there is nothing 
 to be said. The question at bottom is, do they ? 
 
 The old practice gave us the point of view by stating 
 it; nor could its statement even then always be called 
 an artistic intrusion, a false note, a disillusion. It was 
 not always imposed on the phenomena by main strength. 
 When Thackeray was reproached with marrying Henry 
 Esmond to Lady Castlewood, he replied, "I didn t do 
 it; they did it themselves." Some such artistic rectitude 
 as that, recognizing the law of his own creations, is cer 
 tainly to be required of the artist. But if his devotion 
 is so thoroughgoing as to involve complete self-efface 
 ment, the practical result will be the disappearance, or 
 at least the obscuration, of his point of view. That, I 
 think, is the peril which Mr. James s theory and prac 
 tice of art have not sufficiently recognized. Disinter 
 ested curiosity may have much of the value that has 
 been claimed for it. It may have been too much neg 
 lected in the past. And to point out its logical self-con 
 tradiction as an absolute prescription may be conceded 
 to savor of hair-splitting. It is, nevertheless, only valua 
 ble as a means, as an agent. When it is worked so hard 
 
 358 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 as itself to become a part of the effect, its value ceases. 
 And in Mr. James s later work what we get, what 
 we see, what impresses us, is not the point of view, it 
 is his own disinterested curiosity. It counts as part, 
 as a main part, of the spectacle he provides for us. We 
 see him busily getting out of the way, visibly withdraw 
 ing behind the screen of his story, illustrating his theory 
 by palpably withholding from us the expected, the 
 needful, exposition and explanation, making of his 
 work, in fine, a kind of elaborate and complicated 
 fortification between us and his personality. 
 
 This latter indeed he may be said to have rendered 
 nearly proof against all attack by a device of which he 
 has latterly made systematic use and which may be de 
 scribed as passing the story to the reader through the 
 mind of one of the personages of it, thus obliterating all 
 traces of its origin. He is thoroughly in love with this 
 idea and nothing could more sharply attest his devotion 
 to artistic theory than his advocacy and his practice of 
 what in his Preface to "The Golden Bowl" he terms 
 "the still marked inveteracy of a certain indirect and 
 oblique view of my presented action." This oblique 
 view is obtained, he continues, by dealing with his sub 
 ject-matter " through the opportunity and the sensibility 
 of some more or less detached, some not strictly in 
 volved, though thoroughly interested and .intelligent, 
 witness or reporter." So that the story appears "not 
 as my own impersonal account of the affair in hand, but 
 as my account of somebody s impression of it the 
 terms of this person s access to it and estimate of it con- 
 
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 tributing thus by some fine little law to intensification 
 of interest." Even as a matter of theory, one would say, 
 this "fine little law" could only operate to intensify in 
 terest in readers who preferred the " triturate" to the 
 " mother tincture." For even the element of how the 
 action strikes one of the participants must be feebler 
 than that of how it strikes not only its own author, but 
 the author of the participant himself. There is, to be 
 sure, a new element of interest added, but a larger one 
 being in this very process subtracted, the net result 
 is less interest. 
 
 And I think it works out in this way, too, in the last 
 three novels, which are certainly wonderful and truly 
 monumental instances of extraordinary and original 
 literary capacity. In "The Golden Bowl" I, at least, 
 am sensible of the presence of this artificial ame damn e 
 of the author as an obstruction. Why should we not 
 know what happened except as he or she could imper 
 fectly ascertain it, since what we wish to discover is 
 not how it all strikes him or her, but how it strikes us. 
 In "The Ambassadors" the alembication of the story 
 in the crucible of the real hero s mind is a miracle of 
 systematic art, but its result is considerably to obscure 
 and greatly to enfeeble the story itself by concentrat 
 ing the interest on this personage, who after we get over 
 thinking of him as an obstructionist monopolizes our 
 attention. He certainly rewards it and is indubitably 
 one of Mr. James s most sympathetic successes. But 
 this success is distinctly not achieved through it is 
 distinctly postponed by his indirect portrayal in illus- 
 
 360 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 tration of the artistic theory that conceives him as 
 augmenting the interest of what he comes completely 
 to overshadow, and as an expedient for incidentally 
 securing the inviolability of the author s own person 
 ality. 
 
 One notable effect of this detachment in the novelist 
 is that his characters do not seem to be his characters. 
 Being the results of his observation, the fruit of his 
 experiences, they do not count as his creations. We 
 meet Mr. James s in life, or we do not meet them, 
 as it happens; but they do not figure importantly for 
 us in the world of art. American travellers who drift 
 about Europe doubtless American residents of Lon 
 don encounter their counterparts from time to time, 
 and note with a pleasure that is always more acute than 
 permanent how cleverly, how searchingly, Mr. James 
 has caught an individual or fixed a type. Necessarily, 
 however, a museum thus collected has rather an an 
 thropological than an artistic interest. The novelist s 
 personages are not sufficiently unified by his own pen 
 chant, preference, personality, to constitute a society 
 of varied individuals viewed and portrayed from one 
 definite and particular point of view as the characters 
 of the great novelists do. There is not enough of their 
 creator in them to constitute them a particular society. 
 The society is simply differentiated by the variety and 
 circumscribed by the limits of Mr. James s experience 
 (and, of course, its suggestions to an extremely sensitive 
 and speculative mind) ; it is not coordinated, and, as it 
 were, organized into an ideal correlation of the actual 
 
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 world as conceived by a novelist of imagination, im 
 agination not only such as Thackeray s and George 
 Eliot s, but such as Trollope s, even. 
 
 It is, however, not precise enough to say that Mr. 
 James s mind is essentially critical, and that therefore 
 his attitude is essentially detached. There are two 
 sufficiently distinct varieties of the critical mind, the 
 philosophical and the scientific. Mr. James s is the 
 latter. And when that portion of literature which 
 includes the works of the imagination is conceived as a 
 criticism of life, it is so conceived in virtue of its illus 
 trating the former the philosophical spirit. So far as 
 fiction is a criticism of life, it is so because it exhibits a 
 philosophy of life, in general or in some particular. It 
 is far more the scientific habit of viewing life and its 
 phenomena that Mr. James illustrates. His charac 
 teristic attitude is that of scrutiny. His inspiration is 
 curiosity. Certainly to affirm of so mature, so thought 
 ful, and so penetratingly observant a writer, that he 
 has no philosophy of life would, aside from its imper 
 tinence, be quite unwarrantable. It is impossible not 
 to feel in his fiction that he has made his own synthesis 
 of "all this unintelligible world." However impersonal 
 and objective his art, it cannot conceal this. It is 
 enough to be felt to give weight to his utterances, to 
 furnish credentials for the larger correspondences and 
 comparisons of his pictures to their moral analogies in 
 
 362 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 life, to add authoritativeness to his expositions, and 
 exorcise suspicion of their ephemeralness and super 
 ficiality. What I mean is that even in such a work as 
 " The Sacred Fount " is to be discerned the man who 
 has reflected on the traits and currents of existence, on 
 their character and their implications, as well as the 
 writer who notes the phenomena, without correlating 
 them through the principles, of human life. 
 
 But what this philosophy is, it is idle to speculate. 
 It is doubtless profound enough, and though one does 
 not argue introspection of Mr. James s temperament, 
 unless, indeed, his work betray an effort to escape 
 it, as the nuisance it may easily become, he could 
 doubtless sketch it for us if inclined, and very eloquently 
 and even elaborately draw out for us its principles and 
 positions. But he has no interest whatever in doing 
 so no interest in giving us even a hint of it. One 
 may infer that taste plays a large part in it, the 
 taste that some philosophers have made the foundation 
 and standard of morals, the taste, perhaps, that pre 
 vents him from disclosing it. He has the air of assum 
 ing its universality, as if, indeed, it were a matter of 
 breeding, a mere preference for "the best" in life as in 
 art, a system, in a wo^d, whose sanctions are instinctive, 
 and so not strongly enough or consciously enough felt 
 to call for emphasis or exposition. No manifestation 
 or quality or incarnation of "the best" evokes his 
 enthusiasm. That it "may prevail" is the youngest 
 of his cares. His philosophy appears in the penumbra 
 of his performance as a cultivated indifference, or at 
 
 363 
 
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 most a subconscious basis of moral fastidiousness on 
 which the superstructure that monopolizes his interest 
 is erected. 
 
 There are two sufficiently obvious results. In the 
 first place, his work has less importance as literature, 
 because it has significance only as art. In the next 
 place, his individuality being as philosophically obscure 
 as it is artistically detached, his books do not count as 
 expressional variants of it, and are no more unified 
 than their characters are. If they were pervaded by, 
 or even tinctured with, some general philosophic char 
 acter, they would count in the mass for far more, his 
 ceuvre, as the French say, would have more relief, 
 his position in literature would be better defined and 
 more important. As it is, for the lack of some unifying 
 philosophy, each one is an independent illustration of 
 some particular exercise of his talent, and his person 
 ality is dissipated by being thus disseminated. 
 
 What is it to have a philosophy of life ? In any sense 
 in which it may be legitimately required of the artist, 
 even of the artist who deals expressly with life, of 
 the poet, the dramatist, or the writer of fiction, to 
 have a philosophy of life certainly does not demand 
 the possession of a body of doctrine "based on inter 
 dependent, subordinate, and coherent principles," as 
 has been prescribed by pedantry for criticism. It is 
 simply to be profoundly impressed by certain truths. 
 These truths need not be recondite, but they must be 
 deeply felt. They need be in no degree original. The 
 writer s originality will have abundant scope in their 
 
 364 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 expression. Goethe, it is true, replied to a perhaps not 
 wholly pedantic criticism of "Wilhelm Meister": "I 
 should think a rich, manifold life brought close to our 
 eyes would be enough in itself without any express 
 tendency." And Goethe is probably the greatest ex 
 ample of the artist and the philosopher combined. This 
 observation, however, is confined to a single work; it is 
 impossible to think of the author of " Wilhelm Meister " 
 as the author only of it and of works of like aim and 
 scope. And furthermore, the life which Mr. James s 
 books bring close to our eyes, though manifold, is not 
 rich. It is remarkably multifarious, but "rich" is 
 precisely the last epithet that could properly be applied 
 to it. 
 
 It is, nevertheless, the result of observation of the 
 most highly developed material, and if it lack vitality, 
 it is not because it is commonplace or rudimentary. 
 The converse is so pointedly the case as to constitute 
 Mr. James s chief excellence. It has been said of him 
 that he has not sounded the depths, but " charted the 
 shallows" of life. But to say this is quite to miss the 
 point about him. Occupy himself with the shallows 
 he certainly often does, though quite without any 
 attempt to chart them, any attempt at completeness. 
 It is evident that he is not concerned to show them 
 as shallows, with the inference that they compose a 
 far larger part of life than is apprehended by cur 
 rent mechanical optimism. He does not deal with 
 them in any such philosophical spirit. His scientific 
 curiosity does not distinguish between the phenomena, 
 
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 all of which are inexhaustibly interesting to him. 
 Except certain coarsenesses, which probably seem to 
 him almost pathologic, or at any rate too ordinary 
 and commonplace for treatment, nothing is to him, 
 as I have said, too insignificant to be interesting, 
 considered as material for artistic treatment. The 
 treatment is to dignify the theme always. And in this 
 attitude no one can fail to see, if not a deeper interest 
 in art than in life, at least an interest in life so impar 
 tial and inclusive as to approach aridity so far as feeling 
 is concerned. To take an interest in making interesting 
 what is in itself perfectly colorless is, one must admit, 
 almost to avow a fondness for the tour de force dear to 
 the dilettante. Still it would be misleading to insist 
 on this, because Mr. James s intention is, on the whole, 
 to indicate the significance of the apparently trifling, 
 and not to protest that an artistic effect can be got out of 
 next to nothing. It betrays the interest of the naturalist 
 asseverating that nothing is really trifling, since it exists. 
 It is easy to lose one s way in endeavoring to follow 
 the clue of Mr. James s preoccupation, but with due 
 attention I think it may be done. And his interest in 
 making interesting the pose and gesture of a lady 
 standing by a table, let me recapitulate, is not, or is only 
 a little, to produce an artistic effect with a minimum 
 of means; nor is it to show that of such trifles human 
 life is largely composed; it is to show that in life itself 
 such things are interesting not only because everything 
 is, but also because, though slight, they are subtle and 
 certain indications of the character to which they belong. 
 
 366 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 In this way he can find something recondite in what 
 is superficially very simple. And I should say that it is, 
 in a word, to the pursuit of the recondite in life that he 
 has come more and more to consecrate his extraordi 
 nary powers. He sees it in everything, in the simple 
 as well as in the complicated, in the shallows as well as 
 in the depths. That is all one can truthfully say, per 
 haps, though of course in seeking it in the familiar and 
 the commonplace it is difficult to avoid the semblance 
 of mystification. 
 
 The pursuit of the recondite, however, is quite in 
 consistent with much dwelling on the meaning of life 
 as a whole. And it is owing to his taking this latter so 
 much for granted as so largely to exclude it from his 
 fiction, that the life which Mr. James "brings close" to 
 us should lack the " richness" that Goethe claimed for 
 " Wilhelm Meister." If he conceived the shallows as 
 shallows and the depths as depths, he could hardly 
 avoid taking a less arid view of them, and the astonish 
 ing variety of the phenomena that entertain and even 
 absorb him would be grouped in some synthetic way 
 around centres of coordinating feeling, instead of 
 unrolled like a panorama of trifles hitherto unconsid- 
 ered and tragedies hitherto unsuspected exhibited 
 like a naturalist s collection made in a country accessible 
 to all, but heretofore un visited by the scientist with the 
 seeing eye. 
 
 Hence, I think, the lack of large vitality in his books, 
 of a sensibly noble and moving effect. The search for 
 the recondite involves the absence of direct dealing with 
 
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 the elemental. The passions are perforce minimized, 
 from being treated in their differentiation rathor than 
 in their universality, as well as from being so swamped 
 in minutiae as largely to lose their energy. His books 
 are not moral theses, but psychological themes, studies 
 not of forces, but of manifestations. The latter are re 
 lated as cause and effect, perhaps, but not combined 
 in far-reaching suggestiveness. The theme has weight 
 at times, morally considered, but it is not rendered typi 
 cal, as in George Eliot, for example. It is never either 
 ominous or reassuring. It is never brought close, in 
 Goethe s words, to the reader. It makes him reflect, 
 but speculatively; reason, but academically. It is an 
 unfolding, a laying bare, but not a putting together. 
 The imagination to which it is due is too tinctured with 
 curiosity to be truly constructive. It has the disadvan 
 tage of never taking possession of the theme and con 
 ducting it masterfully. It is not a priori enough. It 
 is held in the leash of observation and fettered by its 
 voluntary submission to the material, to exhibit rather 
 than to arrange which is its specific ambition. The 
 work as a whole is thus necessarily coldly conceived. 
 The heat is in the narration of detail. And thus the 
 reader is impressed far more by the detail than by 
 either the grand construction or by the general design. 
 Above all, the characters, the portraiture of human na 
 ture, upon which the vitality of fiction depends, suffer 
 from the recondite quality, which wars with the ele 
 mental and thus tends to eliminate the typical, the rep 
 resentative, which constitutes the basis of both effec- 
 
 368 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 tive illusion and significant truth. But of course all that 
 makes types interesting is the possession of a philosophy 
 of life. They imply classification, which is the last 
 thing to be looked for in the espieglerie of the most pre 
 cocious conceivable chiel among us merely occupied in 
 taking notes. 
 
 VI 
 
 After all, the supreme test of a novelist s abiding 
 interest is the humanity of his characters. This is cer 
 tainly true of the drama. The play is not the thing 
 without Hamlet. But as to the novel Mr. James would 
 doubtless insist that the characters be enveloped and 
 exhibited in an illusion of life as a distinct though not 
 of course independent factor of the picture a palpa 
 ble general medium in which the figures exist and 
 move. This, indeed, I take it, is his view of the peculiar 
 province, the distinctive advantage, of the novel over 
 other varieties of literary representation. The difficulty 
 with this is not in the idea, but in its execution. Exe 
 cuted in conscious illustration of its importance the 
 medium is apt to minimize the figures. We exchange 
 "The School of Athens" for "The Departure for Cy- 
 thera," Titian s "Entombment" for an interior by De 
 Hooghe. On the other hand, if the figures are fine the 
 scene is extremely likely to take care of itself. Mr. 
 James, for instance, professes a preference for "The 
 House of the Seven Gables" over the other romances 
 of Hawthorne because it seems to him more of a novel, 
 because he hears more of the "vague hum" of life in it 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 than in the other novels, and to find or search for the 
 hum of life in Hawthorne is to have a sharp sense for it. 
 "The House of the Seven Gables" is, however, if not the 
 least characteristic of Hawthorne s larger productions, at 
 least that in which the characters have the slenderest in 
 terest, the most shadowy outlines. They do not compare 
 with those of "The Scarlet Letter." Mr. James also 
 notes the general absence of types in Hawthorne s books, 
 and they certainly fail in effectiveness for this reason as 
 well as for containing so little of the hum of life. The 
 same might be said of the personages of later and far less 
 romantic writers. The type in fiction has become a little 
 old-fashioned at least the labelled and easily recog 
 nized type has. It is relegated to the stage, where, ap 
 parently, it will continue, from the limitations of the 
 histrionic art, to be a necessity. In the novel it has large 
 ly succumbed to the conquering force of psychology, 
 which in creating an individual and to that end em 
 phasizing his idiosyncrasies has, almost proportionally, 
 robbed him of his typical interest. And this is a loss 
 for which absolutely nothing can atone in the work of 
 the realistic novelist whose theme is actual life. It is im 
 possible to be deeply interested in something too idiosyn 
 cratic for identification. 
 
 The list of Mr. James s novels is a long one, and his 
 short stories are very numerous; and among them all 
 there is not one with a perfunctory or desultory in 
 spiration. Why is it that they in no sense constitute a 
 com edie humainef They are very populous; why is it 
 that the characters that people them have so little re- 
 
 370 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 lief? Taken together they constitute the least success 
 ful element of his fiction. Partly this is because, as I 
 say, they possess so little typical quality. But why also 
 do they possess so little personal interest ? They have, 
 seemingly, astonishingly little, even for their creator. 
 So far from knowing the sound of their voices, as 
 Thackeray said of his, he is apparently less preoccupied 
 with them than about the situation the "predica 
 ment," he would aptly say in which he places them. 
 Apparently he is chiefly concerned with what they are 
 to do when confronted with the complications his in 
 genuity devises for them, how they are to "pull it off." 
 These complications are sometimes very slight, in order 
 to show, or at least showing, what trifles control desti 
 nies; sometimes they are very grave, and exhibit the 
 conflict of the soul with warring desires and distracting 
 perplexities. And they are never commonplace any 
 more than the characters themselves, each one of which 
 is intimately observed and thoroughly respected as an 
 individuality. But their situation rather than them 
 selves is what constitutes the claim, the raison d etre, of 
 the book in which they figure. The interest in the book, 
 accordingly, becomes analogous to that of a game in 
 which the outcome rather than the pieces monopolizes 
 the attention. It cannot be said that the pieces are not 
 attentively described, some of them, indeed, are very 
 artistically and even beautifully carved, but it is the 
 moves that count most of all. Will Densher give a 
 plausible solution to the recondite problem of how to 
 combine the qualities of a cad and of a gentleman ? 
 
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 Will Maisie decide for or against Sir Claude? What 
 decision will Sir Claude himself make? Has Vander- 
 bank ideality enough to marry Nanda? Will Chad 
 Newsome go back to Woollett ? The game is very well, 
 often exquisitely, played; and the result, which, never 
 theless, from all we know of the characters, we can 
 rarely foresee, wears when we argue it out in ret 
 rospect as the author clearly has done in advance the 
 proper artistic aspect of a foregone conclusion. Mr. 
 James rarely seems to impose it himself; except on the 
 few occasions when, as in "The Princess Casamas- 
 sima" or "The Other House," he deals in melodrama, 
 in which he almost never suceeds in being convincing, 
 his rectitude is so strong a reliance as to exclude all 
 impression of perversity or wilfulness and convey the 
 agreeable sense of sufficiently fatalistic predestination. 
 Meantime you find out about the characters from the 
 result. Since it has turned out in this way, they must 
 have been such and such persons. In other words, they 
 have not been characterized very vividly, have not been 
 presented very completely as human beings. 
 
 At least they do not people one s memory, I think, 
 as the personages of many inferior artists do. When 
 one thinks of the number of characters that Mr. James 
 has created, each, as I have said, carefully individual 
 ized, and none of them replicas, an amazing world 
 they certainly compose in their originality and variety, 
 it is odd what an effort it is to recall even their names. 
 The immortal Daisy Miller, the sensitive and highly 
 organized Ralph Touchett, the robust and thoroughly 
 
 372 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 national Christopher Newman, the gentle Miss Pynsent, 
 and a number of others that do remain in one s mem 
 ory, mainly belong to the earlier novels and form but 
 a small proportion of the great number of their author s 
 creations. Different readers, however, would no doubt 
 answer this rather crude test differently, and in any 
 case it is not because they fail in precision that Mr. 
 James s personages lose distinctness as their story, like 
 all stories, fades from the recollection. They have a 
 sharp enough outline, but they are not completely 
 enough characterized. 
 
 Why ? Why is it that when the American heroine of 
 one of his stories, beautifully elaborated in detail, a per 
 fect specimen of Dutch intarsla, kills herself because 
 her English husband publishes a savage book about 
 her country, we find ourselves perfectly unprepared for 
 this denouement? Why is it that with all the pains ex 
 pended on the portrait of the extraordinary Mrs. Head 
 way of "The Siege of London," we never quite get his 
 point of view, but are kept considering the social duty 
 of the prig who passes his valuable time in observing her 
 attempts at rehabilitation and no doubt most justly 
 exposes her in the end ? There is nothing to complain 
 of in the result, the problem is worked out satisfactorily 
 enough, but Mrs. Headway herself does not count for 
 us, does not hang together, in the way in which Augier s 
 Aventuriere does, or even Dumas s Baronne d Ange. 
 It would be difficult, for example, for this reason, to 
 make a play of "The Siege of London." 
 
 The answer to this query, the explanation of this in- 
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 completeness of characterization in Mr. James s never 
 theless very precise personages, consists, I think, in the 
 fact that he rather pointedly neglects the province of 
 the heart. This has been from the first the natural peril 
 of the psychological novelist, the neglect of what in 
 the Scripture view constitutes "the whole man," just 
 as the neglect of the mind which discriminates and de 
 fines personalities once constituted was the defect of 
 the psychological novelist s predecessor. But for Mr. 
 James this peril has manifestly no terrors. The prov 
 ince of the heart seems to him, perhaps, so much to be 
 taken for granted as to be on the whole rather negligi 
 ble, so far as romantic exploitation is concerned. 
 
 Incidentally, one may ask, if all the finest things in 
 the world are to be assumed, what is there left for ex 
 ploitation ? Matter for curiosity mainly the curiosity 
 which in Mr. James is so sharp and so fruitful. The 
 realm of the affections is that which ex vi termini, one 
 may say most engages and attaches. Are we to be 
 interested in fiction without liking it? And are we to 
 savor art without experiencing emotion ? The fact that 
 few reread Mr. James means that his form, however 
 adequate and effective, is not in itself agreeable. But 
 it means still more that his "content" is not attaching. 
 When Lockhart once made some remark to Scott about 
 poets and novelists looking at life as mere material for 
 art, the "veteran Chief of Letters" observed: "I fear 
 you have some very young ideas in your head. We shall 
 never learn to feel and respect our real calling, unless we 
 have taught ourselves to consider everything as moon- 
 
 374 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 shine compared with the education of the heart." Is 
 it possible that Mr. James s controlling idea is a " young 
 one"? Is his undoubted originality, after all, the ex 
 ploitation of what seemed to so wise a practitioner as 
 Scott, "moonshine"? That would account, perhaps, 
 for the pallid light that often fills his canvas when his 
 characters are grouped in a scene where "the human 
 heart" insight into which used to be deemed the 
 standard of the novelist s excellence has a part of any 
 prominence to play. The voluntary abandonment by 
 the novelist of such a field of interest as the province 
 of the heart is witness, at all events, of an asceticism 
 whose compensations ought in prudence to be thor 
 oughly assured. Implied, understood this domain! 
 Very well, one may reply, but what a field of universal 
 interest you neglect, what a rigorously puritanic sacri 
 fice you make! 
 
 Thus to neglect the general field which the historic 
 poets and romancers have so fruitfully cultivated re 
 sults, however, in only a negative disadvantage, it may 
 be contended, and Mr. James s psychology may be 
 thought by many readers a fair compensation. It is cer 
 tainly prodigiously well done. A writer with nothing 
 more and nothing better to his credit than the group 
 of stories assembled under the title "The Better Sort" 
 has an indisputable claim to be considered a master, 
 whatever one may think of the tenuity of his themes 
 and the disproportionate attentiveness of their treat 
 ment. "It is proprement dit, but it is pale," he makes 
 a suppositions Frenchman say of his romance, in his 
 
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 clever and suggestive "The Point of View"; and he 
 frankly records his failure to interest Turge*nieff in the 
 fictions he used to send him from time to time. All the 
 same, a new genre is a new genre, and as such it is idle 
 to belittle Mr. James s, as readers too dull to seize its 
 qualities sometimes impertinently and impatiently do. 
 But specifically and positively a novelist s neglect of 
 the province of the heart involves the disadvantage of 
 necessarily incomplete portraiture. 
 
 A picture of human life without reference to the 
 passions, the depiction of human character minus this 
 preponderating constituent element of it, cannot but be 
 limited and defective. The view that half-consciously 
 regards the passions as either titanic or vulgar, and 
 therefore only pertinent as artistic material to either 
 tragedy or journalism, is a curiously superficial one. 
 The most controlled and systematized life, provided it 
 illustrate any ideality, is inspired by them as fully as the 
 least directed and most irregular. The diminution of 
 demonstrativeness under the influence of civilization is 
 no measure of the diminution of feeling; and even 
 if we feel less than our forefathers, our feeling is still 
 the dominant element in us. Every one s consciousness 
 attests this, that of the ascetic as well as that of the epi 
 curean, that of the patrician and the Brahmin as well as 
 that of the peasant and the clown. Whether the drama 
 of human life is of the soul or of the senses, it is equally 
 real, universal, and the resultant of the passions. To 
 assume that the modern man, whatever the degree of his 
 complicated differentiation, is any more destitute of 
 
 376 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 them than his autochthonous ancestor, is to leave out of 
 consideration the controlling constituent of his nature 
 and the mainspring of his action. All of these per 
 sonages that people Mr. James s extraordinarily varied 
 world must have them, and the circumstance that he 
 rarely, if ever, tells us what they are, makes us feel 
 our acquaintance with his personages to be partial 
 and superficial. At times we can infer them, it is true. 
 But every art, certainly not excepting the novelist s, 
 needs all the aid it can get to make itself effective, and 
 reliance on inference instead of statement results here 
 in a very shadowy kind of substance. 
 
 Is it because of a certain coolness in Mr. James s 
 own temperament that his report of human nature is 
 thus incomplete? Does he make us weep or laugh 
 so little because he is so unmoved himself, because he 
 illustrates so imperturbably and fastidiously the con 
 verse of the Horatian maxim? Candidly speaking, 
 perhaps we have no business to inquire. Whether it is 
 due to his theory or to the temperament responsible 
 for his theory, perhaps it is both pertinent and proper 
 to rest in the indisputable fact that he does leave us 
 unmoved. After all, the main question is, does the fact 
 have for us the compensations that evidently it has 
 for him ? Say that he deals so little with the emotions 
 because preoccupation with them deflects and distracts 
 from the business of presenting in all its force of singu- 
 larization and relief, at whatever cost of completeness, 
 the truths and traits of human nature that most in 
 terest him, that interest him so intensely. Say even, 
 
 377 
 
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 in other words, that to feel an emotional interest in his 
 personages is for an author to incur the risk of a partial 
 ity inconsistent with artistic rectitude. Certainly it is 
 impossible to be blind to this controlling rectitude in 
 Mr. James, impossible to avoid recognizing however 
 easy we may suspect nature has made it for him his 
 unalterable fidelity to his main purpose in his fictions, 
 which is to clothe and depict the idea he wishes to illus 
 trate, whatever becomes of his people in the process. 
 Say, too, that though sometimes, in consequence, these 
 remain very much on the hither side of realization, and 
 though they never take possession of the scene them 
 selves and tell or enact their own story, without, at any 
 rate, our feeling that they rely largely on the subtlest of 
 prompters they nevertheless always strictly subserve 
 the larger design of their creator. Grant all this. The 
 salient fact remains that their creator is too much con 
 cerned with the laws of his universe, apparently, to as 
 sign them other than vicarious functions, or to take 
 other than what is called an "intellectual" interest in 
 them. 
 
 And this is an interest extremely difficult for an au 
 thor to make his readers share. The reader is much 
 more readily interested through his sympathies, and 
 cannot be relied upon to attach to phenomena which 
 exclude these the same importance as the writer who is 
 exploiting them. He will readily respond to the au 
 thor who illustrates "What a piece of work is man I" 
 and at the same time imperfectly echo the enthusiasm of 
 the artist who exclaims, "How beautiful a thing is this 
 
 378 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 perspective!" Mr. James s enthusiasm, one may fanci 
 fully say, is for the perspective rather than for the sub 
 stance of human nature, and even this, of course, in tak 
 ing it from him, we are obliged to enjoy at one remove; 
 so that, even supposing our pure curiosity to equal his, 
 we can hardly be counted on to feel the same amount 
 for his report of life as he feels for life itself. We need 
 something of him to compensate for the inevitable loss 
 of heat involved in the process of translation. And this 
 he is extremely chary of giving us. What chiefly we 
 perceive is his own curiosity. 
 
 Of this, indeed, we get, I think, a surfeit. Without 
 more warmth than he either feels or will suffer himself 
 to exhibit, it is difficult for him to communicate the zest 
 he plainly takes in the particular material he in general 
 exploits. It is too special, too occasional, too recondite, 
 at times certainly too trivial, to stand on its own merits, 
 aided merely by extraordinary but wholly unemotional 
 cleverness of presentation. In fact, I think one may 
 excusably go so far as to confess a certain antipathy 
 to the degree in which the author exhibits this curiosity. 
 Scrutiny so searching quite excludes sympathy. " In the 
 Cage/ for instance, is a wonderful study, but so persist 
 ent and penetrating as to appear positively pitiless. 
 How many years ago was it that Arnold complained 
 that curiosity, which had a good sense in French, had 
 a bad one in English ? For Mr. James it is not only 
 not a defect, and not merely a quality, but a cardinal 
 virtue. Balzac was certainly not a sentimentalist, yet 
 Taine ascribes what he considers the superiority of 
 
 379 
 
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 Valerie Marneffe to Rebecca Sharp to the fact that 
 Balzac "aime sa Valerie." Would it ever occur to 
 any one to suspect that Mr. James " loved" any of his 
 characters? Ralph Touchett, perhaps; perhaps also 
 Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether; yes, and Miss Pyn- 
 sent; but surely the extraordinary attention that almost 
 all his later personages receive from him is not an 
 affectionate interest, and, as I say, I think the result 
 is less completeness of presentment, less vigor of por 
 traiture. 
 
 It is not unlikely that his frequent practice of identi 
 fying himself with one of his characters by making him 
 narrate the tale is in part responsible for this impression 
 of extreme coolness in the narrator that we get from 
 the book and unconsciously refer to the author. There 
 are a number of his stories in which the fictitious narra 
 tor exhibits his frigid curiosity with a single-minded- 
 ness that awakens discomfort as positive as that Mr. 
 James himself complains of in reading the closing 
 scenes of "The Newcomes." One winces at the scrutiny 
 of defenceless personages practised by the narrators of 
 "The Pension Beaurepas," a delightful sketch; of 
 "Four Meetings," a masterpiece of satire and of 
 pathos; of a dozen other tales in which some en 
 thusiastic naturalist studies his spitted specimens. 
 The most conspicuous instance of this is undoubtedly 
 "The Sacred Fount," which for this reason is an 
 unpleasant as well as a mystifying book. The amount 
 of prying, eavesdropping, "snooping," in that ex 
 asperating performance is prodigious, and the uncon- 
 
 380 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 sciousness of indiscretion combined with its excess 
 gives one a very uncomfortable feeling, a feeling, too, 
 whose discomfort is aggravated by the insipidity of the 
 fanciful phenomena which evoke in the narrator such 
 a disproportionate interest. Perhaps this nosing curios 
 ity is itself a trait of the "week-end" in England, and 
 designed to be pilloried as such. No one can know. 
 But in this case one may wish the point had been made 
 plainer, even in a book where it is apparently the au 
 thor s intention to make everything obscure. 
 
 There are, moreover, many stories by Mr. James in 
 which this pathologic curiosity is manifested, not by the 
 narrator, for whom there is a technical excuse, but 
 by one or more of the characters. "The Siege of Lon 
 don" is an example. From this story one might infer 
 that the close observation of a squirming and suffer 
 ing though doubtless highly reprehensible woman could 
 really occupy the leisure of a scrupulous gentleman. 
 Is it true that curiosity is a " passion " of our attenuated 
 modern life, curiosity of this kind, I mean; the curi 
 osity that feeds on the conduct and motives of one s 
 fellows in whom one feels no other interest ? It is at all 
 events true that it is the one "passion" celebrated with 
 any ample cordiality by Mr. James, though, as I say, to 
 inquire if he shares it be to inquire "too curiously." 
 He himself whom nothing escapes that he does not 
 exclude, one is sometimes tempted to think has noted 
 the characteristic. I wish I could put my hand on the 
 passage I am confident it is in one of his earlier works 
 in which he speaks of a certain indiscreet closeness 
 
 381 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 of observation as a disagreeable trait of a certain order 
 of Frenchman. Literature of course has quite other 
 sanctions than those of life, but surely no writer of dis 
 tinction, French or other, has ever shown this trait 
 in such opulent profusion as it is exhibited in Mr. 
 James s fiction, where the famous watchword, "dis 
 interested curiosity," is carried so far as to count as an 
 element of the fiction itself, and not merely as a guaran 
 tee of the author s impartiality. It is "disinterested" 
 enough in the sense hitherto intended by the epithet, 
 but in its own exercise it is made to appear ferociously 
 egoistic. The author is not merely detached; his de 
 tachment is enthusiastic. One may say he is ardently 
 frigid. The result in these instances, I think, is the 
 detachment of his readers; certainly the elimination 
 from the field of interest of those characters and that 
 part of every character which, too fundamental and 
 general to reward mere curiosity, however disinterest 
 edly avid, nevertheless constitute the most real, the 
 most attaching, and the most substantial elements of 
 human life. 
 
 VII 
 
 It is possibly owing in some degree to his dispassion 
 ateness that Mr. James passes popularly for preemi 
 nently the novelist of culture. A writer so refined and 
 so detached is inferen dally the product of letters as well 
 as of life. Less than with any other would it seem con 
 gruous to associate with him the notion of crudity in 
 any of its aspects or degrees, the notion of nonconform- 
 
 382 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 ity to the canon, recalcitrancy to the received. And 
 certainly he has neglected nothing of the best that has 
 been thought and said in the world so far as his own art 
 is concerned. He does not look at life through books; 
 far from it. But with the books that illustrate the prob 
 lem of how art should look at life he is thoroughly 
 familiar. On the art and in the province of latter-day 
 fiction, at any rate, there is certainly nothing he has not 
 read and perfectly assimilated. No writer in any de 
 partment of literature can more distinctly leave the im 
 pression of acquaintance with the modern classics of 
 his chosen field in all languages, and with all the com 
 mentaries on them. There is, besides, in his moral 
 attitude, his turn of phrase, his absence of emphasis, 
 his esoteric diction, his carelessness of communication, 
 even, his air of noblesse oblige, his patrician fastidious 
 ness and manifest contentment with justification by his 
 own standards, in the wide range of his exclusions, and 
 above all in his preference for dealing with high 
 differentiation instead of the elementary and universal, 
 in all this there is clearly manifest the aristocratic 
 conformity to the conclusions of culture and of the good 
 taste which culture can alone even if only supply. 
 
 There is, however, this peculiarity about his culture, 
 considered as an element of his equipment. It is very 
 far from being with him, as it is sometimes assumed 
 to be in the case of the literary or other artist, a handi 
 cap on his energy, his originality an emasculating 
 rather than an invigorating force. It has, on the con 
 trary, been a stimulant as well as a guiding agent in his 
 
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 activity. But its singularity consists in the circum 
 stance that, though unmistakably culture, it is culture 
 of a highly specialized kind. Prominent as Mr. James s 
 culture is, in a word, it is precisely the lack of back 
 ground, the background that it is eminently the province 
 of culture to supply, that is the conspicuous lack in his 
 work considered as a whole, considered with reference 
 to its permanent appeal, considered, in brief, as a con 
 tribution to literature. Is there any other writer whose 
 work, taken in the mass, is so considerable and marked 
 by such extreme cleverness, so much insight, and so 
 much real power, which is also so extremely dependent 
 upon its own qualities and character and so little upon 
 its relations and correspondences? It is so altogether 
 of the present time, of the moment, that it seems almost 
 an analogue of the current instantaneous photography. 
 Behind it one feels the writer interested, not in Moliere 
 but in Daudet, not in Fielding but in Trollope, not in 
 Dante but in The ophile Gautier. He writes about "Le 
 Capitaine Fracasse," not about "Don Quixote," about 
 the "Come die Humaine," not about the world of 
 Shakespeare. This is treading on delicate ground, 
 and where the end of culture is in any wise so conspicu 
 ously achieved as it is in Mr. James, it is perhaps im 
 pertinent to inquire as to his use of the means. But 
 where a writer s work is so voluminous as his, as well 
 as of such a high order, it is in the interest of definition 
 to inquire why his evident culture betrays so little evi 
 dence of interest in the classics of literature or the course 
 of history. It is very likely true that for the writer of 
 
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 modern fiction an acquaintance with "Salammbd" is 
 of more instant pertinence than saturation with the 
 " Divine Comedy," that such an essay as Mr. James s 
 on Maupassant a very nearly perfect masterpiece is 
 more apposite than Lowell s rather inadequate pa 
 per on " Don Quixote." I only point out that from the 
 point of view of culture, his preoccupation with Du 
 Maurier and Reinhart and Abbey and Stevenson and 
 Miss Woolson indicates culture of an unusually con 
 temporary kind. In mere point of time Mme. de Sa- 
 bran is as far back as I remember his going. How 
 exquisite his treatment of these more or less current 
 themes has occasionally been I do not need to say, or 
 repeat. If in the last analysis there is a tincture of 
 "journalism" in this, it is journalism of a very high 
 class, and perhaps anything nowadays without a trace 
 of journalism is justly to be suspected of pedantry and 
 pretension, qualities absolutely foreign to Mr. James s 
 genius. They are wholly absent, too, in such "jour 
 nalism" as his books of travel, the "Little Tour in 
 France," which is curiously dependent upon "the ex 
 cellent Mr. Murray" and derives from the "red-book" 
 rather than from the library; and the "Portraits of 
 Places," which, however abounding in penetration and 
 justesse, I recall some remarkable pages about Tinto 
 retto, for example, is too enamored of the actual to 
 think twice about its origins. But for a literary figure 
 that seems and really is the antipode of seme of the 
 prominent and by no means negligible apostles of 
 crudity of the present day, it is plain that his rather ex- 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 elusive interest in the literature of the present day is a 
 peculiarity worth remark. The man is always more 
 than the special province in which his talent is exercised, 
 and Mr. James s culture is such that one does not as 
 sociate him with such writers of fiction as Wilkie Col 
 lins, say, so much as with Arnold and Lowell and Brown 
 ing and Tennyson and Thackeray and George Eliot 
 and Bulwer. But beside any one of these, his culture 
 seems quite modern and current in its substance and 
 preoccupations. 
 
 It is not, however, merely paradoxical, and therefore 
 noteworthy, that his culture should be at once so con 
 spicuous and so apparently partial. The circumstance 
 is particularly significant because it is particularly 
 disadvantageous to his impressiveness as a writer of 
 fiction. "L artiste moderne," says Paul Bourget, "le- 
 quel se double tou jours d un critique et d un rudit." 
 The critic is conspicuous enough in Mr. James, but one 
 cannot help thinking that precisely his kind of fiction 
 would be more effective if its lining were more evidently 
 erudite. For example, a writer interested in the "An 
 tigone," and imbued with the spirit of its succession, 
 would naturally and instinctively be less absorbed in 
 what Maisie knew, to mention what is certainly a very 
 remarkable, but what is also, by the very perfection of 
 its execution, shown to be a fantastic book, except on 
 the supposition that whatever is, is important. Satu 
 ration with contemporary belles-lettres will no doubt suf 
 fice an artist whose talent, like that of Mr. James, is of 
 the first class, for the production of delightful works, 
 
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HENRY JAMES 
 
 but to produce works for the pantheon of the world s 
 masterpieces without a more or less constant even if 
 subconscious reference to the figures already on their 
 august pedestals, fringes the chimerical. One could 
 wish the representative American novelist to be less 
 interested in inventing a new game of fiction than in 
 figuring as the "heir of all the ages." For lovers of 
 " the last new book," Mr. James s is no doubt the most 
 important. But why should it not be an " event" such 
 as one of Thackeray s or George Eliot s used to be? 
 It is certainly not because his talent is inferior; is it 
 because his culture is limited, as well as because, as I 
 have already said, his art is as theoretic as his philosophy 
 of life is obscure ? 
 
 To take the particular instance of "The Awkward 
 Age," which may perhaps be called Mr. James s tech 
 nical masterpiece among the later novels. I cannot 
 better explain what I have in mind in speaking of his 
 peculiar kind of culture than by saying that "The 
 Awkward Age" strikes one as a little like Lilliput with 
 out Gulliver. One has only to imagine what Swift s 
 picture of that interesting kingdom would be if the fig 
 ure that lends it its significance were left out of it. 
 Its significance, of course, depends wholly on the sense 
 of contrast, the play of proportion. So does the signif 
 icance of the corresponding Brobdingnag. And not 
 at all exclusively in an artistic sense, it is to be borne in 
 mind, but in a literary and human one. If the futilities 
 and niaiseries of "The Awkward Age," instead of be 
 ing idealized by the main strength of imputed impor- 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 tance, were depicted from a standpoint perhaps even less 
 artistically detached, but more removed in spirit by 
 knowledge of and interest in the sociology of the human 
 species previous to its latest illustration by a wretched 
 little clique of negligible Londoners, the negligibility of 
 these dramatis personce would be far more forcefully 
 felt. It would constitute a thesis. As it is, the thesis 
 apparently of an extraordinary number of pages is that 
 a girl freely brought up may turn out a better girl than 
 one claustrally reared. Of course this is not really all. 
 There is a corollary a coda: the former does not get 
 married and the latter does. And there is a still fur 
 ther moral to be drawn by those expert in nuances of 
 the kind. But one feels like asking brutally, in the 
 name of literature, if this order of it is worth the lavish 
 expenditure of the best literary talent we have. If it is, 
 there is nothing more to be said. But it can only be 
 so considered by the amateur of novelty, and must seem 
 attenuated from the standpoint of culture. 
 
 It is not a matter of realism. Fielding was a realist, 
 if ever there was one. But is it likely that without his 
 classical culture such a realist as Fielding, even, would 
 have depicted figures of such commanding importance 
 and universal interest as those with which his novels are 
 peopled? Can one fancy Gibbon praising with the 
 same elaborate enthusiasm that he expressed for " Tom 
 Jones" the " exquisite picture of human life and man 
 ners" provided by "The Awkward Age" or "The 
 Other House," supremely clever as is the art of these 
 books and their fellows? Nor is it a question of art. 
 
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HENRY JAMES 
 
 Meredith, for example, is not a realist like Mr. James, 
 but his art constantly suggests that of the younger 
 writer. Yet it differs from Mr. James s not more in 
 its preoccupations with the fanciful, that is to say, 
 rather than the real than in its whole attitude, which, 
 in spite of its absence of pedantry and close correspond 
 ence to the matter in hand, is obviously, markedly, the 
 attitude of culture, the attitude of not being absorbed by, 
 swamped in, the importance of the matter in hand, but 
 of treating it at least enough at arm s length to avoid 
 exaggerating its importance. He leaves the impression 
 of a certain lack of seriousness. He has the air of the 
 dilettante; which, to my sense, Mr. James never has. 
 But he also leaves the impression, and has the air in 
 separably connected with what is understood by cul 
 ture. In art of any kind at the present time, it is well 
 known that culture is not overvalued. It is quite gener 
 ally imagined that we should gain rather than lose, for 
 instance, by having Raphael without the Church and 
 Rembrandt without the Bible. But the special art of 
 fiction has not yet been emancipated to this implied ex 
 tent, because the general life of humanity, of which this 
 art is ex hypothesi a picture, is felt to have a unity su 
 perior in interest and importance to any of its variations. 
 Too great an interest in the history, as well as in the 
 present status, of mankind, therefore, can hardly be ex 
 acted of the creator of a mimic world, I will not say of 
 Mr. James s pretensions, for he makes none, but of his 
 powers, of which in justice too much cannot be exacted. 
 A novelist in whom the historic sense is lacking is, one 
 
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AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 would say, particularly liable to lack also that sense of 
 proportion which alone can secure the right emphasis 
 and accent in his pictures of contemporary life if they 
 are to have any reach and compass of significance, if 
 they are to rise very far above the plane of art for art s 
 sake. From the point of view of culture as a factor in a 
 novelist s production, it may be said, surely, that no 
 one knows his own time who knows only it. Any con 
 spectus of the sociology of the present day, in other 
 words, that neglects its aspect as an evolution, neglects 
 also its meaning. The life of the present day can no 
 more be satisfactorily represented and interpreted in 
 isolation in fiction than in history or sociology. To 
 record its facts, even its subtlest and most recondite 
 facts, those that have hitherto been neglected by more 
 cursory observers, without at the same time admeasur 
 ing them, in however indirect and unconscious fashion, 
 by reference to previous stages of the evolution, or at 
 least the succession, to which the life of the present day 
 belongs, is, measurably, to lose sight of their meaning, 
 of the reason for recording them. As Buckle said, 
 very acutely, any one who thinks a fact valuable in itself 
 may be a good judge of facts, but cannot be of value. 
 And it is hardly too much to say that this is how Mr. 
 James impresses us in his recent studies of English 
 society, the studies that, taken in the mass, constitute 
 the bulk, as in some respects they do the flower, of his 
 work. He is an excellent judge of the phenomena the 
 sharp-eyed and penetrating critic for whom, in a sense, 
 perhaps, this extraordinary and extraordinarily inept 
 
 390 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 society has in fancied security unwittingly been waiting. 
 But of their value he seems to be less a judge than an 
 advocate. If his culture included such development of 
 the historic sense as would present to his indirect vision 
 the analogues of other civilizations, other societies, other 
 milieux, he could hardly avoid placing as well as 
 fixing his phenomena. And this would, I think, give 
 an altogether different aspect and value to his work. 
 In illustration, I may refer to a portion the most in 
 teresting, and, I am inclined to think, the most impor 
 tant though not perhaps the most "wonderful" portion 
 of this work itself. There was a time when Mr. 
 James did things with obvious zest, with a freedom that 
 excluded the notion of the theoretic; when he com 
 municated pleasure by first feeling it himself; when, 
 therefore, there was a strong personal note in what he 
 wrote, and he did not alienate by his aloofness; when, 
 indeed, one could perceive and enjoy a strain of positive 
 gayety in his compositions. Has any reader of his, I 
 wonder, any doubt as to the period I have in mind ? 
 I refer to the period of his studies in contemporary 
 sociology, so to speak, the years when the contrast be 
 tween America and Europe preoccupied him so de 
 lightfully. Then he produced "documents" of real 
 value and of striking vitality. He had the field all to 
 himself, and worked it to his own distinct profit and 
 that of his readers. Then he portrayed types and drew 
 out their suggestiveness. His characters were not only 
 real, but representative. He provided material not only 
 for the keenest enjoyment, but for reflection. His 
 
 391 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 scientific curiosity resulted in something eminently 
 worth while, something in which he excelled so nota 
 bly as virtually to seem, if indeed he was not literally, 
 the originator of a new and most engaging genre of ro 
 mance, to be, one may say, the Bopp of the compara 
 tive method as applied to fiction. 
 
 The literature that he produced at this period owes 
 its superiority to his current product in general import 
 and interest, I think, precisely to this factor of culture 
 on which he now places so little reliance. It was in 
 spired and penetrated with the spirit of cosmopolitan 
 ism, that is to say, culture in which the contemporary 
 is substituted for the more universal element, and, if 
 it does not quite make up in vividness for what it lacks 
 in breadth, certainly performs the similar inestimable 
 service of providing a standard that establishes the rela 
 tive value and interest of the material directly dealt with. 
 Out of his familiarity with contemporary society in 
 America, England, France, and Italy, grew a series of 
 novels and tales that were full of vigor, piquancy, truth, 
 and significance. The play of the characters against 
 contrasting backgrounds was most varied and interest 
 ing. The contrasts of points of view, of conventions 
 and ideas, of customs and traditions, gave a richness of 
 texture to the web of his fiction which, since it has 
 lacked these, it has disadvantageously lost. His return 
 to the cosmopolitan motif in "The Ambassadors" and 
 (measurably) in "The Golden Bowl" is accordingly 
 a welcome one, and would be still more welcome if the 
 development of this motif were not now incrusted and 
 
 392 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 obscured with mannerisms of presentation accreted in 
 the pursuit of what no doubt seems to the author a 
 "closer correspondence with life," but what certainly 
 seems to the reader a more restricted order of art, 
 an art, at any rate, so largely dependent on scrutiny 
 as perforce to dispense with the significance to be ex 
 pected only of the culture it suggests, but does not 
 illustrate. It is a part of Mr. James s distinction that 
 he gives us so much as to make us wish for more, that 
 he entertains us on so high a plane that we ask to be 
 conducted still higher, and that his penetration reveals 
 to us such wonders in the particular local, that we call 
 upon him to show us "the kingdoms of the earth." 
 
 VIII 
 
 We could readily forego anything that he lacks, how 
 ever, if he would demolish for us the chevaux-de-frise of 
 his later style. In early days his style was eminently 
 clear, and at the same time wholly adequate, but in the 
 course of years it has become an exceedingly complicated 
 vehicle. Its complexity is probably quite voluntary. 
 Indeed, like his whole attitude, it is even theoretic. It 
 images, no doubt, the multifariousness of its substance, 
 of which it follows the nuances and subtleties, and with 
 its parentheses and afterthoughts and qualifications, its 
 hints and hesitations, its indirection and innuendo, pur 
 sues the devious and haphazard development of the 
 drama of life itself. It is thoroughly alive and sincere. 
 It has mannerisms but no affectations. One gets tired 
 
 393 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 of the frequent recurrence of certain favorite words and 
 locutions, but the author s fondness for them is always 
 genuine. Least of all are they perfunctory, any more 
 than is any other manifestation of Mr. James s in 
 tellectual activity. His vocabulary is remarkable, both 
 in range and in intimate felicity; and it is the academic 
 vocabulary, rendered vigorous by accents of raciness 
 now and then, the acme of literary breeding, without, 
 however, a trace of bookish aridity. He is less desultory 
 than almost any writer of anything like his productive 
 ness. His scrupulous care involves often quite need 
 less precautions, as if the reader were watching for a 
 slip, "like a terrier at a rat-hole," a sufferer from 
 his superfluous concessions once impatiently observed. 
 But his precision involves no strain. His style in general 
 shows no effort, though it ought to be said that, on the 
 other hand, it also shows no restraint. It is tremen 
 dously personal in its pointed neglect of conformity to 
 any ideal of what, as style, it should be. It avoids thus 
 most conspicuously the hackneyed traits of rhetorical 
 excellence. And certainly the pursuit of technical per 
 fection may easily be too explicit, too systematic. Cor 
 rectness is perhaps the stupidest way of achieving arti 
 ficiality. But a writer of Mr. James s rhetorical fertility, 
 combined with his distinction in the matter of taste, need 
 have no fear of incurring artificiality in deferring to the 
 more elementary requirements of the rhetorical canon. 
 He has, however, chosen to be an original writer in a 
 way that precludes him from being, as a writer, a great 
 one. Just as his theory of art prevents his more impor- 
 
 394 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 tant fiction from being a rounded and synthetic image 
 of life seen from a certain centralizing point of view, 
 and makes of it an essay at conveying the sense and 
 illusion of life by following, instead of focussing, its 
 phenomena, so his theory of style prevents him from 
 creating a texture of expression with any independent 
 interest of its own. The interest of his expression con 
 sists solely in its correspondence to the character of 
 what it endeavors to express. So concentrated upon 
 this end is he that he very rarely gives scope to the 
 talent for beautiful and effective expression which 
 occasional lapses from his rigorous practice show him 
 to possess in a distinguished degree. There are entire 
 volumes of his writings that do not contain a sentence 
 like, for example, this from a brief essay on Hawthorne: 
 "His beautiful and light imagination is the wing that on 
 the autumn evening just brushes the dusky pane." Of 
 a writer who has this touch, this capacity, in his equip 
 ment, it is justifiable to lament that his theory of art has 
 so largely prevented his exercise of it. The fact that his 
 practice has not atrophied the faculty clear enough 
 from a rare but perfect exhibition of it from time to 
 time only increases our regret. We do not ask of Mr. 
 James s fastidiousness the purple patch of poetic prose, 
 any more than we expect from him any kind of medioc 
 rity whatever. But when a writer, who shows us un 
 mistakably now and then that he could give us frequent 
 equivalents of such episodes as the death of Ralph 
 Touchett, rigorously refrains through a long series of 
 admirable books from producing anything of greater 
 
 395 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 extent than a sentence or a paragraph that can be called 
 classic, that has the classic "note," we may, I think, 
 legitimately complain that his theory of art is exasperat- 
 ingly exacting. 
 
 And of what may be called the strategy, in distinction 
 from the tactics, of style he is quite as pointedly negli 
 gent. The elements of combination, distribution, cli 
 max, the whole larger organization and articulation of 
 literary presentment, are dissembled, if not disdained. 
 Even if it be possible to secure a greater sense of life 
 by eliminating the sense of art in the general treatment 
 of a fiction, which is certainly carrying the theory of 
 ars celare artem very far (the first word in the aphorism 
 having hitherto stood for "art," and the last for "arti 
 fice"), even if in attitude and construction, that is to 
 say, the amount of life in Mr. James s books atones 
 for the absence of the visible, sensible, satisfying ele 
 ment of art as art, it is nevertheless clear that in style 
 as such there is nothing whatever that can atone for the 
 absence of art. Skill is an insufficient substitute; it is 
 science, not art, that is the adaptation of means to ends. 
 And upon skill Mr. James places his whole reliance. 
 
 He is, of course, supremely skilful. His invention, 
 for example, which has almost the force and value of the 
 creative imagination, appears in particularly exhaust- 
 less variety in the introductions of his short stories. 
 Each one is a study in exordiums, as skilful as Cicero J s. 
 And the way in which the narrative proceeds, the 
 characters are introduced, and the incidents succeed 
 one another, is most attentively considered. But 
 
 396 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 no amount of skill and care compensate for the loss of 
 integral interest in the handling, the technic, the style, 
 that is involved in a subordination of style to content so 
 complete as positively to seem designed to flout the 
 traditional convention which makes the interpenetra- 
 tion of the two the ideal. Such an ideal is perhaps a 
 little too obvious for Mr. James, who is as uninterested 
 in " the obvious " as he is unconcerned about " the sub 
 lime," of which, according to a time-honored theory, 
 the obvious is a necessary constituent. 
 
 The loss of interest involved in obscurity is, to begin 
 with, enormous. Such elaborate care as that of Mr. 
 James should at least secure clearness. But with all 
 his scrupulousness, clearness never seems to be an object 
 of his care. At least, this is true of his later work. In 
 his earlier, his clearness was conspicuous. There are 
 even extremely flat-footed things to be encountered in 
 it now and then as, for example, his reprehension of 
 the trivial in Hawthorne, the "parochial" in Thoreau. 
 But since his later, his preponderant, and what we 
 must consider his true, manner has been established, 
 no one needs to be reminded that obscurity has been one 
 of its main traits. His concern is to be precise, not to 
 be clear. He follows his thought with the most intimate 
 exactness no doubt in its subtile sinuosities, into its 
 complicated connotations, unto its utmost attenuations; 
 but it is often so elusive, so insaisissdble by others 
 than himself that he may perfectly express without 
 in the least communicating it. Yet the very texture 
 of his obscurity is composed of incontestable evidences 
 
 397 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 that he is a master of expression. The reader s pleasure 
 becomes a task, and his task the torture of Tantalus. 
 
 It is simply marvellous that such copiousness can be 
 so elliptical. It is usually in greater condensation 
 such as Emerson s that we miss the connectives. 
 The fact attests the remarkable fulness of his intellec 
 tual operations, but such plenitude imposes the -neces 
 sity of restraint in direct proportion to the unusual ex 
 tent and complexity of its material. "Simplification" 
 is a favorite word with Mr. James, but he himself never 
 simplifies for our benefit. Beyond question, he does 
 for his own. He has clearly preliminarily mastered his 
 complicated theme in its centrality; he indisputably sits 
 in the centre of the web in whose fine-spun meshes his 
 readers are entangled. If in reading one of his fictions 
 you are conscious of being in a maze, you know that 
 there is an issue if you are but clever enough to find it. 
 Mr. James gives you no help. He flatters you by assum 
 ing that you are sufficiently clever. His work, he seems 
 to say, is done when he has constructed his labyrinth 
 in emulating correspondence with the complexity of his 
 model, life, and at the same time furnished a potentially 
 discoverable clue to it. There are readers who find the 
 clue, it is not to be doubted, and follow it in all its ser 
 pentine wanderings, though they seem to do so in virtue 
 of a special sense the sense, it might be called, of 
 understandingly savoring Mr. James. But its possess 
 ors are marked individuals in every one s acquaintance; 
 and it need not be said that they are exceptionally clever 
 people. There are others, the mystically inclined, and 
 
 398 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 therefore perhaps more numerous, who divine the sig 
 nificance that is hidden from the wise and prudent. 
 But to the majority of intelligent and cultivated readers, 
 whose appreciation constitutes fame, the great mass of 
 his later writing is of a difficulty to conquer which re 
 quires an amount of effort disproportionate to the sense 
 of assured reward. 
 
 Are the masterpieces of the future to be written in 
 this fashion ? If they are, they will differ signally from 
 the masterpieces of the past in the substitution of a 
 highly idiosyncratic manner for the hitherto essential 
 element of style; and in consequence they will require 
 a second reading, not, as heretofore, for the discovery 
 of "new beauties," or the savoring again of old ones, but 
 to be understood at all. In which case, one may sur 
 mise, they will have to be very well worth while. It can 
 hardly be hoped that they will be as well worth while 
 as those of Mr. James, and the chances are, accordingly, 
 that he will occupy the very nearly unique niche in the 
 history of fiction hard by that of Meredith, perhaps 
 of being the last as well as the first of his line. There 
 is no question of its eminence or of his powers. But 
 what chiefly distinguishes his fiction is the extraordi 
 narily high differentiation of his material and the com 
 plicated treatment that matches it. His talent, his 
 method, his point of view are extremely personal. He 
 is too idiosyncratic to have rivals or successors. He has 
 a host of imitators, it is true; he has, in a way, founded 
 a school, but as yet certainly this has produced no 
 masterpieces. Has he himself? If so, they are, at all 
 
 399 
 
AMERICAN PROSE MASTERS 
 
 events, not unmistakably of the scale and on the plane 
 suggested by his unmistakable powers, powers that 
 make it impossible to measure him otherwise than by 
 the standards of the really great novelists and of the 
 masters of English prose. 
 
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