#aj3i5lOni5 
 
 
BERKELEY 
 
 ARY 
 
 • ;-Y Of 
 
 I 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 CRITICISM ^ FICTION 
 
fy Mnim i 
 
 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 CRITICISM ^ FICTION 
 
 W. D. H O W E L L S 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 HARPER a' BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
Copyright, i8qi, 1910, by Harper & Brothers 
 Copyright, 1895, by W. D. Howells 
 
 LOAN SrACK 
 
9jrz 
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 CHAPTKR PAGE 
 
 Bibliographical. ix 
 
 I. The Bookcase at Home 3 
 
 II. Goldsmith 10 
 
 III. Cervantes 17 
 
 IV. Irving 23 
 
 V. First Fiction and Drama 28 
 
 VI. Longfellow's "Spanish Student" 31 
 
 VII. Scott 33 
 
 VIII. Lighter Fancies 36 
 
 IX. Pope 39 
 
 X. Various Preferences 48 
 
 XI. Uncle Tom's Cabin 50 
 
 XII. OssiAN . . . . 53 
 
 XIII. Shakespeare 55 
 
 XIV. Ik Marvel G4 
 
 XV. Dickens 68 
 
 XVI. Wordsworth, Lowell, Chaucer 79 
 
 XVII. Macaulay 86 
 
 XVIII. Critics and Reviews 90 
 
 XIX. A Non-Literary Episode 93 
 
 XX. Thackeray 97 
 
 XXI. " Lazarillo de Tormes" 104 
 
 XXII. Curtis, Longfellow, Schlegel 109 
 
 XXIII. Tennyson 113 
 
 XXIV. Heine 124 
 
 XXV. De Quincey, Goethe, Longfellow 131 
 
 XXVI. George Eliot, Hawthorne, Goethe, Heine . . 137 
 
 iii 
 
 583 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CnAFTER PAGE 
 
 XXVII. Charles Reade 143 
 
 XXVIII. D.VNTE 148 
 
 XXIX. GoLDONi, Manzoni, D'Azeglio 154 
 
 XXX. " Pastor FiDo," "Aminta," " Romola," "Yeast," 
 
 "Paul Ferroll" 161 
 
 XXXI. Erckmann-Chatrlan, Bjorstjerne Bjornson . 165 
 
 XXXII. TouRGUENiEP, Auerbach 169 
 
 XXXIII. Certain Preferences and Experiences , . . 173 
 
 XXXIV. Valdes, Galdos, Verga, Zola, Trollope, 
 
 Hardy 179 
 
 XXXV. Tolstoy 183 
 
 « 
 
 CRITICISM AND FICTION 193 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 W. D. HOWELLS THE WEEK HE WAS SEVENTY YEARS OLD 
 
 {fbotogravure) Frontispiece 
 
 W. D'. HOWELLS, AGE EIGHTEEN Facing p. 4 
 
 CERVANTES " 18 
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY " 98 
 
 HEINRICH HEINE " 126 
 
 DANTE " 150 
 
 COUNT LYOF TOLSTOY " 184 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 The papers collected here under the name of My 
 Literary Passions were printed serially in a periodical 
 of such vast circulation that they might well have been 
 supposed to have found there all the acceptance that 
 could be reasonably hoped for them, ISTevertheless, they 
 were reissued in a volume the year after they first ap- 
 peared, in 1895, and they had a pleasing share of such 
 favor as their author's books have enjoyed. But it is 
 to be doubted whether any one liked reading them so 
 much as he liked writing them — say, some time in the 
 years 1893 and 1894, in a E'ew York flat, where he 
 could look from his lofty windows over two miles and 
 a half of woodland in Central Park, and halloo his 
 fancy wherever he chose in that faery realm of books 
 which he re-entered in reminiscences perhaps too fond 
 at times, and perhaps always too eager for the reader's 
 following. The name was thought by the friendly 
 editor of the popular publication where they were 
 serialized a main part of such inspiration as they 
 might be conjectured to have, and was, as seldom hap- 
 pens with editor and author, cordially agreed upon be- 
 fore they were begun. 
 
 The name says, indeed, so exactly and so fully what 
 they are that little remains for their bibliographer to 
 add beyond the meagre historical detail here given. 
 Their short and simple annals could be eked out by 
 confidences which would not appreciably enrich the 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 materials of the literary history of their time, and it 
 seems better to leave them to the imagination of such 
 posterity as they may reach. They are rather helplessly 
 frank, but not, I hope, with all their rather helpless 
 frankness, offensively frank. They are at least not part 
 of the polemic which their author sustained in the essays 
 following them in this volume, and which might have 
 been called, in conformity with My Literary Passions, 
 by the title of My Literary Opinions better than by the 
 vague name whicli they actually wear. 
 
 They deal, to be sure, with the office of Criticism 
 and the art of Fiction, and so far their present name 
 is not a misnomer. It follows them from an earlier 
 date and could not easily be changed, and it may serve 
 to recall to an elder generation than this the time 
 when their author was breaking so many lances in the 
 great, forgotten war between Realism and Romanticism 
 that the floor of the " Editor's Study" in Harpers 
 Magazine was strewn with the embattled splinters. The 
 " Editor's Study " is now quite another place, but he 
 who originally imagined it in 1 886, and abode in it until 
 1892, made it at once the scene of such constant offence 
 that he had no time, if he had the temper, for defence. 
 The great Zola, or call him the immense Zola, was the 
 prime mover in the attack upon the masters of the 
 Romanticistic school ; but he lived to own that he had 
 fought a losing fight, and there are some proofs that 
 he was right. The Realists, who were undoubtedly the 
 masters of fiction in their passing generation, and 
 who prevailed not only in France, but in Russia, in 
 Scandinavia, in Spain, in Portugal, were overborne in 
 all Anglo-Saxon countries by the innumerable hosts of 
 Romanticism, who to this day possess the land ; though 
 still, whenever a young novelist does work instantly 
 recognizable for its truth and beauty among us, he is 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL 
 
 seen and felt to have ^v^ou^•ht in the spirit of Realism. 
 N^ot even yet, however, does the average critic recognize 
 this, and such lesson as the " Editor's Study " assumed 
 to teach remains here in all its essentials for his 
 improvement. 
 
 ]\Ionth after montli for the six years in which the 
 " Editor's Study " continued in the keeping of its first 
 occupant, its lesson was more or less stormily delivered, 
 to the exclusion, for the greater part, of other prophecy, 
 but it has not been found well to keep the tempestuous 
 manner along with the fulminant matter in this volume. 
 AMien the author came to revise the material, he found 
 sins against taste which his zeal for righteousness could 
 not suffice to atone for. He did not hesitate to omit the 
 proofs of these, and so far to make himself not only a 
 precept, but an example in criticism. He hopes that 
 in other and slighter things he has bettered bis own 
 instruction, and that in form and in fact the book is 
 altogether less crude and less rude than the papers from 
 which it bas here been a second time evolved. 
 
 The papers, as they appeared from month to month, 
 were not the product of those unities of time and place 
 which were the happy conditioning of My Literary 
 Passions. They could not have been written in quite 
 so many places as times, but they enjoyed a comparable 
 variety of origin. Beginning in Boston, they were 
 continued in a Boston suburb, on the shores of Lake 
 George, in a Western 'New York health resort, in 
 Buffalo, in Xahant ; once, twice, and thrice in !N^ew 
 York, with reversions to Boston, and summer excur- 
 sions to the hills and waters of !N'ew England, until 
 it seemed that their author had at last said his say, 
 and he voluntarily lapsed into silence with the applause 
 of friends and enemies alike. 
 
 The papers had made him more of the last than of 
 
BIBLIOGKAPIIICAL 
 
 the first, but not as still appears to him with greater 
 reason. At moments his deliverances seemed to stir 
 people of different minds to furj in two continents, so 
 far as they were English-speaking, and on the coasts of 
 the seven seas ; and some of these came back at him 
 with such violent personalities as it is his satisfaction 
 to remember that he never indulged in his attacks upon 
 their theories of criticism and fiction. His opinions 
 were always impersonal; and now as their manner 
 rather than their make has been slightly tempered, it 
 may surprise the belated reader to learn that it was the 
 belief of one English critic that their author had 
 " placed himself beyond the pale of decency " by 
 them. It ought to be less surprising that, since these 
 dreadful words were written of him, more than one 
 magnanimous Englishman has penitently expressed to 
 the author the feeling that he was not so far wrong in 
 his overboldly hazarded convictions. The penitence of 
 his countrymen is still waiting expression, but it may 
 come to that when they have recurred to the evidences 
 of his offence in their present shape. 
 
 KiTTEEY Point, Maine, July, 1909. 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 CRITICISM & FICTION 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 I 
 
 THE BOOKCASE AT HOME 
 
 To give an account of one's reading is in some sort 
 to give an account of one's life ; and I hope that I shall 
 not offend those who follow me in these papers, if I 
 cannot help speaking of myself in speaking of the au- 
 thors I must call my masters : my masters not because 
 they taught me this or that directly, but because I had 
 such delight in them that I could not fail to teach myself 
 from them whatever I was capable of learning. I do 
 not know whether I have been what people call a great 
 reader; I cannot claim even to have been a very 
 wise reader ; but I have always been conscious of a high 
 purpose to read much more, and more discreetly, than 
 I have ever really done, and probably it is from the 
 vantage-ground of this good intention that I shall some- 
 times be found writing here rather than from the facts 
 of the case. 
 
 But I am pretty sure that I began right, and that if 
 I had always kept the lofty level which I struck at the 
 outset I should have the right to use authority in these 
 reminiscences without a bad conscience. I shall try 
 not to use authority, however, and I do not expect to 
 speak here of all my reading, whether it has been mucli 
 
 3 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 or little, but only of tliose books, or .of those authors 
 that I have felt a genuine passion for, I have known 
 such passions at every period of my life, but it is 
 mainly of the loves of my youth that I shall write, and 
 I shall write all the more frankly because my own youth 
 now seems to me rather more alien than that of any 
 other person. 
 
 I think that I came of a reading race, which has 
 always loved literature in a way, and in. spite of varying 
 fortunes and many changes. From a letter of my 
 great-grandmother's wa-itten to a stubborn daughter 
 upon some uufilial behavior, like running away to be 
 married, I suspect that she was fond of the high-colored 
 fiction of her day, for she tells the wilful child that she 
 has " planted a dagger in her mother's heart," and I 
 should not be surprised if it were from this fine-lan- 
 gTiaged lady that my grandfather derived his taste for 
 poetry rather than from his father, who was of a worldly 
 wiser mind. To be sure, he became a Friend by Con- 
 vincement as the Quakers say, and so I cannot imagine 
 that he was altogether worldly ; but he had an eye to the 
 main chance: he founded the industry of making flan- 
 nels in the little Welsh town where he lived, and he 
 seems to have grown richer, for his day and place, than 
 any of us have since grown for ours. My grandfather, 
 indeed, was concerned chiefly in getting away from the 
 world and its wickedness. He came to this country 
 early in the nineteenth century and settled his family 
 in a log-cabin in the Ohio woods, that they might be 
 safe from the sinister influences of the village where he 
 was managing some woollen-mills. But he kept his 
 affection for certain poets of the graver, not to say 
 gloomier sort, and he must have suffered his children 
 to read them, pending that great question of their 
 souls' salvation which was a lifelong trouble to him. 
 
 4 
 
THE BOOKCASE AT HOME 
 
 My father, at any rate, had such a decided bent in 
 the direction of literature, that he was not content in 
 any of his several economical experiments till he be- 
 came the editor of a newspaper, which was then the 
 sole means of satisfying a literary passion. His pa- 
 per, at the date when I began to know him, was a 
 living, comfortable and decent, but without the least 
 promise of wealth in it, or the hope even of a much 
 better condition. I think now that he was wise not 
 to care for the advancement which most of us have 
 our hearts set upon, and that it was one of his finest 
 qualities that he was content with a lot in life where 
 he was not exempt from work with his hands, and yet 
 where he was not so pressed by need but he could 
 give himself at will not only to the things of the spir- 
 it, but the things of the mind too. After a season of 
 scepticism he had become a religious man, like the 
 rest of his race, but in his o^vn fashion, which was 
 not at all the fashion of my grandfather : a Friend who 
 had married out of Meeting, and had ended a perfer- 
 vid Methodist. My father, who could never get him- 
 self converted at any of the camp-meetings where my 
 grandfather often led the forces of prayer to his sup- 
 port, and had at last to be given up in despair, fell in 
 with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and em- 
 braced the doctrine of that philosopher with a content 
 that has lasted him all the days of his many years. 
 Ever since I can remember, the works of Swedenborg 
 formed a large part of his library ; he read them much 
 himself, and much to my mother, and occasionally a 
 " Memorable Eolation " from them to us children. 
 But he did not force them upon our notice, nor urge 
 us to read them, and I think this was very well. I 
 suppose his conscience and his reason kept him from 
 doing so. But in regard to other books, his fondness 
 
 5 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 was too iiiucli for liiin, and when I began to show 
 a liking for literature he was eager to guide my 
 choice. 
 
 His own choice was for poetry, and the most of 
 our library, which was not given to theology, was 
 given to poetry. I call it the library now, but then 
 we called it the bookcase, and that was what literally 
 it was, because I believe that whatever we had called 
 our modest collection of books, it was a larger private 
 collection than any other in the town where we lived. 
 Still it Avas all held, and shut with glass doors, in a 
 case of very few shelves. It was not considerably en- 
 larged during my childhood, for few books came to 
 my father as editor, and he indulged himself in buy- 
 ing them even more rarely. My grandfather's book- 
 store (it was also the village drug-store) had then the 
 only stock of literature for sale in the place ; and once, 
 when Harper & Brothers' agent came to replenish it, 
 he gave my father several volumes for review. One 
 of these was a copy of Thomson's Seasons, a finely 
 illustrated edition, whose pictures I knew long be- 
 fore I knew the poetry, and thought them the most 
 beautiful things that ever were. My father read pas- 
 sages of the book aloud, and he w^anted me to read it 
 all myself. For the matter of that he wanted me to 
 read Co^vper, from whom no one could get anything 
 but good, and he wanted me to read Byron, from 
 whom I could then have got no harm; we get harm 
 from the evil Ave understand. He loved Burns, too, 
 and he used to read aloud from him, I must own, to 
 my inexpressible weariness. I could not away with 
 that dialect, and I could not then feel the charm of 
 the poet's wit, nor the tender beauty of his pathos. 
 Moore, T could manage better; and when my father 
 read " Lalla Rookh " to my mother I sat up to listen, 
 
 6 
 
THE BOOKCASE AT HOME 
 
 and entered into all the woes of Iran in the story of the 
 " Fire Worshippers." I drew the line at the " Veiled 
 Prophet of Khorassan," though I had some sense of 
 the humor of the poet's conception of the critic in 
 " Fadladeen." But I liked Scott's poems far better, 
 and got from Ispahan to Edinburgh wdth a glad alac- 
 rity of fancy. I followed the " Lady of the Lake " 
 throughout, and wdien I first began to contrive verses 
 of my own I found that poem a fit model in mood and 
 metre. 
 
 Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the 
 bookcase, of which I used to look at the outside with- 
 out penetrating deeply within, were Pope's translation 
 of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dry den's Virgil, 
 pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James 
 Crissy in Philadelphia, and illustrated with small 
 copper-plates, which somehow seemed to put the matter 
 hopelessly beyond me. It was as if they said to me 
 in so many words that literature which furnished the 
 subjects of such pictures I could not hope to under- 
 stand, and need not try. At any rate, I let them alone 
 for the time, and I did not meddle with a volume of 
 Shakespeare, in green cloth and cruelly fine print, 
 which overawed me in like manner with its wood-cuts. 
 I cannot say just why I conceived that there was 
 something imhallowed in the matter of the book; per- 
 haps this was a tint from the reputation of the rather 
 profligate young man from whom my father had it. 
 If he were not profligate I ask bis pardon. I have not 
 the least notion who he was, but that was the notion 
 I had of him, whoever he was, or wherever he now is. 
 There may never have been such a young man at all ; 
 the impression I had may have been pure invention 
 of my own, like many things with children, who do not 
 very distinctlv know their dreams from their expe- 
 
 T 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 riences, and live in the world where hoth project the 
 same quality of shadow. 
 
 There were, of course, other books in the bookcase, 
 which my consciousness made no account of, and I 
 speak only of those I remember. Fiction there was 
 none at all that I can recall, except Poe's Tales of the 
 Grotesque and the Arabesque (I long afflicted myself 
 as to what those words meant, when I might easily 
 have asked and found out) and Bulwer's Last Days of 
 Pompeii, all in the same kind of binding. History is 
 known, to my young remembrance of that library, by 
 a History of the United States, whose dust and ashes 
 I hardly made my way through; and by a Chronicle 
 of the Conquest of Granada, by the ever dear and 
 precious Fray Antonio Agapida, whom I was long in 
 making out to be one and the same as Washington 
 Irving. 
 
 In school there was as little literature then as there 
 is now, and I cannot say anything worse of our school 
 reading; but I was not really very much in school, 
 and so I got small harm from it. The printing-office 
 was my school from a very early date. My father 
 thoroughly believed in it, and he had his beliefs as to 
 work, which he illustrated as soon as we were old 
 enough to learn the trade he followed. We could go 
 to school and study, or we could go into the printing- 
 office and work, with an equal chance of learning, but 
 we could not be idle; we must do something, for our 
 souls' sake, though he was willing enough we should 
 play, and he liked himself to go into the woods with 
 us, and to enjoy the pleasures that manhood can share 
 with childhood. I suppose that as the world goes now 
 we were poor. His income was never above twelve 
 hundred a year, and his family was large ; but nobody 
 was rich there or then; we lived in the simple abun- 
 
 8 
 
THE BOOKCASE AT HOME 
 
 dance of that time and place, and we did not know 
 that we were poor. As yet the unequal modern condi- 
 tions were undreamed of (who indeed could have 
 dreamed of them forty or fifty years ago?) in the 
 little Southern Ohio town where nearly the whole of 
 my most happy boyhood was passed. 
 
II 
 
 GOLDSMITH 
 
 When I began to have literary likings of my own, 
 and to love certain books above others, the first au- 
 thors of my heart were Goldsmith, Cervantes, and 
 Irving. In the sharply foreshortened perspective of 
 the past I seem to have read them all at once, but I 
 am aware of an order of time in the pleasure they 
 gave me, and I know that Goldsmith came first. He 
 came so early that I cannot tell when or how I began 
 to read him, but it must have been before I was ten 
 years old. I read other books about that time, notably 
 a small book on Grecian and Roman mythology, which 
 I perused with such a passion for those pagan gods and 
 goddesses that, if it had ever been a question of sacri- 
 ficing to Diana, I do not really know whether I should 
 have been able to refuse. I adored indiscriminately 
 all the tribes of nymphs and naiads, demigods and 
 heroes, as well as the high ones of Olympus ; and I am 
 afraid that by day I dwelt in a world peopled and 
 ruled by them, though I faithfully said my prayers 
 at night, and fell asleep in sorroAv for my sins. I do 
 not know in the least how Goldsmith's Greece came 
 into my hands, though I fancy it must have been pro- 
 cured for me because of a taste which I showed for 
 that kind of reading, and I can imagine no greater 
 luck for a small boy in a small town of Southwestern 
 Ohio wellnigh fifty years ago. I have the books yet; 
 
 10 
 
GOLDSMITH 
 
 two little, stout volumes in fine print, with the marks 
 of wear on them, but without those dishonorable blots, 
 or those other injuries which boys inflict upon books 
 in resentment of their dulness, or out of mere wanton- 
 ness. I was always sensitive to the maltreatment of 
 books : I could not bear to see a book faced down or 
 dogs-eared or broken-backed. It was like a hurt or an 
 insult to a thing that could feel. 
 
 Goldsmith's History of Rome came to me much 
 later, but quite as immemorably, and after I had 
 formed a preference for the Greek Kepublics, which I 
 dare say was not mistaken. Of course I liked Athens 
 best, and yet there was something in the fine behavior 
 of the Spartans in battle, which won a heart formed 
 for hero-worship. I mastered the notion of their com- 
 munism, and approved of their iron money, with the 
 poverty it obliged them to, yet somehow their cruel 
 treatment of the Helots failed to shock me; perhaps I 
 forgave it to their patriotism, as I had to forgive many 
 ugly facts in the history of the Romans to theirs. 
 There was hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would 
 not pardon in those days to the slayers of tyrants; 
 and the swagger form of such as despatched a despot 
 with a fine speech was so much to my liking that I 
 could only grieve that I was born too late to do and to 
 say those things. 
 
 I do not think I yet felt the beauty of the literature 
 which made them all live in my fancy, that I con- 
 ceived of Goldsmith as an artist using for my rapture 
 the finest of the arts; and yet I had been taught to 
 see the loveliness of poetry, and was already trying to 
 make it on my own poor account. I tried to make 
 verses like those I listened to when my father read 
 Moore and Scott to my mother, but I heard them 
 with no such happiness as I read my beloved histories, 
 
 11 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 though I never thought then of attempting to write 
 like Goldsmith. I accepted his beautiful work as ig- 
 norantly as I did my otlier blessings. I was concerned 
 in getting at the Greeks and llomans, and I did not 
 know through what nimble air and by what lovely 
 ways I was led to them. Some retrospective percep- 
 tion of this came long afterward when I read his 
 essays, and after I knew all of his poetry, and later 
 yet when I read the Vicar of Wakefield; but for the 
 present my eyes were holden, as the eyes of a boy 
 mostly are in the world of art. What I wanted with 
 my Greeks and Romans after I got at them was to 
 be like tliem, or at least to turn them to account in 
 verse, and in dramatic verse at that. The Romans 
 were less civilized than the Greeks, and so were more 
 like boys, and more to a boy's purpose. I did not make 
 literature of the Greeks, but I got a whole tragedy 
 out of the Romans; it was a rhymed tragedy, and in 
 octosyllabic verse, like the " Lady of the Lake." I 
 meant it to be acted by my schoolmates, but I am not 
 sure that I ever made it known to them. Still, they 
 were not ignorant of my reading, and I remember 
 how proud I was when a certain boy, who had always 
 whipped me when we fouglit together, and so outranked 
 me in that little boys' world, once sent to ask me the 
 name of the Roman emperor who lamented at night- 
 fall, when he had done nothing worthy, that he had 
 lost a day. The boy was going to use tlie story in a 
 composition, as we called the school themes then, and 
 I told him tlie emperor's name; I could not tell him 
 now without turning to the book. 
 
 My reading gave me no standing among the boys, 
 and I did not expect it to rank me with boys who were 
 more valiant in figlit or in play; and I have since 
 found that literature gives one no more certain station 
 
 12 
 
GOLDSMITH 
 
 in the world of men's activities, either idle or useful. 
 We literary folk try to believe that it does, but that 
 is all nonsense. At every period of life, among boys 
 or men, we are accepted when they are at leisure, and 
 want to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather 
 than accepted. I must have told the boys stories out 
 of my Goldsmith's Greece and Rome, or it would not 
 have been knovni that I had read them, but I have no 
 recollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remem- 
 ber rehearsing the allegories and fables of the Gesta 
 Romanorum, a book which seems to have been in my 
 hands about the same time or a little later. I had a 
 delight in that stupid collection of monkish legends 
 which I cannot account for now, and which persisted 
 in spite of the nightmare confusion it made of my 
 ancient Greeks and Romans. They were not at all 
 the ancient Greeks and Romans of Goldsmith's his- 
 tories. 
 
 I cannot say at what times I read these books, but 
 they must have been odd times, for life was very full 
 of play then, and was already beginning to be troubled 
 Avith work. As I have said, I was to and fro between 
 the school-house and the printing-office so much that 
 when I tired of the one I must have been very 
 promptly given my choice of the other. The reading, 
 however, somehow went on pretty constantly, and no 
 doubt my love for it won me a chance for it. There 
 were some famous cherry-trees in our yard, which, as 
 I look back at them, seem to have been in flower or 
 fruit the year round; and in one of them there was a 
 level branch where a boy could sit with a book till his 
 dangling legs went to sleep, or till some idler or 
 busier boy came to the gate and called him down to 
 play marbles or go swimming. When this happened 
 the ancient world was rolled up like a scroll, and put 
 
 13 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 away until the next day, with all its orators and con- 
 spirators, its nymphs and satyrs, gods and demigods; 
 thongh sometimes they escaped at night and got into 
 the boy's dreams. 
 
 I do not think I cared as much as some of the other 
 boys for the Arabian Nights or Robinson Crusoe, but 
 when it came to the Ingenious Gentleman of La 
 Mancha, I was not only first, I was sole. 
 
 Before I speak, however, of the beneficent humorist 
 who next had my boyish heart after Goldsmith, let 
 me acquit myself in full of my debt to that not un- 
 equal or unkindred spirit. I have said it was long 
 after I had read those histories, full of his inalienable 
 charm, mere pot-boilers as they were, and far beneath 
 his more willing efforts, that I came to know^ his 
 poetry. My father must have read the " Deserted 
 Village " to us, and told us something of the author's 
 pathetic life, for I cannot remember when I first knew 
 of " sweet Auburn," or had the light of the poet's own 
 troubled day upon the " loveliest village of the plain." 
 The Vicar of Wakefield must have come into my life 
 after that poem and before The Traveler. It was 
 when I w^ould have said that I knew all Goldsmith ; 
 we often give ourselves credit for knowledge in this 
 way without having any tangible assets; and my read- 
 ing has always been very desultory. I should like to 
 say here that the reading of any one Avho reads to 
 much purpose is always very desultory, though perhaps 
 I had better not say so, but merely state the fact in my 
 case, and own that I never read any one author quite 
 through without W'andering from him to others. 
 When I first read the Vicar of WaJce field (for I have 
 since read it several times, and hope yet to read it 
 many times), I found its persons and incidents fa- 
 miliar, and so I suppose I must have heard it read. It 
 
 14 
 
GOLDSMITH 
 
 is still for me one of the most modern novels : that is to 
 say, one of the best. It is unmistakably good up to 
 a certain point, and then unmistakably bad, but with 
 always good enough in it to be forever imperishable. 
 Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion ; it 
 is these in Goldsmith which make him our contempo- 
 rary, and it is worth the while of any young person 
 presently intending deathless renown to take a little 
 thought of them. They are the source of all refine- 
 ment, and I do not believe that the best art in any 
 kind exists without them. The style is the man, and 
 he cannot hide himself in any garb of words so that 
 we shall not know somehow what manner of man he 
 is within it ; his speech bewrayeth him, not only as to 
 his country and his race, but more subtly yet as to his 
 heart, and the loves and hates of his heart. As to 
 Goldsmith, I do not think that a man of harsh and 
 arrogant nature, of worldly and selfish soul, could 
 ever have written his style, and I do not think that, in 
 far greater measure than criticism has recognized, his 
 spiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed 
 itself in the literary beauty that wins the heart as well 
 as takes the fancy in his work. 
 
 I should have my reservations and my animadver- 
 sions if it came to close criticism of his work, but I 
 am glad that he was the first author I loved, and that 
 even before I knew I loved him I was his devoted 
 reader. I was not consciously his admirer till I began 
 to read, when I was fourteen, a little volume of his 
 essays, made up, I dare say, from the Citizen of the 
 World and other unsuccessful ventures of his. It con- 
 tained the papers on Beau Tibbs, among others, and I 
 tried to write sketches and studies of life in their 
 manner. But this attempt at Goldsmith's manner 
 followed a long time after I tried to write in the style 
 
 15 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 of Edgar A. Foe, as I kuew it from his Tales of the 
 Grotesque and Arabesque. I suppose the very poorest 
 of these was the " Devil in the Belfry," but such as it 
 was I followed it as closely as I could in the " Devil in 
 the Smoke-Pipes " ; I meant tobacco-pipes. The resem- 
 blance was noted by those to whom I read my story; 
 I alone could not see it or would not own it, and I 
 really felt it a hardship that I should be found to have 
 produced an imitation. 
 
 It was the first time I had imitated a prose writer, 
 though I had imitated several poets like Moore, Camp- 
 bell, and Goldsmith himself. I have never greatly 
 loved an author without wishing to write like him. 
 I have now no reluctance to confess that, and I do not 
 see why I should not say that it was a long time before 
 I found it best to be as like myself as I could, even 
 when I did not think so well of myself as of some 
 others. I hope I shall always be able and willing to 
 learn something from the masters of literature and 
 still be myself, but for the young writer this seems im- 
 possible. He must form himself from time to time 
 upon the different authors he is in love with, but when 
 he has done this he must wish it not to be known, for 
 that is natural too. The lover always desires to ignore 
 the object of his passion, and the adoration which a 
 young writer has for a great one is truly a passion 
 passing the love of women. I think it hardly less 
 fortunate that Cervantes was one of my early passions, 
 though I sat at his feet with no more sense of his 
 mastery than I had of Goldsmith's. 
 
Ill 
 
 CERVANTES 
 
 I RECALL very fully the moment and the place when 
 I first heard of Don Quixote, while as yet I could not 
 connect it very distinctly with anybody's authorship. 
 I was still too young to conceive of authorship, even 
 in my own case, and wrote my miserable verses with- 
 out any notion of literature, or of anything but the 
 pleasure of seeing them actually come out rightly 
 rhymed and measured. The moment was at the close 
 of a summer's day just before supper, which, in our 
 house, we had lawlessly late, and the place was the 
 kitchen where my mother was going about her work, 
 and listening as she could to what my father was tell- 
 ing my brother and me and an apprentice of ours, 
 who was like a brother to us both, of a book that he 
 had once read. We boys were all shelling peas, but 
 the story, as it went on, rapt us from the poor em- 
 ploy, and whatever our fingers were doing, our spirits 
 were away in that strange land of adventures and mis- 
 haps, where the fevered life of the knight truly with- 
 out fear and without reproach burned itself out. I 
 dare say that my father tried to make us understand 
 the satirical purpose of the book. I vaguely remember 
 his speaking of the books of chivalry it was meant to 
 ridicule; but a boy could not care for this, and what 
 I longed to do at once was to get that book and plunge 
 into its story. He told us at random of the attack 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 on the windmills and the flocks of sheep, of the night 
 in the valley of the fulling-mills with their trip- 
 hammers, of the inn and the muleteers, of the tossing 
 of Sancho in the blanket, of the island that was given 
 him to govern, and of all the merry pranks at the 
 duke's and duchess's, of the liberation of the galley- 
 slaves, of the capture of Mambrino's helmet, and of 
 Sancho's invention of the enchanted Dulcinea, and 
 whatever else there was wonderful and delightful in 
 the most wonderful and delightful book in the world. 
 I do not know when or where my father got it for me, 
 and I am aware of an appreciable time that passed be- 
 tween my hearing of it and my having it. The event 
 must have been most important to me, and it is strange 
 I cannot fix the moment when the precious story came 
 into my hands ; though for the matter of that there is 
 nothing more capricious than a child's memory, what 
 it will hold and what it will lose. 
 
 It is certain my Don Quixote was in two small, stout 
 volumes not much bigger each than my Goldsmith's 
 Greece, bound in a sort of law-calf, Avell fitted to with- 
 stand the wear they were destined to undergo. The 
 translation was, of course, the old-fashioned version of 
 Jervas, which, whether it was a closely faithful version 
 or not, was honest eighteenth-century English, and 
 reported faithfully enough the spirit of the original. 
 If it had any literary influence with me the influence 
 must have been good. But I cannot make out that I 
 was sensible of the literature; it was the forever en- 
 chanting story that I enjoyed. I exulted in the bound- 
 less freedom of the design; the open air of that im- 
 mense scene, where adventure followed adventure with 
 the natural sequence of life, and the days and the nights 
 were not long enougli for the events that thronged 
 them, amidst the fields and woods, the streams and 
 
 IS 
 
CERVANTES 
 
 hills, the highways and byways, hostelries and hovels, 
 prisons and palaces, which were the setting of that 
 matchless history. I took it as simply as I took every- 
 thing else in the world about me. It was full of mean- 
 ing that I could not grasp, and there were significances 
 of the kind that literature unhappily abounds in, but 
 they were lost upon my innocence. I did not know 
 whether it was well written or not; I never thought 
 about that ; it was simply there in its vast entirety, its 
 inexhaustible opulence, and I was rich in it beyond the 
 dreams of avarice. 
 
 My father must have told us that night about Cer- 
 vantes as well as about his Don Quixote, for I seem 
 to have knoAvn from the beginning that he was once a 
 slave in Algiers, and that he had lost a hand in battle, 
 and I loved him with a sort of personal affection, as 
 if he were still living and he could somehow return 
 my love. His name and nature endeared the Spanish 
 name and nature to me, so that they were always my 
 romance, and to this day I cannot meet a Spanish man 
 without clothing him in something of the honor and 
 worship I lavished upon Cervantes when I was a child. 
 While I was in the full flush of this ardor there came 
 to see our school, one day, a Mexican gentleman who 
 was studying the American system of education ; a 
 mild, fat, saffron man, whom I could almost have 
 died to please for Cervantes' and Don Quixote's sake, 
 because I knew he spoke their tongue. But he smiled 
 upon us all, and I had no chance to distinguish myself 
 from the rest hy any act of devotion before the blessed 
 vision faded, though for long afterwards, in impas- 
 sioned reveries, I accosted him and claimed him kin- 
 dred because of my fealty, and because I would have 
 been Spanish if I could. 
 
 I would not have had the boy-world about me know 
 
 19 
 
MY LITEKARY PASSIONS 
 
 an^-tliing of these fond dreams ; l)ut it was mj tastes 
 alone, my passions, which were alien there; in every- 
 thing else I was as much a citizen as any boy who had 
 never heard of Don Quixote. But I believe that I 
 carried the book about with me most of the time, so 
 as not to lose any chance moment of reading it. Even 
 in the blank of certain years, when I added little other 
 reading to my store, I must still have been reading it. 
 This was after we had removed from the town where 
 the earlier years of my boyhood were passed, and I 
 had barely adjusted myself to the strange environ- 
 ment when one of my imcles asked me to come with 
 him and learn the drug business, in the place, forty 
 miles away, where he practised medicine. We made 
 the long journey, longer than any I have made since, 
 in the stage-coach of those days, and we arrived at 
 his house about twilight, he glad to get home, and I 
 sick to death with yearning for the home I had left. 
 I do not know how it was that in this state, when all 
 the world was one hopeless blackness around me, I 
 should have got my Don Quixote out of my bag; I 
 seem to have had it with me as an essential part of 
 my equipment for my new career. Perhaps I had 
 been asked to show it, with the notion of beguiling me 
 from my misery; perhaps I was myself trying to 
 drown my sorrows in it. But anyhow I have before 
 me now the vision of my sweet young aunt and her 
 young sister looking over her shoulder, as they stood 
 together on the lawn in the summer evening light. 
 My aunt held my Do7i Quixote open in one hand, while 
 she clasped with the other the child she carried on 
 her arm. She looked at the book, and then from time 
 to time she looked at me, very kindly but very curi- 
 ously, with a faint smile, so that as I stood there, 
 inwardly writhing in my bashfulness, I had the sense 
 
 20 
 
CERVANTES 
 
 that in her eyes I was a queer boy. She returned the 
 book without comment, after some questions, and I 
 took it off to my room, where the confidential friend 
 of Cervantes cried himself to sleep. 
 
 In the morning I rose up and told them I could not 
 stand it, and I was going home. ]^otliing they could 
 say availed, and my uncle went down to the stage- 
 office with me and took my passage back. 
 
 The horror of cholera was then in the land ; and we 
 heard in the stage-office that a man lay dead of it in 
 the hotel overhead. But my uncle led me to his drug- 
 store, where the stage was to call for me, and made 
 me taste a little camphor; with this prophylactic, Cer- 
 vantes and I somehow got home together alive. 
 
 The reading of Don Quixote went on throughout 
 my boyhood, so that I cannot recall any distinctive 
 period of it when I was not, more or less, reading that 
 book. In a boy's way I knew it well when I was ten, 
 and a few years ago, when I was fifty, I took it up in 
 the admirable new version of Ormsby, and found it so 
 full of myself and of my own irrevocable past that I 
 did not find it very gay. But I made a great many 
 discoveries in it; things I had not dreamt of were 
 there, and must always have been there, and other 
 things wore a new face, and made a new effect upon 
 me. I had my doubts, my reserves, where once I had 
 given it my whole heart without question, and yet in 
 what formed the greatness of the book it seemed to 
 me greater than ever. I believe that its free and sim- 
 ple design, where event follows event without the 
 fettering control of intrigue, but where all grows nat- 
 urally out of character and conditions, is the supreme 
 form of fiction; and I cannot help thinking that if we 
 ever have a great American novel it must be built 
 upon some such large and noble lines. As for the cen- 
 
 21 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 tral figure, Don Quixote himself, in his dignity and 
 generosity, his unselfish ideals, and his fearless devo- 
 tion to them, he is always heroic and beautiful ; and I 
 was glad to find in my latest look at his history that 
 I had truly conceived of him at first, and had felt the 
 sublimity of his nature. I did not want to laugh at 
 him so much, and I could not laugh at all any more 
 at some of the things done to him. Once they seemed 
 funny, but now only cruel, and even stupid, so that it 
 was strange to realize his qualities and indignities as 
 both flowing from the same mind. But in my mature 
 experience, which threw a broader light on the fable, 
 I was happy to keep my old love of an author who 
 had been almost personally dear to me. 
 
IV 
 
 IRVING 
 
 I HAVE told boAv Cervantes made his race precious 
 to me, and I am sure that it must have been he who 
 fitted me to miderstand and enjoy the American anthor 
 who now stayed me on Spanish gronnd and kept me 
 happy in Spanish air, though I cannot trace the tie in 
 time and circnmstance between Irving and Cervantes. 
 The most I can make snre of is that I read the Con- 
 quest of Granada after I read Don Quixote, and that 
 I loved the historian so much because I had loved the 
 novelist much more. Of course I did not perceive 
 then that Irving's charm came largely from Cervantes 
 and the other Spanish humorists yet unknown to me, 
 and that he had formed himself upon them almost as 
 much as upon Goldsmith, but I dare say that this fact 
 had insensibly a great deal to do with my liking. 
 Afterwards I came to see it, and at the same time to 
 see what was Irving's own in Irving ; to feel his native, 
 if somewhat attenuated humor, and his original, if 
 somewhat too studied grace. But as yet there was 
 no critical question \vitli me. I gave my heart simply 
 and passionately to the author who made the scenes 
 of that most pathetic history live in my sympathy, and 
 companioned me with the stately and gracious actors 
 in them. 
 
 I really cannot say now whether I loved the Moors or 
 the Spaniards more. I fought on both sides ; I would 
 
 23 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 not have had the Spaniards beaten, and yet when the 
 Moors lost I was vanquished with them ; and when the 
 poor young King Boabdil (I was his devoted partisan 
 and at the same time a follower of his fiery old uncle 
 and rival, liamet el Zegri) heaved the Last Sigli of the 
 Moor, as his eyes left the roofs of Granada forever, 
 it was as much my grief as if it had burst from my 
 o-wTi breast. I put both these princes into the first 
 and last historical romance I ever wrote. I have now 
 no idea what they did in it, but as the story never 
 came to a conclusion it does not greatly matter. I 
 had never yet read an historical :^'omance that I 
 can make sure of, and probably my attempt must 
 have been based almost solely upon the facts of 
 Irving's history. I am certain I could not have 
 thought of adding anything to them, or at all 
 varying them. 
 
 In reading his Chronicle I suffered for a time from 
 its attribution to Fray Antonio Agapida, the pious 
 monk whom he feigns to have written it, just as in 
 reading Don Quixote I suffered from Cervantes mas- 
 querading as the Moorish scribe, Cid Hamet Ben En- 
 geli. My father explained the literary caprice, but it 
 remained a confusion and a trouble for me, and I 
 made a practice of skipping those passages where 
 either author insisted upon his invention. I will own 
 that I am rather glad that sort of thing seems to be 
 out of fashion now, and I think the director and franker 
 methods of modern fiction will forbid its revival. 
 Thackeray was fond cf such open disguises, and liked 
 to greet his reader from the mask of Yellowplush and 
 Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but it seems to me this was 
 in his least modern moments. 
 
 My Conquest of Granada was in two octavo vol- 
 umes, bound in drab boards, and printed on paper very 
 
 24 
 
IRVING 
 
 much yellowed with time at its irregular edges. I do 
 not know when the books happened in my hands. I 
 have no remembrance that they were in any wise of- 
 fered or commended to me, and in a sort of way they 
 were as authentically mine as if I had made them. I 
 saw them at home, not many months ago, in my fa- 
 ther's library (it has long outgrown the old bookcase, 
 which has gone I know not where), and upon the 
 whole I rather shrank from taking them down, much 
 more from opening them, though I could not say 
 why, unless it was from the fear of perhaps find- 
 ing the ghost of my boyish self within, pressed flat 
 like a withered leaf, somewhere between the familiar 
 pages. 
 
 When I learned Spanish it was with the purpose, 
 never yet fulfilled, of writing the life of Cervantes, al- 
 though I have since had some forty-odd years to do it 
 in. I taught myself the language, or began to do so, 
 when I knew nothing of the English grammar but the 
 prosody at the end of the book. My father had the 
 contempt of familiarity with it, having himself written 
 a very brief sketch of our accidence, and he seems to 
 have let me plunge into the sea of Spanish verbs and 
 adverbs, nouns and pronouns, and all the rest, when 
 as yet I could not confidently call them by name, with 
 the serene belief that if I did not swim I would still 
 somehow get ashore without sinking. The end, per- 
 haps, justified him, and I suppose I did not do all 
 that work without getting some strength from it; but 
 I wish I had back the time that it cost me; I should 
 like to waste it in some other way. However, time 
 seemed interminable then, and I thought there would 
 be enough of it for me in which to read all Spanish 
 literature; or, at least, I did not propose to do any- 
 thing less. 
 
 9r; 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 I followed Irving, too, iu my later reading, but at 
 haphazard, and with other authors at the same time. I 
 did my poor best to be amused by his Knickerbocker 
 History of New York, because my father liked it so 
 much, but secretly I found it heavy; and a few years 
 ago when I went carefully tlirough it again I could 
 not laugh. Even as a boy I found some other things 
 of his uphill work. There was the beautiful manner, 
 but the thought seemed thin ; and I do not remember 
 having been much amused by Bracehridge Hall, 
 though I read it devoutly, and with a full sense that 
 it would be very comme il faut to like it. But I did 
 like the Life of Goldsmith; I liked it a great deal bet- 
 ter than the more authoritative Life by Forster, and I 
 think there is a deeper and sweeter sense of Goldsmith 
 in it. Better than all, except the Conquest of Grana- 
 da, I liked the Legend vf Sleepy Hollow and the story 
 of Rip Van Winkle, with their humorous and affec- 
 tionate caricatures of life that w^as once of our own 
 soil and air; and the Tales of the Alhamhra, which 
 transported me again to the scenes of my youth beside 
 the Xenil. It was long after my acquaintance with 
 his work that I came to a due sense of Irving as an 
 artist, and perhaps I have come to feel a full sense of 
 it only now, when I perceive that he worked willingly 
 only when he worked inventively. At last I can do 
 justice to the exquisite conception of his Conquest of 
 Granada, a study of history which, in unique measure, 
 conveys not only the pathos, but the humor of one of 
 the most splendid and impressive situations in the ex- 
 perience of the race. Very possibly something of the 
 severer truth might have been sacrificed to the effect 
 of the pleasing and touching tale, but I do not under- 
 stand that this was really done. Upon the whole I 
 am very well content with my first three loves in liter- 
 
 26" 
 
IRVING 
 
 ature, and if I were to choose for any other boy I do 
 not see how I could choose better than Goldsmith and 
 Cervantes and Irving, kindred spirits, and each not 
 a master only, but a sweet and gentle friend, whose 
 kindness could not fail to profit him. 
 
V 
 
 FIRST FICTION AND DRA]\IA 
 
 In my omti case there followed my acquaintance 
 with these authors certain Boeotian years, when if I did 
 not go backward I scarcely went forward in the paths 
 I had set out upon. They were years of the work, of 
 the over-work, indeed, which falls to the lot of so many 
 that I should be ashamed to speak of it except in 
 accounting for the fact. My father had sold his paper 
 in Hamilton and had bought an interest in another at 
 Dayton, and we were all straining our utmost to help 
 pay for it. My daily tasks began so early and ended 
 so late that I had little time, even if I had the spirit, 
 for reading; and it was not till what we thought ruin, 
 but what was really release, came to us that I got 
 back again to my books. Then we went to live in the 
 country for a year, and that stress of toil, with the 
 shadow of failure darkening all, fell from me like 
 the horror of an evil dream. The only new book 
 which I remember to have read in those two or three 
 years at Dayton, when I hardly remember to have read 
 any old ones, was the novel of Jane Eyre, which I took 
 in very imperfectly, and which I associate with the 
 first rumor of the Rochester Knockings, then just be- 
 ginning to reverberate through a world that they have 
 not since left wholly at peace. It was a gloomy Sunday 
 afternoon when the book came under my hand; and 
 mixed with my interest in the story was an anxiety lest 
 
 28 
 
FIKST FICTION AND DKAMA 
 
 the pictures on the walls should leave their nails and 
 come and lay themselves at my feet ; that was what the 
 pictures had been doing in Rochester and other places 
 where the disembodied spirits were beginning to make 
 themselves felt. The thing did not really happen in 
 my case, but I was alone in the house, and it might very 
 easily have happened. 
 
 If very little came to me in those days from books, 
 on the other hand my acquaintance with the drama 
 vastly enlarged itself. There was a hapless company 
 of players in the town from time to time, and they 
 came to us for their printing. I believe they never 
 paid for it, or at least never wholly, but they lavished 
 free passes upon us, and as nearly as I can make out, 
 at this distance of time, I profited by their generosity, 
 every night. They gave two or three plays at every 
 performance to houses ungratefully small, but of a 
 lively spirit and impatient temper that would not brook 
 delay in the representation; and they changed the bill 
 each day. In this way I became familiar with Shake- 
 speare before I read him, or at least such plays of his 
 as were most given in those days, and I saw " Macbeth " 
 and "Hamlet," and above all "Eichard III.," again and 
 again. I do not know why my delight in those tragedies 
 did not send me to the volume of his plays, which was 
 all the time in the bookcase at home, but I seem not to 
 have thought of it, and rapt as I was in them I am not 
 sure that they gave me greater pleasure, or seemed at 
 all finer, than " Rollo," " The Wife," " The Stranger," 
 " Barbarossa," " The Miser of Marseilles," and the rest 
 of the melodramas, comedies, and farces which I saw at 
 that time. I have a notion that there were some clever 
 people in one of these companies, and that the lighter 
 pieces at least were well played, but I may be altogether 
 wrong. The gentleman who took the part of villain, 
 3 29 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 with an unfailing lovo of evil, in the different dramas, 
 used to come about the printing-office a good deal, and I 
 was puzzled to find him a very mild and gentle person. 
 To be sure he had a mustache, which in those days 
 devoted a man to wickedness, but by day it was a blond 
 mustache, quite flaxen, in fact, and not at all the dark 
 and deadly thing it was behind the footlights at night. 
 I could scarcely gasp in his presence, my heart bounded 
 so in awe and honor of him when he paid a visit to us ; 
 perhaps he used to bring the copy of the show-bills. The 
 company he belonged to left town in the adversity 
 habitual wath them. 
 
 Our own adversity had been growing, and now it be- 
 came overwhelming. We had to give up the paper we 
 had struggled so hard to keep, but when the worst came 
 it was not half so bad as what had gone before. There 
 was no more waiting till midnight for the telegraphic 
 news, no more waking at dawn to deliver the papers, no 
 more weary days at the case, heavier for the doom hang- 
 ing over us. My father and his brothers had long 
 dreamed of a sort of family colony somewhere in the 
 country, and now the imcle who was most prosperous 
 bought a milling property on a river not far from Day- 
 ton, and my father went out to take charge of it until the 
 others could shape their business to follow him. The 
 scheme came to nothing finally, but in the mean time 
 we escaped from the little city and its sorrow^ful associa- 
 tions of fruitless labor, and had a year in the country, 
 which was blest, at least to us children, by sojourn in a 
 log-cabin, while a house was building for us. 
 
VI 
 
 LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT" 
 
 This log-cabin had a loft, where we boys slept, and 
 in the loft were stored in barrels the books that had 
 now begun to overflow the bookcase. I do not know 
 why I chose the loft to renew my long-neglected friend- 
 ship with them. The light could not have been good, 
 though if I brought my books to the little gable window 
 that overlooked the groaning and whistling gristmill 
 I could see well enough. But perhaps I liked the loft 
 best because the books were handiest there, and because 
 I could be alone. At any rate, it was there that I read 
 Longfellow's " Spanish Student," which I found in an 
 old paper copy of his poems in one of the barrels, and I 
 instantly conceived for it the passion which all things 
 Spanish inspired in me. As I read I not only renewed 
 my acquaintance with literature, but renewed my de- 
 light in people and places where I had been happy be- 
 fore those heavy years in Dayton. At the same time I 
 felt a little jealousy, a little grudge, that any one else 
 should love them as well as T, and if the poem had not 
 been so beautiful I should have hated the poet for tres- 
 passing on my ground. But I could not hold out long 
 against the witchery of his verse. The " Spanish Stu- 
 dent " became one of my passions ; a minor passion, not 
 a grand one, like Don Quixote and the Conquest of 
 Granada, but still a passion, and I should dread a little 
 to read the piece now, lest I should disturb my old ideal 
 
 31 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 of its biaiity. The hero's rogue servant, Chispa, seemed 
 to me, then and long afterwards, so fine a bit of Spanish 
 character that I chose his name for my first pseudonym 
 when I began to write for the newspapers, and signed 
 my legislative correspondence for a Cincinnati paper 
 with it. I was in love with the heroine, the lovely 
 dancer whose cachucha turned my head, along with that 
 of the cardinal, but whose name even I have forgotten, 
 and I went about with the thought of her burning in 
 my heart, as if she had been a real person. 
 
VII 
 
 SCOTT 
 
 All the while I was bringing up the long arrears of 
 play which I had not enjoyed in the toil-years at Day- 
 ton, and was trying to make my Spanish reading serve 
 in the sports that we had in the woods and by the river. 
 We were Moors and Spaniards almost as often as we 
 were British and Americans, or settlers and Indians. 
 I suspect that the large, mild boy, the son of a neigh- 
 boring farmer, who mainly shared our games, had but 
 a dim notion of what I meant by my strange people, 
 but I did my best to enlighten him, and he helped me 
 make a dream out of my life, and did his best to dwell 
 in the region of unrealities where I preferably had my 
 being; he was from time to time a Moor when I think 
 he would rather have been a Mingo. 
 
 I got hold of Scott's poems, too, in that cabin loft, 
 and read most of the tales which were yet unknown to 
 me after those earlier readings of my father's. I could 
 not say why " Harold the Dauntless " most took my 
 fancy; the fine, strongly flowing rhythm of the verse 
 had a good deal to do with it, I believe. I liked these 
 things, all of them, and in after years I liked the " Lady 
 of the Lake " more and more, and from mere love of it 
 got great lengths of it by heart; but I cannot say that 
 Scott was then or ever a great passion with me. It 
 was a sobered affection at best, which came from my 
 sympathy with his love of nature, and the whole kindly 
 
 r>3 
 
MY LITEFARY PASSIONS 
 
 and humane keeping of his genius. Many years later, 
 during the month when I was waiting for my passport 
 as Consul for Venice, and had the time on my hands, 
 I passed it chiefly in reading all his novels, one after 
 another, without the interruption of other reading. 
 IvanJioe I had known before, and the Bride of Lnmmer- 
 moor and Woodstock, but the rest had remained in that 
 sort of abeyance which is often the fate of books people 
 expect to read as a matter of course, and come very near 
 not reading at all, or read only very late. Taking them 
 in this swift sequence, little or nothing of them remained 
 with me, and my experience with them is against that 
 sort of ordered and regular reading, which I have so 
 often heard advised for young people by their elders. I 
 always suspect their elders of not having done that kind 
 of reading themselves. 
 
 For my own part I believe I have never got any 
 good from a book that I did not read lawlessly and 
 wilfully, out of all leading and following, and merely 
 because I wanted to read it; and I here make bold to 
 praise that way of doing. The book which you read 
 from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you 
 must, does not commonly make friends with you. It 
 may happen that it will yield you an unexpected de- 
 light, but this will be in its own unentreated way and 
 in spite of your good intentions. Little of the book read 
 for a purpose stays with the reader, and this is one 
 reason why reading for review is so vain and unprofit- 
 able. I have done a vast deal of this, but I have usu- 
 ally been aware that the book was subtly withholding 
 from mo the best a book can give, since I was not read- 
 ing it for its own sako and because T loved it, but for 
 selfish ends of my own, and because T wished to possess 
 myself of it for business purposes, as it were. The 
 reading that does one good, and lasting good, is the 
 
 34 
 
SCOTT 
 
 n-aJiiig that one docs for pleasure, and simply and un- 
 selfishlj, as children do. Art will still withhold herself 
 from thrift, and she docs well, for nothing but love has 
 any right to her. 
 
 Little remains of the events of any period, however 
 vivid they were in passing. The memory may hold 
 record of everything, as it is believed, but it will not 
 be easily entreated to give up its facts, and I find my- 
 self striving in vain to recall the things that I must 
 have read that year in the country. Probably I read 
 the old things over; certainly I kept on with Cervan- 
 tes, and very likely with Goldsmith. There was a 
 delightful history of Ohio, stuffed with tales of the 
 pioneer times, which was a good deal in the hands of 
 us boys ; and there was a book of Western Adventure, 
 full of Indian fights and captivities, which we wore to 
 pieces. Still, I think that it was now that I began to 
 have a literary sense of what I was reading. I wrote 
 a diary, and I tried to give its record form and style, 
 but mostly failed. The versifying which I was always 
 at was easier, and yielded itself more to my hand. I 
 should be very glad to know at present what it dealt 
 with. 
 
VIII 
 
 LIGHTER FANCIES 
 
 When my uncles changed their minds in regard to 
 colonizing their families at the mills, as they did in 
 ahout a year, it became necessary for my father to 
 look about for some new employment, and he naturally 
 looked in the old direction. There were several 
 schemes for getting hold of this paper and that, and 
 there were offers that came to nothing. In that day 
 there were few salaried editors in the country outside 
 of New York, and the only hope we coiild have was 
 of some place as printers in an office which we might 
 finally buy. The affair ended in our going to the 
 State capital, where my father found work as a report- 
 er of legislative proceedings for one of the daily jour- 
 nals, and I was taken into the office as a compositor. 
 In this way I came into living contact with literature 
 again, and the day-dreams began once more over the 
 familiar cases of type. A definite literary ambition 
 grew up in me, and in the long reveries of the after- 
 noon, when I was distributing my case, I fashioned a 
 future of overpowering magnificence and undying ce- 
 lebrity. I should be ashamed to say what literary 
 triumphs I achieved in those preposterous deliriums. 
 What I actually did was to write a good many copies 
 of verse, in imitation, never owned, of Moore and 
 Goldsmith, and some minor poets, whose work caught 
 
 36 
 
LIGHTER FANCIES 
 
 my fauc}', as I read it in tlic newspapers or put it 
 iuto type. 
 
 One of my pieces, which fell so far short of my 
 visionary performances as to treat of the lowly and 
 familiar theme of Spring, was the first thing I ever 
 had in print. IMy father offered it to the editor of 
 the paper I worked on, and I first knew, with mingled 
 shame and pride, of what he had done when I saw it 
 in the journal. In the tnmult of my emotions I prom- 
 ised myself that if I got through this experience safely 
 I w^ould never suffer anything else of mine to be pub- 
 lished ; but it was not long before I offered the editor 
 a poem myself. I am now glad to think it dealt with 
 so humble a fact as a farmer's family leaving their old 
 home for the West, The only fame of my poem which 
 reached me was when another boy in the office quoted 
 some lines of it in derision. This covered me with such 
 confusion that I wonder that I did not vanish from the 
 earth. At the same time I had my secret joy in it, and 
 even yet I think it was attempted in a way which was 
 not false or wrong. I had tried to sketch an aspect of 
 life that I had seen and known, and that was very well 
 indeed, and I had w^'ought patiently and carefully in 
 the art of the poor little affair. 
 
 My elder brother, for whom there was no place in 
 the office where I worked, had found one in a store, 
 and he beguiled the leisure that light trade left on 
 his hands by reading the novels of Captain Marryat. 
 I read them after him with a great deal of amusement, 
 but without the passion that I bestowed upon my 
 favorite authors. I believe I had no critical reserves 
 in regard to them, but simply they did not take my 
 fancy. Still, w^e had great fun w^ith Japliet in Search 
 of a Father, and with Midshipman Easy, and we felt 
 a fine physical shiver in the darkling moods of Snarle- 
 
 37 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 yow the Dog-Fiend. 1 do not remember even the 
 names of the other novels, except Jacob Faithful, which 
 I chanced npon a few years ago and found very hard 
 reading. 
 
 We children wlio were used to the free range of 
 woods and fields were homesick for the country in our 
 narrow city yard, and I associate with this longing the 
 Farmer's Boy of Bloomfield, which my father got for 
 me. It was a little book in blue cloth, and there were 
 some mild wood-cuts in it. I read it with a tempered 
 pleasure, and with a vague resentment of its trespass 
 upon Thomson's ground in the division of its parts 
 under the names of the seasons. I do not know why 
 I need have felt this. I was not yet very fond of 
 Thomson. I really liked Bloomfield better; for one 
 thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllabics 
 which I preferred to any other verse. 
 
IX 
 
 POPE 
 
 I INFER from the fact of this preference that I had 
 already begun to read Pope, and that I must have read 
 the " Deserted Village " of Goldsmith. I fancy, also, 
 that I must by this time have read the Odyssey, for 
 the " Battle of the Frogs and Mice " was in the second 
 volume, and it took me so much that I paid it the 
 tribute of a bald imitation in a mock-heroic epic of a 
 cat fight, studied from the cat fights in our back yard, 
 with the wonted invocation to the Muse, and the ma- 
 chinery of partisan gods and goddesses. It was in 
 some hundreds of verses, which I did my best to bal- 
 ance as Pope did, with a ca?sura falling in the middle 
 of the line, and a neat antithesis at the end. 
 
 The story of the Odyssey charmed me, of course, 
 and I had moments of being intimate friends with 
 Ulysses, but I was passing out of that phase, and was 
 coming to read more with a sense of the author, and 
 less with a sense of his characters as real persons ; that 
 is, I was growing more literary, and less human. I 
 fell in love with Pope, whose life I read with an ardor 
 of sympathy which I am afraid he hardly merited. I 
 was of his side in all his quarrels, as far as I under- 
 stood them, and if I did not understand them I was 
 of his side anyway. When I found that he was a Cath- 
 olic I was almost ready to abjure the Protestant religion 
 for his sake; but I perceived that this was not neces- 
 
 39 
 
MY LITEJIARY PASSIONS 
 
 sarj when I came to know tliat most of his friends 
 were Protestants. If the truth must be told, I did not 
 like his best things at first, but long remained chiefly 
 attached to his rubbishing pastorals, which I was per- 
 petually imitating, with a whole apparatus of swains 
 and shepherdesses, purling brooks, enamelled meads, 
 rolling years, and the like. 
 
 After my day's work at the case I wore the evening 
 away in my boyish literary attempts, forcing my poor 
 invention in that unnatural kind, and rubbing and 
 polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes 
 take on an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was 
 like none of mine. With all my pains I do not think 
 I ev^er managed to bring any of my pastorals to a satis- 
 factory close. They all stopped somewhere about half- 
 w^ay. My swains could not think of anything more to 
 say, and the merits of my shepherdesses remained un- 
 decided. To this day I do not know whether in any 
 given instance it was the champion of Chloe or of 
 Sylvia that carried off the prize for his fair, but I dare 
 say it does not much matter. I am sure that I pro- 
 duced a rhetoric as artificial and treated of things as 
 unreal as my master in the art, and I am rather glad 
 that I acquainted myself so thoroughly with a mood 
 of literature which, whatever we may say against it, 
 seems to have expressed very perfectly a mood of civ- 
 ilization. 
 
 The severe schooling I gave myself was not without 
 its immediate use. I learned how to choose between 
 words after a study of their fitness, and though I often 
 employed them decoratively and with no vital sense of 
 their qualities, still in mere decoration they had to be 
 chosen intelligently, and after some thought about their 
 structure and meaning. I could not imitate Pope with- 
 out imitating his methods, and his method was to the 
 
 40 
 
POPE 
 
 last, degree intelligent. Tic certainly knew what lie 
 was doing, and althoiigh I did not always know what 1 
 was doing, he made me wish to know, and ashamed of 
 not knowing. "T'licre arc several truer poets who might 
 not have done this; and after all the modern contempt 
 of Pope, he seems to me to have heen at least one of the 
 great masters, if not one of the great poets. The poor 
 man's life was as weak and crooked as his frail, tor- 
 mented hody, bnt he had a danntless spirit, and he 
 fought his way against odds that might well have appall- 
 ed a stronger nature. I suppose I must own that he 
 was from time to time a snob, and from time to time a 
 liar, but I believe that he loved the truth, and would 
 have liked always to respect himself if he could. He 
 violently revolted, now and again, from the abasement 
 to which he forced himself, and he always bit the heel 
 that trod on him, especially if it was a very high, narrow 
 heel, with a clocked stocking and a hooped skirt above 
 it. I loved him fondly at one time, and afterwards de- 
 spised him, but now I am not sorry for the love, and I 
 am very sorry for the despite. I humbly own a vast 
 debt to him, not the least part of which is the perception 
 that he is a model of ever so much more to be shunned 
 than to be followed in literature. 
 
 He was the first of the writers of great Anna's time 
 whom I knew, and he made me ready to understand, if 
 he did not make me understand at once, the order of 
 mind and life which he belonged to. Thanks to his 
 pastorals, I could long afterw^ards enjoy with the double 
 sense requisite for full pleasure in them, such divinely 
 excellent artificialities at Tasso's " Aminta " and Gua- 
 rini's " Pastor Fido " ; things which you will thor- 
 oughly like only after you are in the joke of thinking 
 how people once seriously liked them as high examples 
 of poetry. 
 
 41 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 Of course I read other things of Pope's besides his 
 pastorals, even at the time I read these so much. I 
 read, or not very easily or willingly read at, his Essay 
 on Man, which my father admired, and which he 
 probably put Pope's works into my hands to have me 
 read ; and I read the Dunciad, with quite a furious 
 ardor in the tiresome quarrels it celebrates, and an in- 
 terest in its machinery, which it fatigues me to think of. 
 But it was only a few years ago that I read the Rape 
 of the Loch, a thing perfect of its kind, whatever we 
 may choose «to think of the kind. Upon the whole I 
 think much better of the kind than I once did, though 
 still not so much as I should have thought if I had 
 read the poem when the fever of my love for Pope was 
 at the highest. 
 
 It is a nice question how far one is helped or hurt 
 by one's idealizations of historical or imaginary char- 
 acters, and I shall not try to answer it fully. I sup- 
 pose that if I once cherislied such a passion for Pope 
 personally that I would willingly have done the things 
 that he did, and told the lies, and vented the malice, 
 and inflicted the cruelties that the poor soul was full 
 of, it was for the reason, partly, that I did not see 
 these things as they were, and that in the glamour of 
 his talent I was blind to all but the virtues of his de- 
 fects, which he certainly had, and partly that in my 
 love of him I could not take sides against him, even 
 when I knew him to be wrong. After all, I fancy not 
 much harm comes to the devoted boy from his enthu- 
 siasms for this imperfect hero or that. In my own 
 case I am sure that I distinguished as to certain sins 
 in my idols. I could not cast them down or cease to 
 worship them, but some of their frailties grieved me 
 and put me to secret shame for them. I did not ex- 
 cuse these things in them, or try to believe that they 
 
 42 
 
POPE 
 
 were less evil for tliem than tlicy would have been for 
 less people. This was after I came more or less to 
 the knowledge of good and evil. While I remained 
 in the innocence of childhood I did not even under- 
 stand the wrong. When I realized what lives some 
 of my poets had led, how they were drunkards, and 
 SAvindlers, and unchaste, and untrue, I lamented over 
 them w^ith a sense of personal disgrace in them, and 
 to this day I have no patience with that code of the 
 world which relaxes itself in behalf of the brilliant and 
 gifted offender; rather he should suffer more blame. 
 The worst of the literature of past times, before an 
 ethical conscience began to inform it, or the advance 
 of the race compelled it to decency, is that it leaves 
 the mind foul with tilthy images and base thoughts; 
 but what I have been trying to say is that the boy, 
 unless he is exceptionally depraved beforehand, is 
 saved from these through his ignorance. Still I wish 
 they were not there, and I hope the time will come 
 when the beast-man will be so far subdued and tamed 
 in us that the memory of him in literature shall be left 
 to perish; that what is lewd and ribald in the great 
 poets shall be kept out of such editions as are meant 
 for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which 
 now perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets 
 shall no longer have its way. At the end of the ends 
 such things do defile, they do corrupt. We may pal- 
 liate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but 
 that is the truth, and I do not see why they should 
 not be dropped from literature, as they were long ago 
 dropped from the talk of decent people. The literary 
 histories might keep record of them, but it is loath- 
 some to think of those heaps of ordure, accumulated 
 from generation to generation, and carefully passed 
 down from age to age as something precious and vital, 
 
 43 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 and not justly regarded as the moral offal which they 
 are. 
 
 During the winter we passed at Columbus I suppose 
 that my father read things aloud to us after his old 
 habit, and that I listened with the rest. I have a dim 
 notion of first knowing Thomson's Castle of Indolence 
 in this way, but I was getting more and more imj^a- 
 tient of having things read to me. The trouble was 
 that I caught some thought or image from the text, 
 and that my fancy remained playing with that while 
 the reading went on, and I lost the rest. But I think 
 the reading was less in every way than it had been, 
 because his work was exhausting and his leisure less. 
 My own hours in the printing-office began at seven and 
 ended at six, with an hour at noon for dinner, which I 
 often used for putting down such verses as had come to 
 me during the morning. As soon as supper was over 
 at night I got out my manuscripts, which I kept in 
 great disorder, and written in several different hands 
 on several different kinds of paper, and sawed, and filed, 
 and hammered away at my blessed Popean heroics till 
 nine, when I went regularly to bed, to rise again at five. 
 Sometimes the foreman gave me an afternoon off on 
 Saturdays, and though the days were long the work was 
 not always constant, and was never very severe. I sus- 
 pect now the office was not so prosperous as might have 
 been Avished. I was shifted from place to place in it, 
 and there was plenty of time for my day-dreams over the 
 distribution of my ease. I was very fond of my work, 
 thongh, and proud of my swiftness and skill in it. Once 
 when the perplexed foreman could not think of any 
 task to set me he offered me a holiday, but T would not 
 take it, so I fancy that at tliis time I was not more inter- 
 ested in my art of poetry than in my trade of printing. 
 What went on in the office interested me as much as the 
 
 44 
 
POPE 
 
 quarrels of the Augustan age of English letters, and I 
 made uiuoli more record of it in the crude and shape- 
 less diary which T kept, partly in verse and partly in 
 prose, but always of a distinctly lower literary kind 
 than that I was trying otherwise to write. 
 
 There must have been some mention in it of the 
 tremendous combat with wet sponges I saw there one 
 day between two of the boys who hurled them back 
 and forth at each other. This amiable fray, carried 
 on during the foreman's absence, forced upon my no- 
 tice for the first time the boy who has come to be a 
 name well-known in literature. I admired his vigor 
 as a combatant, but I never spoke to him at that time, 
 and I never dreamed that he, too, was effervescing 
 Avith verse, probably as fiercely as myself. Six or 
 seven years later we met again, when we had both 
 become journalists, and had both had poems accepted 
 by Mr. LowtII for the Atlantic Monthly, and then we 
 formed a literary friendship which eventuated in the 
 joint publication of a volume of verse. The Poems of 
 Two Friends became instantly and lastingly unknown 
 to fame; the West waited, as it always does, to hear 
 what the East should say; the East said nothing, and 
 two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred came 
 back upon the publisher's hands. I imagine these 
 copies were "• ground up " in the manner of worthless 
 stock, for I saw a single example of the book quoted 
 the other day in a book-seller's catalogue at ten dollars, 
 and I infer that it is so rare as to be prized at least 
 for its rarity. It was a very pretty little book, printed 
 on tinted paper then called '' blush," in the trade, and 
 it was manufactured in the same office where we had 
 once been boys together, unknown to each other. An- 
 other boy of that time had by this time become fore- 
 man in the office, and he w'as very severe with us 
 4 45 
 
MY litehary passions 
 
 about the proofs, and sent us hurting messages on the 
 margin. Perhaps he thought we might be going to 
 take on airs, and perhaps we might have taken on airs 
 if the fate of our book had been diiferent. As it was 
 I really think we behaved with nufficient meekness, and 
 after thirty four or five years for reflection I am 
 still of a very modest mind about my share of the 
 book, in spite of the price it bears in the book-seller's 
 catalogue. But I have steadily grown in liking for my 
 friend's share in it, and I think that there is at present 
 no American of twenty-three writing verse of so good 
 a quality, with an ideal so pure and high, and from an 
 impulse so authentic as John J. Piatt's were then. He 
 already knew how to breathe into his glowing rhyme 
 the very spirit of the region w^here we were both na- 
 tive, and in him the ]\Iiddle West has its true poet, 
 who was much more than its poet, who had a rich and 
 tender imagination, a lovely sense of color, and a touch 
 even then securely and fully his own. I was reading 
 over his poems in that poor little book a few days ago, 
 and wondering wnth shame and contrition that I had 
 not at once known their incomparable superiority to 
 mine. But I used then and for long afterwards to tax 
 him with obscurity, not knowing that my own want of 
 simplicity and directness was to blame for that effect. 
 
 My reading from the first was such as to enamour 
 me of clearness, of definiteness ; anything Vft in the 
 vague Avas intolerable to me; but my long subjection 
 to Pope, while it was useful in other ways, made me 
 so strictly literary in my point of view that sometimes 
 I could not see wdiat was, if more naturally approached 
 and without any technical preoccupation, perfectly 
 transparent. It remained for another great passion, 
 perhaps the greatest of my life, to fuse these gyves in 
 which I was trying so hard to dance, and free me for- 
 
 46 
 
POPE 
 
 ever from the bonds which I had spent so much time 
 and trouble to involve myself in. But I was not to 
 know that passion for five or six years yet, and in the 
 mean time I kept on as I had been going, and worked 
 out my deliverance in the predestined way. What I 
 liked then was regularity, uniformity, exactness. I 
 did not conceive of literature as the expression of life, 
 and I could not imagine that it ought to be desultory, 
 mutable, and unfixed, even if at the risk of some vague- 
 ness. 
 
X 
 
 VARIOUS PREFERENCES 
 
 My father was very fond of Bjron, and I must bo- 
 fore this have known that his poems were in our book- 
 case. While we were still in Columbus I began to read 
 them, but I did not read so much of them as could have 
 helped me to a truer and freer ideal. I read " English 
 Bards and Scotch Reviewers," and I liked its vulgar 
 music and its heavy-handed sarcasm. These would, 
 perhaps, have fascinated any boy, but I had such a 
 fanaticism for methodical verse that any variation from 
 the octosyllabic and decasyllabic couplets was painful to 
 me. The Spencerian stanza, with its rich variety 
 of movement and its harmonious closes, long shut 
 " Childe Harold " from me, and whenever I found a 
 poem in any book which did not rhyme its second line 
 with its first I read it unwillingly or not at all. 
 
 This craze could not last, of course, but it lasted 
 beyond our stay in Columbus, which ended with the 
 winter, when the Legislature adjourned, and my fa- 
 ther's employment ceased. He tried to find some edi- 
 torial work on the paper which had printed his reports, 
 but every place was full, and it was hopeless to dream 
 of getting a proprietary interest in it. We had noth- 
 ing, and we must seek a chance where something be- 
 sides money would avail us. This ofi'ered itself in 
 the village of Ashtabula, in the northeastern part of 
 the State, and there we all found ourselves one moon- 
 
 48 
 
VARIOUS PKEFEKENCES 
 
 light night of early summer. The Lake Shore Railroad 
 then ended at Ashtabula, in a bank of sand, and my 
 elder brother and I walked up from the station, while 
 the rest of the family, which pretty well filled the 
 omnibus, rode. We had been very happy at Colum- 
 bus, as Ave were apt to be anywhere, but none of us 
 liked the narrowness of city streets, even so near to 
 the woods as those were, and we were eager for the 
 country again. We had always lived hitherto in large 
 towns, except for that year at the Mills, and we w^ero 
 eager to see what a village was like, especially a village 
 peopled wholly by Yankees, as our father had reported 
 it. I must own that we found it far prettier than 
 anything we had known in Southern Ohio, which we 
 were so fond of and so loath to leave, and as I look 
 back it still seems to me one of the prettiest little 
 places I have ever known, with its white wooden 
 houses, glimmering in the dark of its elms and maples, 
 and their silent gardens beside each, and the silent, 
 grass-bordered, sandy streets between them. The ho- 
 tel, where we rejoined our family, lurked behind a 
 group of lofty elms, and we drank at the toA\Ti pump 
 before it just for the pleasure of pumping it. 
 
 The village was all that we could have imagined of 
 simply and sweetly romantic in the moonlight, and 
 when the day came it did not rob it of its charm. It 
 was as lovely in my eyes as the loveliest village of the 
 plain, and it had the advantage of realizing the De- 
 serted Village without being deserted. 
 
XI 
 
 UNCLE TOM'S CABIN 
 
 The book that moved mc most, in our stay of six 
 months at Ashtabula, was then beginning to move the 
 whole world more than any other book has moved it. 
 I read it as it came out week after week in the old 
 National Era, and I broke my heart over Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin, as every one else did. Yet I cannot say that 
 it was a passion of mine like Don Quixote, or the 
 other books that I had loved intensely. I felt its 
 greatness when I read it first, and as often as I have 
 read it since, I have seen more and more clearly that 
 it was a very great novel. With certain obvious lapses 
 in its art, and Avith an art that is at its best very sim- 
 ple, and perhaps primitive, the book is still a work of 
 art. I knew this, in a measure then, as I know it 
 now, and yet neither the literary pride I was beginning 
 to have in the perception of such things, nor the 
 powerful appeal it made to my sympathies, sufficed to 
 impassion me of it. I could not say why this was so. 
 Why does the }■ oung man's fancy, when it lightly turns 
 to thoughts of love, turn this way and not that ? There 
 seems no more reason for one than for the other. 
 
 Instead of remaining steeped to the lips in the strong 
 interest of what is still perhaps our chief fiction, I shed 
 my tribute of tears, and went on my way. I did 
 not try to write a story of slavery, as I might very 
 well have done; I did not imitate either the make or 
 
 50 
 
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN 
 
 the manner of Mrs. Stowe's romance; I kept on at 
 my imitation of Pope's pastorals, which I dare say I 
 thought much finer, and worthier the powers of such 
 a poet as I meant to be. I did this, as I must have 
 felt then, at some personal risk of a supernatural kind, 
 for my studies were apt to be prolonged into the 
 night after the rest of the family had gone to bed, and 
 a certain ghost, which I had every reason to fear, 
 might very well have visited the small room given me 
 to write in. There was a story, which I shrank from 
 verifying, that a former inmate of our house had hung 
 himself in it, but I do not know to this day whether it 
 was true or not. The doubt did not prevent him from 
 dangling at the door-post, in my consciousness, and 
 many a time I shunned the sight of this problematical 
 suicide by keeping my eyes fastened on the book be- 
 fore me. It was a very simple device, but perfectly 
 effective, as I think any one will find who employs 
 it in like circumstances ; and I would really like 
 to commend it to growing boys troubled as I was 
 then. 
 
 I never heard who the poor soul was, or why he 
 took himself out of the world, if he really did so, or 
 if he ever was in it ; but I am sure that my passion for 
 Pope, and my purpose of writing pastorals, must have 
 been powerful indeed to carry me through dangers of 
 that kind. I suspect that the strongest proof of their 
 existence was the gloomy and ruinous look of the 
 house, which was one of the oldest in the village, and 
 the only one that was for rent there. We went into 
 it because we must, and we were to leave it as soon 
 as we could find a better. But before this happened 
 we left Ashtabula, and I parted with one of the few 
 possibilities I have enjoyed of seeing a ghost on his 
 own ground, as it were. 
 
 51 
 
:^rY tjteeary passions 
 
 I was not sorrv, for I believe I never went in or 
 came out of the place, by day or by night, without a 
 slmddor, more or less secret ; and at least, now, wo 
 shonld be able to get another house. 
 
XII 
 
 OSSIAN 
 
 Very likely tlie reading of Ossian had something 
 to do with my morbid anxieties. T liad read Byron's 
 imitation of him before that, and admired it prodig- 
 iously, and when my father got me the book — as usual 
 I did not know where or how he got it — not all the 
 tall forms that moved before the eyes of haunted 
 bards in the dusky vale of autumn could have kept me 
 from it. There were certain outline illustrations in it, 
 which were very good in the cold Flaxman manner, 
 and helped largely to heighten the fascination of the 
 poems for me. They did not supplant the pastorals 
 of Pope in my aifections, and they were never the 
 grand passion with me that Pope's poems had been. 
 
 I began at once to make my imitations of Ossian, 
 and I dare say they were not windier and mistier than 
 the original. At the same time I read the literature 
 of the subject, and gave the pretensions of Macpher- 
 son an unquestioning faith. I should have made very 
 short work of any one who had impugned the authen- 
 ticity of the poems, but happily there was no one who 
 held the contrary opinion in that village, so far as I 
 knew, or who cared for Ossian, or had even heard of 
 him. This saved me a great deal of heated contro- 
 versy with my contemporaries, but I had it out in 
 many angry reveries with Dr. Johnson and others, 
 who had dared to say in their time that the poems of 
 Ossian were not genuine lays of the Gaelic bard, handed 
 
 53 
 
ilY LITEFARY PASSIONS 
 
 do^vn from father to son, and taken from the lips of old 
 M'omcn in ITigliland lints, as Maepliersou claimed. 
 
 In fact I lived over in my small way the epoch of 
 the eighteenth century in which these curious frauds 
 found i'>olite acceptance all over Europe, and I think 
 3'et that they were really worthier of acceptance than 
 most of the artificialities that then passed for poetry. 
 There was a light of nature in them, and this must 
 have been what pleased me, so long shut up to the 
 studio-work of Pope. But strangely enough I did not 
 falter in my allegiance to him, or realize that here in 
 this free form was a deliverance, if I liked, from the 
 fetters and manacles which I had been at so much 
 pains to fit myself with. Probably nothing would then 
 liave persuaded me to put them off permanently, or to 
 do more than lay them aside for the moment while I 
 tried that new stop and that new step. 
 
 I think that even then I had an instinctive doubt 
 whether formlessness was really better than formality. 
 Something, it seems to me, may be contained and kept 
 alive in formality, but in formlessness everything spills 
 and wastes away. This is what I find the fatal defect 
 of our American Ossian, Walt Whitman, whose way is 
 where artistic madness lies. He had great moments, 
 beautiful and noble thoughts, generous aspirations, and 
 a heart wide and warm enough for the whole race, but 
 he had no bounds, no shape; he was as liberal as the 
 casing air, but he was often as vague and intangible. 
 I cannot say how long my passion for Ossian lasted, but 
 not long, I fancy, for I cannot find any trace of it in 
 the time following our removal from Ashtabula to the 
 county seat at Jefferson. I kept on with Pope, I kept 
 on with Cervantes, I kept on with Irving, but I sup- 
 pose there was really not substance enough in Ossian to 
 feed my passion, and it died of inanition. 
 
 54 
 
XIII 
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The establisliinent of our paper in the village where 
 there had been none before, and its enlargement from 
 four to eight pages, were events so filling that they 
 left little room for any other excitement but that of 
 getting acquainted with the young people of the vil- 
 lage, and going to parties, and sleigh rides, and walks, 
 and drives, and picnics, and dances, and all the other 
 pleasures in which that community seemed to indulge 
 beyond any other we had known. The village was 
 smaller than the one we had just left, but it was by 
 no means less lively, and I think that for its size and 
 time and place it had an uncommon share of what has 
 since been called culture. The intellectual experience 
 of the people was mainly theological and political, as 
 it was everywhere in that day, but there were several 
 among them who had a real love for books, and when 
 they met at the druggist's, as they did every night, to 
 dispute of the inspiration of the Scriptures and the 
 principles of the Free Soil party, the talk sometimes 
 turned upon the respective merits of Dickens and 
 Thackeray, Gibbon and !Macaulay, Wordsworth and 
 Byron. There were law students who read " l^octes 
 Ambrosiana?," the Age of Reason, and Bailey's " Fes- 
 tus," as well as Blackstone's Commentaries; and there 
 was a public library in that village of six himdred 
 people, small but very well selected, which was kept in 
 
 55 
 
MY LITEEARY PASSIONS 
 
 one of the lawyers' offices, and was free to all. It seems 
 to me now that the people met there oftener than they 
 do in most country places, and rubbed their wits to- 
 gether more, but this may be one of those pleasing 
 illusions of memory which men in later life are sub- 
 ject to. 
 
 I insist Ti])on nothing, but certainly the air was 
 friendlier to the tastes I had formed than any I had 
 yet known, and I found a wider if not deeper sym- 
 pathy with them. There was one of our printers who 
 liked books, and we went through Don Quixote to- 
 gether again, and through the Conquest of Granada, 
 and we began to read other things of Irving's. There 
 was a very good little stock of books at the village drug- 
 store, and among those that began to come into my 
 hands were the poems of Dr. Holmes, stray volumes 
 of De Quincey, and here and there minor works of 
 Thackeray. I believe I had no money to buy them, 
 but there was an open account, or a comity, between 
 the printer and the bookseller, and I must have been 
 allowed a certain discretion in regard to getting books. 
 
 Still I do not think I went far in the more modern 
 authors, or gave my heart to any of them. Suddenly, 
 it was now given to Shakespeare, witliout notice or 
 reason, that I can recall, except that my friend liked 
 him too, and that we found it a double pleasure to 
 read him together. Printers in the old-time offices 
 were always spouting Shakes])eare more or less, and I 
 suppose I could not have kept away from him much 
 longer in the nature of things. I cannot fix the time 
 or place v/hen my friend and 1 began to read him, but 
 it was in the fine print of that unhallowed edition of 
 ours, and presently we had great lengths of him by 
 heart, but of " Hamlet," out of " The Tempest," out of 
 " Macbeth," out of " Richard III.," out of " Midsum- 
 
 5G 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 uior-Xight's Dream," out of tlie " Comedy of Errors," 
 out of " Julius Cirsar," out of '' Measure for Measure," 
 out of " Komeo and Juliet," out of " Two Gentlemou 
 of Verona." 
 
 These were the plays that we loved, and must have 
 read in common, or at least at the same time : but others 
 that I more especially liked were the Histories, and 
 among them particularly were the Henrys, where 
 Falstaff appeared. This gross and palpable reprobate 
 greatly took my fancy. I delighted in him immensely, 
 and in his comrades. Pistol, and Bardolph, and Nym. 
 I could not read of his death without emotion, and it 
 was a personal pang to me when the prince, croAvned 
 king, denied him: blackguard for blackguard, I still 
 think the prince the worse blackguard. Perhaps I 
 flatter myself, but I believe that even then, as a boy 
 of sixteen, I fully conceived of Falstaff's character, 
 and entered into the author's wonderfully humorous 
 conception of him. There is no such perfect concep- 
 tion of the selfish sensualist in literature, and the con- 
 ception is all the more perfect because of the wit that 
 lights up the vice of FalstafF, a cold light without ten- 
 derness, for he was not a good fellow, though a merry 
 companion. I am not sure but I should put him be- 
 side Hamlet, and on the same level, for the merit of 
 his artistic completeness, and at one time I much pre- 
 ferred him, or at least his humor. 
 
 As to Falstaff personally, or his like, I was rather 
 fastidious, and would not have made friends with him 
 in the flesh, much or little. I revelled in all his ap- 
 pearances in the Histories, and I tried to be as happy 
 where a factitious and perfunctory Falstaff comes to 
 life again in the " Merry Wives of Windsor," though at 
 the bottom of my heart I felt the difference. I began 
 to make mv imitations of Shakespeare, and I wrote 
 
 57 
 
MY LITEEARY PASSIONS 
 
 out passages where Falstaff and Pistol and Bardolph 
 talked together, in that Ercles vein which is so easily 
 caught. This was after a year or two of the irregular 
 and interrupted acquaintance wnth the author which 
 has been my mode of friendship with all the authors 
 I have loved. My worship of Shakespeare w^ent to 
 heights and lengths that it had reached with no earlier 
 idol, and there was a supreme moment, once, when I 
 found myself saying that the creation of Shakespeare 
 was as great as the creation of a planet. 
 
 There ought certainly to be some bound beyond 
 which the cult of favorite authors should not be suf- 
 fered to go. I should keep well within the limit of 
 that early excess now, and should not liken the crea- 
 tion of Shakespeare to the creation of any heavenly 
 body bigger, say, than one of the nameless asteroids 
 tliat revolve between Mars and Jupiter. Even this I 
 do not feel to be a true means of comparison, and I 
 think that in the case of all great men we like to let 
 our wonder mount and mount, till it leaves the truth 
 behind, and honesty is pretty much cast out as ballast. 
 A w^ise criticism will no more magnify Shakespeare be- 
 cause he is already great than it will magnify any less 
 man. But we are loaded do\vn with the responsibility 
 of finding him all w^e have been told he is, and we must 
 do this or suspect ourselves of a want of taste, a want of 
 sensibility. At the same time, we may really be honester 
 than those who have led us to expect this or that of him, 
 and more truly his friends. I wish the time might come 
 when we could read Shakespeare, and Dante, and 
 Homer, as sincerely and as fairly as we read any new 
 book by the least known of our contemporaries. The 
 course of criticism is towards this, but when I began to 
 read Shakespeare I sliould not have ventured to think 
 that he was not at every moment great. I should no 
 
 58 
 
SIIAKESPEAEE 
 
 more have thought of questioning the poetry of any 
 passage in him than of questioning the proofs of holy 
 writ. All the same, I knew very well that much which 
 I read was really poor stuif, and the persons and posi- 
 tions were often preposterous. It is a great pity that 
 the ardent youth should not he permitted and even en- 
 couraged to say this to himself, instead of falling 
 slavishly before a great author and accepting him at all 
 points as infallible. Shakespeare is fine enough and 
 great enough when all the possible detractions are made, 
 and I have no fear of saying now that he would be finer 
 and greater for the loss of half his work, though if I 
 had heard any one say such a thing then I should have 
 held him as little better than one of the wicked. 
 
 Upon the whole it was well that I had not found my 
 way to Shakespeare earlier, though it is rather strange 
 that I had not. I knew him on the stage in most of the 
 plays that used to be given. I had shared the conscience 
 of Macbeth, the passion of Othello, the doubt of Ham- 
 let; many times, in my natural affinity for villains, I 
 had mocked and suffered with Kichard III. 
 
 Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less, and 
 none ever brought more to it. There have been few 
 joys for me in life comparable to that of seeing the 
 curtain rise on " Hamlet," and hearing the guards begin 
 to talk about the ghost; and yet how fully this joy 
 imparts itself without any material embodiment! It 
 is the same in the whole range of his plays: they fill 
 the scene, but if there is no scene they fill the soul. 
 They are neither worse nor better because of the theatre. 
 They are so great that it cannot hamper them ; they are 
 so vital that they enlarge it to their own proportions 
 and endue it with something of their own living force. 
 They make it the size of life, and yet they retire it so 
 wholly that you think no more of it than you think of 
 
 59 
 
MY LITEIIARY PASSIONS 
 
 the physiognomy of one who talks importantly to you. 
 I have heard people say that they would rather not see 
 Shakespeare played than to see him played ill, but 
 I cannot agree "vvitli them. He can better afford to be 
 played ill than any other man that ever wrote. Who- 
 ever is on the stage, it is always Shakespeare who ii^ 
 speaking to me, and perhaps this is the reason why in 
 the past I can trace no discrepancy between reading his 
 plays and seeing them. 
 
 The effect is so equal from either experience that I 
 am not sure as to some plays whether I read them or 
 saw them first, though as to most of them I am aware 
 that I never saw them at all; and if the whole truth 
 must be told there is still one of his plays that I have 
 not read, and I believe it is esteemed one of his great- 
 est. There are several, with all my reading of others, 
 that I had not read till wdthin a few years; and I do 
 not think I should have lost much if I had never read 
 " Pericles " and " Winter's Tale." 
 
 In those early days I had no philosophized preference 
 for reality in literature, and I dare say if I had been 
 asked, I should have said that the plays of Shakespeare 
 where reality is least felt Avere the most imaginative; 
 that is the belief of the puerile critics still ; but I sup- 
 pose it was my instinctive liking for reality that made 
 the great Histories so delightful to me, and that 
 rendered " Macbeth " and " Hamlet " vital in their 
 very ghosts and witches. There I found a world ap- 
 preciable to experience, a world inexpressibly vaster and 
 grander than the poor little affair that T had only known 
 a small obscure corner of, and yet of one quality with 
 it, so that I could be as much at home and citizen in it 
 as where I actually lived. There I found joy and sorrow 
 mixed, and nothing abstract or typical, but everything 
 standing for itself, and not for some other thing. Then, 
 
 CO 
 
SIIAKESPEAKE 
 
 I suppose it was the interfusion of humor through so 
 much of it, that made it all precious and friendly. I 
 think I had a native love of laughing, which was fos- 
 tered in me bj my father's way of looking at life, and 
 had certainly been flattered by my intimacy with Cer- 
 vantes; but whether this was so or not^ I know that I 
 liked best and felt deepest those plays and passages in 
 Shakespeare where the alliance of the tragic and the 
 comic was closest. Perhaps in a time when self-con- 
 sciousness is so widespread, it is the only thing that saves 
 us from ourselves. I am sure that without it I should 
 not have been naturalized to that world of Shakespeare's 
 Histories, where I used to spend so much of my 
 leisure, with such a sense of his own intimate com- 
 panionship there as I had nowhere else. I felt that he 
 must somehow like my being in the joke of it all, and 
 that in his great heart he had room for a boy willing 
 absolutely to lose himself in him, and be as one of his 
 creations. 
 
 It was the time of life with me when a boy begins 
 to be in love with the pretty faces that then peopled 
 this world so thickly, and I did not fail to fall in love 
 with the ladies of that Shakespeare-world where I lived 
 e(|ually. I cannot tell whether it was because I found 
 them like my ideals here, or whether my ideals acquired 
 merit because of their likeness to the realities there; 
 they appeared to be all of one degree of enchanting love- 
 liness ; but upon the whole I must have preferred them 
 in the plays, because it was so much easier to get on 
 with them there; I was always much better dressed 
 there; I was vastly handsomer; I was not bashful or 
 afraid, and I had some defects of these advantages to 
 contend with here. 
 
 That friend of mine, the printer whom I have men- 
 tioned, was one with me in a sense of the Shakespearean 
 s 01 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 humor, and he dwelt with me in the sort of double being 
 I had in those two worlds. We took the book into the 
 woods at the ends of the long summer afternoons that 
 remained to us when wc had finished our work, and on 
 the shining Sundays of the warm, late spring, the early, 
 warm autumn, and we read it there on grassy slopes or 
 heaps of fallen leaves; so that much of the poetry is 
 mixed for me with a rapturous sense of the out-door 
 beauty of this lovely natural world. We read turn 
 about, one taking the story up as the other tired, and as 
 we read the drama played itself under the open sky and 
 in the free air with such orchestral effects as the sough- 
 ing woods or some rippling stream afforded. It was 
 not interrupted when a squirrel dropped a nut on us 
 from the top of a tall hickory ; and the plaint of a 
 meadow-lark prolonged itself with unbroken sweetness 
 from one world to the other. 
 
 But I think it takes two to read in the open air. The 
 pressure of walls is wanted to keep the mind within 
 itself when one reads alone; otherwise it wanders and 
 disperses itself through nature. When my friend left 
 us for want of work in the office, or from the vagarious 
 impulse which is so strong in our craft, I took my 
 Shakespeare no longer to the woods and fields, but 
 pored upon him mostly by night, in the narrow little 
 space which I had for my study, under the stairs at 
 home. There was a desk pushed back against the wall, 
 which the irregular ceiling sloped down to meet behind 
 it, and at my left was a window, which gave a good 
 light on the writing-leaf of my desk. This was ray 
 workshop for six or seven years, and it was not at all a 
 bad one ; I have had many since that were not so much 
 to the purpose; and though I would not live my life 
 over, I would willingly enough have that little study 
 mine again. But it is gone as utterly as the faces and 
 
 62 
 
SHAKESPEAKE 
 
 voices that made home around it, and that I was fierce 
 to shut out of it, so that no sound or sight should molest 
 me in the pursuit of the end which I sought gropingly, 
 blindly, with very little hope, but with an intense ambi- 
 tion, and a courage that gave way under no burden, 
 before no obstacle. Long ago changes were made in the 
 low, rambling house which threw my little closet into a 
 larger room; but this was not until after I had left it 
 many years ; and as long as I remained a part of that 
 dear and simple home it was my place to read, to write, 
 to muse, to dream. 
 
 I sometimes wish in these later years that I had 
 spent less time in it, or that world of books which it 
 opened into ; that I had seen more of the actual world, 
 and had learned to know my brethren in it better. I 
 might so have amassed more material for after use in 
 literature, but I had to fit myself to use it, and I sup- 
 pose that this was what I was doing, in my own way, 
 and by such light as I had. I often toiled wrongly 
 and foolishly; but certainly I toiled, and I suppose no 
 work is wasted. Some strength, I hope, was coming 
 to me, even from my mistakes, and though I went over 
 ground that I need not have traversed, if I had not been 
 left so much to find the way alone, yet I was not stand- 
 ing still, and some of the things that I then wished to 
 do I have done. I do not mind owning that in others 
 I have failed. For instance, I have never surpassed 
 Shakespeare as a poet, though I once firmly meant to 
 do so; but then, it is to be remembered that very few 
 other people have surpassed him, and that it would not 
 have been easy. 
 
XIV 
 
 IK MARVEL 
 
 ^[y ardor for Shakespeare must have been at its 
 hc-ight when I was betw^een sixteen and seventeen years 
 old, for I fancy when I began to formulate my admira- 
 tion, and to try to measure his greatness in phrases, I 
 was less simply impassioned than at some earlier time. 
 At any rate, I am sure that I did not proclaim his planet- 
 ary importance in creation until I was at least nineteen. 
 But even at an earlier age I no longer worshipped at a 
 single shrine; there were many gods in the temple of 
 my idolatry, and I bowed the knee to them all in a devo- 
 tion which, if it was not of one quality, M-as certainly 
 impartial. While I was reading, and thinking, and 
 living Shakespeare with such an intensity that I do not 
 see how there could have been room in my consciousness 
 for anything else, there seem to have been half a dozen 
 other divinities there, great and small, whom I have 
 some present difficulty in distinguishing. I kept 
 Irving, and Goldsmith, and Cervantes on their old 
 altars, but I added new ones, and these I translated 
 from the contemporary literary world quite as often as 
 from the past. I am rather glad that among them was 
 the gentle and kindly Ik Marvel, whose Reveries of a 
 Bachelor and whose Dream Life the young people of 
 that day were reading with a tender rapture which 
 would not be altogether surprising, I dare say, to the 
 young people of this. The books have survived the span 
 
 64 
 
IK MAKVEL 
 
 of immortality fixed by our amusing copyright laws, 
 and seem now, when any pirate publisher may plunder 
 their author, to have a new life before them. Perhaps 
 this is ordered by Providence, that those who have no 
 right to them may profit by them, in that divine con- 
 tempt of such profit which Providence so often shows. 
 
 I cannot understand just how I came to know of the 
 books, but [ suppose it was through the contemporary 
 criticism which I was then beginning to read, wherever 
 I could find it, in the magazines and newspapers ; and 
 I could not say why I thought it would be very comme 
 il faut to like them. Probably the literary fine world, 
 which is always rubbing shoulders with the other fine 
 world, and bringing off a little of its powder and 
 perfume, was then dawming upon me, and I was wish- 
 ing to be of it, and to like the things that it liked ; I am 
 not so anxious to do it now. But if this is true, I found 
 the books better than their friends, and had many a 
 heartache from their pathos, many a genuine glow of 
 purpose from their high import, many a tender suffusion 
 from their sentiment. I dare say I should find their 
 pose now a little old-fashioned. I believe it was rather 
 full of sighs, and shrugs and starts, expressed in dashes, 
 and asterisks, and exclamations, but I am sure that the 
 feeling was the genuine and manly sort which is of all 
 times and always the latest wear. Whatever it w^as, it 
 sufficed to win my heart, and to identify me with what- 
 ever was most romantic and most pathetic in it. I read 
 Dream Life first — though the Reveries of a Bachelor 
 was written first, and I believe is esteemed the better 
 book — and Dream Life remains first in my affections. 
 I have now little notion what it was about, but I love 
 its memory. The book is associated especially in my 
 mind with one golden day of Indian summer, w^hen I 
 carried it into the woods with me, and abandoned my- 
 
MY LlTEllAKY TASSIONS 
 
 self to a welter of emotion over its page. I lay iindcr a 
 crimson maple, and I remember how the light struck 
 through it and flushed the print with the gules of the 
 foliage. My friend was away by this time on one of 
 his several absences in the Northwest, and I was quite 
 alone in the absurd and irrelevant melancholy witli 
 which I read myself and my circumstances into tho 
 book. I began to read them out again in due time, 
 clothed with the literary airs and graces that I admired 
 in it, and for a long time I imitated Ik Marvel in the 
 voluminous letters I wrote my friend in compliance 
 with his Shakespearean prayer : 
 
 " To Milan let me hear from thee by letters. 
 Of thy success in love, and what news else 
 Betideth here in absence of thy friend; 
 And I likewise will visit thee with mine." 
 
 Milan was then presently Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 
 and Verona was our little village ; but they both served 
 the soul of youth as well as the real places would have 
 done, and were as really Italian as anything else in the 
 situation was really this or that. Heaven knows what 
 gaudy sentimental parade we made in our borrowed 
 plumes, but if the travesty had kept itself to the written 
 word it would have been all well enough. My mis- 
 fortune was to carry it into print when I began to 
 write a story in the Ik Marvel manner, or rather to com- 
 pose it in type at the ease, for that was what 1 did ; and 
 it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel either, 
 for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and 
 helped myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House 
 in many places. It was all very well at the beginning, 
 but I had not reckoned with the future sufficiently to 
 have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I 
 went on I began to find myself more and more in doubt 
 
 66 
 
IK MAKVEL 
 
 about it. My material gave out ; incidents failed me ; 
 tlie characters wavered and threatened to perish on my 
 hands. To crown my misery there grew up an im- 
 patience with the story among its readers, and this found 
 its way to me one day when I overheard an old farmer 
 who came in for his paper say that he did not think that 
 story amounted to much. I did not think so either, but 
 it was deadly to have it put into words, and how I 
 escaped the mortal effect of the stroke I do not know. 
 Somehow I managed to bring the wretched thing to a 
 close, and to live it slowly into the past. Slowly it 
 seemed then, but I dare say it was fast enough; and 
 there is always this consolation to be whispered in the 
 ear of wounded vanity, that the world's memory is 
 equally bad for failure and success ; that if it will not 
 keep your triumphs in mind as you think it ought, 
 neither will it long dwell upon your defeats. But 
 that experience was really terrible. It was like some 
 dreadful dream one has of finding one's self in battle 
 without the courage needed to carry one creditably 
 through the action, or on the stage unprepared by 
 study of the part which one is to appear in. I have 
 never looked at that story since, so great was the shame 
 and anguish that I suffered from it, and yet I do not 
 think it was badly conceived, or attempted upon lines 
 that were mistaken. If it were not for what happened 
 in the past I might like some time to write a story on 
 the same lines in the future. 
 
XV 
 
 DICKENS 
 
 What I have said of Dickens reminds me that I 
 had been reading him at the same time that I had been 
 reading Ik Marvel ; but a curious thing about the read- 
 ing of my later boyhood is that the dates do not 
 sharply detach themselves one from another. This 
 may be so because ray reading was much more multi- 
 farious than it had been earlier, or because I was read- 
 ing always two or three authors at a time. I think 
 Macaulay a little antedated Dickens in my affections, 
 but when I came to the novels of that masterful artist 
 (as I must call him, with a thousand reservations as to 
 the times when he is not a master and not an artist), I 
 did not fail to fall under his spell. 
 
 This was in a season of great depression, when I 
 began to feel in broken health tlie effect of trying to 
 burn my candle at both ends. It seemed for a while 
 very simple and easy to come home in the middle of 
 the afternoon, when my task at the printing-office was 
 done, and sit down to my books in my little study, 
 which I did not finally leave until the family were in 
 bed ; but it was not well, and it was not enough that I 
 should like to do it. The most that can be said in de- 
 fence of such a thing is that with the strong native 
 impulse and the conditions it was inevitable. If I 
 was to do tlie thing T wanted to do I was to do it in 
 that wav, and T wanted to do that thing, whatever it was, 
 
 68 
 
DICKENS 
 
 more than I wanted to do anything clso, and even more 
 than I wanted to do nothing. I cannot make ont tliat 
 I was fond of study, or cared for tlie things I was trying 
 to do, except as a means to otlier things. As far as my 
 pleasure went, or my natural bent was concerned, I 
 would rather have been Avandering through the woods 
 with a gun on my shoulder, or lying under a tree, or 
 reading some book that cost me no sort of effort. But 
 there was much more than my pleasure involved ; there 
 was a hope to fulfil, an aim to achieve, and I could no 
 more have left oif trying for what I hoped and aimed 
 at than I could have left oif living, though I did not 
 know very distinctly what either was. As I look back 
 at the endeavor of those days much of it seems mere 
 purblind groping, wilful and wandering. I can see 
 that doing all by myself I was not truly a law to myself, 
 but only a sort of helpless force. 
 
 I studied Latin because I believed that I should 
 read the Latin authors, and I suppose I got as much of 
 the language as most school-boys of my age, but I never 
 read any Latin author but Cornelius ITepos. I studied 
 Greek, and I learned so much of it as to read a chapter 
 of the Testament, and an ode of Anacreon. Then I 
 left it, not because I did not mean to go farther, or in- 
 deed stop short of reading all Greek literature, but be- 
 cause that friend of mine and I talked it over and de- 
 cided that I could go on with Greek any time, but I had 
 better for the present study German, with the help of 
 a German who had come to the village. Apparently I 
 was carrying forward an attack on French at the same 
 time, for I distinctly recall my failure to enlist with me 
 an old gentleman who had once lived a long time in 
 France, and whom I hoped to get at least an accent 
 from. Perhaps because he knew he had no accent worth 
 speaking of, or perhaps because he did not want the 
 
 no 
 
MY LITERAEY PASSIONS 
 
 bother of imparting it, he never would keep any of the 
 engagements he made with me, and when we did meet 
 he so abounded in excuses and subterfuges that he finally 
 escaped me, and I was left to acquire an Italian accent 
 of French in Venice seven or eight years later. At the 
 same time I was reading Spanish, more or less, but 
 neither wisely nor too well. Having had so little help 
 in my studies, I had a stupid pride in refusing all, even 
 such as I might have availed myself of, without shame, 
 in books, and I would not read any Spanish author with 
 English notes. I would have him in an edition wholly 
 Spanish from beginning to end, and I w^ould fight my 
 way through him single-handed, with only such aid as 
 I must borrow from a lexicon. 
 
 I now call this stupid, but I have really no more 
 right to blame the boy who was once I than I have to 
 praise him, and I am certainly not going to do that. 
 In his day and place he did what he could in his own 
 way; he had no true perspective of life, but I do not 
 know that youth ever has that. Some strength came 
 to him finally from the mere struggle, undirected and 
 misdirected as it often was, and such mental fibre as 
 he had was toughened by the prolonged stress. It could 
 be said, of course, that the time apparently wasted in 
 these effectless studies could have been well spent in 
 deepening and widening a knowledge of English litera- 
 ture never yet too great, and I have often said this my- 
 self; but then, again, I am not sure that the studies 
 were altogether effectless. I have sometimes thought 
 that greater skill had come to my hand from them than 
 it would have had without, and I have trusted that in 
 making kno"\vn to me the sources of so much English, 
 my little Latin and less Greek have enabled me to use 
 my own speech with a subtler sense of it than I should 
 have had otherwise. 
 
 YO 
 
DICKENS 
 
 But I will by no means insist upon my conjecture. 
 Wliat is certain is that for the present my studies, with- 
 out method and without stint, began to tell upon my 
 health, and that my nerves gave way in all manner of 
 hypochondriacal fears. These finally resolved themselves 
 into one, incessant, inexorable, which I could escape only 
 through bodily fatigue, or through some absorbing in- 
 terest that took me out of myself altogether and filled 
 my morbid mind with the images of another's creation. 
 
 In this mood I first read Dickens, whom I had 
 known before in the reading I had listened to. But 
 now I devoured his books one after another as fast as 
 I could read them. I plunged from the heart of one 
 to another, so as to leave myself no chance for the 
 horrors that beset me. Some of them remain associ- 
 ated with the gloom and misery of that time, so that 
 when I take them up they bring back its dreadful 
 shadow. But I have since read them all more than 
 once, and I have had my time of thinking Dickens, 
 talking Dickens, and writing Dickens, as we all had 
 who lived in the days of the mighty magician. I 
 fancy the readers who have come to him since he 
 ceased to fill the world with his influence can have little 
 notion how great it was. In that time he colored 
 the parlance of the English-speaking race, and formed 
 upon himself every minor talent attempting fiction. 
 While his glamour lasted it was no more possible for 
 a yoimg novelist to escape writing Dickens than it was 
 for a young poet to escape writing Tennyson. I ad- 
 mired other authors more; I loved them more, but 
 when it came to a question of trying to do something 
 in fiction I was compelled, as by a law of nature, to 
 do it at least partially in his way. 
 
 All the while that he held me so fast by his potent 
 charm I was aware that it was a very rough magic 
 
 71 
 
MY LITEIIAKY T ASSIGN'S 
 
 now ami again, but I could not assert my sense of this 
 against him in matters of character and structure. To 
 these I gave in helplessly ; their very grotesqueness 
 was proof of their divine origin, and I bowed to the 
 crudest manifestations of his genius in these kinds as 
 if they were revelations not to be doubted without 
 sacrilege. But in certain small matters, as it were of 
 ritual, I suffered myself to think, and I remember 
 boldly speaking my mind about his style, which I 
 thought bad. 
 
 I spoke it even to the quaint character whom I bor- 
 rowed his books from, and Avho might almost have 
 come out of his books. He lived in Dickens in a 
 measure that I have never known another to do, and 
 my contumely must have brought him a pang that was 
 truly a personal grief. He forgave it, no doubt be- 
 cause I bowed in the Dickens worship without ques- 
 tion on all other points. He was then a man well on 
 towards iifty, and he had come to America early in life, 
 and had lived in our village many years, without cast- 
 ing one of his English prejudices, or ceasing to be of 
 a contrary opinion on every question, political, relig- 
 ious and social. He had no fixed belief, but he went 
 to the service of his church whenever it was held 
 among us, and he revered the Book of Common Prayer 
 while he disputed the authority of the Bible with all 
 comers. He had become a citizen, but he despised 
 democracy, and achieved a hardy consistency only by 
 voting with the pro-slavery party upon all measures 
 friendly to the institution which he considered the 
 scandal and reproach of the American name. From a 
 heart tender to all, he liked to say wanton, savage and 
 cynical things, but he bore no malice if you gainsaid 
 him. I know nothing of his origin, except the fact of 
 his being an Englishman, or what his first calling had 
 
 72 
 
DICKENS 
 
 been ; but he had evolved among us from a house- 
 painter to an organ-builder, and he had a passionate 
 love of music. ITc built his organs from the ground 
 up, and made every part of them with his own hands; 
 I believe they were very good, and at any rate the 
 churches in the country about took them from him as 
 fast as he could make them. He had one in his own 
 house, and it was fine to see him as he sat before it, 
 with his long, tremulous hands outstretched to the keys, 
 his noble head thrown back and his sensitive face lifted 
 in the rapture of his music. He was a rarely intelli- 
 gent creature, and an artist in every fibre ; and if you 
 did not quarrel with his manifold perversities, he was a 
 delightful companion. 
 
 After my friend went away I fell much to him for 
 society, and we took long, rambling walks together, or 
 sat on the stoop before his door, or lounged over the 
 books in the drug-store, and talked evermore of litera- 
 ture. He must have been nearly three times my age, 
 but that did not matter ; we met in the equality of the 
 ideal world where there is neither old nor young, any 
 more than there is rich or poor. He had read a great 
 deal, but of all he had read he liked Dickens best, and 
 was always coming back to him with affection, when- 
 ever the talk strayed. He could not make me out when 
 I criticised the style of Dickens; and when I praised 
 Thackeray's style to the disadvantage of Dickens's he 
 could only accuse me of a sort of aesthetic snobbishness 
 in my preference. Dickens, he said, was for the million, 
 and Thackeray was for the upper ten thousand. His 
 view amused me at the time, and yet I am not sure 
 that it was altogether mistaken. 
 
 There is certainly a property in Thackeray that 
 somehow flatters the reader into the belief that he is 
 better than other people. I do not mean to say that 
 
 73 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 this was why I thought him a finer writer than Dickens, 
 but I will own that it was probably one of the reasons 
 why I liked him better; if I appreciated him so fully 
 as I felt, I must be of a finer porcelain than the earthen 
 pots which were not aware of any particular difference 
 in the various liquors poured into them. In Dickens 
 the virtue of his social defect is that he never appeals 
 to the principle which sniffs, in his reader. The base 
 of his work is the whole breadth and depth of humanity 
 itself. It is helplessly elemental, but it is not the less 
 grandly so, and if it deals with the simpler manifesta- 
 tions of character, character affected by the interests 
 and passions rather than the tastes and preferences, it 
 certainly deals with the larger moods through them. 1 
 do not know that in the whole range of his work he once 
 suffers us to feel our superiority to a fellow-creature 
 through any social accident, or except for some moral 
 cause. This makes him very fit reading for a boy, 
 and I should say that a boy could get only good from 
 him. His view of the world and of society, though it 
 was very little philosophized, was instinctively sane 
 and reasonable, even when it was most impossible. 
 
 We are just beginning to discern that certain con- 
 ceptions of our relations to our fellow-men, once for- 
 mulated in generalities which met with a dramatic 
 acceptation from the world, and were then rejected by 
 it as mere rhetoric, have really a vital truth in them, 
 and that if they have ever seemed false it was because 
 of the false conditions in which we still live. Equal- 
 ity and fraternity, rhese are the ideals which once 
 moved the world, and then fell into despite and mock- 
 ery, as unrealities; but now they assert themselves in 
 our hearts once more. 
 
 Blindly, unwittingly, erringly as Dickens often 
 urged them, these ideals mark the whole tendency of 
 
 74 
 
DICKENS 
 
 his fiction, and they are what endear him to the heart, 
 and will keep him dear to it long after many a cun- 
 ningcr artificer in letters has passed into forgetfulness. 
 I do not pretend that I perceived the full scope of his 
 books, but I was aware of it in the finer sense which 
 is not consciousness. While I read him, I was in a 
 world where the right came out best, as I believe it 
 will yet do in this world, and where merit was crowned 
 with the success which I believe will yet attend it in 
 our daily life, untrammelled by social convention or 
 economic circumstance. In that world of his, in the 
 ideal world, to which the real world must finally con- 
 form itself, I dwelt among the shows of things, but 
 under a Providence that governed all things to a good 
 end, and where neither wealth nor birth could avail 
 against virtue or right. Of course it was in a way all 
 crude enough, and was already contradicted by expe- 
 rience in the small sphere of my own being ; but never- 
 theless it was true with that truth which is at the 
 bottom of things, and I was happy in it. I could not 
 fail to love the mind which conceived it, and my wor- 
 ship of Dickens was more grateful than that I had yet 
 given any writer. I did not establish with him that 
 one-sided understanding which I had with Cervantes 
 and Shakespeare; with a contemporary that was not 
 possible, and as an American I was deeply hurt at the 
 things he had said against us, and the more hurt be- 
 cause I felt that they were often so just. But I was for 
 the time entirely his, and I could not have wished to 
 write like any one else. 
 
 I do. not pretend that the spell I was under was 
 wholly of a moral or social texture. For the most part 
 I was charmed with him because he was a delightful 
 story-teller; because he could thrill me, and make me 
 hot and cold ; because he could make me laugh and cry, 
 
 75 
 
MY LITEUAKY PASSIONS 
 
 and iritop my pulse and breath at will. There seemed an 
 inexhaustible source of humor and pathos in his work, 
 which I now find choked and dry ; I cannot laugh any 
 more at Pickwick or Sam Weller, or weep for little Xell 
 or Paul Dombey ; their jokes, their griefs, seemed to me 
 to be turned on, and to have a mechanical action. But 
 beneath all is still the strong drift of a genuine emotion, 
 a sympath}', deep and sincere, with the poor, the lowly, 
 the unfortunate. In all that vast range of fiction, there 
 is nothing that tells for the strong, because they are 
 strong, against the weak, nothing that tells for the 
 haughty against the humble, nothing that tells for 
 wealth against poverty. The effect of Dickens is purely 
 democratic, and however contemptible he found our 
 pseudo-equality, he was more truly democratic than any 
 American who had yet written fiction. I suppose it was 
 our instinctive perception in the region of his instinctive 
 expression, that made him so dear to us, and wounded 
 our silly vanity so keenly through our love when he told 
 us the truth about our horrible sham of a slave-based 
 freedom. But at any rate the democracy is there in 
 his work more than he knew perhaps, or would ever 
 have known, or ever recognized by his own life. In 
 fact, when one comes to read the story of his life, and 
 to know that he w^as really and lastingly ashamed of 
 having once put up shoe-blacking as a boy, and was 
 unable to forgive his mother for suffering him to be 
 so degraded, one perceives that he too w^as the slave 
 of conventions and the victim of conditions which it 
 is the liighest function of his fiction to help destroy. 
 
 I imagine that my early likes and dislikes in Dickens 
 were not very discriminating. I liked David Copper- 
 field, and Barnahy Rvdgc, and Bleak House, and I 
 still like them; but I do not think I liked them more 
 than Dombey cf- Son, and Nicholas Nicldehy, and the 
 
 70 
 
DICKENS 
 
 Pickwicl' Papers, which I cannot read now with any 
 sort of patience, not to speak of pleasure, I liked 
 Martin Chuzzleivit, too, and the other day I read a 
 great part of it again, and found it roughly true in the 
 passages that referred to America, though it was sur- 
 charged in the serious moods, and caricatured in the 
 comic. The English are always inadequate observers; 
 they seem too full of themselves to have eyes and ears 
 for any alien people ; but as far as an Englishman could, 
 Dickens had caught the look of our life in certain 
 aspects. His report of it was clumsy and farcical ; but 
 in a large, loose way it was like enough ; at least he had 
 caught the note of our self-satisfied, intolerant, and 
 hypocritical provinciality, and this was not altogether 
 lost in his mocking horse-play. 
 
 I cannot make out that I was any the less fond of 
 Dickens because of it. I believe I was rather more 
 willing to accept it as a faithful portraiture then than 
 I should be now; and I certainly never made any 
 question of it with my friend the organ-builder. Mar- 
 tin Chuzzleivit was a favorite book with him, and so 
 was the Old Curiosity Shop. Xo doubt a fancied 
 affinity with Tom Pinch through their common love of 
 music made him like that most sentimental and im- 
 probable personage, whom he would have disowned 
 and laughed to scorn if he had met him in life ; but it 
 was a purely altruistic sympathy that he felt with 
 Little ISTell and her grandfather, lie was fond of 
 reading the pathetic passages from both books, and I 
 can still hear his rich, vibrant voice as it lingered in 
 tremulous emotion on the periods he loved. lie would 
 catch the volume up anwhere, any time, and begin to 
 read, at the book-store, or the harness-shop, or the 
 law-office, it did not matter in the wide leisure of a 
 country village, in those days before the war, when 
 6 77" 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 people had all the time there was; and he was sure of 
 his audience as long as he chose to read. One Christ- 
 mas eve, in answer to a general wish, he read the 
 Christmas Carol in the Court-house, and people came 
 from all about to hear him. 
 
 He was an invalid and he died long since, ending a 
 life of suffering in the saddest way. Several years 
 before his death money fell to his family, and he went 
 with them to an Eastern city, where he tried in vain 
 to make himself at home. He never ceased to pine 
 for the village he had left, with its old companion- 
 ships, its easy usages, its familiar faces ; and he escaped 
 to it again and again, till at last every tie was severed, 
 and he could come back no more. He was never recon- 
 ciled to the change, and in a manner he did really die 
 of the homesickness which deepened an hereditary taint, 
 and enfeebled him to the disorder that carried him off. 
 My memories of Dickens remain mingled with my 
 memories of this quaint and most original genius, and 
 though I knew Dickens long before I knew his lover, I 
 can scarcely think of one without thinking of the other. 
 
XYl 
 
 WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER 
 
 Certain other books I associate with another pathetic 
 nature, of whom the organ-builder and I were both fond. 
 This was the young poet who looked after the book half 
 of the village drug and book store, and who wrote 
 poetry in such leisure as he found from his duties, and 
 with such strength as he found in the disease preying 
 upon him. lie must have been far gone in consump- 
 tion when I first knew him, for I have no recollection 
 of a time when his voice was not faint and husky, his 
 sweet smile wan, and his blue eyes dull with the disease 
 that wasted him away, 
 
 " Like wax in the fire. 
 Like snow in the sun." 
 
 People spoke of him as once strong and vigorous, but 
 I recall him fragile and pale, gentle, patient, knowing 
 his inexorable doom, and not hoping or seeking to escape 
 it. As the end drew near he left his employment and 
 went home to the farm, some twenty miles away, where 
 I drove out to see him once through the deep snow of a 
 winter which was to be his last. My heart was heavy 
 all the time, but he tried to make the visit pass cheer- 
 fully with our wonted talk about books. Only at part- 
 ing, when he took my hand in his thin, cold clasp, he 
 said, " I suppose my disease is progressing,'' with the 
 patience he always showed. 
 
 79 
 
T^fY LITEFARY PASSIONS 
 
 I (lid not see lilm again, and I am not sure now 
 lliat his gift wan very distinct or very great. It was 
 slight and graceful rather, I fancy, and if he had lived 
 it might not have sufficed to make him widely known, 
 but he had a real and a very delicate sense of beauty 
 in literature, and I believe it was through sympathy 
 with his preferences that I came into appreciation of 
 several authors whom I had not known, or had not 
 cared for before. There could not have been many 
 shelves of books in that store, and I came to be pretty 
 well acquainted with them all before I began to buy 
 them. For the most part, I do not think it occurred 
 to me that they were there to be sold ; for this pale 
 poet seemed indifferent to the commercial property in 
 them, and only to wish me to like them. 
 
 I am not sure, but I think it was through some 
 volume which I found in his charge that I first came* to 
 know of De Quincey; he was fond of Dr. Holmes's 
 poetry; he loved Whittier and Longfellow, each repre- 
 sented in his slender stock by some distinctive work. 
 There were several stray volumes of Thackeray's minor 
 w^ritings, and I still have the YeUov plush Papers in 
 the smooth red cloth (now pretty well tattered) of 
 Appleton's Popular Library, which I bought there. 
 But most of the books were in the famous old brown 
 cloth of Ticknor & Fields, which was a warrant of ex- 
 cellence in the literature it covered. Besides these 
 there were standard volumes of poetry, published by 
 Phillips & Sampson, from worn-out plates; for a l)irth- 
 day present my mother got me Wordsworth in this 
 shape, and I am glad to think that I once read the 
 " Excursion " in it, for I do not think I could do so now, 
 and I have a feeling that it is very right and fit to have 
 read the " Excursion." To be honest, it was very hard 
 reading even then, and I cannot truthfully pretend 
 
 80 
 
WOKDSWOKTII, LOWELL, CHAUCER 
 
 that I liave over liked Wordsworth except in parts, 
 though for the matter of that, I do not suppose that any 
 one ever did. I tried hard enough to like everything in 
 him, for I had already learned enough to know that I 
 ought to like him, and that if I did not, it was a proof 
 of intellectual and moral inferiority in me. My early 
 idol. Pope, had already been tumbled into the dust by 
 Lowell, whose lectures on English Poetry had lately 
 been given in Boston, and had met with my rapturous 
 acceptance in such newspaper report as I liad of them. 
 So, my preoccupations were all in favor of the Lake 
 School, and it was both in my will and my conscience 
 to like Wordsworth. If I did not do so it was not my 
 fault, and the fault remains very much what it first was. 
 
 I feel and understand him more deeply than I did 
 then, but I do not think that I then failed of the 
 meaning of much that I read in him, and I am sure 
 that my senses were quick to all the beauty in him. 
 After suffering once through the " Excursion " I did 
 not afflict myself with it again, but there were other 
 poems of his which I read over and over, as I fancy 
 it is the habit of every lover of poetry to do with the 
 pieces he is fond of. Still, I do not make out that 
 Wordsworth was ever a passion of mine; on the other 
 hand, neither was Byron. Him, too, I liked in passages 
 aud in certain poems which I knew before I read 
 Wordsworth at all ; I read him throughout, but I did 
 not try to imitate him, and I did not try to imitate 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Those lectures of Lowell's had a great influence 
 with me, and I tried to like whatever they bade me 
 like, after a fashion common to young people when 
 they begin to read criticisms ; their aesthetic pride is 
 touched ; they wish to realize that they too can feel the 
 fine things the critic admires. From this motive they 
 
 81 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 do a great deal of factitious liking; but after all the 
 affections will not be bidden, and the critic can only 
 avail to give a point of view, to enlighten a perspec- 
 tive. When I read Lowell's praises of him, I had 
 all the will in the world to read Spencer, and I really 
 meant to do so, but I have not done so to this day, 
 and as often as I have tried I have found it impossible. 
 It was not so with Chaucer, whom I loved from the 
 first word of liis which I found quoted in those lectures, 
 and in Cliambers's Encyclopaedia of English Literature, 
 which I had borrowed of my friend the organ-builder. 
 
 In fact, I may fairly class Chaucer among my pas- 
 sions, for I read him with that sort of personal attach- 
 ment I had for Cervantes, who resembled him in a 
 certain sweet and cheery humanity. But I do not 
 allege this as the reason, for I had the same feeling 
 for Pope, who was not like either of them. Kissing 
 goes by favor, in literature as in life, and one cannot 
 quite account for one's passions in either ; what is cer- 
 tain is, I liked Chaucer and I did not like Spencer; 
 possibly there was an affinity between reader and 
 poet, but if there was I should be at a loss to name 
 it, unless it was the liking for reality, and the sense of 
 mother earth in human life. By the time I had read 
 all of Chaucer that I could find in the various collec- 
 tions and criticisms, my father had been made a clerk 
 in the legislature, and on one of his visits home he 
 brought me the poet's works from the State Library, 
 and I set about reading them with a glossary. It was 
 not easy, but it brought strength with it, and lifted 
 my heart with a sense of noble companionship. 
 
 I will not pretend that I was insensible to the gross- 
 ness of the poet's time, wliicli I found often enough 
 in the poet's verse, as well as the goodness of his na- 
 ture, and my father seems to have felt a certain mis- 
 
 82 
 
WOKDSWORTII, LOWELL, CHAUCER 
 
 giving about it. He repeated to me the librarian's 
 question as to whether he thought he ought to put an 
 unexpurgated edition in the hands of a boy, and his 
 own answer that he did not believe it would hurt me. 
 It was a kind of appeal to me to make the event justify 
 him, and I suppose he had not given me the book with- 
 out due reflection. Probably he reasoned that with my 
 greed for all manner of literature the bad would be- 
 come known to me along with the good at any rate, and 
 I had better know that he knew it. 
 
 The streams of filth flow down through the ages in 
 literature, which sometimes seems little better than an 
 open sewer, and, as I have said, I do not see why the 
 time should not come when the noxious and noisome 
 channels should be stopped ; but the base of the mind 
 is bestial, and so far the beast in us has insisted upon 
 having his full say. The worst of lewd literature is 
 that it seems to give a sanction to lewdness in the 
 life, and that inexperience takes this effect for reality: 
 that is the danger and the harm, and I think the fact 
 ought not to be blinked. Compared with the meaner 
 poets the greater are the cleaner, and Chaucer w^as 
 probably safer than any other English poet of his time, 
 but I am not going to pretend that there are not things 
 in Chaucer which a boy w^ould be the better for not 
 reading; and so far as these words of mine shall be 
 taken for counsel, I am not willing that they should 
 unqualifiedly praise him. The matter is by no means 
 simple ; it is not easy to conceive of a means of puri- 
 fying the literature of the past without weakening it, 
 and even falsifying it, but it is best to own that it is 
 in all respects just what it is, and not to feign it other- 
 wise. I am not ready to say that the harm from it is 
 positive, but you do get smeared with it, and the filthy 
 thought lives with the filtliy rhyme in the ear, even 
 
 83 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIOXS 
 
 wlioii it docs not cornipt the heart or make it seem a 
 light thing for the reader's tongue and pen to sin in 
 kind. 
 
 1 loved my Chaucer too well, I hope, not to get some 
 good from the best in him ; and my reading of criticism 
 had taught me how and where to look for the best, and 
 to know it when I had found it. Of course I began to 
 copy him. That is, I did not attempt anything like 
 his tales in kind ; they must have seemed too hopelessly 
 far away in taste and time, but T studied his verse, and 
 imitated a stanza which I found in some of his things 
 and had not found elsewhere ; I rejoiced in the fresh- 
 ness and sweetness of his diction, and though I felt that 
 his structure was obsolete, there was in his wording 
 something homelier and heartier than the imported ana- 
 logues that had taken the place of the phrases he used. 
 
 I began to employ in my own work the archaic 
 words that I fancied most, which was futile and foolish 
 enough, and I formed a preference for the simpler 
 Anglo-Saxon woof of our speech, which was not so bad. 
 Of course, being left so much as I was to my own whim 
 in such things, I could not keep a just mean ; I had an 
 aversion for the Latin derivatives which was nothing 
 short of a craze. Some half-bred critic whom I had read 
 made me believe that English could be written without 
 them, and had better be written so, and I did not escape 
 from this lamentable error until I had produced with 
 weariness and vexation of spirit several pieces of prose 
 wholly composed of monosyllables. I suspect now that T 
 did not always stop to consider whether my short words 
 were not as Latin by race as any of the long words I re- 
 jected, and that I only made sure they were short. 
 
 The frivolous ingenuity which wasted itself in this 
 exercise happily could not hold out long, and in verse 
 it was pretty well helpless from the beginning. Yet 
 
 84 
 
WORDSWORTH. LOWELL, CnAUCER 
 
 I will not altogether blame it, for it made me know, 
 as nothing else could, the resources of our tongue in 
 that sort; and in the revolt from the slavish bondage 
 I took upon myself I did not go so far as to plunge into 
 any very wild polysyllabic excesses. I still like the 
 little word if it says the thing E want to say as well as 
 the big one, but I honor above all the word that says the 
 thing. At the same time I confess that I have a preju- 
 dice against certain words that 1 cannot overcome; the 
 sight of some offends me, the sound of others, and rather 
 than use one of those detested vocables, even when I per- 
 ceive that it would convey mj' exact meaning, I would 
 cast about long for some other. I think this is a foible, 
 and a disadvantage, but I do not deny it. 
 
 An author who had much to do with preparing me 
 for the quixotic folly in point was that Thomas Babing- 
 ton Macaulay, who taught simplicity of diction in 
 phrases of as " learned length and thundering sound," 
 as any he would have had me shun, and who deplored 
 the Latinistic English of Johnson in terms emulous of 
 the great doctor's orotundity and j^onderosity. I wonder 
 now that I did not see how my physician avoided his 
 medicine, but I did not, and I went on to spend myself 
 in an endeavor as vain and senseless as any that pedan- 
 try has conceived. It was none the less absurd because 
 I believed in it so devoutly, and sacrificed myself to it 
 with such infinite pains and labor. But this was long 
 after I read Macaulay, who was one of my grand 
 passions before Dickens or Chaucer. 
 
XVII 
 
 MACAULAY 
 
 One of the many characters of the village was the 
 machinist who had his shop under our printing-office 
 when we first brought our newspaper to the place, and 
 who was just then a machinist because he was tired of 
 being many other things, and had not yet made up his 
 mind what he should be next. He could have been 
 whatever he turned his agile intellect and his cunning 
 hand to ; he had been a schoolmaster and a watch-maker, 
 and I believe an amateur doctor and irregular lawyer ; 
 he talked and wrote brilliantly, and he was one of the 
 group that nightly disposed of every manner of theo- 
 retical and practical question at the drug-store; it was 
 quite indifferent to him which side he took; what 
 he enjoyed was the mental exercise. He was in con- 
 sumption, as so many were in that region, and he carbon- 
 ized against it, as he said; he took his carbon in the 
 liquid form, and the last time I saw him the carbon had 
 finally prevailed over the consumption, but it had itself 
 become a seated vice; that was many years since, and 
 it is many years since he died. 
 
 He must have been kno-\vn to me earlier, but I re- 
 member him first as he swam vividly into my ken, with 
 a volume of Macaulay's essays in his hand, one day. 
 Less figuratively speaking, he came up into the printing- 
 office to expose from the book the nefarious plagiarism 
 of an editor in a neighboring city, who had adapted 
 
 8G ' 
 
MACAULAY 
 
 with the change of names and a word or two here and 
 there, whole passages from the essay on Barere, to the 
 denimciation of a brother editor. It Avas a very simple- 
 hearted fraud, and it w^as all done with an innocent 
 trust in the popular ignorance wdiich now seems to me 
 a little pathetic; but it was certainly very barefaced, 
 and merited the public punishment which the discoverer 
 inflicted by means of wdiat journalists call the deadly 
 parallel column. The effect ought logically to have 
 been ruinous for the plagiarist, but it was really noth- 
 ing of the kind. He simply ignored the exposure, 
 and the comments of the other city papers, and 
 in the process of time he easily lived down the mem- 
 ory of it and went on to greater usefulness in his 
 profession. 
 
 But for the moment it appeared to me a tremendous 
 crisis, and I listened as the minister of justice read his 
 communication, with a thrill which lost itself in the 
 interest I suddenly felt in the plundered author. Those 
 facile and brilliant phrases and ideas struck me as the 
 finest things I had yet known in literature, and I bor- 
 row^ed the book and read it through. Then I borrowed 
 another volume of JMacaulay's essays, and another and 
 another, till I had read them every one. It was like a 
 long debauch, from which I emerged with regret that it 
 should ever end. 
 
 I tried other essayists, other critics, whom the ma- 
 chinist had in his library, but it was useless; neither 
 Sidney Smith nor Thomas Carlyle could console me; 
 I sighed for more IMacaulay and evermore Macaulay. 
 I read his History of England, and I could measurably 
 console myself with that, but only measurably; and I 
 could not go back to the essays and read them again, 
 for it seemed to me I had absorbed them so thoroughly 
 that I had left nothing unenjoved in them. I used to 
 
 87' " 
 
MY LITEKAKY PASSIONS 
 
 talk with the machinist about them, and with the organ- 
 builder, and with my friend the printer, but no one 
 seemed to feel the intense fascination in them that I 
 did, and that I should now be quite unable to account 
 for. 
 
 Once more I had an author for whom I could feel 
 a personal devotion, whom I could dream of and dote 
 upon, and whom I could offer my intimacy in many 
 an impassioned revery. I do not think T. B. Macaulay 
 would really have liked it; I dare say he would not 
 have valued the friendship of the sort of a youth I was, 
 but in the conditions he was helpless, and I poured out 
 my love upon him without a rebuff. Of course I re- 
 formed my prose style, which had been carefully mo- 
 delled upon that of Goldsmith and Irving, and began to 
 write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quick sen- 
 tences, and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon 
 words, which he prescribed, but did not practise. As 
 for his notions of literature, I simply accepted them 
 with the feeling that any question of them would have 
 been little better than blasphemy. 
 
 For a long time he spoiled my taste for any other 
 criticism; he made it seem pale, and poor, and weak; 
 and he blunted my sense to subtler excellences than I 
 found in him. I think this was a pity, but it was a 
 thing not to be helped, like a great many things that 
 happen to our hurt in life ; it was simply inevitable. 
 How or when my frenzy for him began to abate I 
 cannot say, but it certainly waned, and it must have 
 waned rapidly, for after no great while I found my- 
 self feeling the charm of quite different minds, as fully 
 as if his had never enslaved me. I cannot regret that 
 I enjoyed him so keenly as T did ; it was in a way a 
 generous delight, and though he swayed me helplessly 
 whatever way he thought, I do not think yet that he 
 
 88 
 
MACAULAY 
 
 swayed me in any very wrong way. lie was a briglit 
 and clear intelligence, and if his light did not go far, 
 it is to be said of him that his worst fanlt was only to 
 have stopped short of the finest truth in art, in morals, 
 in politics. 
 
XVIII 
 
 CRITICS AND REVIEWS 
 
 What remained to me from my love of Macaiilay 
 was a love of criticism, and I read almost as much in 
 criticism as I read in poetry and history and fiction. 
 It was of an eccentric doctor, another of the village 
 characters, that I got the works of Edgar A. Poe ; I do 
 not know just how, but it must have been in some ex- 
 change of books ; he preferred metaphysics. At any rate 
 I fell greedily upon them, and I read with no less zest 
 than his poems the bitter, and cruel, and narrow-minded 
 criticisms which mainly filled one of the volumes. As 
 usual, I accepted them implicitly, and it was not till 
 long afterwards that I understood how worthless they 
 were. 
 
 I think that hardly less immoral than the lubricity of 
 literature, and its celebration of the monkey and the 
 goat in us, is the spectacle such criticism affords of the 
 tigerish play of satire. It is monstrous that for no 
 offence but the wish to produce something beautiful, and 
 the mistake of his powers in that direction, a writer 
 should become the prey of some ferocious wit, and that 
 his tormentor should achieve credit by his lightness and 
 ease in rending his prey; it is shocking to think how 
 alluring and depraving the fact is to the young reader 
 emulous of such credit, and eager to achieve it. Be- 
 cause I admired these barbarities of Poe's, I wished to 
 imitate them, to spit some hapless victim on my own 
 
 90 
 
CRITICS AND EEVIEWS 
 
 spear, to make him suffer and to make the reader laugh. 
 This is as far as possible from the criticism that en- 
 lightens and ennobles, but it is still the ideal of most 
 critics, deny it as they will ; and because it is the ideal 
 of most critics criticism still remains behind all the 
 other literary arts. 
 
 I am glad to remember that at the same time I 
 exulted in these ferocities I had mind enough and heart 
 enough to find pleasure in the truer and finer work, the 
 humaner work of other ^vl•iters, like Ilazlitt, and Leigh 
 Hunt, and Lamb, which became known to me at a date 
 I cannot exactly fix. I believe it was Ilazlitt whom I 
 read first, and he helped me to clarify and formulate my 
 admiration of Shakespeare as no one else had yet done ; 
 Lamb helped me too, and with all the dramatists, and 
 on every hand I was reaching out for light that should 
 enable me to place in literary history the authors I knew 
 and loved. 
 
 I fancy it was well for me at this period to have got 
 at the four great English reviews, the Edinburgh, the 
 Westminster, the London Quarterly , and the North 
 British, which I read regularly, as well as Blackwood's 
 Magazine. We got them in the American editions in 
 payment for printing the publisher's prospectus, and 
 their arrival was an excitement, a joy, and a satisfaction 
 with me, which I could not now describe without having 
 to accuse myself of exaggeration. The love of litera- 
 ture, and the hope of doing something in it, had become 
 my life to the exclusion of all other interests, or it was 
 at least the great reality, and all other things were as 
 shadows. I was living in a time of high political tumult, 
 and I certainly cared very much for the question of 
 slavery which was then filling the minds of men ; I felt 
 deeply the shame and wrong of our Fugitive Slave Law ; 
 I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where the great 
 
 91 
 
MY LITEKAKY TAiSSlONS 
 
 struggle between the two great principles in our na- 
 tionality was beginning in bloodshed ; but I cannot pre- 
 tend that any of these things were more than ripples on 
 the surface of n)y intense and profound interest in 
 literature. If I was not to live by it, I was somehow 
 to live for it. 
 
 If I thought of taking up some other calling it was 
 as a means only; literature was always the end I had 
 in view, immediately or finally. I did not see how it 
 was to yield me a living, for I knew that almost all the 
 literary men in the country had other professions ; they 
 were editors, lawyers, or had public or private employ- 
 ments ; or they were men of wealth ; there was then not 
 one who earned his bread solely by his pen in fic- 
 tion, or drama, or history, or poetry, or criticism, in a 
 day when people wanted very much less butter on their 
 bread than they do now. But I kept blindly at my 
 studies, and yet not altogether blindly, for, as I have 
 said, the reading I did had more tendency than before, 
 and I was beginning to see authors in their proj^ortion 
 to one another, and to the "body of literature. 
 
 The English reviews were of great use to me in this ; 
 I made a rule of reading each one of them quite 
 through. To be sure I often broke this rule, as people 
 are apt to do with rules of the kind ; it was not possible 
 for a boy to wade through heavy articles relating to Eng- 
 lish politics and economic?, but I do not think I left 
 any paper upon a literary topic unread, and I did read 
 enough politics, especially in Blaclcwood's, to be of Tory 
 opinions; they were very fit opinions for a boy, and 
 they did not exact of me any change in regard to the 
 slavery question. 
 
XIX 
 
 A NON-LITERARY EPISODE 
 
 I SUPPOSE I might almost class my devotion to Eng- 
 lish reviews among my literary passions, but it was of 
 very short lease, not beyond a year or two at the most. 
 In the midst of it I made my first and only essay aside 
 from the lines of literature, or rather wholly apart 
 from it. After some talk with my father it was decided, 
 mainly by myself, I suspect, that I should leave the 
 printing-office and study law ; and it was arranged with 
 the United States Senator who lived in our village, and 
 who was at home from Washington for the siunmer, that 
 I was to come into his ofl&ce. The Senator was by no 
 means to undertake my instruction himself ; his nephew, 
 who had just begun to read law, was to be my fellow- 
 student, and we were to keep each other up to the work, 
 and to recite to each other, until we thought we had 
 enough law to go before a board of attorneys and test 
 our fitness for admission to the bar. 
 
 This was the custom in that day and place, as I sup- 
 pose it is still in most parts of the country. We were 
 to be fitted for practice in the courts, not only by our 
 reading, but by a season of pettifogging before justices 
 of the peace, which I looked forward to with no small 
 shrinking of my shy spirit ; but what really troubled 
 me most, and was always the grain of sand between my 
 teeth, was Blackstone's confession of his o^^^l original 
 preference for literature, and his perception that the 
 7 93 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 law was " a jealous mistress," who would suffer no 
 rival in his affections. I agreed with him that I could 
 not go through life with a divided interest ; I must give 
 up literature or I must give up law. I not only con- 
 sented to this logically, but I realized it in my attempt 
 to carry on the reading I had loved, and to keep at the 
 efforts I was always making to write something in verse 
 or prose, at night, after studying law all day. The 
 strain was great enough when I had merely the work in 
 the printing-office; but now I came home from my 
 Blackstone mentally fagged, and I could not take up the 
 authors whom at the bottom of my heart I loved so much 
 better. I tried it a month, but almost from the fatal day 
 when I found that confession of Blackst one's, my whole 
 being turned from the " jealous mistress " to the high- 
 minded muses. 
 
 I had not only to go back to literature, but I had 
 also to go back to the printing-office. I did not regret 
 it, but I had made my change of front in the public 
 eye, and I felt that it put me at a certain disadvantage 
 with my fellow-citizens; as for the Senator, whose 
 office I had forsaken, I met him now and then in the 
 street, without trying to detain him, and once when 
 he came to the printing-office for his paper we en- 
 countered at a point where we could not help speak- 
 ing. He looked me over in my general effect of base 
 mechanical, and asked me if I had given up the law; 
 I had only to answer him I had, and our conference 
 ended. 
 
 It was a terrible moment for me, because I knew 
 that in his opinion I had chosen a path in life, which 
 if it did not lead to the Poor House was at least no 
 way to the Wliite House. I suppose now that he 
 thought I had merely gone back to my trade, and so 
 for the time I had; but I have no reason to suppose 
 
 94 
 
A NON-LITERARY EPISODE 
 
 that he judged my case narrow-mindedly, and I ought 
 to have had the courage to have the affair out with 
 him, and tell him just why I had left the law; we had 
 sometimes talked the English reviews over, for he read 
 them as well as I, and it ought not to have been im- 
 possible for me to be frank with him; but as yet I 
 could not trust any one with my secret hope of some 
 day living for literature, although I had already lived 
 for nothing else. I preferred the disadvantage which 
 I must be at in his eyes, and in the eyes of most of 
 my fellow-citizens ; I believe I had the applause of the 
 organ-builder, who thought the law no calling for me. 
 
 In that village there was a social equality which, if 
 not absolute, was as nearly so as can ever be in a com- 
 petitive civilization; and I could have suffered no 
 slight in the general esteem for giving up a profession 
 and going back to a trade; if I was despised at all it 
 was because I had thrown away the chance of material 
 advancement; I dare say some people thought I was a 
 fool to do that. 'No one, indeed, could have imagined 
 the rapture it was to do it, or what a load rolled from 
 my shoulders when I dropped the law from them. 
 Perhaps Sinbad or Christian could have conceived of 
 my ecstatic relief; yet so far as the popular vision 
 reached I was not returning to literature, but to the 
 printing business, and I myself felt the difference. 
 My reading had given me criterions different from 
 those of the simple life of our village, and I did not 
 flatter myself that my calling would have been thought 
 one of great social dignity in the world where I hoped 
 some day to make my living. My convictions were 
 all democratic, but at heart I am afraid I was a snob, 
 and was unworthy of the honest work which I ought 
 to have felt it an honor to do; this, whatever we 
 falsely pretend to the contrary, is the frame of every 
 
 .95 
 
MY TJTEEAEY PASSIONS 
 
 one who aspires bojorid tlic work of liis hands. T do 
 not know how it had become mine, except through my 
 reading, and I tliiiik it was through the devotion I 
 then had for a certain author that I came to a knowledgo 
 not of good and evil so much as of common and super- 
 fine. 
 
XX 
 
 THACKERAY 
 
 It was of the organ-builder that I had Thackeray's 
 books first. He knew their literary quality, and their 
 rank in the literary world ; but I believe he was sur- 
 prised at the passion I instantly conceived for them. 
 He could not understand it; he deplored it almost as 
 a moral defect in me ; though he honored it as a proof 
 of my critical taste. In a certain measure he was right. 
 
 What flatters the worldly pride in a young man is 
 what fascinates him with Thackeray. With his air of 
 looking down on the highest, and confidentially inviting 
 you to be of his company in the seat of the scorner he 
 is irresistible; his very confession that he is a snob, 
 too, is balm and solace to the reader who secretly ad- 
 mires the splendors he affects to despise. His senti- 
 mentality is also dear to the heart of youth, and the boy 
 who is dazzled by his satire is melted by his easy pathos. 
 Then, if the boy has read a good many other books, ho 
 is taken with that abundance of literary turn and allu- 
 sion in Thackeray; there is hardly a sentence but re- 
 minds him that he is in the society of a great literary 
 swell, who has read everything, and can mock or bur- 
 lesque life right and left from the literature always at 
 his command. At the same time he feels his mastery, 
 and is abjectly grateful to him in his own simple love 
 of the good for his patronage of the unassuming virtues. 
 It is so pleasing to one's vanity, and so safe, to be of the 
 
 97' 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 master's side when he assails those vices and foibles 
 which are inherent in the system of things, and which 
 one can contemn with vast applause so long as one does 
 not attempt to imdo the conditions thej spring from. 
 
 I exulted to have Thackeray attack the aristocrats, 
 and expose their wicked pride and meanness, and I 
 never noticed that he did not propose to do away with 
 aristocracy, which is and must always be just what it 
 has been, and which cannot be changed while it exists 
 at all. He appeared to me one of the noblest crea- 
 tures that ever was when he derided the shams of so- 
 ciety; and I was far from seeing that society, as we 
 have it, was necessarily a sham ; when he made a mock 
 of snobbishness I did not know but snobbishness was 
 something that might be reached and cured by ridicule. 
 ]^ow I know that so long as we have social inequality 
 we shall have snobs ; we shall have men who bully and 
 truckle, and women w^ho snub and crawl. I know that 
 it is futile to spurn them, or lash them for trying to 
 get on in the world, and that the world is what it must 
 be from the selfish motives which underlie our economic 
 life. But I did not know these things then, nor for 
 long afterwards, and so I gave my heart to Thackeray, 
 who seemed to promise me in his contempt of the world 
 a refuge from the shame I felt for my o"\vn want of 
 figure in it. He had the effect of taking me into the 
 great world, and making me a party to his splendid in- 
 difference to titles, and even to royalties; and I could 
 not see that sham for sham he was imwittingly the 
 greatest sham of all. 
 
 I think it w'as Pendcnnis I began with, and I lived 
 in the book to the very last line of it, and made its alien 
 circumstance mine to the smallest detail. I am still 
 not sure but it is the author's greatest book, and I 
 speak from a thorough acquaintance wdth every line 
 
 98 
 
THACKERAY 
 
 he has written, except the Virginians, which I have 
 never been able to read quite through; most of his 
 work I have read twice, and some of it twenty times. 
 
 After reading Pendennis I went to Vanity Fair, 
 which I now think the poorest of Thackeray's novels 
 — crude, heavy-handed, caricatured. About the same 
 time I revelled in the romanticism of Henry Esmond, 
 with its pseudo-eighteenth-century sentiment, and its 
 appeals to an overwrought ideal of gentlemanhood and 
 honor. It was long before I was duly revolted by 
 Esmond's transfer of his passion from the daughter 
 to the mother whom he is successively enamoured of. 
 I believe this unpleasant and preposterous affair is 
 thought one of the fine things in the story; I do not 
 mind owning that I thought it so myself when I was 
 seventeen; and if I could have found a Beatrix to be 
 in love with, and a Lady Castlewood to be in love 
 with me, I should have asked nothing finer of fortune. 
 The glamour of Henry Esmond was all the deeper be- 
 cause I was reading the Spectator then, and was con- 
 stantly in the company of Addison, and Steele, and 
 Swift, and Pope, and all the wits at Will's, who are 
 presented evanescently in the romance. The intensely 
 literary keeping, as well as quality, of the story I sup- 
 pose is what formed its highest fascination for me; 
 but that effect of great world which it imparts to the 
 reader, making him citizen, and, if he will, leading 
 citizen of it, was what helped turn my head. 
 
 This is the toxic property of all Thackeray's writ- 
 ing. He is himself forever dominated in imagination 
 by the world, and even while he tells you it is not worth 
 while he makes you feel that it is worth while. It is 
 not the honest man, but the man of honor, who shines 
 in his page ; his meek folk are proudly meek, and there 
 is a touch of superiority, a glint of mundane splendor, 
 
 99 
 
:^^r literary passions 
 
 ill liis lowliest. ITe rails at tlic order of things, but ho 
 imagines nothing different, even when he shows that its 
 baseness, and cruelty, and hypoerisy arc wcllnigh in- 
 evitable, and, for most of those v/ho wish to get on in it, 
 quite inevitable. He has a good word for the virtues, 
 he patronizes the Christian gi'aces, he pats humble merit 
 on the head; he has even explosions of indignation 
 against the insolence and pride of birth, and purse- 
 ])ride. But, after all, he is of the world, worldly, and 
 the highest hope he holds out is that you may be in the 
 world and despise its ambitions while you compass its 
 ends. 
 
 I should be far from blaming him for all this. He 
 was of his time; but since his time men have thought 
 beyond him, and seen life with a vision wdiich makes 
 his seem rather purblind. He must have been im- 
 mensely in advance of most of the thinking and feeling 
 of his day, for people then used to accuse his senti- 
 mental pessimism of cynical qualities which we could 
 hardly find in it now^ It was the age of intense indi- 
 vidualism, when you w^ere to do right because it was 
 becoming to you, say, as a gentleman, and you were to 
 have an eye single to the effect upon your character, if 
 not your reputation ; you were not to do a mean thing 
 because it was wrong, but because it was mean. It was 
 romanticism carried into the region of morals. But T 
 had very little concern then as to that sort of error. 
 
 I was on a very high aesthetic horse, which I could 
 not have conveniently stooped from if I had wished; 
 it was quite enough for me that Thackeray's novels 
 were prodigious works of art, and I acquired merit, at 
 least with myself, for appreciating them so keenly, for 
 liking them so much. It must be, I felt with far less 
 consciousness than my formulation of the feeling ex- 
 presses, that I was of some finer sort myself to be 
 
 100 
 
THACKERAY 
 
 able to enjoy sucli a fine sort. I^o doubt T should 
 have hoon a coxcomb of some kind, if not that kind, 
 and I shall not be very strenuous in censuring Thack- 
 eray for his effect upon me in this way. 'No doubt 
 the effect was already in me, and he did not so much 
 produce it as find it. 
 
 In the mean time he was a vast delight to me, as 
 much in the variety of liis minor works — his YelloW' 
 plush, and Letters of Mr. Brown, and Adventures of 
 Major Gahafjan, and the Paris Sketch Booh, and the 
 Irish Slrtch Booh, and the Great Iloggarty Diamond, 
 and the Booh of Snohs, and the English Humorists, 
 and the Four Oeorges, and all the multitude of his 
 essays, and verses, and caricatures — as in the spacious 
 designs of his huge novels, the Newcomes, and Pen- 
 dennis, and Vanity Fair, and Henry Esmond, and 
 Barry Lyndon. 
 
 There was something in the art of the last which 
 seemed to me then, and still seems, the farthest reach 
 of the author's great talent. It is couched, like so 
 much of his work, in the autobiographic form, which 
 next to the dramatic form is the most natural, and 
 which lends itself with such flexibility to the purpose 
 of the author. In Barry Lyndon there is imagined to 
 the life a scoundrel of such rare quality that he never 
 supposes for a moment but he is the finest sort of a 
 gentleman ; and so, in fact, he was, as most gentlemen 
 went in his day. Of course, the picture is overcolored ; 
 it was the vice of Thackeray, or of Thackeray's time, 
 to surcharge all imitations of life and character, so that 
 a generation apparently much slower, if not duller than 
 ours, should not possibly miss the artist's meaning. 
 But I do not think it is so much surcharged as Esmond; 
 Barry Lyndon is by no manner of means so conscious 
 as that mirror of gentlemanhood, with its manifold self- 
 
 101 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 reverberations; and for these reasons I am inclined to 
 think he is the most perfect creation of Thackeray's 
 mind. 
 
 I did not make the acquaintance of Thackeray's 
 books all at once, or even in rapid succession, and he 
 at no time possessed the whole empire of my catholic, 
 not to say, fickle, affections, during the years I was 
 compassing a full knowledge and sense of his gTcatness, 
 and burning incense at his shrine. But there was a 
 moment when he so outshone and overtoi^ped all other 
 divinities in my worship that I was effectively his 
 alone, as I have been the helpless and, as it were, hypno- 
 tized devotee of three or four others of the very great. 
 From his art there flowed into me a literary quality 
 which tinged my whole mental substance, and made it 
 impossible for me to say, or wish to say, ani^iihing with- 
 out giving it the literary color. That is, while he domi- 
 nated my love and fancy, if I had been so fortunate 
 as to have a simple concept of anything in life, I must 
 have tried to give the expression of it some turn or tint 
 that would remind the reader of books even before it 
 reminded him of men. 
 
 It is hard to make out what I mean, but this is a 
 try at it, and I do not know that I shall be able to do 
 better unless I add that Thackeray, of all the writers 
 that I have known, is the most thoroughly and pro- 
 foundly imbued with literature, so that when he speaks 
 it is not v/ith words and blood, but with words and 
 ink. You may read the greatest part of Dickens, as 
 you may read the greatest part of ITawthorne or Tolstoy, 
 and not once be reminded of literature as a business 
 or a cult, but you can hardly read a paragraph, hardly a 
 sentence, of Thackeray's without being reminded of it 
 either by suggestion or downright allusion. 
 
 I do not blame him for this ; he was himself, and lie 
 102 
 
THACKERAY 
 
 could not liave been any other manner of man without 
 loss ; but I say that the greatest talent is not that which 
 breathes of the library, but that which breathes of the 
 street, the field, the open sky, the simple earth. I 
 began to imitate this master of mine almost as soon 
 as I began to read him; this must be, and I had a 
 greater pride and joy in my success than I should 
 probably have known in anything really creative; I 
 should have suspected that, I should have distrusted 
 that, because I had nothing to test it by, no model ; but 
 here before me was the very finest and noblest model, 
 and I had but to form my lines upon it, and I had pro- 
 duced a work of art altogether more estimable in my 
 eyes than anything else could have been. I saw the 
 little world about me through the lenses of my master's 
 spectacles, and I reported its facts, in his tone and his 
 attitude, with his self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, 
 his facile satire. I need not say I was perfectly satis- 
 fied with the result, or that to be able to imitate 
 Thackeray was a much greater thing for me than to have 
 been able to imitate nature. In fact, I could have 
 valued any picture of the life and character I knew 
 only as it put me in mind of life and character as these 
 had shown themselves to me in his books. 
 
XXI 
 
 " LAZARILLO DE TORMES " 
 
 At the same time, I was not only reading many 
 Looks besides Thackeray's, but I was studying to get 
 a smattering of several languages as well as I could, 
 with or without help. I could now manage Spanish 
 fairly well, and I was sending on to 'New York for 
 authors in that tongue. I do not remember how I 
 got the money to buy them ; to be sure it was no great 
 sum; but it must have been given me out of the sums 
 we were all working so hard to make up for the debt, 
 and the interest on the debt (that is always the wicked 
 pinch for the debtor ! ) , we had incurred in the purchase 
 of the newspaper which we lived by, and the house 
 which we lived in. I spent no money on any other sort 
 of pleasure, and so, I suppose, it was afforded me the 
 more readily; but I cannot really recall the history of 
 those acquisitions on its financialside. In any case, 
 if the sums I laid out in literature could not have been 
 comparatively great, the excitement attending the out- 
 lay was prodigious. 
 
 I know that I used to write on to Messrs. Roe Lock- 
 wood & Son, I^ew York, for my Spanish books, and I 
 dare say that my letters were sufficiently pedantic, and 
 filled with a simulated acquaintance with all Spanish 
 literature. Heaven knows what they must have thought, 
 if they thought anything, of their queer customer in 
 that obscure little Ohio village ; but he could not have 
 
 104 
 
"LAZAEILLO DE TORMES " 
 
 been queerer to them than to his fellow-villagers, I am 
 sure. I haunted the post-offiee about the time the books 
 Avore due, and when I found one of them in our deep 
 box among a heap of exchange newspapers and business 
 letters, my emotion was so great that it almost took my 
 breath. I hurried home with the precious volume, and 
 shut myself into my little den, where I gave myself up 
 to a sort of transport in it. These books were always 
 from the collection of Spanish authors published by 
 Baudry in Paris, and they were in saffron-colored paper 
 covers, printed full of a perfectly intoxicating catalogue 
 of other Spanish books which I meant to read, every one, 
 some time. The paper and the ink had a certain odor 
 which was sweeter to me than the perfumes of Araby. 
 The look of the type took me more than the glance of 
 a girl, and I had a fever of longing to know the heart 
 of the book, which was like a lover's passion. Some- 
 times I did not reach its heart, but commonly I did. 
 Moratin's Origins of the Spanish Theatre, and a large 
 volume of Spanish dramatic authors, were the first 
 Spanish books I sent for, but I could not say why I 
 sent for them, unless it was because I saw that there 
 were some plays of Cervantes among the rest. I read 
 these and I read several comedies of Lope de Vega, and 
 numbers of archaic dramas in Moratin's history, and I 
 really got a fairish perspective of the Spanish drama, 
 which has now almost wholly faded from my mind. It 
 is more intelligible to me why I should have read 
 Conde's Dominion of the Arabs in Spain; for that was 
 in the line of my reading in Irving, which would account 
 for my pleasure in the History of the Civil Wars of 
 Granada; it was some time before I realized that the 
 chronicles in this were a bundle of romances and not 
 veritable records; and my whole study in those things 
 was wholly undirected and unenlightened. But I meant 
 
 105 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 to be thorough iu it, and I could not rest satisfied with 
 the Spanish-English grammars I had ; I was not willing 
 to stop short of the official grammar of the Spanish 
 'Academy. I sent to Il\"ew York for it, and my book- 
 sellers there reported that they would have to send 
 to Spain for it. I lived till it came to hand through 
 them from Madrid; and I do not understand why 
 I did not perish then from the pride and joy I had 
 in it. 
 
 But, after all, I am not a Spanish scholar, and can 
 neither speak nor write the language. I never got more 
 than a good reading use of it, perhaps because I never 
 really tried for more. But I am very glad of that, 
 because it has been a gi*eat pleasure to me, and even 
 some profit, and it has lighted up many meanings in 
 literature, which must always have remained dark to 
 me. IS^ot to speak now of the modern Spanish writers 
 whom it has enabled me to know in their own houses 
 as it were, I had even in that remote day a rapturous 
 delight in a certain Spanish book, which was well worth 
 all the pains I had undergone to get at it. This was 
 the famous picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, by 
 Hurtado de Mendoza, whose name then so familiarized 
 itself to my fondness that now as I write it I feel as if 
 it were that of an old personal friend whom I had 
 kno^vn in the flesh. I believe it would not have been 
 always comfortable to know Mendoza outside of his 
 books; he was rather a terrible person; he was one of 
 the Spanish invaders of Italy, and is known in Italian 
 history as the Tyrant of Siena. But at my distance of 
 time and place I could safely revel in his friendship, 
 and as an author I certainly found him a most charm- 
 ing companion. The adventures of his rogue of a hero, 
 who began life as the servant and accomplice of a blind 
 beggar, and then adventured on through a most divert- 
 
 106 
 
"LAZARILLO DE TORMES" 
 
 ing career of knavery, brought back tlic atmosphere of 
 Don Quixote, and all the landscape of that dear wonder- 
 world of S]>ain, where I had lived so nmch, and I fol- 
 lowed him with all the old delight. 
 
 I do not know that I should counsel others to do so, 
 or that the general reader would find his account in 
 it, but I am sure that the intending author of American 
 fiction would do well to study the Spanish picaresque 
 novels ; for in their simplicity of design he will find 
 one of the best forms for an American story. The in- 
 trigue of close texture wull never suit our conditions, 
 which are so loose and open and variable ; each man's 
 life among us is a romance of the Spanish model, if it 
 is the life of a man who has risen, as we nearly all have, 
 with many ups and downs. The story of Lazarillo is 
 gross in its facts, and is mostly " unmeet for ladies," 
 like most of the fiction in all languages before our 
 times ; but there is an honest simplicity in the narration, 
 a pervading humor, and a rich feeling for character that 
 gives it value. 
 
 I think that a good deal of its foulness was lost 
 upon me, but I certainly understood that it would not 
 do to present it to an American public just as it was, 
 in the translation which I presently planned to make. 
 I went about telling the story to people, and trying to 
 make them find it as amusing as I did, but whether I 
 ever succeeded I cannot say, though the notion of a 
 version with modifications constantly grew with me, 
 till one day I went to the city of Cleveland with my 
 father. There was a branch house of an Eastern firm 
 of publishers in that place, and I must have had the 
 hope that I might have the courage to propose a trans- 
 lation of Lazarillo to them. My father urged me to 
 try my fortune, but my heart failed me. I was half 
 blind with one of the headaches that tormented me in 
 
 107 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS • 
 
 tbosc da3'S, and I turned my sick cjcs from the sign, 
 " J. P. Jewett & Co., Publishers," which held me fas- 
 cinated, and went home without at least having my 
 much-drcamed-of version of Lazarillo refused. 
 
XXII 
 
 CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL 
 
 I AM quite at a loss to know why my reading had this 
 direction or that in those days. It had necessarily 
 passed beyond my father's suggestion, and I think it 
 must have been largely by accident or experiment that 
 I read one book rather than another. He made some 
 sort of newspaper arrangement w^ith a book-store in 
 Cleveland, which was the means of enriching our home 
 library with a goodly number of books, shop-worn, but 
 none the worse for that, and new in the only way that 
 books need be new to the lover of them. Among these 
 I found a treasure in Curtis's two books, the Nile Notes 
 of a Howadji, and tlie Howadji in Syria. I already 
 knew him by his Potiphar Papers,, and the ever-delight- 
 ful reveries which have since gone under the name of 
 Prue and I; but those books of Eastern travel opened a 
 new world of thinking and feeling. They had at once 
 a great influence upon me. The smooth richness of 
 their diction ; the amiable sweetness of their mood, their 
 gracious caprice, the delicacy of their satire (which was 
 so kind that it should have some other name), their 
 abundance of light and color, and the deep heart of 
 humanity underlying their airiest fantasticality, all 
 united in an effect which was different from any I had 
 yet known. 
 
 As usual, I steeped myself in them, and the first run- 
 nings of my fancy when T began to pour it ont after- 
 
 109 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 Avards were of their flavor. I tried to write like this new 
 master ; but whether I had tried or not, I should prob- 
 ably have done so from the love I bore him. lie was a 
 favorite not only of mine, but of all the young people 
 in the village who were reading current literature, so 
 that on this ground at least I had abundant s^^mpathy. 
 The present generation can have little notion of the deep 
 impression made upon the intelligence and conscience 
 of the whole nation by the Potiphar Papers, or how its 
 fancy was rapt with the Prue and I sketches. These are 
 among the most veritable literary successes we have had, 
 and probably we who were so glad when the author of 
 these beautiful things turned aside from the flowery 
 paths where he led us, to battle for freedom in the field 
 of politics, Avould have felt the sacrifice too great if we 
 could have dreamed it would be life-long. But, as it 
 was, we could only honor him the more, and give 
 him a place in our hearts which he shared with Long- 
 fellow. 
 
 This divine poet I have never ceased to read. His 
 Hiawatha was a new book during one of those terrible 
 Lake Shore winters, but all the other poems were old 
 friends with me by that time. With a sister who is 
 no longer living I had a peculiar affection for his pretty 
 and touching and lightly humorous tale of Kavanagli, 
 which was of a village life enough like our own, in 
 some things, to make us know the truth of its delicate 
 realism. We used to read it and talk it fondly over to- 
 gether, and I believe some stories of like make and 
 manner grew out of our pleasure in it. They were never 
 finished, but it was enough to begin them, and there 
 were few writers, if any, among those I delighted in 
 w^ho escaped the tribute of an imitation. One has to 
 begin that way, or at least one had in my day ; perhaps 
 it is now possible for a young writer to begin by being 
 
 110 
 
CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL 
 
 himself; but for my part, that was not half so important 
 as to bo like some one else. Literature, not life, was 
 my aim, and to reproduce it was my joy and my 
 pride. 
 
 I was widening my knowledge of it helplessly and 
 involuntarily, and I was always chancing upon some 
 book that served this end among the great number of 
 books that I read merely for my pleasure without any 
 real result of the sort. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic 
 Literature came into my hands not long after I had 
 finished my studies in the history of the Spanish 
 theatre, and it made the whole subject at once luminous. 
 I cannot give a due notion of the comfort this book 
 afforded me by the light it cast upon paths where I had 
 dimly made my way before, but which I now followed in 
 the full day. 
 
 Of course, I pinned my faith to everything that 
 Schlegel said. I obediently despised the classic unities 
 and the French and Italian theatre which had perpetu- 
 ated them, and I revered the romantic drama which 
 had its glorious course among the Spanish and Eng- 
 lish poets, and which was crowned with the fame of the 
 Cervantes and the Shakespeare whom I seemed to own, 
 they owned me so completely. It vexes me now to find 
 that I cannot remember how the book came into my 
 hands, or who could have suggested it to me. It is 
 possible that it may have been that artist who came 
 and stayed a month with us while she painted my 
 mother's portrait. She was fresh from her studies in 
 ]^ew York, where she had met authors and artists at 
 the house of the Carey sisters, and had even once seen 
 my adored Curtis somewhere, though she had not spoken 
 with him. Her talk about these things simply era- 
 paradised me ; it lifted me into a heaven of hope that I, 
 too, might some day meet such elect spirits and con- 
 Ill 
 
]^fY LITETJARY PASSIONS 
 
 verse with tlicm face to face. My mood was sufficiently 
 foolish, but it was not such a frame of mind as I can be 
 ashamed of; and I could wish a boy no happier fortune 
 than to possess it for a time, at least. 
 
XXIII 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 I CANNOT quite see now how I found time for even 
 trying to do the things I had in hand more or less. It 
 is perfectly clear to me that I did none of them well, 
 though I meant at the time to do none of them other 
 than excellently. I was attempting the study of no less 
 than four languages, and I presently added a fifth to 
 these. I was reading right and left in every direction, 
 but chiefly in that of poetry, criticism, and fiction. 
 From time to time I boldly attacked a history, and car- 
 ried it by a coup de main, or sat down before it for a 
 prolonged siege. There was occasionally an author who 
 worsted me, whom I tried to read and quietly gave up 
 after a vain struggle, but I must say that these authors 
 were few. I had got a very fair notion of the range of 
 all literature, and the relations of the different litera- 
 tures to one another, and I knew pretty well what man- 
 ner of book it was that I took up before I committed 
 myself to the task of reading it. Always I read for 
 pleasure, for the delight of knowing something more; 
 and this pleasure is a very different thing from amuse- 
 ment, though I read a great deal for mere amusement, 
 as I do still, and to take my mind away from unhappy or 
 harassing thoughts. There are very few things that I 
 think it a waste of time to have read ; I should probably 
 have wasted the time if I had not read them, and at the 
 period I speak of I do not think I wasted much time. 
 
 113 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 My day began about seven o'clock, in the printing- 
 office, where it took me till noon to do my task of so 
 many thousand ems, say four or five. Then we had 
 dinner, after the simple fashion of people who work 
 with their hands for their dinners. In the afternoon 
 I went back and corrected the proof of the type I had 
 set, and distributed my case for the next day. At two 
 or three o'clock I was free, and then I went home and 
 began my studies ; or tried to write something ; or read 
 a book. We had supper at six, and after that I rejoiced 
 in literature, till I went to bed at ten or eleven. I can- 
 not think of any time when I did not go gladly to my 
 books or manuscripts, when it was not a noble joy as 
 well as a high privilege. 
 
 But it all ended as such a strain must, in the sort of 
 break which was not yet known as nervous prostration. 
 "When I could not sleep after my studies, and the sick 
 headaches came oftener, and then days and weeks of 
 hypochondriacal misery, it was apparent I was not well ; 
 but that was not the day of anxiety for such things, 
 and if it was thought best that I should leave work and 
 study for a while, it was not with the notion that the 
 case was at all serious, or needed an uninterrupted cure. 
 I passed days in the woods and fields, gunning or pick- 
 ing berries ; I spent myself in heavy work ; I made little 
 journeys; and all this was very wholesome and very 
 well ; but I did not give up my reading or my attempts 
 to write. jSTo doubt I was secretly proud to have been 
 invalided in so great a cause, and to be sicklied over with 
 the pale cast of thought, rather than by some ignoble 
 ague or the devastating consumption of that region. If 
 I lay awake, noting the wild pulsations of my heart, and 
 listening to the death-watch in the wall, I was certainly 
 very much scared, but I was not without the consolation 
 that I Avas at least a sufferer for literature. At the 
 
 114 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 same time that I was so horribly afraid of dying, I 
 could have composed an epitaph which would have 
 moved others to tears for my untimely fate. But there 
 was really no impairment of my constitution, and after 
 a while I began to be better, and little by little the 
 health which has never since failed me imder any 
 reasonable stress of work established itself. 
 
 I was in the midst of this unequal struggle when I 
 first became acquainted with the poet who at once pos- 
 sessed himself of what was best worth having in me. 
 Probably I knew of Tennyson by extracts, and from 
 the English reviews, but I believe it was from reading 
 one of Curtis's " Easy Chair " papers that I was 
 prompted to get the new poem of " Maud," which I 
 understood from the " Easy Chair " was then moving 
 polite youth in the East. It did not seem to me that I 
 could very well live without that poem, and when I 
 went to Cleveland with the hope that I might have 
 courage to propose a translation of LazariUo to a pub- 
 lisher it was with the fixed purpose of getting " Maud " 
 if it was to be found in any book-store there. 
 
 I do not know why I was so long in reaching Tenny- 
 son, and I can only account for it by the fact that I was 
 always reading rather the earlier than the later English 
 poetry. To be sure I had passed through what I may 
 call a paroxysm of Alexander Smith, a poet deeply un- 
 known to the present generation, but then acclaimed 
 immortal by all the critics, and put with. Shakespeare, 
 who must be a good deal astonished from time to time 
 in his Elysian quiet by the companionship thrust upon 
 him. I read this now dead-and-gone immortal with an 
 ecstasy unspeakable ; I raved of him by day, and dream- 
 ed of him by night ; I got great lengths of his " Life- 
 Drama" by heart, and I can still repeat several gorgeous 
 passages from it ; I would almost have been willing to 
 
 115 
 
MY LITERARY PASSTOXS 
 
 take tlic life of the sole critic who had the sense to laugh 
 at him, and who made his wicked fnn in Grahnn's 
 Magazine, an extinct periodical of the old extinct Phila- 
 dclphian species. I cannot tell how I came out of this 
 craze, bnt neither could any of the critics who led me 
 into it, I dare say. The reading world is very sus- 
 ceptible of such lunacies, and all that can be said is that 
 at a given time it was time for criticism to go mad over a 
 poet who was neither better nor worse than many an- 
 other third-rate poet apotheosized before and since. 
 What was good in Smith was the reflected fire of the 
 poets who had a vital heat in them ; and it was by mere 
 chance that I bathed myself in his second-hand efful- 
 gence. I already knew pretty well the origin of the 
 Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, and 
 Keats, and Shelley ; and I did not come to Tennyson's 
 worship a sudden convert, but my devotion to him was 
 none the less complete and exclusive. Like every other 
 great poet he somehow expressed the feelings of his day, 
 and I suppose that at the time he wrote " ]\Iaud " he said 
 more fully what the whole English-speaking race were 
 then dimly longing to utter than any English poet who 
 has lived. 
 
 One need not question the greatness of Browning in 
 owning the fact that the two poets of his day who pre- 
 eminently voiced their generation were Tennyson and 
 Longfellow ; though Browning, like Emerson, is possibly 
 now more modern than either. However, I had then 
 nothing to do with Tennyson's comparative claim on 
 my adoration ; there was for the time no parallel for him 
 in the whole range of literary divinities that I had 
 bowed the knee to. Eor that while, the temple was not 
 only emptied of all the other idols, but I had a richly 
 flattering illusion of being his only worshipper. 'SVlien 
 I came to the sense of this error, it was with the belief 
 
 lie 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 lliat jit least no one else had ever appreciated liini so 
 fully, stood so (dose to him iu that holy of holies where 
 he wrought his miracles. 
 
 I sav tawdrily and ineffectively and falsely what was 
 a very precious and sacred experience with me. This 
 great poet opened to me a whole world of thinking and 
 feeling, where I had my being with him in that mystic 
 intimacy which cannot be pnt into words. I at once 
 identified myself not only with the hero of the poem, 
 but in some sort with the poet himself, when I read 
 " ]\Iand " ; bitt that was only the first step towards the 
 lasting state in which his poetry has upon the whole 
 been more to me than that of any other poet. I have 
 never read any other so closely and continuously, or 
 read myself so much into and out of his verse. There 
 have been times and moods when I have had my ques- 
 tions, and made my cavils, and when it seemed to me 
 that the poet was less than I had thought him ; and cer- 
 tainly I do not revere equally and unreservedly all that 
 he has written; that would be impossible. But when 
 I think over all the other poets I have read, he is su- 
 preme above them in his response to some need in me 
 that he has satisfied so perfectly. 
 
 Of course, " Maud " seemed to me the finest poem I 
 had read, up to that time, but I am not sure that thig 
 conclusion was wholly my own ; I think it was partially 
 formed for me by the admiration of the poem which I 
 felt to be everjivhere in the critical atmosphere, and 
 which had already penetrated to me. I did not like all 
 parts of it equally well, and some parts of it seemed 
 thin and poor (though I would not suffer myself to say 
 so then), and they still seem so. But there were whole 
 passages and spaces of it whose divine and perfect 
 beauty lifted me above life. I did not fully understand 
 the poem then; I do not fullv understand it now, but 
 
 117/ 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 that did not and does not matter ; for there is something 
 in poetry that reaches the soul bj other avenues than 
 the intelligence. Both in this poem and others of 
 Tennyson, and in every poet that I have loved, there 
 are melodies and harmonies enfolding a significance 
 tliat appeared long after I had first read them, aiid had 
 even learned them by heart; that lay sweetly in my 
 onter ear and were enough in their mere beauty of 
 phrasing, till the time came for them to reveal their 
 whole meaning. In fact they could do this only to later 
 and greater knowledge of myself and others, as every 
 one must recognize who recurs in after-life to a book 
 that he read when young ; then he finds it twice as full 
 of meaning as it was at first. 
 
 I could not rest satisfied with " Maud " ; I sent the 
 same summer to Cleveland for the little volume which 
 then held all the poet's work, and abandoned myself 
 so wholly to it, that for a year I read no other verse 
 that I can remember. The volume was the first of 
 that pretty blue-and-gold series which Ticknor & Fields 
 began to publish in 1856, and which their imprint, so 
 rarely afiixed to an unworthy book, at once carried far 
 and wide. Their modest old brown cloth binding had 
 long been a quiet warrant of quality in the literature 
 it covered, and now this splendid blossom of the book- 
 making art, as it seemed, was fitly employed to convey 
 the sweetness and richness of the loveliest poetry that I 
 thought the world had yet known. After an old fashion 
 of mine, I read it continuously, with frequent recur- 
 rences from each new poem to some that had already 
 pleased me, and with a most capricious range among the 
 pieces. " In Memoriam " was in that book, and the 
 " Princess " ; I read the " Princess " through and 
 through, and over and over, but I did not then read " In 
 Memoriam " through, and I have never read it in 
 
 118 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 course ; I am not sure that I have even yet read every 
 part of it. I did not come to the " Princess," either, 
 until I had saturated my fancy and my memory with 
 some of the shorter poems, with the " Dream of Fair 
 AVomen," with the " Lotus-Eaters," with the " Miller's 
 Daughter," with the " :aiorte d' Arthur," with " Edwin 
 Morris, or The Lake," with " Love and Duty," and 
 a score of other minor and briefer poems. I read the 
 book night and day, in-doors and out, to myself and to 
 whomever I could make listen. I have no words to 
 tell the rapture it was to me ; but I hope that in some 
 more articulate being, if it should ever be my unmer- 
 ited fortune to meet that somnio poeta face to face, it 
 shall somehow be uttered from me to him, and he will 
 understand how completely he became the life of the 
 boy I was then. I think it might please, or at least 
 amuse, that lofty ghost, and that he would not resent 
 it, as he would probably have done on earth. I can 
 well understand why the homage of his worshippers 
 should have afflicted him here, and I could never have 
 been one to burn incense in his earthly presence; but 
 perhaps it might be done hereafter without offence. I 
 eagerly caught up and treasured every personal word I 
 could find about him, and I dwelt in that sort of charmed 
 intimacy with him through his verse, in which I could 
 not presume nor he repel, and wdiich I had enjoyed in 
 turn with Cervantes and Shakespeare, without a snub 
 from them. 
 
 I have never ceased to adore Tennyson, though the 
 rapture of the new convert could not last. That must 
 pass like the flush of any other passion. I think I 
 have now a better sense of his comparative greatness, 
 but a better sense of his positive greatness I could not 
 have than I had at the beginning; and I believe this 
 is the essential knowledge of a poet. It is very well 
 
 119 
 
MY LITERARY Px\SSIONS 
 
 to say one is j^rcater than Keats, or not so great as 
 Wordsworth ; that one is or is not of the highest order 
 of poets like Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe; but 
 that does not mean anything of value, and I never 
 find my account in it. I know it is not possible for any 
 less than the greatest writer to abide lastingly in one's 
 life. Some dazzling comer may enter and possess it 
 for a day, but he soon wears his welcome out, and pres- 
 ently finds the door, to be answered with a not-at-home 
 if he knocks again. But it was only this morning that 
 I read one of the new last poems of Tennyson wdtli a 
 return of the emotion which he first woke in me well- 
 nigh forty years ago. There has been no year of those 
 many when I have not read him and loved him with 
 something of the early fire if not all the early conflagra- 
 tion ; and each successive poem of his has been for me a 
 fresh joy. 
 
 He went with me into the world from my village 
 when I left it to make my first venture away from home. 
 My father had got one of those legislative clerkships 
 which used to fall sometimes to deserving country 
 editors when their party was in power, and we together 
 imagined and carried out a scheme for corresponding 
 wdth some city newspapers. We were to furnish a daily 
 letter giving an account of the legislative proceedings 
 which I was mainly to write up from material he helped 
 me to get together. The letters at once found favor with 
 the editors who agreed to take them, and my father then 
 withdrew from the work altogether, after telling them 
 who was doing it. We were afraid they might not care 
 for the reports of a boy of nineteen, but they did not 
 seem to take my age into account, and T did not boast 
 of my youth among the law-makers. I looked three or 
 four years older than T was ; but I experienced a terrible 
 moment once when a fatlierly Senator asked me my 
 
 120 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 age. I got away somehow without saying, but it was a 
 great relief to me when m}' twentieth hirthdiiy came that 
 winter, and 1 eoiiIJ honestly proclaim tliat I was in my 
 twenty-first year. 
 
 I had noM- the free range of tlio State Library, and 
 I drew many sorts of books from it. Largely, how- 
 ever, they were fiction, and I read all tlic novels of 
 Bulwer, for whom I had already a great liking from 
 The Caxtons and My Novel. I was dazzled by them, 
 and I thought him a great writer, if not so great a one 
 as he thought himself. Little or nothing of those ro- 
 mances, with their swelling prefaces about the poet 
 and his function, their glittering criminals, and showy 
 rakes and rogues of all kinds, and their patrician per- 
 fume and social splendor, remained with me ; they may 
 have been better or w^orse ; I will not attempt to say. 
 If I may call my fascination with them a passion at all, 
 I must say that it was but a fitful fever. I also read 
 many volumes of Zschokke's admirable tales, which I 
 found in a translation in the Library, and I think I 
 began at the same time to find out De Quincey. These 
 authors I recall out of the many that passed through 
 my mind almost as tracelessly as they passed through 
 my hands. I got at some versions of Icelandic poems, 
 in the metre of " Hiawatha " ; I had for a while a notion 
 of studying Icelandic, and I did take out an Icelandia 
 grammar and lexicon, and decided that I would learn 
 the language later. By this time I must have begun 
 German, which I afterwards carried so far, with one 
 author at least, as to find in him a delight only second 
 to that I had in Tennyson; but as yet Tennyson was 
 all in all to me in poetry. I suspect that I carried his 
 poems about with me a great part of the time; I am 
 afraid that I always had that blue-and-gold Tennyson 
 in my pocket ; and I was ready to draw it upon anybody 
 
 121 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 at tlie slightest provocation. This is the worst of tlie 
 ardent lover of literature: he wishes to make every 
 one else share his rapture, will he, nill he. Many good 
 fellows suffered from my admiration of this author or 
 that, and many more pretty, patient maids. I wanted 
 to read ni}' favorite passages, my favorite poems to 
 them; I am afraid I often did read, when they would 
 rather have been talking; in the case of the poems I 
 did worse, I repeated them. This seems rather in- 
 credible now, but it is true enough, and absurd as it 
 is, it at least attests my sincerity. It was long before 
 I cured myself of so pestilent a habit; and I am not 
 3'et so perfectly well of it that I could be safely trusted 
 with a fascinating book and a submissive listener. 
 
 I dare say I could not have been made to understand 
 at this time that Tennyson was not so nearly the first 
 interest of life with other people as he was with me; I 
 must often have suspected it, but I was helpless against 
 the wish to make them feel him as important to their 
 prosperity and well-being as he was to mine. My head 
 was full of him ; his words were always behind my lips ; 
 and when I was not repeating his phrase to myself or 
 to some one else, I was trying to frame something of 
 my own as like him as I could. It was a time of melan- 
 choly from ill-health, and of anxiety for the future in 
 which I must make my own place in the world. Work, 
 and hard work, I had always been used to and never 
 afraid of; but work is by no means the whole story. 
 You may get on without much of it, or you may do a 
 great deal, and not get on. I was willing to do as much 
 of it as I could get to do, but I distrusted my health, 
 somewhat, and I had many forebodings, which my 
 adored poet helped me to transfigure to the substance of 
 literature, or enabled me for the time to forget. I was 
 already imitating him in the verse I wrote; he now 
 
 122 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 seemed tlic only worthy model for one "who meant to be 
 as great a poet as I did. Xone of the authors whom I 
 read at all displaced him in my devotion, and I could 
 not have believed that any other poet would ever be so 
 much to me. In fact, as I have expressed, none ever has 
 been. 
 
XXIV 
 
 HEINE 
 
 That winter passed very quickly and happily for 
 me, and at the end of the legislative session I had 
 acqnitted inyself so mnch to the satisfaction of one of 
 the newspapers which I wrote for that I was offered a 
 place on it. I was asked to be city editor, as it was 
 called in that day, and I was to have charge of the 
 local reporting. It was a great temptation, and for a 
 while I thought it the greatest piece of good fortune. 
 I went down to Cincinnati to acquaint myself with the 
 details of the work, and to fit myself for it by begin- 
 ning as reporter myself. One night's round of the 
 police stations with the other reporters satisfied me 
 that I was not meant for that work, and I attempted 
 it no farther. I have often been sorry since, for it 
 would have made knovv'n to me many phases of life 
 that I have always remained ignorant of, but I did not 
 know then that life was supremely interesting and im- 
 portant. I fancied that literature, that poetry was so; 
 and it was humiliation and anguish indescribable to 
 think of myself torn from my higli ideals by labors 
 like those of the reporter. I would not consent even 
 to do the office work of the department, and the pro- 
 prietor and editor who was more especially my friend 
 tried to make some other place for me. All the depart- 
 ments were full but the one I would have nothing to do 
 with, and after a few weeks of sufferance and suffering I 
 
 124 
 
HEINE 
 
 turned my back on a thousand dollars a year, and for 
 the second time returned to the printin{]^-office. 
 
 I was glad to get home, for I had been all the time 
 tormented by my old malady of homesickness. But 
 otherwise the situation was not cheerful for me, and I 
 now began trying to write something for publication 
 that I could sell. I sent off poems and they came 
 back ; T offered little translations from the Spanish 
 that nobody wanted. At the same time I took up the 
 study of German, which I must have already played 
 with, at such odd times as I could find. My father 
 knew something of it, and that friend of mine among 
 the printers was already reading it and trying to 
 speak it. I had their help with the first steps so far 
 as the recitations from Ollendorff were concerned, but 
 I was impatient to read German, or rather to read one 
 German poet who had seized my fancy from the first 
 line of his I had seen. 
 
 This poet was Heinrich Heine, who dominated me 
 longer than any one author that I have known. Where 
 or when I first acquainted myself with his most fasci- 
 nating genius, I cannot be sure, but I think it was in 
 some article of the West7ninsfer Review^ where several 
 poems of his were given in English and German; and 
 their singular beauty and grace at once possessed my 
 soul. I was in a fever to know more of him, and it 
 was my great good luck to fall in with a German in 
 the village who had his books. He w^as a bookbinder, 
 one of those educated artisans whom the revolutions of 
 1848 sent to us in great numbers. He was a Hano- 
 verian, and his accent was then, I believe, the standard, 
 though the Berlinese is now the accepted pronuncia- 
 tion. But I cared very little for accent; my wish was 
 to get at Heine with as little delay as possible; and I 
 ])egan to cultivate the friendship of that bookbinder 
 ^9 125 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 in every way. I dare say he was glad of mine, for he 
 was otherwise quite alone in the village, or had no 
 companionship outside of his own family. I clothed 
 him in all the romantic interest I began to feel for his 
 race and language, which now took the place of the 
 Spaniards and Spanish in my affections. He was a 
 very quick and gay intelligence, with more sympathy 
 for my love of our author's humor than for my love 
 of his sentiment, and I can remember very well the 
 twinkle of his little sharp black eyes, with their Tar- 
 tar slant, and the twitching of his keenly pointed, sensi- 
 tive nose, when we came to some passage of biting 
 satire, or some phrase in which the bitter Jew had un- 
 packed all the insult of his soul. 
 
 We began to read Heine together when my vocab- 
 ulary had to be dug almost word by word out of the 
 dictionary, for the bookbinder's English was rather 
 scanty at the best, and was not literary. As for the 
 grammar, T was getting that up as fast as I could 
 from Ollendorff, and from other sources, but I was 
 enjoying Heine before I well knew a declension or a 
 conjugation. As soon as my task was done at the 
 office, I went home to the books, and worked away at 
 them until supper. Then my bookbinder and I met 
 in my father's editorial room, and with a couple of 
 candles on the table between ua, and our Heine and 
 the dictionary before us, we read till we were both 
 tired out. 
 
 The candles were tallow, and they lopped at differ- 
 ent angles in the flat candlesticks heavily loaded with 
 lead, which compositors once used. It seems to have 
 been summer when our readings began, and they are 
 associated in my memory with the smell of the neigh- 
 boring gardens, which came in at the open doors and 
 windows, and with the fluttering of moths, and the 
 
 126 
 
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 jJlrSJ^ ^^^^^^H 
 
 ^^^^^^^^^^B^^"' 
 
 p^'^Rk '^^^^^^1 
 
 
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 ^^Hl 
 
 l^f'f ^^^^^H 
 
 ^^1 
 
 K^Jg^H 
 
 1^1 
 
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 n 
 
 ^^^^I^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H 
 
HEINE 
 
 bumbling of the dorbiigs, that stole in along with tlio 
 odors. I can see the perspiration on the shining fore- 
 head of the bookbinder as he looks np from some brill- 
 iant passage, to exchange a smile of triumph with me at 
 having made out the meaning with the meagre facili- 
 ties we had for the purpose; he had beautiful red 
 pouting lips, and a stiff little branching mustache above 
 them, that went to the making of his smile. Sometimes, 
 in the truce we made with the text, he told a little story 
 of his life at home, or some anecdote relevant to our 
 reading, or quoted a passage from some other author. 
 It seemed to me the make of a high intellectual banquet, 
 and I should be glad if I could enjoy anything as much 
 now. 
 
 We walked home as far as his house, or rather his 
 apartment over one of the village stores; and as he 
 mounted to it by an outside staircase, we exchanged 
 a joyous " Gute Nacht," and I kept on homeward 
 through the dark and silent village street, which was 
 really not that street, but some other, where Heine had 
 been, some street out of the Reisebilder, of his knowl- 
 edge, or of his dream. When I reached home it was 
 useless to go to bed. I shut myself into my little study, 
 and went over what we had read, till my brain was 
 so full of it that when I crept up to my room at last, 
 it was to lie do\vn to slumbers which were often a mere 
 phantasmagory of those witching Pictures of Travel. 
 
 I was awake at my father's call in the morning, and 
 before my mother had breakfast ready I had recited 
 my lesson in Ollendorff to him. To tell the truth, I 
 hated those grammatical studies, and nothing but the 
 love of literature, and the hope of getting at it, could 
 ever have made me go through them. I^Taturally, I 
 never got any scholarly use of the languages I was 
 worrying at, and though I could once write a passable 
 
 127 
 
MT LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 literary German, it lias all gone from me now, except 
 for the purposes of reading. It cost me so much 
 trouble, however, to dig the sense out of the granmiar 
 and lexicon, as I went on with the authors I was im- 
 patient to read, that I remember the words very w(;ll 
 in all their forms and inflections, and I have still what 
 I think I may call a fair German vocabulary. 
 
 The German of Heine, when once you are in the 
 joke of his capricious genius, is very simple, and in 
 his poetry it is simple from the first, so that he was, 
 perhaps, the best author I could have fallen in with 
 if I wanted to go fast rather than far. I found this 
 out later, when I attempted other German authors 
 without the glitter of his wit or the lambent glow of 
 his fancy to light me on my hard way. I should find 
 it hard to say just why his peculiar genius had such 
 an absolute fascination for me from the very first, and 
 perhaps I had better content myself with saying simply 
 that my literary liberation began with almost the 
 earliest word from him; for if he chained me to him- 
 self he freed me from all other bondage. I had been 
 at infinite pains from time to time, now upon one model 
 and now upon another, to literarify myself, if I may 
 make a word which does not quite say the thing for me. 
 What I mean is that I had supposed, witli the sense at 
 times that I was all wrong, that the expression of litera- 
 ture must be difi'erent from the expression of life ; that 
 it must be an attitude, a pose, with something of state 
 or at least of formality in it ; that it must be this style, 
 and not that; that it must be like that sort of acting 
 which you know is acting when you see it and never mis- 
 take for reality. There are a great many children, 
 apparently grown-up, and largely accepted as critical 
 authorities, who are still of this youthful opinion of 
 mine. But Heine at once showed me that this ideal 
 
 128i 
 
HEINE 
 
 of literature was false; that the life of literature was 
 from the springs of the best common speech,- and that 
 the nearer it could be made to conform, in voice, look, 
 and gait, to graceful, easy, picturesque and humorous 
 or impassioned talk, the better it was. 
 
 lie did not impart these truths without imparting 
 certain tricks with them, which I was careful to imitate 
 as soon as I began to write in his manner, that is to 
 say instantly. His tricks he had mostly at second-hand, 
 and mainly from Sterne, whom I did not know well 
 enough then to know their origin. But in all essentials 
 he was himself, and my final lesson from him, or the 
 final effect of all my lessons from him, was to find 
 myself, and to be for good or evil whatsoever I really 
 was. 
 
 I kept on writing as much like Heine as I could for 
 several years, though, and for a much longer time than 
 I should have done if I had ever become equally impas- 
 sioned of any other author. Some traces of his method 
 lingered so long in my work that nearly ten years after- 
 wards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine 
 that he had been reading : " You must sweat the Heine 
 out of your bones as men do mercury," and his kind- 
 ness for me would not be content with less than the 
 entire expulsion of the poison that had in its good time 
 saved my life. I dare say it was all well enough not to 
 have it in my bones after it had done its office, but it 
 did do its office. 
 
 It was in some prose sketch of mine that his keen 
 analysis had found the Heine, but the foreigTi property 
 had been so prevalent in my earlier work in verse that 
 he kept the first contribution he accepted from me 
 for the Atlantic MontJihj a long time, or long enough 
 to make sure that it was not a translation of Heine. 
 Then he printed it, and I am bound to say that the poem 
 
 129 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 now justifies his doubt to me, in so much that I do not 
 see Avhy Heine should not have had the name of writing 
 it if he had wanted. His potent spirit became immedi- 
 ateh^ so wholly my " control," as the mediums say, that 
 my poems might as well have been communications from 
 him so far as any authority of my own was concerned ; 
 and they were quite like other inspirations from the 
 other world in being so inferior to the work of the 
 spirit before it had the misfortune to be disembodied 
 and obliged to use a medium. But I do not think that 
 either Heine or I had much lasting harm from it, and 
 I am sure that the good, in my case at least, was one that 
 can only end with me. He undid my hands, which I 
 had taken so much pains to tie behind my back, and he 
 forever persuaded me that though it may be ingenious 
 and surprising to dance in chains, it is neither pretty 
 nor useful. 
 
XXV 
 
 DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW 
 
 Another author who was a prime favorite with me 
 about this time was De Quincey, whose books I took 
 out of the State Library, one after another, until I had 
 read them alh We who were young people of that 
 day thought his style something wonderful, and so in- 
 deed it was, especially in those passages, abundant 
 everywhere in his work, relating to his own life with 
 an intimacy which was always more rather than less. 
 His rhetoric there, and in certain of his historical 
 studies, had a sort of luminous richness, without losing 
 its colloquial ease. I keenly enjoyed this subtle spirit, 
 and the play of that brilliant intelligence which lighted 
 up so many ways of literature with its lambent glow 
 or its tricksy glimmer, and I had a deep sympathy with 
 certain morbid moods and experiences so like my own, 
 as I was pleased to fancy. I have not looked at his 
 Twelve Ccesars for twice as many years, but I should 
 be greatly surprised to find it other than one of the 
 greatest historical monographs ever written. His liter- 
 ary criticisms seemed to me not only exquisitely humor- 
 ous, but perfectly sane and just; and it delighted me 
 to have him personally present, with the warmth of his 
 own temperament in regions of cold abstraction; I am 
 not sure that I should like that so much now. De 
 Quincey was hardly less autobiographical when he wrote 
 of Kant, or the Flight of the Crim-Tartars, than when 
 
 131 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 lie wrote of his own boyhood or the miseries of the opium 
 habit. He had the hospitable gift of making you at 
 home with him, and appealing to your sense of com- 
 radery with something of the flattering confidentiality 
 of Thackeray, but with a Avholly different effect. 
 
 In fact, although De Qnincey was from time to time 
 perfunctorily Tory, and always a good and faithful 
 British subject, he was so eliminated from his time and 
 place by his single love for books, that one could be in 
 his company through the whole vast range of his writ- 
 ings, and come away without a touch of snobbishness; 
 and that is saying a great deal for an English writer. 
 He was a great little creature, and through his intense 
 personality he achieved a sort of impersonality, so that 
 you loved the man, who was forever talking of himself, 
 for his modesty and reticence. He left you feeling 
 intimate with him but by no means familiar; with all 
 his frailties, and with all those freedoms he permitted 
 himself with the lives of his contemporaries, he is to me 
 a figure of delicate dignity, and winning kindness. I 
 think it a misfortune for the present generation that 
 his books have fallen into a kind of neglect, and I be- 
 lieve that they will emerge from it again to the advan- 
 tage of literature. 
 
 In spite of Heine and Tennyson, De Qnincey had a 
 large place in my affections, though this was perhaps 
 because he was not a poet; for more than those two 
 great poets there was then not much room. I read him 
 the first winter I was at Columbus, and when I went 
 down from the village the next M'iuter, to take up my 
 legislative correspondence again, I read him more than 
 ever. But that was destined to be for me a very dis- 
 heartening time. T had just passed through a rheumatic 
 fever, which left my health more broken than before, 
 and one morning shortly after I was settled iji the 
 
 132 
 
DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW 
 
 capital, I wckc to find the room goin^ roiuid luc like a 
 wheel. It was the boginiiiug of a vertigo which Uisted 
 for .six months, and whicli I began to fight with varions 
 devices and ninst yield to at last. I tried medicine and 
 exercise, but it was useless, and my father came to 
 take my letters off my hands while I gave myself some 
 ineffectual respites. I made a little journey to my old 
 home in southern Ohio, but there and everywhere, the 
 sure and firm-set earth waved and billowed under my 
 feet, and I came back to Cohnnbus and tried to forget 
 in my work the fact that I was no better. I did not 
 give up trying to read, as usual, and part of my en- 
 deavor that winter was with Schiller, and Ilhland, and 
 even Goethe, whose Wahlverwandschaften hardly yield- 
 ed up its mystery to me. To tell the truth, I do not 
 think that I found my account in that novel. It must 
 needs be a disappointment after Wilhelm Meister, 
 wdiich I had read in English ; but I dare say my dis- 
 appointment was largely my own fault ; I had certainly 
 no right to expect such constant proofs and instances of 
 wisdom in Goethe as the unwisdom of his critics had 
 led me to hope for. I remember little or nothing of the 
 story, wdiich I tried to find very memorable, as I held 
 my sick way through it. Longfellow's " Miles Stand- 
 ish " came out that winter, and I suspect that I got 
 vastly more real pleasure from that one poem of his than 
 I found in all my German authors put together, the 
 adored Heine always excepted ; though certainly I felt 
 the romantic beauty of Uhland, and was aware of some- 
 thing of Schiller's generous grandeur. 
 
 Of the American writers Longfellow has been most 
 a passion with me, as the English, and German, and 
 Spanish, and Russian writers have been. I am sure 
 that this was largely by mere chance. It was because 
 I happened, in such a frame and at such a time, to 
 
 133 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 come upon his books that I loved them above those of 
 other men as great. I am perfectly sensible that Lowell 
 and Emerson outvalue many of the poets and prophets 
 I have given my heart to; I have read them with de- 
 light and with a deep sense of their greatness, and yet 
 they have not been my life like those other, those lesser, 
 men. But none of the passions are reasoned, and I do 
 not try to account for my literary preferences or to 
 justify them. 
 
 I dragged along through several months of that win- 
 ter, and did my best to carry out that notable scheme 
 of not minding my vertigo. I tried doing half-work, 
 and helping my father with the correspondence, but 
 when it appeared that nothing would avail, he remained 
 in charge of it, till the close of the session, and I went 
 home to try what a complete and prolonged rest would 
 do for me. I was not fit for work in the printing-office, 
 but that w^as a simpler matter than the literary work 
 that was always tempting me. I could get away from it 
 only by taking my gun and tramping day after day 
 through the deep, primeval woods. The fatigue was 
 wholesome, and I was so bad a shot that no other crea- 
 ture suffered loss from my gain except one hapless wild 
 pigeon. The thawing snow left the fallen beechnuts 
 of the autumn before uncovered among the dead leaves, 
 and the forest was full of the beautiful birds. In most 
 parts of the middle West they are no longer seen, except 
 in twos or threes, but once they were like the sands of 
 the sea for multitude. It was not now the season when 
 they hid half the heavens with their flight day after day ; 
 but they were in myriads all through the woods, where 
 their iridescent breasts shone like a sudden untimely 
 growth of flowers when you came upon them from the 
 front. When they rose in fright, it was like the upward 
 leap of fire, and with the roar of flame. I use images 
 
 134 
 
DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW 
 
 which, after all, are false to the thing I wish to express; 
 but they must serve. I tried honestly enough to kill the 
 pigeons, but I had no luck, or too much, till I happened 
 to bring down one of a pair that I found apart from the 
 rest in a lofty tree-top. The poor creature I had wid- 
 owed followed me to the verge of the woods, as I started 
 home with my prey, and I do not care to know more per- 
 sonally the feelings of a murderer than I did then. I 
 tried to shoot the bird, but my aim was so bad that I 
 could not do her this mercy, and at last she flew away, 
 and I saw her no more. 
 
 The spring was now opening, and I was able to keep 
 more and more with Nature, who was kinder to me 
 than I was to her other children, or wished to be, and 
 I got the better of my malady, which gradually left me 
 for no more reason apparently than it came upon me. 
 But I was still far from well, and I was in despair of 
 my future. I began to read again — I suppose I had 
 really never altogether stopped. I borrowed from my 
 friend the bookbinder a German novel, which had for 
 me a message of lasting cheer. It was the Afraja of 
 Theodore IMligge, a story of life in ITorway during the 
 last century, and I remember it as a very lovely story 
 indeed, with honest studies of character among the IsFor- 
 wegians, and a tender pathos in the fate of the little 
 Lap heroine Gula, who was perhaps sufficiently ro- 
 manced. The hero was a young Dane, who was going 
 up among the fiords to seek his fortune in the northern 
 fisheries ; and by a process inevitable in youth I became 
 identified with him, so that I adventured, and enjoyed, 
 and suffered in his person throughout. There was a su- 
 preme moment when he was sailing through the fiords, 
 and finding himself apparently locked in by their moun- 
 tain walls without sign or hope of escape, but somehow 
 always escaping by some unimagined channel, and keep- 
 
 135 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 ing on. The lesson for him was one of trust and 
 courage; and I, who seemed to be then shut in upon a 
 mountain-walled fiord without inlet or outlet, took the 
 lesson home and promised myself not to lose heart again. 
 It seems a little odd that this passage of a book, by no 
 means of the greatest, should hav^e had such an effect 
 with me at a time when I was no longer so young as to 
 be unduly impressed by what I read ; but it is true that 
 I have never since found myself in circumstances where 
 there seemed to be no getting forward or going back, 
 without a vision of that fiord scenery, and then a rise 
 of faith, that if I kept on I should, somehow, come out 
 of my prisoning environment. 
 
XXVI 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE 
 
 I GOT back health enough to be of use in the printing- 
 office that autumn, and I was quietly at work there 
 with no visible break in my surroundings when sud- 
 denly the whole world opened to me through what had 
 seemed an impenetrable wall. The Republican news- 
 paper at the capital had been bought by a new manage- 
 ment, and the editorial force reorganized upon a foot- 
 ing of what we then thought metropolitan enterprise; 
 and to my great joy and astonishment I was asked to 
 come and take a place in it. The place offered me was 
 not one of lordly distinction ; in fact, it was partly of 
 the character of that I had already rejected in Cincin- 
 nati, but I hoped that in the smaller city its duties 
 would not be so odious ; and by the time I came to fill it, 
 a change had taken place in the arrangements so that I 
 was given charge of the news department. This in- 
 cluded the literary notices and the book reviews, and I 
 am afraid that I at once gave my prime attention to 
 these. 
 
 It was an evening paper, and I had nearly as much 
 time for reading and study as I had at home. But 
 now society began to claim a share of this leisure, which 
 I by no means begrudged it. Society was very charm- 
 ing in Columbus then, w^ith a pretty constant round 
 of dances and suppers, and an easy cordiality, which I 
 dare say young people still find in it everywhere. I met 
 
 137 
 
MY LITEPARY PASSIONS 
 
 a great many cultivated people, chiefly young ladies, 
 and there were several houses where we yoimg fellows 
 went and came almost as freely as if they were our own. 
 There we had music and cards, and talk about books, 
 and life appeared to me richly worth living ; if any one 
 had said this was not the best planet in the universe I 
 should have called him a pessimist, or at least thought 
 him so, for we had not the word in those days. A world 
 in which all those pretty and gracious women dwelt, 
 among the figures of the waltz and the lancers, with chat 
 between about the last instalment of The Newcomes, was 
 good enough world for me ; I was only afraid it was too 
 good. There were, of course, some girls who did not 
 read, but few openly professed indifference to litera- 
 ture, and there was much lending of books back and 
 forth, and much debate of them. That was the day 
 when Adam Bede was a new book, and in this I had 
 my first knowledge of that great intellect for which I 
 had no passion, indeed, bat always the deepest respect, 
 the highest honor; and which has from time to time 
 profoundly influenced me by its ethics. 
 
 I state these things simply and somewhat baldly; I 
 might easily refine upon them, and study that subtle 
 effect for good and for evil which young people are 
 always receiving from the fiction they read; but this 
 is not the time or place for the inquiry, and I only 
 wish to own that so far as I understand it, the chief 
 part of my ethical experience has been from novels. 
 The life and character I have found portrayed there 
 have appealed always to the consciousness of right and 
 wrong implanted in me ; and from no one has this appeal 
 been stronger than from George Eliot. Her influence 
 continued through many years, and I can question it 
 now only in the undue burden she seems to throw upon 
 the individual, and her failure to account largely 
 
 138 
 
GEOKGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE 
 
 enough for motive from the social environment. There 
 her work seems to me un})hilosophical. 
 
 It shares whatever error there is in its perspective 
 with that of Hawthorne, whose Marble Faun was a new 
 book at the same time that Adam Bede was new, and 
 whose books now came into my life and gave it their 
 tinge. He was always dealing with the problem of 
 evil, too, and I found a more potent charm in his more 
 artistic handling of it than I found in George Eliot. 
 Of course, I then preferred the region of pure romance 
 where he liked to place his action; but I did not find 
 his instances the less veritable because they shone out in 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or land." 
 
 I read the Marble Faun first, and then the Scarlet 
 Letter, and then the House of Seven Gables, and then 
 the Blithedale Romance; but I always liked best the 
 last, which is more nearly a novel, and more realistic 
 than the others. They all moved me with a sort of 
 effect such as I had not felt before. They were so far 
 from time and place that, although most of them re- 
 lated to our country and epoch, I could not imagine 
 anything approximate from them ; and Hawthorne him- 
 self seemed a remote and impalpable agency, rather than 
 a person whom one might actually meet, as not long 
 afterward happened with me. I did not hold the sort of 
 fancied converse with him that I held with other 
 authors, and I cannot pretend that I had the affection 
 for him that attracted me to them. But he held me by 
 his potent spell, and for a time he dominated me as 
 completely as any author I have read. More truly than 
 any other American author he has been a passion with 
 me, and lately I heard with a kind of pang a young man 
 saying that he did not believe I should find the Scarlet 
 Letter bear reading now. I did not assent to the possi- 
 
 139 
 
MY LITEKAKY PASSIONS 
 
 l)ility, but the notion gave me a shiver of dismay. I 
 thought how much tliat book had been to me, how much 
 all of Hawthorne's books had been, and to have parted 
 with my faith in their perfection would have been some- 
 thing I would not willingly have risked doing. 
 
 Of course there is always something fatally weak in 
 the scheme of the pure romance, which, after the color 
 of the contemporary mood dies out of it, leaves it in 
 danger of tumbling into the dust of allegory ; and per- 
 haps this inherent weakness was what that bold critic 
 felt in the Scarlet Letter. But none of Hawthorne's 
 fables are Avithout a profound and distant reach into 
 the recesses of nature and of being. He came back 
 from his researches with no solution of the question, 
 with no message, indeed, but the awful warning, " Be 
 true, be true," which is the burden of the Scarlet Let- 
 ter; yet in all his books there is the hue of thoughts 
 that we think only in the presence of the mysteries of 
 life and death. It is not his fault that this is not intelli- 
 gence, that it knots the brow in sorer doubt rather than 
 shapes the lips to utterance of the things that can 
 never be said. Some of his shorter stories I have found 
 thin and cold to my later reading, and I have never cared 
 much for the House of Seven GahleSy but the other day 
 I was reading the BlUhedale Romance again, and I 
 found it as potent, as significant, as sadly and strangely 
 true as when it first enthralled my soul. 
 
 In those days when I tried to kindle my heart at 
 the cold altar of Goethe, I did read a great deal of his 
 prose and somewhat of his poetry, but it was to be 
 ton years yet before I should go faithfully through 
 with his Faust and come to know its power. For tho 
 present, T read Wilhehn Mcistrr and the Walilverwand- 
 scliaftcn, and worshipped him much at second-hand 
 through Heine. In the mean time T invested such Ger- 
 
 140 
 
GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTIIOKNE, GOETHE, HEINE 
 
 mans as I met with the halo of their national poetry, 
 and there was one lady of whom I heard with awe that 
 she had once known my Heine. When I came to meet 
 her, over a glass of the mild egg-nog which she served 
 at her house on Sunday nights, and she told me about 
 Heine, and how he looked, and some few things he said, 
 I suffered an indescribable disappointment; and if I 
 could have been frank with myself I should have owned 
 to a fear that it might have been something like that, 
 if I had myself met the poet in the flesh, and tried to 
 hold the intimate converse with him that I held in the 
 spirit. But I shut my heart to all such misgivings and 
 went on reading him much more than I read any other 
 German author. I went on writing him too, just as I 
 went on reading and writing Tennyson. Heine was 
 always a personal interest with me, and every word of 
 his made me long to have had him say it to me, and tell 
 me w^hy he said it. In a poet of alien race and language 
 and religion I found a greater sympathy than I have 
 experienced with any other. Perhaps the Jews are still 
 the chosen people, but now they bear the message of 
 humanity, while once they bore the message of divinity. 
 I knew the ugliness of Heine's nature : his revengef ul- 
 ness, and malice, and cruelty, and treachery, and un- 
 cleanness; and yet he was supremely charming among 
 the poets I have read. The tenderness I still feel for 
 him is not a reasoned love, I must own ; but, as I am 
 always asking, when was love ever reasoned ? 
 
 I had a room-mate that winter in Columbus who 
 was already a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and 
 who read Bro^vning as devotedly as I read Heine. I 
 will not say that he wrote hijn as constantly, but if 
 that had been so, I should not have cared. What I 
 could not endure without pangs of secret jealousy was 
 that he should like Heine, too, and should read him, 
 
 141 
 
MY LITERAKY PASSIONS 
 
 though it was but an arm's-length in an English ver- 
 sion. He had found the origins of those tricks and 
 turns of Heine's in Tristram Shandy and the Senti- 
 mental Journey; and this galled me, as if he had 
 shown that some mistress of my soul had studied her 
 graces from another girl, and that it was not all her 
 own hair that she wore. I hid my rancor as well as I 
 could, and took what revenge lay in my power by in- 
 sinuating that he might have a very different view if 
 he read Heine in the original. I also made haste to 
 try my own fate with the Atlantic, and I sent off to 
 Mr. Lowell that poem which he kept so long in order 
 to make sure that Heine had not written it, as well as 
 authorized it. 
 
XXVII 
 
 CHARLES READE 
 
 This was the winter when mj friend Piatt and I 
 made our first literary venture together in those Poems 
 of Two Friends, which hardly passed the circle of our 
 amity; and it was altogether a time of high literary 
 exaltation with me. I walked the streets of the friendly 
 little city by day and by night with my head so full of 
 rhymes and poetic phrases that it seemed as if their 
 buzzing might have been heard several yards away ; and 
 I do not yet see quite how I contrived to keep their 
 music out of my newspaper paragraphs. Out of the 
 newspaper I could not keep it, and from time to time 
 I broke into verse in its columns, to the great amuse- 
 ment of the leading editor, who knew me for a young 
 man with a very sharp tooth for such self-betrayals in 
 others. He wanted to print a burlesque review he wrote 
 of the Poems of Two Friends in our paper, but I 
 would not suffer it. I must allow that it was very 
 funny, and that he was always a generous friend, whose 
 woimds would have been as faithful as any that could 
 have been dealt me then. He did not indeed care much 
 for any poetry but that of Shakespeare and the In- 
 goldshy Legends; and when one morning a State Sen- 
 ator came into the office with a volume of Tennyson, 
 and began to read, 
 
 " The poet in a golden clime was born, 
 With golden stars above; 
 Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn 
 The love of love," 
 
 143 
 
MY LITEKARY PASSIONS 
 
 he bitclicd his chair about, and started in on his leader 
 for the day. 
 
 He might have been more patient if he had kuowai 
 that this State Senator was to be President Gartiekl, 
 Butwho could know anything of the tragical history that 
 was so soon to follow that winter of 1859-GO? Not I; 
 at least I listened rapt by the poet and the reader, and 
 it seemed to me as if the making and the reading of 
 poetry were to go on forever, and that was to be all there 
 was of it. To be sure I had my hard little journalistic 
 misgivings that it was not quite the thing for a State 
 Senator to come round reading Tennyson at ten o'clock 
 in the morning, and I dare say I felt myself superior 
 in my point of view, though I could not resist the 
 charm of the verse. I myself did not bring Tennyson 
 to the office at that time. I brought Thackeray, and I 
 remember that one day when I had read half an hour 
 or so in the Book of Snobs, the leading editor said 
 frankly. Well, now, he guessed we had had enough of 
 that. He apologized afterwards as if he were to blame, 
 and not I, but I dare say I was a nuisance with my 
 different literary passions, and must have made many 
 of my acquaintances very tired of my favorite authors. 
 T had some consciousness of the fact, but I could not 
 help it. 
 
 I ought not to omit from the list of these favorites 
 an author who was then beginning to have his greatest 
 vogue, and who somehow just missed of being a very 
 great one. We were all reading his jaunty, nervy, know- 
 ing books, and some of us were questioning whether we 
 ought not to set him above Thackeray and Dickens and 
 George Eliot, tulli quanii, so great was the effect that 
 Charles Tfeade had with our generation. He was a man 
 who stood at the parting of the ways between realism 
 and romanticism, and if he had been somewhat more 
 
 144 
 
CHARLES READE 
 
 of a man he might have been the master of a gi'eat 
 school of English realism; but, as it was, he remained 
 content to use the materials of realism and produce the 
 effect of romanticism. Ho saw that life itself infinitely 
 outvalued anything that could be feigned about it, but 
 its richness seemed to corrupt him, and he had not tlio 
 clear, ethical conscience which forced George Eliot to 
 be realistic when probably her artistic prepossessions 
 were romantic. 
 
 As yet, however, there was no reasoning of the mat- 
 ter, and Charles Reade was writing books of tremendous 
 adventure and exaggerated character, which he prided 
 himself on deriving from the facts of the world around 
 him. He was intoxicated with the discovery he had 
 made that the truth was beyond invention, but he did 
 not know what to do with the truth in art after he had 
 found it in life, and to this day the English mostly do 
 not. We young people were easily taken with his glit- 
 tering error, and we read him with much the same fury 
 that he wrote. Never Too Late to Mend; Love Me 
 Little, Love Me Tjong; Christie Johnstone; Peg Wof- 
 fington; and then, later, Hard Cash, The Cloister and 
 the Hearth, Foul Play, Put Yourself in His Place — 
 how much they all meant once, or seemed to mean ! 
 
 The first of them, and the other poems and fictions I 
 was reading, meant more to me than the rumors of 
 war that were then filling the air, and that so soon be- 
 came its awful actualities. To us who have our lives 
 so largely in books the material world is always the 
 fable, and the ideal the fact. I walked with my feet 
 on the ground, but my head was in the clouds, as light 
 as any of them. I neither praise nor blame this fact ; 
 but I feel bound to own it, for that time, and for every 
 time in my life, since the witchery of literature began 
 with me. 
 
 145 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 Those two happy winters in Columbus, when I was 
 finding opportunity and recognition, were the heydey 
 of life for me. There lias been no time like them 
 since, though there have been smiling and prosperous 
 times a plenty; for then I was in the blossom of my 
 youth, and what I had not I could hope for without 
 unreason, for I had so much of that which I had most 
 desired. Those times passed, and there came other 
 times, long years of abeyance, and waiting, and defeat, 
 which I thought would never end, but they passed, too. 
 
 I got my appointment of Consul to Venice, and I 
 went home to wait for my passport and to spend the 
 last days, so full of civic trouble, before I should set 
 out for my post. If I hoped to serve my country 
 there and sweep the Confederate cruisers from the 
 Adriatic, I am afraid my prime intent was to add to 
 her literature and to my own credit. I intended, while 
 keeping a sleepless eye out for privateers, to write poems 
 concerning American life which should eclipse any- 
 thing yet done in that kind, and in the mean time I 
 read voraciously and perpetually, to make the days go 
 swiftly which I should have been so glad to have 
 linger. In this month I devoured all the Waverley 
 novels, but T must have been devouring a great many 
 others, for Charles Reade's Christie Johnstone is asso- 
 ciated with the last moment of the last days. 
 
 A few months ago I was at the old home, and I read 
 that book again, after not looking at it for more than 
 thirty years ; and I read it with amazement at its pre- 
 vailing artistic vulgariiy, its prevailing aesthetic error 
 shot here and there with gleams of light, and of the 
 truth that Eeade himself was always dimly groping for. 
 The book is written throughout on the verge of realism, 
 with divinations and conjectvires across its border, and 
 with lapses into the fool's paradise of romanticism, and 
 
 1.46 
 
CHAKLES EEADE 
 
 an apparent content with its inanity and impossibility. 
 But then it was brilliantly new and surprising; it 
 seemed to bo the last word that could be said for the 
 truth in fiction; and it had a spell that held us like an 
 anaesthetic above the ache of parting, and the anxiety 
 for the years that must pass, with all their redoubled 
 chances, before our home circle could be made whole 
 again. I read on, and the rest listened, till the wheels 
 of the old stage made themselves heard in their ap- 
 proach through the absolute silence of the village street. 
 Then we shut the book and all went down to the gate 
 together, and parted under the pale sky of the October 
 night. There was one of the home group whom I was 
 not to see again : the young brother who died in the blos- 
 som of his years before I returned from my far and 
 strange sojourn. He was too young then to share our 
 reading of the novel, but when I ran up to his room to 
 bid him good-by I found him awake, and, with aching 
 hearts, we bade each other good-by forever ! 
 
XXVIII 
 
 DANTE 
 
 I RAN through an Italian grammar on my way across 
 the Atlantic, and from my knowledge of Latin, Spanish, 
 and French, I soon had a reading acquaintance with 
 the language. I had really wanted to go to Germany, 
 that I might carry forward my studies in German 
 literature, and I first applied for the consulate at 
 Munich. The powers at Washington thought it quite 
 the same thing to offer me Rome ; but I found that the 
 income of the Roman consulate would not give me a 
 living, and I was forced to decline it. Then the Presi- 
 dent's private secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. 
 John Hay, who did not know me except as a young 
 Westerner who had written poems in the Atlantic 
 Monthly, asked me how I would like Venice, and 
 promised that they would have the salary put up to a 
 thousand a year, under the new law to embarrass priva- 
 teers. It was really put up to fifteen hundred, and 
 with this income assured me I went out to the city 
 whose influence changed the whole course of my lit- 
 erary life. 
 
 No privateers ever came, though I once had notice 
 from Turin that the Florida had been sighted off An- 
 cona; and I had nearly four years of nearly uninter- 
 rupted leisure at Venice, which I meant to employ in 
 reading all Italian literature, and writing a history of 
 the republic. The history, of course, I expected would 
 ♦ "l48 
 
DANTE 
 
 be a long affair, and I did not quite suppose that I could 
 despatch the literature iu any short time ; besides, I had 
 several considerable poems on hand that occupied mc a 
 good deal, and I worked at these as well as advanced 
 myself in Italian, preparatory to the efforts be- 
 fore me. 
 
 I had already a slight general notion of Italian let- 
 ters from Leigh Hunt, and from other agreeable English 
 Italianates ; and I knew that I wanted to read not only 
 the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and 
 Tasso, but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, 
 Berni, and the rest, who, from what I knew of them, 
 I thought would be even more to my mind. As a matter 
 of fact, and in the process of time, I did read somewhat 
 of all these, but rather in the minor than the major way ; 
 and I soon went off from them to the study of the 
 modern poets, novelists, and playwrights who interested 
 me so much more. After my wonted fashion I read 
 half a dozen of these authors together, so that it would 
 be hard to say which I began with, but I had really a 
 devotion to Dante, though not at that time, or ever for 
 the whole of Dante. During my first year in Venice 
 I met an ingenious priest, who had been a tutor in a 
 patrician family, and who was willing to lead my fal- 
 tering steps through the " Inferno." This part 
 of the " Divine Comedy " I read with a beginner's 
 carefulness, and with a rapture in its beauties, 
 which I will whisper the reader do not appear in 
 every line. 
 
 Again I say it is a great pity that criticism is not 
 honest about the masterpieces of literature, and does 
 not confess that they are not every moment masterly, 
 that they are often dull and tough and dry, as is cer- 
 tainly the case with Dante's. Some day, perhaps, we 
 shall have this way of treating literature, and then the 
 
 149 
 
MY LITEEART PASSIONS 
 
 lover of it Avill not feel obliged to browbeat himself into 
 the belief that if he is not always enjoying himself it 
 is his own fault. At any rate I will permit myself the 
 luxury of frankly saying that while I had a deep sense 
 of the majesty and grandeur of Dante's design, many 
 points of its execution bored me, and that I found the 
 intermixture of small local fact and neighborhood his- 
 tory in the fabric of his lofty creation no part of its 
 noblest effect. What is marvellous in it is its expression 
 of Dante's personality, and I can never think that his 
 personalities enhance its greatness as a work of art. I 
 enjoyed them, however, and I enjoyed them the more, 
 as the innumerable perspectives of Italian history began 
 to open all about me. Then, indeed, I understood the 
 origins if I did not understand the aims of Dante, which 
 there is still much dispute about among those who pro- 
 fess to know them clearly. What I finally perceived 
 was that his poem came through him from the heart of 
 Italian life, such as it was in his time, and that whatever 
 it teaches, his poem expresses that life, in all its splen- 
 dor and squalor, its beauty and deformity, its love and 
 its hate. 
 
 Criticism may torment this sense or that sense out of 
 it, but at the end of the ends the " Divine Comedy " 
 will stand for the patriotism of mediaeval Italy, as far 
 as its ethics is concerned, and for a profound and lofty 
 ideal of beauty, as far as its jiesthetics is concerned. 
 This is vague enough and slight enough, I must con- 
 fess, but I must confess also that I had not even a 
 conception of so much when I first read the ^' Inferno." 
 I went at it very simply, and my enjoyment of it was 
 that sort which finds its account in the fine passages, 
 the brilliant episodes, the striking pictures. This was 
 the effect with me of all the criticism which I had 
 hitherto read, and I am not sure yet that the criticism 
 
 150 
 
DANTE 
 
 wliicli tries to be of a larger scope, and to see things 
 " M-holc," is of any definite effect. As a matter of 
 fact we see nothing whole, neither life nor art. We 
 are so made, in soul and in sense, that we can deal 
 only with parts, with points, with degrees; and the 
 endeavor to compass any entirety must involve a dis- 
 comfort and a danger very threatening to our intel- 
 lectual integrity. 
 
 Or if this postulate is as untenable as all the others, 
 still I am very glad that I did not then lose any fact 
 of the majesty, and beauty, and pathos of the great 
 certain measures for the sake of that fourth dimension 
 of the poem which is not yet made palpable or visible. 
 I took my sad heart's fill of the sad story of " Paolo 
 and Francesca," which I already knew in Leigh 
 Hunt's adorable dilution, and most of the lines read 
 themselves into my memory, where they linger yet. I 
 supped on the horrors of Ugolino's fate with the strong 
 gust of youth, which finds every exercise of sympathy a 
 pleasure. My good priest sat beside me in these rich 
 moments, knotting in his lap the calico handkerchief of 
 the snuff-taker, and entering with tremulous eagerness 
 into my joy in things that he had often before enjoyed. 
 "No doubt he had an inexhaustible pleasure in them 
 apart from mine, for I have found my pleasure in them 
 perennial, and have not failed to taste it as often as I 
 have read or repeated any of the great passages of the 
 poem to myself. This pleasure came often from some 
 vital phrase, or merely the inspired music of a phrase 
 quite apart from its meaning. I did not get then, and I 
 have not got since, a distinct conception of the journey 
 through Hell, and as often as I have tried to under- 
 stand the topography of the poem I have fatigued my- 
 self to no purpose, but I do not think the essential mean- 
 ing was lost upon me. 
 
 151 
 
MY LITERACY PASSIONS 
 
 I dare say my priest had his notion of the general 
 shape and purport, the gross material hody of the 
 thing, but he did not trouble me with it, while we sat 
 tranced together in the jiresence of its soul. He seemed, 
 at times, so lost in the beatific vision, that he forgot my 
 stumblings in the philological darkness, till I appealed 
 to him for help. Then he would read aloud with that 
 magnificent rhythm the Italians have in reading their 
 verse, and the obscured meaning would seem to shine 
 out of the mere music of the poem, like the color the 
 blind feel in sound. 
 
 I do not know what has become of him, but if he 
 is like the rest of the strange group of my guides, 
 philosophers, and friends in literature — the printer, 
 the organ-builder, the machinist, the drug-clerk, and 
 the bookbinder — I am afraid he is dead. In fact, I 
 who was then I, might be said to be dead too, so little 
 is my past self like my present self in anything but 
 the " increasing purpose '' wliicli has kept me one in 
 my love of literature. He was a gentle and kindly 
 man, with a life and a longing, quite apart from his 
 vocation, which were never lived or fulfilled. I did 
 not see him after he ceased to read Dante with me, and 
 in fact I was instructed by the suspicions of my Italian 
 friends to be careful how I consorted with a priest, who 
 might very well be an Austrian spy. I parted with him 
 for no such picturesque reason, for I never believed 
 him other than the truest and faithfulest of friends, 
 but because I was then giving myself more entirely to 
 work in which he could not help me. 
 
 Xaturally enough this was a long poem in the terza 
 rima of the " Divina Commedia," and dealing with a 
 story of our civil war in a fashion so remote that no 
 editor would print it. This was the first fruits and 
 the last of my reading of Dante, in verse, and it was 
 
 1.^)2 
 
DANTE 
 
 not so like Dante as I would have liked to make it; 
 but Dante is not easy to imitate ; he is too unconscious, 
 and too single, too bent upon saying the thing that is 
 in him, with whatever beauty inheres in it, to put on 
 the graces that others may catch. 
 
XXIX 
 
 GOLDONT, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO 
 
 However, this poem only shared the fate of nearly 
 all the others that I wrote at this time; they came 
 back to me with imfailing regularity from all the maga- 
 zine editors of the English-speaking world ; I had no 
 success with any of them till I sent Mr. Lowell a paper 
 on recent Italian comedy for the North American Re- 
 view, which he and Professor JSTorton had then begun 
 to edit. I was in the mean time printing the material 
 of Venetian Life and the Italian Journeys in a Boston 
 newspaper after its rejection by the magazines; and 
 my literary life, almost without my willing it, had 
 taken the course of critical observance of books and men 
 in their actuality. 
 
 That is to say, I was studying manners, in the elder 
 sense of the word, wherever I could get at them in 
 the frank life of the people about me, and in sucH 
 literature of Italy as was then modern. In this pur- 
 suit I made a discovery that greatly interested me, 
 and that specialized my inquiries. I found that the 
 Italians had no novels which treated of their contem- 
 porary life; that they had no modern fiction but the 
 historical romance. I found that if I wished to know 
 their life from their literature I must go to their drama, 
 which was even then endeavoring to give their stage a 
 faithful picture of their civilization. There was even 
 then, in the new circumstance of a people just liberated 
 
 154 
 
GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO 
 
 from every variety of intellectual repression and 
 political oppression, a group of dramatic authors, whose 
 plays were not only delightful to see but delightful to 
 read, working in the good tradition of one of the great- 
 est realists who has ever lived, and producing a drama 
 of vital strength and charm. One of them, whom I. 
 by no means thought the best, has given us a play, 
 knowTi to all the world, which I am almost ready to 
 think with Zola is the greatest play of modern times; 
 or if it is not so, I should be puzzled to name the 
 modern drama that surpasses " La Morte Civile " of 
 Paolo Giacometti. I learned to know all the dramatists 
 pretty well, in the whole range of their work, on the 
 stage and in the closet, and I learned to know still better, 
 and to love supremely, the fine, amiable genius whom, 
 as one of them said, they did not so much imitate as 
 learn from to imitate nature. 
 
 This was Carlo Goldoni, one of the first of the real- 
 ists, but antedating conscious realism so long as to have 
 been born at Venice early in the eighteenth century, and 
 to have come to his hand-to-hand fight with the romanti- 
 cism of his day almost before that century had reached 
 its noon. In the early sixties of our own century I was 
 no more conscious of his realism than he was himself a 
 hundred years before ; but I had eyes in my head, and 
 I saw that what he had seen in Venice so long before 
 was so true that it was the very life of Venice in my 
 own day; and because I have loved the truth in art 
 above all other things, I fell instantly and lastingly in 
 love with Carlo Goldoni. I was reading his memoirs, 
 and learning to know his sweet, honest, simple nature 
 while I was learning to know his work, and I wish that 
 every one who reads his plays would read his life as 
 well ; one must know him before one can fully know 
 them. I believe, in fact, that his autobiography came 
 
 155 
 
MY LITEIIAKY PASSIOKS 
 
 into my hands first. But, at any rate, both arc associ- 
 ated with the fervors and languors of that first summer 
 in Venice, so that I cannot now take up a book of 
 Goldoni's without a renewed sense of that sunlight and 
 moonlight, and of the sounds and silences of a city that 
 is at once tlie stillest and shrillest in the world. 
 
 Perhaps because I never found his work of great 
 ethical or aisthetical proportions, but recognized that 
 it pretended to be good only within its strict limita- 
 tionSj I recur to it now without that painful feeling of 
 a diminished grandeur in it, which attends us so often 
 when we go back to something that once greatly pleased 
 us. It seemed to me at the time that I must have read 
 all his comedies in Venice, but I kept reading new ones 
 after I came home, and still I can take a volume of 
 his from the shelf, and when thirty years are past, find 
 a play or two that I missed before. Their number is 
 very great, but perhaps those that I fancy I have not 
 read, I have really read once or more and forgotten. 
 That might very easily be, for there is seldom anj^hing 
 more poignant in any one of them than there is in the 
 average course of things. The plays are light and 
 amusing transcripts from life, for the most part, and 
 where at times they deepen into powerful situations, or 
 express strong emotions, they do so with persons so 
 little different from the average of our acquaintance 
 that we do not remember just who the persons are. 
 
 There is no doubt but the kindly playwright had his 
 conscience, and meant to make people think as well as 
 laugh. I know of none of his plays that is of wrong 
 effect, or that violates the instincts of purity, or insults 
 common sense with the romantic pretence that wrong 
 will be right if you will only paint it rose-color. He 
 is at some obvious pains to " punish vice and reward 
 virtue," ])ut I do not mean tliat easy morality when I 
 
 ir>(} 
 
GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZE(JL10 
 
 praise his ; I mean the more diflScult sort that recognizes 
 in each man's soul the arbiter not of his fate surely, but 
 surely of his peace, lie never makes a fool of the spec- 
 tator by feigning that passion is a reason or justification, 
 or that suffering of one kind can atone for wrong of 
 another. That was left for the romanticists of our own 
 century to discover; even the romanticists whom Gol- 
 doni drove from the stage, were of that simpler eigh- 
 teenth-century sort who had not yet liberated the indi- 
 vidual from society, but held him accountable in the 
 old way. As for Goldoni himself, he apparently never 
 dreams of transgression; he is of rather an explicit 
 conventionality in most things, and he deals with society 
 as something finally settled. How artfully he deals 
 with it, how decently, how wholesomely, those who know 
 Venetian society of the eighteenth century historically 
 will perceive when they recall the adequate impression 
 he gives of it without offence in character or language or 
 situation. This is the perpetual miracle of his comedy, 
 that it says so much to experience and worldly wisdom, 
 and so little to inexperience and worldly innocence. 
 Xo doubt the Serenest Republic was very strict 
 with the theatre, and suffered it to hold the mirror up 
 to nature only when nature was behaving well, or at 
 least behaving as if young people were present. Yet 
 the Italians are rather plain-spoken, and they recognize 
 facts which our company manners at least do not admit 
 the existence of. I should say that Goldoni was almost 
 English, almost American, indeed, in his observance 
 of the proprieties, and I like this in him; though the 
 proprieties are not virtues, they are very good things, 
 and at least are better than the improprieties. 
 
 This, however, I must own, had not a great deal to 
 do with my liking him so much, and I should be puz- 
 zled to account for my passion, as much in his case 
 
 157 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 as in most others. If there was any reason for it, per- 
 haps it was that he had the power of taking me out 
 of my life, and putting mc into the lives of others, 
 whom I felt to be human beings as much as myself. 
 To make one live in others, this is the highest effect 
 of religion as well as of art, and possibly it will be the 
 highest bliss we shall ever know. I do not pretend 
 that my translation was through my unselfishness; it 
 was distinctly through that selfishness which perceives 
 that self is misery; and I may as well confess here 
 that I do not regard the artistic ecstasy as in any sort 
 noble. It is not noble to love the beautiful, or to live 
 for it, or by it; and it may even not be refining. I 
 would not have any reader of mine, looking forward 
 to some aesthetic career, suppose that this love is any 
 merit in itself; it may be the grossest egotism. If you 
 cannot look beyond the end you aim at, and seek the 
 good which is not your own, all your sacrifice is to 
 yourself and not of yourself, and you might as well 
 be going into business. In itself and for itself it is 
 no more honorable to win fame than to make money, 
 and the wish to do the one is no more elevating than 
 the wish to do the other. 
 
 But in the days I write of I had no conception of 
 this, and I am sure that my blindness to so plain a 
 fact kept me even from seeking and knowing the 
 highest beauty in the things I worshipped. I believe 
 that if I had been sensible of it I should have read 
 much more of such humane Italian poets and novelists 
 as ]\[anzoni and D'Azeglio, whom I perceived to be 
 delightful, without dreaming of them in the length 
 and breadth of their goodness. 'Now and then its extent 
 flashed upon me, but the glimpse was lost to my retro- 
 verted vision almost as soon as won. It is only in think- 
 ing back to them that I can realize How much they might 
 
 158 
 
GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO 
 
 always have meant to me. They were both living in 
 my time in Italy, and they were two men whom I should 
 now like very miicli to have seen, if I could have done 
 so without that futility which seems to attend every 
 effort to pay one's duty to such men. 
 
 The love of country in all the Italian poets and ro- 
 mancers of the long period of the national resurrec- 
 tion ennobled their art in a measure which criticism 
 has not yet taken account of. I conceived of its effect 
 then, but I conceived of it as a misfortune, a fatality; 
 now I am by no means sure that it was so; hereafter 
 the creation of beauty, as we call it, for beauty's sake, 
 may be considered something monstrous. There is 
 forever a poignant meaning in life beyond what mere 
 living involves, and why should not there be this refer- 
 ence in art to the ends beyond art? The situation, 
 the long patience, the hope against hope, dignified and 
 beautified the nature of the Italian writers of that day, 
 and evoked from them a quality which I was too little 
 trained in their school to appreciate. But in a sort I 
 did feel it, I did know it in them all, so far as I knew 
 any of them, and in the tragedies of Manzoni, and in 
 the romances of D'Azeglio, and yet more in the simple 
 and modest records of D'A^eglio's life published after 
 his death, I profited by it, and unconsciously prepared 
 myself for that point of view whence all the arts appear 
 one with all the uses, and there is nothing beautiful 
 that is false. 
 
 I am very glad of that experience of Italian litera- 
 ture, which I look back upon as altogether wholesome 
 and sanative, after my excesses of Heine. 'No doubt 
 it was all a minor affair as compared with equal knowl- 
 edge of French literature, and so far it was a loss of 
 time. It is idle to dispute the general positions of 
 criticism, and there is no useful gainsaying its judg- 
 
 159 
 
MY LTTERAKY PASSIONS 
 
 iiicnt that French literature is a major literature and 
 Italian a minor literature in this century; hut whether 
 this verdict will stand for all time, there may he a 
 reasonahle doubt. Criterions may change, and here- 
 after people may look at the whole affair so differently 
 that a literature which went to the making of a people 
 will not he accounted a minor literature, hut will take 
 its place with the great literary movements. 
 
 I do not insist upon this possibility, and I am far 
 from defending myself for liking the comedies of Gol- 
 doni better than the comedies of Moliere, upon purely 
 resthetic grounds, where there is no question as to the 
 artistic quality. Perhaps it is because I came to 
 !Moliere's comedies later, and with my taste formed 
 for those of Goldoni ; but again, it is here a matter of 
 affection ; I find Goldoni for me more sympathetic, and 
 because he is more sympathetic I cannot do otherwise 
 than find him more natural, more true. I will allow 
 that this is vulnerable, and as I say, I do not defend it. 
 Moliere has a place in literature infinitely loftier than 
 Goldoni's; and he has supplied types, characters, 
 phrases, to the currency of thought, and Goldoni has 
 supplied none. It is, therefore, without reason which 
 I can allege that I enjoy Goldoni more. I am perfectly 
 willing to be rated low for my preference, and yet I 
 think that if it had been Goldoni's luck to have had the 
 great age of a mighty monarchy for his scene, instead 
 of the decline of an outworn republic, his place in litera- 
 ture might have been different. 
 
XXX 
 
 "PASTOR FIDO," "AMINTA," " ROMOLA," "YEAST," 
 "PAUL FERROLL" 
 
 I HAVE always had a great love for the absolutely un- 
 real, the purely fanciful in all the arts, as well as of 
 the absolutely real ; I like the one on a far lower plane 
 than the other, but it delights me, as a pantomime at a 
 theatre does, or a comic opera, which has its being 
 Avholly outside the realm of the probabilities. When I 
 once transport myself to this sphere I have no longer 
 any care for them, and if I could I would not exact of 
 them an allegiance which has no concern with them. 
 Tor this reason I have always vastly enjoyed the arti- 
 ficialities of pastoral poetry ; and in Venice I read with 
 a pleasure few serious poems have given me the " Pastor 
 Fido " of Guarini. I came later but not with fainter 
 zest to the " Aminta " of Tasso, without which, perhaps, 
 the " Pastor Pido " would not have been, and I revelled 
 in the pretty impossibilities of both these charming 
 effects of the liberated imagination. 
 
 I do not the least condemn that sort of thing; one 
 does not live by sweets, unless one is willing to spoil 
 one's digestion ; but one may now and then indulge one's 
 self without harm, and a sugar-plum or two after din- 
 ner may even be of advantage. "What I object to is the 
 romantic thing which asks to be accepted with all its 
 fantasticality on the ground of reality ; that scdms to me 
 hopelessly bad. But I have been able to dwell in their 
 
 161 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 charming out-land or no-land with the shepherds and 
 shepherdesses and nymphs, satyrs, and fauns, of Tasso 
 and Guarini, and I take the finest pleasure in their com- 
 pany, their Dresden china loves and sorrows, their airy 
 raptures, their painless throes, their polite anguish, 
 their tears not the least salt, but flowing as sweet as the 
 purling streams of their enamelled meadows. I wish 
 there were more of that sort of writing; I should like 
 very much to read it. 
 
 The greater part of my reading in Venice, when I 
 began to find that I could not help writing about the 
 place, was in books relating to its life and history, 
 which I made use of rather than found pleasure in. 
 My studies in Italian literature were full of the most 
 charming interest, and if I had to read a good many 
 books for conscience' sake, there were a good many 
 others I read for their own sake. They were chiefly 
 poetry ; and after the first essays in which I tasted the 
 classic poets, they were chiefly the books of the modern 
 poets. 
 
 For the present I went no farther in German litera- 
 ture, and I recurred to it in later years only for deeper 
 and fuller knowledge of Heine; my Spanish was ig- 
 nored, as all first loves are when one has reached the 
 age of twenty -six. My English reading was almost 
 wholly in the Tauchnitz editions, for otherwise English 
 books were not easily come at then and there. George 
 Eliot's Romola was then new, and I read it again and 
 again with the sense of moral enlargement wdiich the 
 first fiction to conceive of the true nature of evil gave 
 all of us who were young in that day. Tito Malema 
 was not only a lesson, he was a revelation, and I 
 trembled before him as in the presence of a warning 
 and a message from the only veritable perdition. Tlis 
 life, in which so much that was good was mixed with 
 
 162 
 
"PASTOR FIDO," "AMINTA," "ROMOLA" 
 
 so much that was bad, lighted up the whole domain of 
 egotism with its glare, and made one feel how near the 
 best and the worst were to each other, and how they 
 sometimes touched without absolute division in texture 
 and color. The book was undoubtedly a favorite of 
 mine, and I did not see then the artistic falterings in it 
 which were afterwards evident to me. 
 
 There were not Romolas to read all the time, 
 though, and I had to devolve upon inferior authors for 
 my fiction the greater part of the time. Of course, I 
 kept up with Our Mutual Friend^ which Dickens was 
 then writing, and with Philip, which was to be the last 
 of Thackeray. I was not yet sufficiently instructed to 
 appreciate Trollope, and I did not read him at all. 
 
 I got hold of Kingsley, and read Yeasty and I think 
 some other novels of his, with great relish, and without 
 sensibility to his Charles Readeish lapses from his art 
 into the material of his art. But of all the minor 
 fiction that I read at this time none impressed me so 
 much as three books which had then already had their 
 vogue, and which I knew somewhat from reviews. 
 They were Paul FerroU, ^Y^ly Paul FcrroU Killed His 
 iWifej, and Day after Day. The first two were, of 
 course, related to each other, and they were all three 
 full of unwholesome force. As to their aesthetic merit 
 I will not say anything, for I have not looked at either 
 of the books for thirty years. I fancy, however, that 
 their strength was rather of the tetanic than the titanic 
 sort. They made your sympathies go with the hero, 
 who deliberately puts his wife to death for the lie she 
 told to break off his marriage with the woman he had 
 loved, and who then marries this tender and gentle 
 girl, and lives in great happiness witli her till her death. 
 Murder in the first degree is flattered by his fate up 
 to the point of letting him die peacefully in Boston 
 
 163 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 after these dealings of his in England; and altogether 
 his story could not be commended to people with a 
 morbid taste for bloodshed. Xaturally enough the 
 books were written by a perfectly good woman, the wife 
 of an English clerg}Tnan, whose friends were greatly 
 scandalized by them. As a sort of atonement she wrote 
 Day after Day, the story of a dismal and joyless orphan, 
 who dies to the sound of angelic music, faint and far- 
 heard, filling the whole chamber. A carefuller study of 
 the phenomenon reveals the fact that the seraphic 
 strains are produced by the steam escaping from the 
 hot-water bottles at the feet of the invalid. 
 
 As usual, I am not able fully to account for my liking 
 of these books, and I am so far from wishing to justify 
 it that I think I ought rather to excuse it. But since I 
 was really greatly fascinated with them, and read them 
 with an ever-growing fascination, the only honest thing 
 to do is to own my subjection to them. It would be an 
 interesting and important question for criticism to 
 study, that question why certain books at a certain time 
 greatly dominate our fancy, and others manifestly bet- 
 ter have no influence with us. A curious proof of the 
 subtlety of these Paul Eerroll books in the appeal they 
 made to the imagination is the fact that I came to them 
 fresh from Romolo, and full of horror for myself in 
 Tito ; yet I sympathized throughout with Paul Ferroll, 
 and was glad when he got away. 
 
XXXI 
 
 ERCKMANN-CHxVfRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON 
 
 On my return to Americca, my literary life immedi- 
 ately took such form that most of my reading was done 
 for review. I wrote at first a good many of the lighter 
 criticisms in The Nation, at ISTew York, and after I 
 went to Boston to hecome the assistant editor of the 
 Atlantic Monthly I wrote the literary notices in that 
 periodical for four or five years. 
 
 It was only when I came into full charge of the maga- 
 zine that I hegan to share these labors with others, and 
 I continued them in some measure as long as I had any 
 relation to it. My reading for reading's sake, as I had 
 hitherto done it, was at an end, and I read primarily 
 for the sake of writing about the book in hand, and 
 secondarily for the pleasure it might give me. This 
 was always considerable, and sometimes so great that I 
 forgot the critic in it, and read on and on for pleasure. 
 I was master to review this book or that as I chose, and 
 generally I reviewed only books I liked to read, though 
 sometimes I felt that I ought to do a book, and did it 
 from a sense of duty ; these perfunctory criticisms I do 
 not think were very useful, but I tried to make tliera 
 honest. 
 
 In a long sickness, which I had shortly after I went 
 to live in Cambridge, a friend brought me several of 
 the stories of Erckmann-Chatrian, whom people were 
 then reading much more than they are now, I believe; 
 
 165 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIOXS 
 
 and I had a great joy in them, which I have renewed 
 since as often as I have read one of their books. They 
 have much the same quality of simple and sincerely 
 moralized realism that I found afterwards in the work 
 of the early Swiss realist, Jeremias Gotthelf, and very 
 likely it was this that captivated my judgment. As for 
 my affections, battered and exhausted as they ought to 
 have been in many literary passions, they never went 
 out with fresher enjoyment than they did to the charm- 
 ing story of UAmi Fritz, which, when I merely name 
 it, breathes the spring sun and air about me, and fills 
 my senses with the beauty and sweetness of cherry blos- 
 soms. It is one of the loveliest and kindest books that 
 ever was written, and my heart belongs to it still ; to be 
 sure it belongs to several hundreds of other books in 
 equal entirety. 
 
 It belongs to all the books of the great ISTorwegian 
 Bjorstjerne Bjornson, whose Arne, and whose Happy 
 Boy, and whose Fisher Maiden I read in this same for- 
 tunate sickness. I have since read every other book of 
 his that I could lay hands on: Sinnove SolbaJcJcen, and 
 Magnliild, and Captain Manzana, and Dust, and In 
 God's Ways, and Sigurd, and plays like " The Glove " 
 and " The Bankrupt." He has never, as some authors 
 have, dwindled in my sense; when I open his page, 
 there I find him as large, and free, and bold as ever. 
 lie is a great talent, a clear conscience, a beautiful art. 
 He has my love not only because he is a poet of the 
 most exquisite verity, but because he is a lover of men, 
 with a faith in them such as can move mountains of 
 ignorance, and dulness, and greed. He is next to 
 Tolstoy in his willingness to give himself for his kind ; 
 if he would rather give himself in fighting than in suf- 
 fering wrong, I do not know that his self-sacrifice is less 
 in degree. 
 
 166 
 
ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORNSON 
 
 I confess, however, that I do not think of him as a 
 patriot and a socialist when I read him; he is then 
 purely a poet, whose gift holds me rapt ahove the world 
 where I have left my troublesome and wearisome self 
 for the time. I do not know of any novels that a young 
 cndeavorer in fiction could more profitably read than 
 his for their large and simple method, their trust of the 
 reader's intelligence, their sympathy with life. With 
 him the problems are all soluble by the enlightened and 
 regenerate will ; there is no baffling Fate, but a helping 
 God. In Bjornson there is nothing of Ibsen's scornful 
 despair, nothing of his anarchistic contempt, but his art 
 is full of the Avarmth and color of a poetic soul, with no 
 touch of the icy cynicism which freezes you in the other. 
 I have felt the cold fascination of Ibsen, too, and I 
 should be far from denying his mighty mastery, but he 
 has never possessed me with the delight that Bjornson 
 has. 
 
 In those days I read not only all the new books, but 
 I made many forays into the past, and came back now 
 and then with rich spoil, though I confess that for the 
 most part I had my trouble for my pains ; and I wish 
 now that I had given the time I spent on the English 
 classics to contemporary literature, which I have not 
 the least hesitation in saying I like vastly better. In 
 fact, I believe that the preference for the literature of 
 the past, except in the case of the greatest masters, is 
 mainly the affectation of people who cannot othermse 
 distinguish themselves from the herd, and who wish 
 very much to do so. ^ 
 
 There is much to be learned from the minor novel- 
 ists and poets of the past about people's ways of think- 
 ing and feeling, but not much that the masters do not 
 give you in better quality and fuller measure; and I 
 should say, Read the old masters and let their schools 
 
 167 
 
]\rY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 go, ratlior tlian neglect any possible master of your own 
 time. Above all, I would not have any one read an old 
 author merely that he might not be ignorant of him ; 
 that is most beggarly, and no good can come of it. 
 When literature becomes a duty it ceases to be a passion, 
 and all the schoolmastering in the world, solemnly ad- 
 dressed to the conscience, cannot make the fact other- 
 wise. It is well to read for the sake of knowing a cer- 
 tain ground if you are to make use of your knowledge 
 in a certain way, but it would be a mistake to suppose 
 that this is a love of literature. 
 
XXXII 
 
 TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH 
 
 In those years at Cambridge my most notable literary 
 experience without donbt was the knowledge of Tour- 
 guenief's novels, which began to be recognized in all 
 their greatness about the middle seventies. I think 
 they made their way with such of our public as were 
 able to appreciate them before they were accepted in 
 England ; but that does not matter. It is enough for 
 the present purpose that 8moJce, and Lisa, and On the 
 Eve, and Dimitrl Roudine, and Spring Floods, passed 
 one after another through my hands, and that I formed 
 for their author one of the profoundest literary passions 
 of my life. 
 
 I now think that there is a finer and truer method 
 than his, but in its way, Tourguenief's method is as 
 far as art can go. That is to say, his fiction is to the 
 last degree dramatic. The persons are sparely de- 
 scribed, and briefly accounted for, and then they are 
 left to transact their affair, whatever it is, with the 
 least possible comment or explanation from the author. 
 The effect flows naturally from their characters, and 
 when they have done or said a thing you conjecture 
 why as unerringly as you would if they were people 
 whom you knew outside of a book. I had already con- 
 ceived of the possibility of this from Bjornson, who 
 practises the same method, but I was still too sunken 
 in the gross darkness of English fiction to rise to a full 
 
 1G9 
 
MY LITERAKY PASSIONS 
 
 consciousness of its excellence. When I remembered 
 the deliberate and impertinent moralizing of Thackeray, 
 tlie clumsy exegesis of George Eliot, the knowing nods 
 and winks of Charles Reade, the stage-carpentering and 
 lime-lighting of Dickens, even the fine and important 
 analysis of Hawthorne, it was with a joyful astonish- 
 ment that I realized the great art of Tourguenief. 
 
 Here was a master who was apparently not trying to 
 work out a plot, who was not even trying to work out a 
 character, but was standing aside from the whole affair, 
 and letting the characters work the plot out. The 
 method was revealed perfectly in Smolie, but each suc- 
 cessive book of his that I read was a fresh proof of its 
 truth, a revelation of its transcendent superiority. I 
 think now that I exaggerated its value somewhat; but 
 this was inevitable in the first surprise. The sane 
 aesthetics of the first Russian author I read, however, 
 have seemed more and more an essential part of the 
 sane ethics of all the Russians I have read. It was 
 not only that Tourguenief had painted life truly, but 
 that he had painted it conscientiously. 
 
 Tourguenief was of that great race which has more 
 than any other fully and freely uttered human nature, 
 without either false pride or false shame in its naked- 
 ness. His themes were oftenest those of the French 
 novelist, but how far he was from handling them in 
 the French manner and with the French spirit ! In his 
 hands sin suffered no dramatic punishment; it did not 
 always show itself as unhappiness, in the personal sense, 
 but it was always unrest, and without the hope of peace. 
 If the end did not appear, tlie fact tliat it must be miser- 
 able always appeared. Life showed itself to me in dif- 
 ferent colors after I had once read Tourguenief; it 
 became more serious, more awful, and with mystical 
 responsibilities I had not known before. Hy gay Amer- 
 
 170 
 
TOUKGUENIEF, AUERBACH 
 
 ican horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of 
 the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time 
 nature revealed herself to me through him with an 
 intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There arc 
 passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth 
 that seems drawn from the reader's own knowledge: 
 who else but Tourguenief and one's own most secret self 
 ever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night air draw- 
 ing in at the open window, of the fires burning in the 
 darkness on the distant fields ? I try in vain to give 
 some notion of the subtle sympathy with nature which 
 scarcely put itself into words with him. As for the 
 people of his fiction, though they were of orders and 
 civilizations so remote from my experience, they were 
 of the eternal human types whose origin and potentiali- 
 ties every one may find in his own heart, and I felt 
 their verity in every touch, 
 
 I camiot describe the satisfaction his work gave me ; 
 I can only impart some sense of it, perhaps, by saying 
 that it was like a happiness I had been waiting for all 
 my life, and now that it had come, I was richly con- 
 tent forever. I do not mean to say that the art of 
 Tourguenief surpasses the art of Bjornson; I think 
 Bjornson is quite as fine and true. But the Norwe- 
 gian deals with simple and j)rimitive circumstances for 
 the most part, and always with a small world ; and the 
 Russian has to do with human nature inside of its 
 conventional shells, and his scene is often as large as 
 Europe. Even when it is as remote as IN'orway, it is 
 still related to the great capitals by the history if not 
 the actuality of the characters. Most of Tourguenief's 
 books I have read many times over, all of them I have 
 read more than twice. Eor a number of years I read 
 them again and again without much caring for other 
 fiction. It was only the other day that I read Smohe 
 
 171 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 through once more, with no diminished sense of its 
 truth, but with somewhat less than my first satisfaction 
 in its art. Perhaps this was because I had reached 
 the point through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where 
 I was impatient even of the artifice that hid itself. In 
 Smol'e I was now aware of an artifice that kept out of 
 sight, but was still always present somewhere, invisibly 
 operating the story. 
 
 I must not fail to o^^^l the great pleasure that I have 
 had in some of the stories of Auerbach. It is true that 
 I have never cared greatly for On the Heights, which in 
 its dealing with royalties seems too far aloof from the 
 ordinary human life, and which on the moral side 
 finally fades out into a German mistiness. But I speak 
 of it with the imperfect knowledge of one who was 
 never able to read it quite through, and I have really 
 no right to speak of it. The book of his that pleased me 
 most was Edelweiss, which, though the story was some- 
 what too catastrophical, seemed to me admirably good 
 and true. I still think it very delicately done, and 
 with a deep insight ; but there is something in all Auer- 
 bach's work which in the retrospect affects me as if it 
 dealt with pigmies. 
 
XXXIII 
 
 CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES 
 
 I HAVE always loved history, wliether in the annals 
 of peoples or in the lives of persons, and I have at all 
 times read it. I am not sure but I rather prefer it to 
 fiction, though I am aware that in looking back over 
 this record of my literary passions I must seem to have 
 cared for very little besides fiction, I read at the time 
 I have just been speaking of, nearly all the new poetry 
 as it came out, and I constantly recurred to it in its 
 mossier sources, where it sprang from the green Eng- 
 lish ground, or trickled from the antique urns of Italy. 
 
 I do not think that I have ever cared much for meta- 
 physics, or to read much in that way, but from time to 
 time I have done something of it. 
 
 Travels, of course, I have read as part of the great 
 human story, and autobiography has at times appeared 
 to me the most delightful reading in the world ; I have 
 a taste in it that rejects nothing, though I have never 
 enjoyed any autobiographies so much as those of such 
 Italians as have reasoned of themselves. 
 
 I suppose I have not been a great reader of the 
 drama, and I do not know that I have ever greatly 
 relished any plays but those of Shakespeare and Gol- 
 doni, and two or three of Beaumont and Fletcher, and 
 one or so of Marlow's, and all of Ibsen's and Maeter- 
 linck's. The taste for the old English dramatists I be- 
 lieve I have never formed. 
 
 173 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 Criticism, ever since I filled myself so full of it in 
 mj boj'hood, I have not cared for, and often I have 
 found it repulsive. 
 
 I have a fondness for books of popular science, per- 
 haps because they too are part of the human story. 
 
 I have read somewhat of the theology of the Sweden- 
 borgian faith I was brought up in, but I have not 
 read other theological works; and I do not apologize 
 for not liking any. The Bible itself was not much 
 known to me at an age when most children have been 
 obliged to read it several times over ; the gospels were 
 indeed familiar, and they have always been to me the 
 supreme human story; but the rest of the New Testa- 
 ment I had not read when a man grown, and only 
 passages of the Old Testament, like the story of the 
 Creation, and the story of Joseph, and the poems of 
 Job and Ecclesiastes, with occasional Psalms. I there- 
 fore came to the Scriptures with a sense at once fresh 
 and mature, and I can never be too glad that I learned 
 to see them under the vaster horizon and in the truer 
 perspectives of experience. 
 
 Again as lights on the human story I have liked to 
 read such books of medicine as have fallen in my way, 
 and I seldom take up a medical periodical without 
 reading of all the cases it describes, and in fact every 
 article in it. 
 
 But I did not mean to make even this slight departure 
 from the main business of these papers, which is to 
 confide my literary passions to the reader ; he probably 
 has had a great many of his own. I think I may class 
 the " Ring and the Book " among them, though I 
 have never been otherwise a devotee of Browning. But 
 I was still newly home from Italy, or away from home, 
 when that poem appeared, and whether or not it was 
 because it took me so with the old enchantment of that 
 
 174 
 
CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES 
 
 land, I gave my heart promptly to it. Of course, there 
 are terrible longueurs in it, and you do get tired of the 
 same story told over and over from the different points 
 of view, and yet it is snch a great story, and unfolded 
 with such a magnificent breadth and noble fulness, that 
 one who blames it lightly blames himself heavil_y. 
 There are certain books of it — " Caponsacchi's story," 
 " Pompilia's story," and " Count Guido's story " — that 
 I think ought to rank with the greatest poetry ever writ- 
 ten, and that have a direct, dramatic expression of the 
 fact and character, which is without rival. There is a 
 noble and lofty pathos in the close of Caponsacchi's 
 statement, an artless and manly break from his self- 
 control throughout, that seems to me the last possible 
 effect in its kind; and Pompilia's story holds all of 
 womanhood in it, the purity, the passion, the tender- 
 ness, the helplessness. But if I begin to praise this or 
 any of the things I have liked, I do not know when I 
 should stop. Yes, as I think it over, the " Eing and 
 the Book " appears to me one of the great few poems 
 whose splendor can never suffer lasting eclipse, how- 
 ever it may have presently fallen into abeyance. If it 
 had impossibly come down to us from some elder time, 
 or had not been so perfectly modern in its recognition 
 of feeling and motives ignored by the less conscious 
 poetry of the past, it might be ranked with the great 
 epics. 
 
 Of other modern poets I have read some things of 
 William Morris, like the " Life and Death of Jason," 
 the " Story of Gudrun," and the " Trial of Guinevere," 
 with a pleasure little less than passionate, and I have 
 equally liked certain pieces of Dante Rossetti. I have 
 had a high joy in some of the great minor poems of 
 Emerson, where the goddess moves over Concord 
 meadows with a gait that is Greek, and her sandalled 
 
 175 
 
-MY TJTETJAP.Y PASSTONR 
 
 tread expresses a high scorn of the india-nibher boots 
 that the American muse so often gets about in. 
 
 The " Commemoration Ode " of Lowell has also been 
 a source from which I drank something of the divine 
 ecstasy of the poet's own exalted mood, and I would 
 set this level with the B'kjIow Papers, high above all 
 his other work, and chief of the things this age of our 
 country shall be remembered by. Holmes I always 
 loved, and not for his wit alone, which is so obvious 
 to liking, but for those rarer and richer strains of his 
 in which he show^s himself the lover of nature and the 
 brother of men. The deep spiritual insight, the celes- 
 tial music, and the brooding tenderness of Whittier 
 have always taken me more than his fierier appeals and 
 his civic virtues, though I do not underrate the value 
 of these in his verse. 
 
 My acquaintance with these modern poets, and many 
 I do not name because they are so many, has been 
 continuous with their work, and my pleasure in it not 
 inconstant if not equal. I have spoken before of Long- 
 fellow as one of my first passions, and I have never 
 ceased to delight in him; but some of the very newest 
 and youngest of our poets have given me thrills of 
 happiness, for which life has become lastingly sweeter. 
 
 Long after I had thought never to read it — in fact 
 when I was nel raezzo del cammin di nostra vita — I 
 read Milton's " Paradise Lost," and found in it a 
 majestic beauty that justified to me the fame it wears, 
 and eclipsed the w^orth of those lesser poems which T 
 had ignorantly accounted his worthiest. In fact, it was 
 one of the literary passions of the time I speak of, and it 
 shared my devotion for the novels of Tourguenief and 
 (shall I own it?) the romances of Cherbuliez. After 
 all, it is best to be honest, and if it is not best, it is at 
 
 1Y6 
 
CERTAIN rilEFERENCES AND EXPEIIIENCES 
 
 least easiest ; it involves the fewest embarrassing conse- 
 quences ; and if I confess the spell that the Revenge of 
 Joseph Noircl cast upon me for a time, perhaps I shall 
 be able to whisper the reader behind my hand that I 
 have never yet read the " J!Cneid " of Virgil ; the 
 " Georgics," yes ; but the " iEneid," no. Some time, 
 however, I expect to read it and to like it innnenscly. 
 That is often the case with things that I have held aloof 
 from indefinitely. 
 
 One fact of my experience which the reader may find 
 interesting is that when I am writing steadily I have 
 little relish for reading. I fancy that reading is not 
 merely a pastime when it is apparently the merest 
 pastime, but that a certain measure of mind-stuff is 
 used up in it, and that if you are using up all the mind 
 stuff you have, much or little, in some other way, you do 
 not read because you have not the mind-stuff for it. At 
 any rate it is in this sort only that I can account for 
 my failure to read a great deal during four years of 
 the amplest quiet that I spent in the country at Belmont, 
 whither we removed from Cambridge. I had promised 
 myself that in this quiet, now that I had given up re- 
 viewing, and wrote little or nothing in the magazine 
 but my stories, I should again read purely for the 
 pleasure of it, as I had in the early days before the 
 critical purpose had qualified it with a bitter alloy. 
 But I found that not being forced to read a number of 
 books each month, so that I might write about them, I 
 did not read at all, comparatively speaking. To be 
 sure I dawdled over a great many books that T had read 
 before, and a number of memoirs and biographies, but 
 I had no intense pleasure from reading in that time, 
 and have no passions to record of it. It may liave been 
 a period when no new thing happened in literature 
 deeply to stir one's interest; I only state the fact con- 
 
 177 
 
MY LITEEAEY PASSIONS 
 
 ccrning myself, and suggest the most plausible theory I 
 can think of. 
 
 I wish also to note another incident, which may or 
 may not have its psj'chological value. An important 
 event of these years was a long sickness which kept 
 me helpless some seven or eight weeks, when I was 
 forced to read in order to pass the intolerable time. 
 But in this misery I found that I could not read any- 
 thing of a dramatic cast, whether in the form of plays 
 or of novels. The mere sight of the printed page, 
 broken up in dialogue, was anguish. Yet it was not 
 the excitement of the fiction that I dreaded, for I con- 
 sumed great numbers of narratives of travel, and was 
 not in the least troubled by hairbreadth escapes, or 
 shipwrecks, or perils from wild beasts or deadly ser- 
 pents ; it was the dramatic effect contrived by the play- 
 ■UTight or novelist, and worked up to in the speech 
 of his characters that I could not bear. I found a like 
 impossible stress from the Sunday newspaper which a 
 mistaken friend sent in to me, and which with its 
 scare - headings, and artfully - wrought sensations, had 
 the effect of fiction, as in fact it largely was. 
 
 At the end of four years we went abroad again, and 
 travel took away the appetite for reading as completely 
 as writing did. I recall nothing read in that year in 
 Europe which moved me, and I think I read very little, 
 except the local histories of the Tuscan cities which I 
 afterwards wrote of. 
 
XXXIV 
 
 VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY 
 
 In fact, it was not till I returned, and took up my life 
 again in Boston, in the old atmosphere of work, that 
 I turned once more to books. Even then I had to wait 
 for the time when I undertook a critical department 
 in one of the magazines, before I felt the rise of the 
 old enthusiasm for an author. That is to say, I had to 
 begin reading for business again before I began reading 
 for pleasure. One of the first great pleasures which I 
 had upon these terms was in the book of a contemporary 
 Spanish author. This was the Marta y Maria of Ar- 
 mando Palacio Valdes, a novelist who delights me be- 
 yond words by his friendly and abundant humor, his 
 feeling for character, and his subtle insight. I like 
 every one of his books that I have read, and I believe 
 that I have read nearly every one that he has written. 
 As I mention Riverito, Maximina, Tin Idilio de un In- 
 ferno, La Hermana de San Sulpizio, El Cuarto Poder, 
 Espuma, the mere names conjure up the scenes and 
 events that have moved me to tears and laughter, and 
 filled me with a vivid sense of the life portrayed in 
 them. I think the Marta y Maria one of the most truth- 
 ful and profound fictions I have read, and Maximina 
 one of the most pathetic, and La Hermana de San Sid- 
 pizio one of the most amusing. Fortunately, these 
 books of Valdes's have nearly all been translated, and 
 
 179 
 
MY LITEr.AET PASSIONS 
 
 ibe reader may test the matter in English, though it 
 necessarily halts somewhat behind the Spanish. 
 
 I do not know whether the Spaniards themselves 
 rank Valdes with Galdos or not, and I have no wish 
 to decide npon their relative merits. Thev are both 
 present passions of mine, and I may say of the Dona 
 Perfecla of Galdos tliat no book, if I except those of 
 the greatest Russians, has given me a keener and deeper 
 impression ; it is infinitely pathetic, and is full of 
 humor, which, if more caustic than that of Valdes, is 
 not less delicious. But I like all the books of Galdos 
 that I have read, and though he seems to have worked 
 more tardily out of his romanticism than Valdes, since 
 he has worked finally into such realism as that of Leon 
 Eoch, his greatness leaves nothing to be desired. 
 
 I have read one of the books of Emilia Pardo-Bazan, 
 called Morriha, which must rank her with the great 
 realists of her country and age ; she, too, has that humor 
 of her race, which brings us nearer the Spanish than 
 any other non- Anglo-Saxon people. 
 
 A contemporary Italian, whom I like hardly less 
 than these noble Spaniards, is Giovamii Verga, who 
 wrote I Malavoglia, or, as we call it in English, Tlie 
 House hy ilic Medlar Tree: a story of infinite beauty, 
 tenderness and truth. As I have said before, I think 
 with Zola that Giacometti, the Italian author of " La 
 ^Rforte Civile," has written almost the greatest play, all 
 round, of modern times. 
 
 But what shall I say of Zola himself, and my admira- 
 tion of his epic greatness? About his material there 
 is no disputing among people of our Puritanic tradi- 
 tion. It is simply abhorrent, but when you have once 
 granted him his material for his own use, it is idle and 
 foolish to deny his power. Every literary theory of 
 mine was contrary to him when I took up L'Assommoir, 
 
 180 
 
VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE 
 
 thuugli uuc'uuaciously I had always been as inucJj of 
 a realist as 1 could, but the book possessed me with 
 the same fascination that I felt the other day in read- 
 ing his L" Argent. The critics know now that Zola is 
 not the realist he used to fancy himself, and he is full 
 of the best qualities of the romanticism he has hated 
 so much ; but for what he is, there is but one novelist 
 of our time, or of any, that outmasters him, and that 
 is Tolstoy. For my own part, I think that the books 
 of Zola are not immoral, but they are indecent through 
 the facts that they nakedly represent ; they are infinitely 
 more moral than tlie books of any other French novelist. 
 This may not be saying a great deal, but it is saying the 
 truth, and I do not mind owning that he has been one 
 of my great literary passions, almost as great as Flau- 
 bert, and greater than Daudet or Maupassant, though 
 I have profoundly appreciated the exquisite artistry of 
 both these. ^N^o French writer, however, has moved me 
 so much as the Spanish, for the French are wanting in 
 the humor which endears these, and is the quintessence 
 of their charm. 
 
 You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does 
 not joke, and I suppose this is what deprived me of a 
 final satisfaction in the company of Anthony Trollope, 
 who jokes heavily or not at all, and whom I should 
 otherwise make bold to declare the greatest of English 
 novelists ; as it is, I must put before him Jane Austen, 
 whose books, late in life, have been a youthful rapture 
 with me. Even without much humor Trollope's books 
 have been a vast pleasure to me through their simple 
 truthfulness. Perhaps if they were more humorous 
 they would not be so true to the British life and 
 character present in them in the whole length and 
 breadth of its expansive commonplaceness. It is their 
 serious fidelity which gives them a value unique in 
 
 181 
 
MY LITERAHY PASSIONS 
 
 literature, and which if it were carefull}' analyzed 
 would afford a principle of the same quality in an 
 author ulio was undoubtedly one of the finest of artists 
 as well as the most Philistine of men. 
 
 I came rather late, but I came with all the ardor of 
 what seems my perennial literary youth, to the love of 
 Thomas Hardy, whom I first knew in his story A Pair 
 of Blue Eyes. As usual, after I had read this book 
 and felt the new charm in it, I washed to read the 
 books of no other author, and to read his books over 
 and over. I love even the faults of Hardy; I will let 
 him play me any trick he chooses (and he is not above 
 playing tricks, when he seems to get tired of his story 
 or perplexed with it), if only he will go on making his 
 peasants talk, and his rather uncertain ladies get in and 
 out of love, and serve themselves of every chance that 
 fortune offers them of having their own way. We 
 shrink from the unmorality of the Latin races, but 
 Hardy has divined in the heart of our o-rti race a linger- 
 ing heathenism, which, if not Greek, has certainly been 
 no more baptized than the neo-hellenism of the Pari- 
 sians. His heroines especially exemplify it, and I 
 should be safe in saying that his EiheTbertas, his Eu- 
 stacias, his Elfridas, his Batlishehas, his Fancies, are 
 wholly pagan. T should not dare to ask how much of 
 their charm came from that fact; and the author does 
 not fail to show you how much harm, so that it is not on 
 my conscience. His people live very close to the heart 
 of nature, and no one, unless it is Tourguenief, gives 
 you a richer and sweeter sense of her unity with human 
 nature. Hardy is a great poet as well as a great 
 humorist, and if he were not a great artist also his 
 humor would be enough to endear him to me. 
 
XXXV 
 
 TOLSTOY 
 
 I COME now, though not quite in the order of time, 
 to the noblest of all these enthusiasms — namely, my 
 devotion for the writings of Lyof Tolstoy, I should 
 wish to speak of him with his own incomj)arable 
 truth, yet I do not know how to give a notion of his 
 influence without the effect of exaggeration. As much 
 as one merely human being can help another I believe 
 that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in 
 aesthetics only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never 
 again see life in the way I saw it before I knew him. 
 Tolstoy awakens in his reader the will to be a man; 
 not effectively, not spectacularly, but simply, really. 
 He leads you back to the only true ideal, away from 
 that false standard of the gentleman, to the Man who 
 sought not to be distinguished from other men, but 
 identified with them, to that Presence in which the 
 finest gentleman shows his alloy of vanity, and the 
 greatest genius shrinks to the measure of his miserable 
 egotism. I learned from Tolstoy to try character and 
 motive by no other test, and though I am perpetually 
 false to that sublime ideal myself, still the ideal re- 
 mains with me, to make me ashamed that I am not 
 true to it. Tolstoy gave me heart to hope that the 
 world may yet be made over in the image of Him who 
 died for it, when all Ctesars things shall be finally 
 rendered unto CiTsar, and men shall come into their 
 
 183 
 
MY LITEKARY PASSIONS 
 
 o^vn, into the right to labor and the right to enjoy the 
 fruits of their labor, each one master of himself and 
 servant to every other. lie taught me to see life not 
 as a chase of a forever impossible personal happiness, 
 but as a field for endeavor towards the happiness of the 
 whole human family ; and I can never lose this vision, 
 however I close my eyes, and strive to see my own 
 interest as the highest good. He gave me new criterions, 
 new principles, which, after all, were those that are 
 taught us in our earliest childhood, before we have 
 come to the evil wisdom of the world. As I read his 
 different ethical books, What to Do, My Confession, 
 and Ml) Religion, I recognized their truth with a rapt- 
 ure such as I have known in no other reading, and I 
 rendered them my allegiance, heart and soul, with 
 whatever sickness of the one and despair of the other. 
 They have it yet, and I believe they will have it while 
 I live. It is with inexpressible astonishment that I 
 hear them attainted of pessimism, as if the teaching 
 of a man whose ideal was simple goodness must mean 
 the prevalence of evil. The way he showed me seemed 
 indeed impossible to my will, but to my conscience it 
 was and is the only possible way. If there is any 
 point on which he has not convinced my reason it is 
 that of our ability to walk this narrow way alone. 
 Even there he is logical, but as Zola subtly distin- 
 guishes in speaking of Tolstoy's essay on " Money," he 
 is not reasonable. Solitude enfeebles and palsies, and 
 it is as comrades and brothers that men must save the 
 world from itself, rather than themselves from the 
 world. It was so the earliest Christians, who had all 
 things common, understood the life of Christ, and I 
 believe that the latest will understand it so. 
 
 I have spoken first of the ethical works of Tolstoy, 
 because they are of the first importance to me, but I 
 
 184 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 jliink (li;il Ills trstlietical works are as perfect. To my 
 thiuking tliev traiisecurl in trutli, wliieh is the highest 
 beauty, all other works of fiction that Jiave been written, 
 and I believe that they do this because they obey the 
 law of the author's own life. His conscience is one 
 ethically and one aesthetically ; with his will to be true 
 to himself he cannot be false to his knowledge of others. 
 I thought the last word in literary art had been said to 
 me by the novels of Tourguenief, but it seemed like the 
 first, merely, when I began to acquaint myself with the 
 simpler method of Tolstoy. I came to it by accident, 
 and without any manner of preoccupation in The Cos- 
 saclcs, one of his early books, which had been on my 
 shelves unread for five or six years. I did not know 
 even Tolstoy's name when I opened it, and it was with 
 a kind of amaze that I read it, and felt word by word, 
 and line by line, the truth of a new art in it. 
 
 I do not know how it is that the great Russians 
 have the secret of simplicity. Some say it is because 
 they have not a long literary past and are not conven- 
 tionalized by the usage of many generations of other 
 writers, but this will hardly account for the brotherly 
 directness of their dealing with human nature ; the 
 absence of experience elsewhere characterizes the art- 
 ist with crudeness, and simplicity is the last effect of 
 knowledge. Tolstoy is, of course, the first of them in 
 this supreme grace. He has not only Tourguenief's 
 transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the 
 personality which we mistakenly value in style, and 
 which ought no more to be there than the artist's per- 
 sonality should be in a portrait ; but he has a method 
 which not only seems without artifice, but is so. I 
 can get at the manner of most writers, and tell what 
 it is, but I should be baffled to tell what Tolstoy's 
 manner is; perhaps he has no manner. This appears 
 
 185 
 
MY LITEEAKY PASSIONS 
 
 to me true of his novels, ■which, with their vast variety 
 of character and incident, are alike in their single en- 
 deavor to get the persons living before you, both in 
 their action and in the peculiarly dramatic interpreta- 
 tion of their emotion and cogitation. There are plenty 
 of novelists to tell you that their characters felt and 
 thought so and so, but you have to take it on trust; 
 Tolstoy alone makes you know how and why it was so 
 with them and not otheru'ise. If there is anything in 
 him which can be copied or burlesqued it is this abil- 
 ity of his to show men inwardly as well as outwardly ; 
 it is the only trait of his which I can put my hand on. 
 
 After The Cossacks I read Anna Karenina with a 
 deepening sense of the author's unrivalled greatness. I 
 thought that I saw through his eyes a human affair of 
 that most sorrowful sort as it must appear to the In- 
 finite Compassion ; the book is a sort of revelation of 
 human nature in circumstances that have been so per- 
 petually lied about that we have almost lost the faculty 
 of perceiving the truth concerning an illicit love. 
 When 3^ou have once read Anna Karenina you know 
 how fatally miserable and essentially unhappy such a 
 love must be. But the character of Karenin himself 
 is quite as important as the intrigue of Anna and 
 Vronsky. It is wonderful how such a man, cold, Philis- 
 tine and even mean in certain ways, towers into a 
 sublimity unknown (to me, at least), in fiction when 
 he forgives, and yet knows that he cannot forgive with 
 dignity. There is something crucial, and something 
 triumphant, not beyond the power, but hitherto beyond 
 the imagination of men in this effect, which is not 
 solicited, not forced, not in the least romantic, but 
 comes naturally, almost inevitably, from the make of 
 man. 
 
 The vast prospects, the far-reaching perspectives of 
 186 
 
TOLSTOY 
 
 War and Peace made it as great a surprise for me in 
 the historical novel as Anna Karenina had been in the 
 study of contemporary life ; and its people and interests 
 did not seem more remote, since they are of a civiliza- 
 tion always as strange and of a humanity always as 
 known. 
 
 I read some shorter stories of Tolstoy's before I came 
 to this greatest work of his : I read Scenes of the Siege 
 of Sehastopol, which is so much of the same quality as 
 War and Peace; and I read PoUcoushha and most of his 
 short stories with a sense of my unity with their people 
 such as I had never felt with the people of other fiction. 
 
 His didactic stories, like all stories of the sort, dwin- 
 dle into allegories; perhaps they do their work the 
 better for this, with the simple intelligences they ad- 
 dress; but I think that where Tolstoy becomes impa- 
 tient of his office of artist, and prefers to be directly a 
 teacher, he robs himself of more than half his strength 
 with those he can move only through the realization 
 of themselves in others. The simple pathos, and the 
 apparent indirectness of such a tale as that of Poli- 
 coushJca, the peasant conscript, is of vastly more value 
 to the world at large than all his parables; and The 
 Death of Ivan Ilyitch, the Philistine worldling, will 
 turn the hearts of many more from the love of the 
 world than such pale fables of the early Christian life 
 as " Work while ye have the Light." A man's gifts are 
 not given him for nothing, and the man who has the 
 great gift of dramatic fiction has no right to cast it 
 away or to let it rust out in disuse. 
 
 Terrible as the Kreutzer Sonata was, it had a moral 
 effect dramatically which it lost altogether when the 
 author descended to exegesis, and applied to marriage 
 the lesson of one evil marriage. In fine, Tolstoy is 
 certainly not to be held up as infallible. He is very 
 
 187 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 distinctly fallible, but I think his life is not less in- 
 structive because in certain things it seems a failure. 
 There was but one life ever lived upon the earth which 
 was without failure, and that was Christ's, whose err- 
 ing and stumbling follower Tolstoy is. There is no 
 other example, no other ideal, and the chief use of 
 Tolstoy is to enforce this fact in our age, after nineteen 
 centuries of hopeless endeavor to substitute ceremony 
 for character, and the creed for the life. I recognize 
 the truth of this without pretending to have been 
 changed in anything but my point of view of it. What 
 I feel sure is that I can never look at life in the mean 
 and sordid way that I did before I read Tolstoy. 
 
 Artistically, he has shown me a greatness that he 
 can never teach me. I am long past the age when I 
 could wish to form myself upon another writer, and I 
 do not think I could now insensibly take on the like- 
 ness of another; but his work has been a revelation 
 and a delight to me, such as I am sure I can never 
 know again. I do not believe that in the whole course 
 of my reading, and not even in the early moment of 
 my literary enthusiasms, I have known such utter satis- 
 faction in any writer, and this supreme joy has come 
 to me at a time of life when new friendships, not to 
 say new passions, are rare and reluctant. It is as if 
 the best wine at this high feast where I have sat so long 
 had been kept for the last, and I need not deny a miracle 
 in it in order to attest my skill in judging vintages. In 
 fact, I prefer to believe that my life has been full of 
 miracles, and that the good has always come to me at 
 the right time, so that I could profit most by it. I be- 
 lieve if I had not turned the corner of my fiftieth year, 
 when I first knew Tolstoy, T should not have been able 
 to know him as fully as I did. He has been to me that 
 final consciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in his 
 
MY LITERARY PASSIONS 
 
 essay on " Life." I came in it to the knowledge of my- 
 self in ways I had not dreamt of before, and began at 
 least to discern my relations to the race, without which 
 we are each nothing. The supreme art in literature 
 had its highest effect in making me set art forever be- 
 low humanity, and it is with the wish to offer the great- 
 est homage to his heart and mind, which any man can 
 pay another, that I close this record with the name of 
 Lyof Tolstoy. 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION" 
 
 The question of a final criterion for the appreciation 
 of art is one that perpetually recurs to those interested 
 in any sort of a?sthetic endeavor. Mr. John Addington 
 Symonds, in a chapter of The Renaissance in Italy 
 treating of the Bolognese school of painting, which once 
 had so great cry, and was vaunted the supreme exemplar 
 of the grand style, but which he now believes fallen into 
 lasting contempt for its emptiness and souUessness, 
 seeks to determine whether there can be an enduring 
 criterion or not ; and his conclusion is applicable to 
 literature as to the other arts. " Our hope," he says, 
 " with regard to the unity of taste in the future then 
 is, that all sentimental or academical seekings after 
 the ideal having been abandoned, momentary theories 
 founded upon idiosyncratic or temporary partialities ex- 
 ploded, and nothing accepted but what is solid and posi- 
 tive, the scientific spirit shall make men progressively 
 more and more conscious of these bleibende Verfi'dlt- 
 nisse, more and more capable of living in the whole ; 
 also, that in proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon 
 our own place in the world, we shall come to comprehend 
 with more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, 
 and honest, welcoming with gladness all artistic prod- 
 ucts that exhibit these qualities. The perception of 
 the enlightened man will then be the task of a healthy 
 person who has made himself acquainted with the laws 
 of evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the 
 
 193 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 excellence of work in any stage from immaturity to 
 decadence by discerning what there is of truth, sincerity, 
 and natural vigor in it." 
 
 That is to say, as I understand, that moods and tastes 
 and fashions change; people fancy now this and now 
 that; but what is unpretentious and what is true is 
 always beautiful and good, and nothing else is so. This 
 is not saying that fantastic and monstrous and artificial 
 things do not please; everybody knows that they do 
 please immensely for a time, and then, after the lapse 
 of a much longer time, they have the charm of the 
 rococo. Nothing is more curious than the charm that 
 fashion has. Fashion in women's dress, almost every 
 fashion, is somehow delightful, else it would never have 
 been the fashion ; but if any one will look through a col- 
 lection of old fashion j)lates, he must o^vn that most fash- 
 ions have been ugly. A few, which could be readily 
 instanced, have been very pretty, and even beautiful, 
 but it is doubtful if these have pleased the greatest num- 
 ber of people. The ugly delights as well as the beauti- 
 ful, and rot merely because the ugly in fashion is asso- 
 ciated with the young loveliness of the women who wear 
 the ugly fashions, and wins a grace from them, not be- 
 cause the vast majority of mankind are tasteless, but 
 for some cause that is not perhaps ascertainable. It is 
 quite as likely to return in the fashions of our clothes 
 and houses and furniture, and poetry and fiction and 
 painting, as the beautiful, and it may be from an in- 
 stinctive or a reasoned sense of this that some of the 
 extreme naturalists have refused to make the old dis- 
 crimination against it, or to regard the ugly as any less 
 
 194 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 worthy of celebration in art than the beautiful; some 
 of them, in fact, seem to regard it as rather more 
 worthy, if anything. Possibly there is no absolutely 
 ugly, no absolutely beautiful ; or possibly the ugly con- 
 tains always an element of the beautiful better adapted 
 to the general appreciation than the more perfectly 
 beautiful. This is a somewhat discouraging conjecture, 
 but I offer it for no more than it is worth ; and I do not 
 pin my faith to the saying of one whom I heard denying, 
 the other day, that a thing of beauty was a joy forever. 
 He contended that Kcats's line should have read, 
 " Some things of beauty are sometimes joys forever," 
 and that any assertion beyond this was too hazardous. 
 
 II 
 
 I SHOULD, indeed, prefer another line of Keats's, if I 
 were to profess any formulated creed, and should feel 
 much safer with his " Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," 
 than even with my friend's reformation of the more 
 quoted verse. It brings us back to the solid ground 
 taken by Mr. S^nnonds, which is not essentially dif- 
 ferent from that taken in the great Mr. Burke's Essay 
 on the 8uhlime and the Beautiful — a singularly modern 
 book, considering how long ago it was wrote (as the 
 great Mr. Steele would have ^vritten the participle a 
 little longer ago), and full of a certain well-mannered 
 and agreeable instruction. In some things it is of that 
 droll little eighteenth-century world, when philosophy 
 had got the neat little universe into the holloAV of its 
 hand, and knew just what it was, and what it was for ; 
 but it is quite without arrogance. " As for those called 
 critics," the author says, " they have generally sought 
 the rule of the arts in the wrong place ; they have sought 
 
 195 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 among poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and build- 
 ings ; but art can never give the rules tliat make an art. 
 This is, I believe, the reason why artists in general, and 
 poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a 
 circle; they have been rather imitators of one another 
 than of nature. Critics follow them, and therefore can 
 do little as guides. I can judge but poorly of anything 
 while I measure it by no other standard than itself. 
 The true standard of the arts is in every man's power ; 
 and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes 
 of the meanest things, in nature will give the truest 
 lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry that 
 slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or, 
 what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights." 
 
 If this should happen to be true — and it certainly 
 commends itself to acceptance — it might portend an 
 immediate danger to the vested interests of criticism, 
 only that it was written a hundred years ago ; and we 
 shall probably have the " sagacity and industry that 
 slights the observation " of nature long enough yet to 
 allow most critics the time to learn some more useful 
 trade than criticism as they pursue it. ISTevertheless, I 
 am in hopes that the communistic era in taste fore- 
 shadowed by Burke is approaching, and that it M-ill 
 occur within the lives of men now overawed by the fool- 
 ish old superstition that literature and art are anything 
 but the expression of life, and are to be judged by any 
 other test than that of their fidelity to it. The time is 
 coming, I hope, when each new author, each new artist, 
 will be considered, not in his proportion to any other 
 author or artist, but in his relation to the human nature, 
 known to us all, which it is his privilege, his high duty, 
 to interpret. " The true standard of the artist is in 
 every man's power " already, as Burke says ; Michel- 
 angelo's " light of the piazza," the glance of the com- 
 
 196 
 
CKTTICISM AND FICTION 
 
 mon eye, is and always was the hest light on a statue; 
 Goethe's " boys and blackbirds " have in all ages been 
 the real connoissenrs of berries; but hitherto the mass 
 of common mon have been afraid to apply their own 
 simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation 
 of the beautiful. They have always cast about for the 
 instruction of some one who professed to know^ better, 
 and who browbeat wholesome common-sense into the 
 self-distrust that ends in sophistication. They have 
 fallen generally to the worst of this bad species, and 
 have been " amused and misled " (how pretty that 
 quaint old use of amuse is!) "by the false lights" of 
 critical vanity and self-righteousness. They have been 
 taught to compare what they see and what they read, 
 not with the things that they have observed and kno^\^l, 
 but with the things that some other artist or writer has 
 done. Especially if they have themselves the artistic 
 impulse in any direction they are taught to form them- 
 selves, not upon life, but upon the masters who became 
 masters only by forming themselves upon life. The 
 seeds of death are planted in them, and they can pro- 
 duce only the still-born, the academic. They are not 
 told to take their work into the public square and see 
 if it seems true to the chance passer, but to test it by the 
 work of the very men who refused and decried any other 
 test of their own w^ork. The young writer wdio attempts 
 to report the phrase and carriage of every-day life, who 
 tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen 
 them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and 
 unworthy by people who would like to have him show 
 how Shakespeare's men talked and looked, or Scott's, or 
 Thackeray's, or Balzac's, or Hawthorne's, or Dickens's ; 
 he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to 
 take the life - likeness out of them, and put the 
 book-likeness into them. He is approached in the 
 
 197 
 
CKITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 spirit of the pedantry into wliieh learning, mucli or 
 little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands 
 apart from experience in an attitude of imagined 
 superiority, and which would say ivith the same confi- 
 dence to the scientist : " I see that you arc looking at a 
 grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, 
 and I suppose you intend to describe it. ISTow don't 
 waste your time and sin against culture in that way. 
 I've got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at 
 considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper 
 in general; in fact, it's a t}^e. It's made up of wire 
 and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional 
 tint, and it's perfectly indestructible. It isn't very 
 much like a real grasshopper, but it's a great deal nicer, 
 and it's served to represent the notion of a grasshopper 
 ever since man emerged from barbarism. You may say 
 that it's artificial. Well, it is artificial ; but then it's 
 ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the 
 ideal. You'll find the books full of my kind of grass- 
 hopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them. 
 The thing that you are proposing to do is commonplace ; 
 but if you say that it isn't commonplace, for the very 
 reason that it hasn't been done before, you'll have to 
 admit that it's photographic." 
 
 As I said, I hope the time is coming when not only 
 the artist, but the common, average man, who always 
 " has the standard of the arts in his power," wull have 
 also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal 
 grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in litera- 
 ture, in art, because it is not " simple, natural, and hon- 
 est," because it is not like a real grasshopper. But I 
 will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the 
 people who have been brought up on the ideal grass- 
 hopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grass- 
 hopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old roman- 
 
 198 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 tic card - board grasshopper, must die out before the 
 simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair 
 field. I am in no haste to compass the end of these good 
 people, whom I find in the mean time very amusing. It 
 is delightful to meet one of them, either in print or out 
 of it — some sweet elderly lady or excellent gentleman 
 whose youth was pastured on the literature of thirty or 
 forty years ago — and to witness the confidence with 
 which they preach their favorite authors as all the law 
 and the prophets. They have commonly read little or 
 nothing since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a 
 standard taken from these authors, and never dreamed 
 of judging it by nature ; they are destitute of the docu- 
 ments in the case of the later writers ; they suppose that 
 Balzac was the beginning of realism, and that Zola is its 
 wicked end ; they are quite ignorant, but they are ready 
 to talk you down, if you differ from them, with an 
 assumption of knowledge sufficient for any occasion. 
 The horror, the resentment, with which they receive any 
 question of their literary saints is genuine ; you descend 
 at once very far in the moral and social scale, and any- 
 thing short of offensive personality is too good for you ; 
 it is expressed to you that you are one to be avoided, and 
 put down even a little lower than you have naturally 
 fallen. 
 
 These worthy persons are not to blame ; it is part of 
 their intellectual mission to represent the petrifaction 
 of taste, and to preserve an image of a smaller and 
 cruder and emptier world than we now live in, a world 
 which was feeling its way towards the simple, the 
 natural, the honest, but was a good deal '" amused and 
 misled " by lights now no longer mistakable for heaven- 
 ly luminaries. They belong to a time, just passing 
 away, when certain authors were considered authorities 
 in certain kinds, when they must be accepted entire 
 
 199 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 and not questioned in any particular. Now we are be- 
 ginning to see and to say that no author is an authority 
 except in those moments when he held his ear close to 
 Nature's lips and caught her very accent. These mo- 
 ments are not continuous with any authors in the past, 
 and they are rare with all. Therefore I am not afraid 
 to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not 
 at all great, and that we can profit by them only when 
 we hold them, like our meanest contemporaries, to a 
 strict accounting, and verify their work by the standard 
 of the arts which we all have in our power, the simple, 
 the natural, and the honest. 
 
 Those good people must always have a hero, an idol of 
 some sort, and it is droll to find Balzac, who suffered 
 from their sort such bitter scorn and hate for his realism 
 while he was alive, now become a fetich in his turn, to 
 be shaken in the faces of those who will not blindly 
 worship him. But it is no new thing in the history of 
 literature: whatever is established is sacred with those 
 who do not think. At the beginning of the century, 
 when romance was making the same fight against effete 
 classicism which realism is making to-day against effete 
 romanticism, the Italian poet Monti declared that " the 
 romantic was the cold grave of the Beautiful," just as 
 the realistic is now supposed to be. The romantic of 
 tliat day and the real of this are in certain degree the 
 same. Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, 
 to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier 
 against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis 
 of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and 
 it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to ex- 
 perience and probability of motive are essential condi- 
 tions of a great imaginative literature. It is not a new 
 theory, but it has never before universally characterized 
 literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself, 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of 
 picturing it, realism will perish too. Every true realist 
 instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps the reason 
 why he is careful of every fact, and feels himself bound 
 to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of over- 
 moralizing. In life lie finds nothing insignificant; all 
 tells for destiny and character; nothing that God has 
 made is contemptible. He cannot look upon human life 
 and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice, 
 any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the 
 material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry. He 
 feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity 
 of men ; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and 
 shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the 
 truth lives. In criticism it is his business to break the 
 images of false gods and misshapen heroes, to take away 
 the poor silly toys that many grown people would still 
 like to play with. He cannot keep terms with " Jack 
 the Giant-killer " or " Puss-in-Boots," under any name 
 or in any place, even when they reappear as the convict 
 Vautrec, or the Marquis de Montrivaut, or the Sworn 
 Thirteen ^N'oblemen. He must say to himself that 
 Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Bal- 
 zac, he was Dumas; he was not realistic, he was ro- 
 manticistic. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Such a critic will not respect Balzac's good work the 
 less for contemning his bad work. He will easily ac- 
 count for the bad work historically, and when he has 
 recognized it, will trouble himself no further with it. 
 In his view no living man is a type, but a character; 
 now noble, now ignoble; now grand, now little; com- 
 plex, full of vicissitude. He will not expect Balzac to 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 be always Balzac, and will be perhaps even more at- 
 tracted to the study of him when he was trying to be 
 Balzac than when he had become so. In Cesar Blrot- 
 teaUj for instance, he will be interested to note how 
 Balzac stood at the beginning of the great things that 
 have followed since in fiction. There is an interesting 
 likeness between his work in this and Nicolas Gogol's 
 in Dead Souls, which serves to illustrate the simultane- 
 ity of the literary movement in men of such widely 
 separated civilizations and conditions. Both represent 
 their characters with the touch of exaggeration which 
 typifies ; but in bringing his story to a close, Balzac em- 
 ploys a beneficence unknown to the Russian, and almost 
 as universal and as apt as that which smiles upon the 
 fortunes of the good in the Vicar of Wakefield. It is 
 not enough to have rehabilitated Birotteau pecuniarily 
 and socially ; he must make him die triumphantly, spec- 
 tacularly, of an opportune hemorrhage, in the midst of 
 the festivities which celebrate his restoration to his old 
 home. Before this happens, human nature has been 
 laid under contribution right and left for acts of gener- 
 osity towards the righteous bankrupt ; even the king 
 sends him six thousand francs. It is very pretty ; it is 
 touching, and brings the lump into the reader's throat ; 
 but it is too much, and one perceives that Balzac lived 
 too soon to profit by Balzac. The later men, especially 
 the Russians, have known how to forbear the excesses 
 of analysis, to withhold the weakly recurring descrip- 
 tive and caressing epithets, to let the characters suffice 
 for themselves. All this does not mean that Cesar 
 Birotteau is not a beautiful and pathetic story, full of 
 shrewdly considered knowledge of men, and of a good 
 art struggling to free itself from self - consciousness. 
 But it does mean that Balzac, when he wrote it, was 
 under the burden of the very traditions which he has 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 helped fiction to tlirow off. He felt obliged to construct 
 a mechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moral- 
 ize openly and baldly ; ho permitted himself to " sym- 
 pathize " with certain of his people, and to point out 
 others for the abhorrence of his readers. This is not so 
 bad in him as it would be in a novelist of our day. It 
 is simply primitive and inevitable, and he is not to be 
 judged by it. 
 
 IV 
 
 In the beginning of any art even the most gifted 
 worker must be crude in his methods, and we ought to 
 keep this fact always in mind when we turn, say, from 
 the purblind w^orshippers of Scott to Scott himself, and 
 recognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and 
 diffuse; that he was tediously analytical where the 
 modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved his characters 
 by means of long-winded explanation and commentary ; 
 that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he 
 made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked ; 
 that he was tiresomely descriptive ; that on the simplest 
 occasions he went about half a mile to express a thought 
 that could be uttered in ten paces across lots ; and that 
 he trusted his readers' intuitions so little that he was 
 apt to rub in his appeals to them. He was probably 
 right: the generation which he wrote for was duller 
 than this; slower-witted, aesthetically untrained, and in 
 maturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention as 
 the children of to-day. All this is not saying Scott was 
 not a gi'eat man ; he was a great man, and a very great 
 novelist as compared with the novelists who went before 
 him. He can still amuse young people, but they ought 
 to be instructed how false and how mistaken he often 
 is, with his mediaeval ideals, his blind Jacobitism, his 
 
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CKITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 intense devotion to aristocracy and royalty ; his acquies- 
 cence in the division of men into noble and ignoble, 
 patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it 
 were the law of God ; for all which, indeed, he is not to 
 blame as he would be if he were one of our contem- 
 poraries. Something of this is true of another master, 
 greater than Scott in being less romantic, and inferior 
 in being more German, namely, the great Goethe him- 
 self. He taught us, in novels otherwise now antiquated, 
 and always full of German clumsiness, that it was false 
 to good art — which is never anything but the reflection 
 of life — to pursue and round the career of the persons 
 introduced, whom he often allowed to appear and dis- 
 appear in our knowledge as people in the actual world 
 do. This is a lesson which the writers able to profit by 
 it can never be too gi'ateful for; and it is equally a 
 benefaction to readers ; but there is very little else in the 
 conduct of the Goethean novels which is in advance of 
 their time; this remains almost their sole contribution 
 to the science of fiction. They are very primitive in 
 certain characteristics, and unite with their calm, deep 
 insight, an amusing helplessness in dramatization. 
 '' Wilhclm retired to his room, and indulged in the fol- 
 lowing reflections," is a mode of analysis which would 
 not be practised nowadays; and all that fancifulness 
 of nomenclature in WilJielm Mcister is very drolly senti- 
 mental and feeble. The adventures ^vitll robbers seem 
 as if dreamed out of books of chivalry, and the tendency 
 to allegorization affects one like an endeavor on the 
 author's part to escape from the unrealities which he 
 must have felt harassingly, German as he was. Mixed 
 up with the shadows and illusions are honest, whole- 
 some, every-day people, who have the air of wandering 
 homelessly about among them, without definite direction ; 
 and the mists are full of a luminosity which, in spite of 
 
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CEITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 them, "we know for common-sense and-^oetry. What is 
 useful in any review of Goethe's methods is the recogni- 
 tion of the fact, which it must bring, that the greatest 
 master cannot produce a masterpiece in a new kind. 
 The novel was too recently invented in Goethe's day not 
 to be, even in his hands, full of the faults of apprentice 
 work. 
 
 In fact, a great master may sin against the " modesty 
 of nature " in many ways, and I have felt this painfully 
 in reading Balzac's romance — it is not worthy the 
 name of novel — Le Pere Goriot, which is full of a 
 malarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art. 
 lAfter that exquisitely careful and truthful setting of 
 his story in the shabby boarding-house, he fills the scene 
 with figures jerked about by the exaggerated passions 
 and motives of the stage. We cannot have a cynic 
 reasonably wicked, disagreeable, egoistic ; we must have 
 a lurid villain of melodrama, a disguised convict, with 
 a vast criminal organization at his command, and 
 
 " So dyed double red " 
 
 in deed and purpose that he lights up the faces of the 
 horrified sjoectators with his glare. A father fond of 
 unworthy children, and leading a life of self-denial for 
 their sake, as may probably and pathetically be, is not 
 enough; there must be an imbecile, trembling dotard, 
 willing to promote even the liaisons of his daughters to 
 give them happiness and to teach the sublimity of the 
 paternal instinct. The hero cannot sufficiently be a 
 selfish young fellow, with alternating impulses of greed 
 and generosity; he must superfluously intend a career 
 of iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by noth- 
 14 205 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 ing but the most cataclysmal interpositions. It can he 
 said that without such personages the plot could not be 
 transacted; but so much the worse for tlie plot. Such 
 a plot had no business to be ; and while actions so un- 
 natural are imagined, no mastery can save fiction from 
 contempt with those who really think about it. To Bal- 
 zac it can be forgiven, not only because in his better 
 mood he gave us such biographies as Eugenie Grandet, 
 but because he wrote at a time when fiction was just 
 beginning to verify the externals of life, to portray 
 faithfully the outside of men and things. It was still 
 held that in order to interest the reader the characters 
 must be moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to 
 be taught that " heroes " and " heroines " existed all 
 around us, and that these abnormal beings needed only 
 to be discovered in their several humble disguises, and 
 then we should see every-day people actuated by the 
 fine frenzy of the creatures of the poets. How false that 
 notion was few but the critics, who are apt to be rather 
 belated, need now be told. Some of these poor fellows, 
 however, still contend that it ought to be done, and that 
 human feelings and motives, as God made them and 
 as men know them, are not good enough for novel- 
 readers. 
 
 This is more explicable than would appear at first 
 glance. The critics — and in speaking of them one al- 
 ways modestly leaves one's self out of the count, for 
 some reason — when they are not elders ossified in tradi- 
 tion, are apt to be young people, and young people are 
 necessarily conservative in tlieir tastes and theories. 
 They have the tastes and theories of their instructors, 
 who perhaps caught the truth of their day, but whose 
 routine life has been alien to any other truth. There is 
 probably no cliair of literature in this country from 
 which the principles now shaping the literary expression 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 of every civilized people are not denounced and con- 
 founded with certain objectionable French novels, or 
 which teaches young men anything of the universal im- 
 pulse which has given us the work, not only of Zola, but 
 of Tourguenief and Tolstoy in Russia, of Bjornson and 
 Ibsen in Norway, of Valdes and Galdos in Spain, of 
 Verga in Italy. Till these younger critics have learned 
 to think as well as to write for themselves they will per- 
 sist in heaving a sigh, more and more perfunctory, for 
 the truth as it was in Sir Walter, and as it was in 
 Dickens and in Hawthorne. Presently all will have 
 been changed; they will have seen the new truth in 
 larger and larger degree; and when it shall have be- 
 come the old truth, they will perhaps see it all. 
 
 VI 
 
 In the mean time the average of criticism is not 
 wholly bad with us. To be sure, the critic sometimes 
 appears in the panoply of the savages whom we have 
 supplanted on this continent ; and it is hard to believe 
 that his use of the tomahawk and the scalping-knife is 
 a form of conservative surgery. It is still his concep- 
 tion of his office that he should assail those who differ 
 with him in matters of taste or opinion; that he must 
 be rude ^viih those he does not like. It is too largely 
 his superstition that because he likes a thing it is good, 
 and because he dislikes a thing it is bad ; the reverse is 
 quite possibly the case, but he is yet indefinitely far 
 from knowing that in affairs of taste his personal 
 preference enters very little. Commonly he has no 
 principles, but only an assortment of prepossessions for 
 and against; and this otherwise very perfect character 
 is sometimes uncandid to the verge of dishonesty. He 
 
 207, 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 socms not to iiiiiul misstating the position of any one 
 he supposes himself to disagree with, and then attacking 
 him for what he never said, or even implied; he thinks 
 this is droll, and appears not to suspect that it is im- 
 moral, lie is not tolerant ; he thinks it a virtue to be 
 intolerant; it is hard for him to understand that tlio 
 same thing may be admirable at one time and deplorable 
 at another ; and that it is really his business to classify 
 and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much 
 as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, 
 rather than to praise or blame them; that there is a 
 measure of the same absurdity in his trampling on a 
 poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as in 
 the botanist's grinding a plant underfoot because he does 
 not find it pretty. He does not conceive that it is his 
 business rather to identify the species and then ex- 
 plain how and where the specimen is imperfect and 
 irregular. If he could once acquire this simple idea of 
 his duty he would be mucli more agreeable company 
 than he now is, and a more useful member of society; 
 though considering the hard conditions under which he 
 works, his necessity of writing hurriedly from an im- 
 perfect examination of far more books, on a greater 
 variety of subjects, than he can even hope to read, the 
 average American critic — the ordinary critic of com- 
 merce, so to speak — is even now very well indeed. Col- 
 lectively he is more than this ; for the joint effect of our 
 criticism is the pretty thorough appreciation of any 
 book submitted to it 
 
 VII 
 
 The misfortune rather than the fault of our indi- 
 vidual critic is that he is the heir of the false theory and 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 bad maimers of the English school. The theory of that 
 school has apparently been that almost any person of 
 glib and lively expression is competent to write of al- 
 most any branch of polite literature; its manners are 
 what we know. The American, whom it has largely 
 formed, is by nature very glib and very lively, and com- 
 monly his criticism, viewed as imaginative work, is 
 more agreeable than that of the Englishman ; but it is, 
 like the art of both countries, apt to be amatenrish. In 
 some degree our authors have freed themselves from 
 English models; they have gained some notion of the 
 more serious work of the Continent: but it is still the 
 ambition of the American critic to write like the Eng- 
 lish critic, to show his wit if not his learning, to strive 
 to eclipse the author under review rather than illustrate 
 him. He has not yet caught on to the fact that it is 
 really no part of his business to display himself, but 
 that it is altogether his duty to place a book in sucb a 
 light that the reader shall know its class, its function, 
 its character. The vast good-nature of our people pre- 
 serves us from the worst effects of this criticism without 
 principles. Our critic, at his lowest, is rarely malig- 
 nant; and when he is rude or untruthful, it is mostly 
 without truculence ; I suspect that he is often offensive 
 without knowing that he is so. ISTow and then he acts 
 simply under instruction from higher authority, and 
 denounces because it is the tradition of his publication 
 to do so. In other cases the critic is obliged to support 
 his journal's repute for severity, or for wit, or for 
 morality, though he may himself be entirely amiable, 
 dull, and wicked ; this necessity more or less warps his 
 verdicts. 
 
 The worst is that he is personal, perhaps because it is 
 so easy and so natural to be personal, and so instantly 
 attractive. In this respect our criticism Has not im- 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 proved from the accession of numbers of ladies to its 
 ranks, though we still hope so much from women in our 
 politics when they shall come to vote. They have come 
 to write, and with the effect to increase the amount of 
 little-digging, which rather superabounded in our liter- 
 ary criticism before. They " know what they like " — 
 that pernicious maxim of those who do not know what 
 they ought to like — and they pass readily from censur- 
 ing an author's performance to censuring him. They 
 bring a stock of lively misapprehensions and prejudices 
 to their work ; they would rather have heard about than 
 known about a book ; and they take kindly to the public 
 wish to be amused ratlier than edified. But neither 
 have they so much harm in them: they, too, are more 
 ignorant than malevolent. 
 
 '^ ./ . VIII 
 
 Our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the 
 critic to learn from an author, and his readiness to mis- 
 trust him. A writer passes his whole life in fitting him- 
 self for a certain kind of performance; the critic does 
 not ask why, or whether the performance is good or bad, 
 but if he does net like the kind, he instructs the writer 
 to go off and do some other sort of thing — usually the 
 sort that has been done already, and done sufficiently. 
 If he could once understand that a man who has written 
 the book he dislikes, probably knows infinitely more 
 about its kind and his own fitness for doing it than any 
 one else, the critic might learn something, and might 
 help the reader to learn ; but by putting himself in a 
 false position, a position of superiority, he is of no use. 
 He is not to suppose that an author has committed an 
 offence against him by writing the kind of book he does 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 not like; lie will be far more profitably employed on 
 behalf of the reader in finding out whether they had 
 better not both like it. Let him conceive of an author 
 as not in any wise on trial before him, but as a reflection 
 of this or that aspect of life, and he will not be tempted 
 to browbeat him or bully him. 
 
 The critic need not be impolite even to the youngest 
 and weakest author. A little courtesy, or a good deal, 
 a constant perception of the fact that a book is not a 
 misdemeanor, a decent self-respect that must forbid the 
 civilized man the savage pleasure of wounding, are 
 what I would ask for our criticism, as something which 
 will add sensibly to its present lustre. 
 
 IX 
 
 I WOULD have my fellow-critics consider what they 
 are really in the world for. The critic must perceive, if 
 he will question himself more carefully, that his office 
 is mainly to ascertain facts and traits of literature, not 
 to invent or denounce them; to discover principles,^ not 
 to establish them ; to report, not to create. 
 
 It is so much easier to say that you like this or dis- 
 like that, than to tell why one thing is, or where another 
 thing comes from, that many flourishing critics will 
 have to go out of business altogether if the scientific 
 method comes in, for then the critic will have to know 
 something besides his own mind. He will have to know 
 something of the laws of that mind, and of its generic 
 history. 
 
 The history of all literature shows that even with the 
 youngest and weakest author criticism is quite powerless 
 against his will to do his own work in his ow^n way; 
 and if this is the case in the green wood, how much more 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 in tlic dry! It has been thought by the scntiiiientalist 
 that criticism, if it cannot cure, can at least kill, and 
 Keats was long alleged in proof of its efficacy in this 
 sort. But criticism neither cured nor killed Keats, as 
 we all now very well know. It Avounded, it cruelly hurt 
 him, no doubt; and it is always in the power of the 
 critic to give pain to the author — the meanest critic to 
 tlie greatest author — for no one can help feeling a rude- 
 ness. But every literary movement has been violently'^ 
 opposed at the start, and yet never stayed in the least, 
 or arrested, by criticism; every author has been con- 
 demned for his virtues, but in no wise changed by it. 
 In the beginning he reads the critics; but presently per- 
 ceiving that he alone makes or mars himself, and that 
 they have no instruction for him, he mostly leaves off 
 reading them, though he is alwaj^s glad of their kind- 
 ness or grieved by their harshness when he chances upon 
 it. This, I believe, is the general experience, modified, 
 of course, by exceptions. 
 
 Then, are we critics of no use in the world ? I should 
 not like to think that, though I am not quite ready to 
 define our use. More than one sober thinker is in- 
 clining at present to suspect that aesthetically or specifi- 
 cally we are of no use, and that we are only useful liis- 
 torically ; that we may register laws, but not enact them. 
 I am not quite prepared to admit that aesthetic criticism 
 is useless, though in view of its futility in any given 
 instance it is liard to deny that it is so. It certainly 
 seems as useless against a book that strikes the popular 
 fancy, and prospers on in spite of condemnation by the 
 best critics, as it is against a book which does not 
 generally please, and which no critical favor can make 
 acceptable. This is so common a phenomenon that I 
 wonder it has never hitherto suggested to criticism that 
 its point of view was altogether mistaken, and that it 
 
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CKTTICISM AND FICTION 
 
 Avas really necessary to judge books uot as dead things, 
 but as living things — things which have an influence and 
 a power irrespective of beauty and wisdom, and merely 
 as expressions of actuality in thought and feeling. Per- 
 haps criticism has a cumulative and final effect ; perhaps 
 it does some good we do not know of. It apparently 
 does not affect the author directly, but it may reach him 
 througli the reader. It may in some cases enlarge or 
 diminish his audience for a while, until he has thor- 
 oughly measured and tested his own powers. If criti- 
 cism is to affect literature at all, it must be through the 
 writers who have newly left the starting-point, and are 
 reasonably uncertain of the race, not with those wdio 
 have won it again and again in their own way. 
 
 X 
 
 Sometimes it has seemed to me that the crudest ex- 
 pression of any creative art is better than the finest 
 comment upon it. I have sometimes suspected that 
 more thinking, more feeling certainly, goes to the crea- 
 tion of a poor novel than to the production of a brilliant 
 criticism ; and if any novel of our time fails to live a 
 hundred years, will any censure of it live? Wlio can 
 endure to read old reviews ? One can hardly read them 
 if they are in praise of one's own books. 
 
 The author neglected or overlooked need not despair 
 for that reason, if he will reflect that criticism can 
 neither make nor unmake authors ; that there have not 
 been greater books since criticism became an art than 
 there were before ; that in fact the greatest books seem 
 to have come much earlier. 
 
 That which criticism seems most certainly to have 
 done is to have put a literary consciousness into books 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 iinfelt ill the early masterpieces, but imfelt now only in 
 the books of men whose lives have been passed in 
 activities, who have been nsed to employing language 
 as they would have employed any implement, to effect 
 an object, who have regarded a thing to be said as in no 
 wise different from a thing to be done. In this sort I 
 have seen no modern book so unconscious as General 
 Grant's Personal Memoirs. The author's one end and 
 aim is to get the facts out in words. He does not cast 
 about for phrases, but takes the word, whatever it is, 
 that will best give his meaning, as if it were a man or a 
 force of men for the accomplishment of a feat of arms. 
 There is not a moment wasted in preening and pretti- 
 fying, after the fashion of literary men; there is no 
 thought of style, and so the style is good as it is in the 
 Book of Chronicles, as it is in the Pilgrims Progress, 
 with a peculiar, almost plebeian, plainness at times. 
 There is no more attempt at dramatic effect than there 
 is at ceremonious pose ; things happen in that tale of a 
 mighty war as they happened in the mighty war itself, 
 without setting, without artificial reliefs one after an- 
 other, as if they were all of one quality and degree. 
 Judgments are delivered with the same unimposing 
 quiet ; no awe surrounds the tribunal except that which 
 comes from the weight and justice of the opinions; it 
 is always an unaffected, unpretentious man who is talk- 
 ing; and throughout he prefers to wear the uniform of 
 a private, with nothing of the general about him but the 
 shoulder-straps, which he sometimes forgets. 
 
 XI 
 
 '^ Oanox Farrar's opinions of literary criticism are 
 very much to my liking, perhaps because when I read 
 
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CEITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 them I found them so like my own, already delivered 
 in print. He tells the critics that " they are in no sense 
 the legislators of literature, barely even its judges and 
 police " ; and he reminds them of Mr. Ruskin's saying 
 that " a bad critic is probably the most mischievous 
 person in the world," though a sense of their relative 
 proportion to the whole of life would perhaps acquit the 
 worst among them of this extreme of culpability. A 
 bad critic is as bad a thing as can be, but, after all, his 
 mischief does not carry very far. Otherwise it would 
 be mainly the conventional books and not the originak 
 books which w^ould survive ; for the censor who imag- 
 ines himself a law-giver can give law only to the imita- 
 tive and never to the creative mind. Criticism has con- 
 demned whatever was, from time to time, fresh and 
 vital in literature; it has always fought the new good 
 thing in behalf of the old good thing ; it has invariably 
 fostered and encouraged the tame, the trite, the nega- 
 tive. Yet upon the whole it is the native, the novel, 
 the positive that has survived in literature. ^Vhereas, 
 if bad criticism were the most mischievous thing in the 
 world, in the full implication of the words, it must have 
 been the tame, the trite, the negative, that survived. 
 
 Bad criticism is mischievous enough, however ; and I 
 think that much if not most current criticism as prac- 
 tised among the English and Americans is bad, is falsely 
 principled, and is conditioned in evil. It is falsely 
 principled because it is unprincipled, or wdthout prin- 
 ciples ; and it is conditioned in evil because it is almost 
 wholly anonymous. At the best its opinions are not con- 
 clusions from cectain easily verifiable principles, but are 
 effects from the worship of certain models. They are in 
 so far quite worthless, for it is the very nature of things 
 that the original mind cannot conform to models; it 
 has its norm wdthin itself ; it can work only in its own 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 ■vvaj, and by its self-given laws. Criticism does not in- 
 quire whether a work is trueJto life, bnt tacitly or ex- 
 plicitly compares it with models, and tests it by them. 
 If literary art travelled by any sncli road as criticism 
 would have it go, it would travel in a vicious circle, and 
 would arrive only at the point of departure. Yet this 
 is the course that criticism must always prescribe when 
 it attempts to give laws. Being itself artificial, it can- 
 not conceive of the original except as the abnormal. 
 It nuist altogether reconceive its office before it can be of 
 use to literature. It must reduce this to the business of 
 observing, recording, and comparing; to analyzing the 
 material before it, and then sjnthetizing its impressions. 
 Even then, it is not too much to say that literature as 
 an art could get on perfectly wtII without it. Just as 
 many good novels, poems, plays, essays, sketches, would 
 be written if there were no such thing as criticism in 
 the literary world, and no more bad ones. 
 
 But it will be long before criticism ceases to imagine 
 itself a controlling force, to give itself airs of sover- 
 eignty, and to issue decrees. As it exists it is mostly a 
 mischief, though not the greatest mischief; but it may 
 be greatly ameliorated in character and softened in 
 manner bj the total abolition of anouMiiity. 
 
 I think it would be safe to say that in no other rela- 
 tion of life is so much brutality permitted by civilized 
 society as in the criticism of literature and the arts. 
 Canon Farrar is quite right in reproaching literary 
 criticism with the uncandor of judging an author with- 
 out reference to his aims; wnth pursuing certain writers 
 from spite and prejudice, and mere habit; with mis- 
 representing a book by quoting a phrase or passage apart 
 from the context ; with magnifying misprints and care- 
 less expressions into important faults ; with abusing an 
 author for his opinions ; with base and personal motives. 
 
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CKITTCTSM AND FICTION 
 
 Every wvitor of experience knows that certain critical 
 journals will condemn his work without regard to its 
 quality, oven if it has never beon his fortune to learn, as 
 one author did from a repcntent reviewer, that in a 
 journal pretending to literary taste his books were given 
 ont for review with the caution, " Remember that the 
 Clarion is opposed to Mr. Blank's books," 
 
 The final conclusion appears to be that the man, or 
 even the young lady, who is given a gun, and told to 
 shoot at some passer from behind a hedge, is placed 
 in circumstances of temptation, almost too strong for 
 human nature. 
 
 XII 
 
 As I have already intimated, I doubt the more lasting 
 effects of unjust criticism. It is no part of my belief 
 that Keats's fame was long delayed by it, or Words- 
 worth's, or Browning's. Something unwonted, unex- 
 pected, in the quality of each delayed his recognition; 
 each was not only a poet, he was a revolution, a new 
 order of things, to which the critical perceptions and 
 habitudes had painfully to adjust themselves. But I 
 have no question of the gross and stupid injustice with 
 which these great men were used, and of the barbariza- 
 tion of the public mind by the sight of the wrong in- 
 flicted on them with impunity. This savage condition 
 still persists in the toleration of anonymous criticism, 
 an abuse that ought to be as extinct as the torture of 
 witnesses. It is hard enough to treat a fellow-author 
 with I'espect even when one has to address him, name to 
 name, upon the same level, in plain day; swooping 
 down upon him in the dark, panoplied in the authority 
 of a great journal, it is impossible. 
 
 Every now and then some idealist comes forward and 
 217 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 declares that you should say nothing in criticism of a 
 man's book which yovi Avonld not say of it to his face. 
 But I am afraid this is asking too much. I am afraid 
 it would put an end to all criticism ; and that if it were 
 practised literature would he left to purify itself. I 
 have no douht literature would do this; but in such a 
 state of things there would be no provision for the 
 critics. We ought not to destroy critics, we ought to 
 reform them, or rather transform them, or turn them 
 from the assumption of authority to a realization of 
 their true function in the civilized state. They are no 
 worse at heart, probably, than many others, and there 
 are probably good husbands and tender fathers, loving 
 daughters and careful mothers, among them. 
 
 It is evident to any student of human nature that the 
 critic who is obliged to sign his review will be more 
 careful of an author's feelings than he would if he could 
 intangibly and invisibly deal with him as the representa- 
 tive of a great journal. He will be loath to have his 
 name connected with those perversions and misstate- 
 ments of an author's meaning in which the critic now 
 indulges without danger of being turned out of honest 
 company. He will be in some degree forced to be fair 
 and just with a book he dislikes; he will not wish to 
 misrepresent it when his sin can be traced directly to 
 him in person ; he will not be willing to voice the preju- 
 dice of a journal which is " opposed to the books " of 
 this or that author; and the journal itself, when it is 
 no longer rcsj)onsible for the behavior of its critic, may 
 find it interesting and profitable to give to an author 
 his innings when he feels wronged by a reviewer and 
 desires to right himself; it may even be eager to offer 
 him the opportunity. We shall then, perhaps, fre- 
 quently witness the spectacle of authors turning upon 
 their reviewers, and imjjroving their manners and 
 
 218 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 morals by confronting them in public with the errors 
 they may now commit with impunity. Many an author 
 smarts under injuries and indignities which he might 
 resent to the advantage of literature and civilization, 
 if he were not afraid of being browbeaten by the jour- 
 nal whose nameless critic has outraged him. 
 
 The public is now of opinion that it involves loss of 
 dignity to creative talent to try to right itself if 
 wronged, but here we are without the requisite statistics. 
 Creative talent may come off with all the dignity it 
 went in with, and it may accomplish a very good work 
 in demolishing criticism. 
 
 In any other relation of life the man who thinks him- 
 self wronged tries to right himself, violently, if he is a 
 mistaken man, and lawfully if he is a wise man or a 
 rich one, which is practically the same thing. But the 
 author, dramatist, painter, sculptor, whose book, play, 
 picture, statue, has been unfairly dealt with, as he be- 
 lieves, must make no effort to right himself with the 
 public; he must bear his wrong in silence; he is even 
 expected to gi'in and bear it, as if it were funny. Every- 
 body understands that it is not funny to him, not in the 
 least funny, but everybody says that he cannot make an 
 effort to get the public to take his point of view without 
 loss of dignity. This is very odd, but it is the fact, and 
 I suppose that it comes from the feeling that the author, 
 dramatist, painter, sculptor, has already said the best 
 he can for his side in his book, play, picture, statue. 
 This is partly true, and yet if he wishes to add some- 
 thing more to prove the critic wrong, I do not see how 
 his attempt to do so should involve loss of dignity. 
 The public, which is so jealous for his dignity, does not 
 otherwise use him as if he were a very great and in- 
 valuable creature ; if he fails, it lets him starve like any 
 one else. I should say that he lost dignity or not as he 
 
 219 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 behaved, in his effort to right himself, with petulance 
 or with principle. If he betrayed a wounded vanity, if 
 he impugned the motives and accused the lives of his 
 critics, I should certainly feel that he was losing dig- 
 nity ; but if he temperately examined their theories, and 
 tried to shov/ where they were mistaken, I think he 
 would not only gain dignity, but would perform a very 
 useful Avork. 
 
 XIII 
 
 I WOULD beseech the literary critics of our country to 
 disabuse themselves of the mischievous notion that they 
 are essential to the progress of literature in the way 
 critics have imagined. Canon Farrar confesses that 
 with the best will in the world to profit by the many 
 criticisms of his books, he has never profited in the least 
 by any of them ; and this is almost the universal experi- 
 ence of authors. It is not always the fault of the critics. 
 They sometimes deal honestly and fairly by a book, and 
 not so often they deal adequately. But in making a 
 book, if it is at all a good book, the author has learned 
 all that is knowable about it, and every strong point and 
 every weak point in it, far more accurately than any one 
 else can possibly learn them. He has learned to do 
 better than well for the future ; but if his book is bad, 
 he cannot be taught anything about it from the out- 
 side. It will perish; and if he has not the root of 
 literature in him, he will perish as an author with it. 
 
 But what is it that gives tendency in art, then? 
 What is it makes people like this at one time, and that 
 at another ? Above all, what makes a better fashion 
 change for a worse; how can the ugly come to be pre- 
 ferred to the beautiful ; in other words, how can an art 
 decay ? 
 
 220 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 This question came up in my mind lately with regard 
 to English fiction and its form, or rather its formless- 
 ness. How, for instance, conld people who had once 
 known the simple verity, the refined perfection of Miss 
 Anstcn, enjoy anything less refined and less perfect? 
 
 Witli her example before them, why should not Eng- 
 lish novelists have gone on writing simply, honestly, 
 artistically, ever after ? One would tliink it must have 
 Leen impossible for them to do otherwise, if one did 
 not remember, say, the lamentable behavior of the actors 
 who support Mr. *Jefferson, and their theatricality in 
 the very presence of his beautiful naturalness. It is 
 very difiicult, that simplicity, and nothing is so hard 
 as to be honest, as the reader, if he has ever happened 
 to try it, must know. " The big bow-wow I can do my- 
 self, like any one going," said Scott, but he owned that 
 the exquisite touch of Miss Austen was denied him ; 
 and it seems certainly to have been denied in greater 
 or less measure to all her successors. But though read- 
 ing and writing come by nature, as Dogberry justly 
 said, a taste in them may be cultivated, or once culti- 
 vated, it may be preserved ; and why was it not so among 
 those poor islanders ? One does not ask such things in 
 order to be at the pains of answering them one's self, 
 but with the hope that some one else will take the 
 trouble to do so, and I propose to be rather a silent 
 partnpr in the enterprise, which I shall leave mainly 
 to Senor Armando Palacio Valdes. This delightful 
 author will, however, only be able to answer my ques- 
 tion indirectly from the essay on fiction with which he 
 prefaces one of his novels, the charming story of The 
 Sister of San Sulpizio, and I shall have some little 
 labor in fitting his saws to my instances. It is an essay 
 which I wish every one intending to read, or even to 
 write, a novel, might acquaint himself with ; for it con- 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 tains some of the best and clearest tilings which have 
 been said of the art of fiction in a time when nearly 
 all who practise it have turned to talk about it. 
 
 Sefior Valdes is a realist, but a realist according to 
 his own conception of realism; and he has some words 
 of just censure for the French naturalists, whom he 
 finds unnecessarily, and suspects of being sometimes 
 even mercenarily, nasty. He sees the wide difference 
 tliat passes between this naturalism and the realism of 
 the English and Spanish; and he goes somewhat further 
 than I should go in condemning it. " The French 
 naturalism represents only a moment, and an insignifi- 
 cant part of life. ... It is characterized by sadness 
 and narrowness. The prototype of this literature is 
 sL the Madame Bovary of Flaubert. I am an admirer of 
 '^ this novelist, and especially of this novel ; but often in 
 thinkino; of it I have said, How dreary would literature 
 be if it were no more than this! Tliere is something 
 antipathetic and gloomy and limited in it, as there is in 
 modern French life;" but this seems to me exactly the 
 best possible reason for its being. I believe with Seiior 
 Valdes that " no literature can live long without joy," 
 not because of its mistaken aesthetics, however, but be- 
 cause no civilization can live long without joy. The ex- 
 pression of French life will change when French life 
 changes; and French naturalism is better at its worst 
 than French unnaturalism at its best. " ISTo one," as 
 Senor Valdes truly says, " can rise from the perusal of 
 a naturalistic book . . . without a vivid desire to 
 escape " from the wretched world de]ucted in it, " and 
 a purpose, more or less vague, of helping to better the 
 lot and morally elevate the abject beings who figure in 
 it. ISTaturalistic art, then, is not immoral in itself, for 
 then it would not merit the name of art ; for though it 
 I is not the business of art to preach morality, still I think 
 i 222 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 that, resting on a divine and spiritual principle, like the 
 idea of the beautiful, it is perforce moral. I hold much 
 more immoral other books which, under a glamour of 
 something spiritual and beautiful and sublime, portray 
 the vices in which we are allied to the beasts. Such, 
 for example, are the works of Octave Feuillet, Arsene 
 Iloussaye, Georges Ohnet, and other contemporary novel- 
 ists much in vogue among the higher classes of society." 
 But what is this idea of the beautiful which art rests 
 upon, and so becomes moral ? " The man of our time," 
 says Senor Valdes, " wishes to know everything and 
 enjoy everything: he turns the objective of a powerful 
 equatorial towards the heavenly spaces where gravitates 
 the infinitude of the stars, just as he applies the micro- 
 scope to the infinitude of the smallest insects ; for their 
 laws are identical. His experience, united with intui- 
 tion, has convinced him that in nature there is neither 
 great nor small ; all is equal. All is equally grand, all 
 is equally just, all is equally beautiful, because all is 
 equally divine." But beauty, Senor Valdes explains, 
 e^iists in the human spirit, and is the beautiful effect 
 which it receives from the true meaning of things; it 
 does not matter what the things are, and it is the func- 
 tion of the artist who feels this effect to impart it to 
 others. I may add that there is no joy in art except 
 this perception of the meaning of things and its com- 
 munication ; when you have felt it, and portrayed it in 
 a poem, a symphony, a novel, a statue, a picture, an 
 edifice, you have fulfilled the purpose for which you 
 were born an artist. 
 
 • The reflection of exterior nature in the individual 
 spirit, Senor Valdes believes to be the fundamental of 
 art. " To say, then, that the artist must not copy but 
 create is nonsense, because he can in no wise copy, and 
 in no wise create. He who sets deliberately about modi- 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 fyiug nature, shows that he has not felt her beauty, and 
 therefore cannot make others feel it. The puerile desire 
 Avhicli some artists without genius manifest to go about 
 selecting in nature, not what seems to them beautiful, 
 but what they think will seem beautiful to others, and 
 rejecting what may displease them, ordinarily produces 
 cold and insipid works. For, instead of exploring the 
 illimitable fields of reality, they cling to the forms in- 
 vented by other artists who have succeeded, and they 
 make statues of statues, poems of poems, novels of 
 novels. It is entirely false that the great romantic, 
 symbolic, or classic poets modified nature ; such as they 
 liave expressed her they felt her; and in this view they 
 are as much realists as ourselves. In like manner if in 
 the realistic tide that now bears us on there are some 
 spirits wdio feel nature in another way, in the romantic 
 way, or the classic way, they would not falsify her in 
 expressing her so. Only those falsify her who, without 
 feeling classic avise or romantic-wise, set about being 
 classic or romantic, wearisomely reproducing the models 
 of former ages ; and equally those who, without sharing 
 the sentiment of realism, which now prevails, force 
 themselves to be realists merely to follow the fashion." 
 
 The pseudo-realists, in fact, are the worse offenders, 
 to my thinking, for tliey sin against the living; whereas 
 those who continue to celebrate the heroic adventures of 
 " Puss-in-Boots " and the hair-breadth escapes of " Tom 
 Thumb," under various aliases, only cast disrespect 
 upon^he immortals who have passed beyond these noises. 
 
 XIV 
 
 " The principal cause," our Spaniard says, " of the 
 decadence of contemporary literature is found, to my 
 
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CKITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 thinking, in the vice which has been very graphically 
 called effcetism, or the itch of awaking at all cost in 
 the reader vivid and violent emotions, which shall do 
 credit to the invention and originality of the writer. 
 This vice has its roots in human nature itself, and more 
 particularly in that of the artist; he has always some- 
 thing feminine in him, which tempts him to coquet 
 with the reader, and display qualities that he thinks 
 will astonish him, as women laugh for no reason, to 
 show their teeth when they have them white and small 
 and even, or lift their dresses to show their feet when 
 there is no mud in the street. . . . What many writers 
 nowadays wish, is to produce an effect, grand and imme- 
 diate, to play the part of geniuses. For this they have 
 learned that it is only necessary to write exaggerated 
 works in any sort, since the vulgar do not ask that they ' 
 shall be quietly made to think and feel, but that they 
 shall be startled ; and among the vulgar, of course, I in- 
 clude the great part of those who write literary criticism, 
 and who constitute the worst vulgar, since they teach 
 what they do not know, . . . There are many persons 
 who suppose that the highest proof an artist can give 
 of his fantasy is the invention of a complicated plot, 
 spiced with perils, surprises, and suspenses; and that 
 anything else is the sign of a poor and tepid imagina- 
 tion. And not only people who seem cultivated, but are 
 not so, suppose this, but there are sensible persons, and 
 even sagacious and intelligent critics, who sometimes 
 allow themselves to be hoodwinked by the dramatic 
 mystery and the surprising and fantastic scenes of a 
 novel. They own it is all false; but they admire the 
 imagination, what they call the ' power ' of the author. 
 Very well ; all I have to say is that the ' power ' to 
 dazzle with strange incidents, to entertain with compli- 
 cated plots and impossible characters, now belongs to 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 some hundreds of writers in Europe; while there are 
 not much above a dozen who know how to interest with 
 the ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of 
 characters truly human. If the former is a talent, it 
 must be o^vned that it is much commoner than the 
 latter. ... If we are to rate novelists according to 
 their fecundity, or the riches of their invention, we 
 must put Alexander Dumas above Cervantes. Cer- 
 vantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without be- 
 lying much or little the natural and logical course of 
 events. This novel which was called Don Quixote, is 
 perhaps the greatest work of human wit. Very well; 
 the same Cervantes, mischievously influenced after- 
 wards by the ideas of the vulgar, who were then what 
 they are now and always will be, attempted to please 
 them by. a work giving a lively proof of his inventive 
 talent, and wrote the Persiles and Sigismunda, where 
 the strange incidents, the vivid complications, the sur- 
 prises, the pathetic scenes, succeed one another so 
 rapidly and constantly that it really fatigues you. . . . 
 But in spite of this flood of invention, imagine," says 
 Senor Valdes, " the place that Cervantes would now 
 occupy in the heaven of art, if he had never written 
 Don Quixote," but only Persiles and Sigismunda ! 
 
 From the point of view of modern English criticism, 
 which likes to be melted, and horrified, and astonished, 
 and blood-curdled, and goose-fleshed, no less than to be 
 " chippcred up " in fiction, Seiior Valdes were indeed 
 incorrigible. !Not only does he despise the novel of 
 complicated plot, and everywhere prefer Don Quixote 
 to Persiles and Sigismunda, but he has a lively eon- 
 tempt for another class of novels much in favor with 
 the gentilities of all countries. He calls their writers 
 " novelists of the world," and he says that more than 
 any others they have the rage of effectism. " They do 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 not seek to produce effect by novelty and invention in 
 plot . . . they seek it in character. For this end they 
 begin by deliberately falsifying human feelings, giving 
 them a paradoxical appearance completely inadmis- 
 sible. . . . Love that disguises itself as hate, incom- 
 parable energy under the cloak of weakness, virginal 
 innocence under the aspect of malice and impudence, 
 wit masquerading as folly, etc., etc. By this means 
 they hope to make an effect of which they are incapable 
 through the direct, frank, and conscientious study of 
 character." He mentions Octave Feuillet as the great- 
 est offender in this sort among the French, and Bulwer 
 among the English; but Dickens is full of it (Boffin in 
 Our Mutual Friend will suffice for all example), and 
 most drama is witness of the result of this effectism 
 when allowed full play. 
 
 But what, then, if he is not pleased with Dumas, or 
 with the effectists who delight genteel people at all the 
 theatres, and in most of the romances, what, I ask, will 
 satisfy this extremely difficult Spanish gentleman? 
 He would pretend, very little. Give him simple, life- 
 like character ; that is all he wants. " For me, the only 
 condition of character is that it be human, and that is 
 enough. If I wished to know what was human, I should 
 study humanity." 
 
 But, Senor Valdes, Senor Valdes ! Do not you know 
 that this small condition of yours implies in its fulfil- 
 ment hardly less than the gift of the whole earth ? You 
 merely ask that the character portrayed in fiction be 
 human ; and you suggest that the novelist should study 
 humanity if he would know whether his personages are 
 human. This appears to me the crudest irony, the 
 most sarcastic affectation of humility. If you had 
 asked that character in fiction be superhuman, or subter- 
 human, or preterhuman, or intrahuman, and had bidden 
 
 227 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 the novelist go, not to humanity, but the humanities, 
 for the proof of his excellence, it would have been all 
 very easy. The books are full of those " creations," of 
 every pattern, of all ages, of both sexes; and it is so 
 much handier to get at books than to get at men ; and 
 when you have portrayed " passion " instead of feeling, 
 and used " power " instead of common-sense, and shown 
 yourself a " genius " instead of an artist, the applause 
 is so prompt and the glory so cheap, that really any- 
 thing else seems wickedly wasteful of one's time. One 
 may not make one's reader enjoy or suffer nobly, but 
 one may give him the kind of pleasure that arises from 
 conjuring, or from a puppet-sliow, or a modern stage- 
 play, and leave him, if he is an old fool, in tlie sort of 
 stupor that comes from hitting the pipe ; or if he is a 
 young fool, half crazed with the spectacle of qualities 
 and impulses like his own in an apotheosis of achieve- 
 ment and fruition far beyond any earthly experience. 
 But apparently Seiior Valdes would not think this 
 any great artistic result. " Things that appear ugliest 
 in reality to the spectator who is not an artist, are trans- 
 formed into beauty and poetry when the spirit of the 
 artist possesses itself of them. We all take part every 
 day in a thousand domestic scenes, every day we see a 
 thousand pictures in life, that do not make any impres- 
 sion upon us, or if they make any it is one of repug- 
 nance ; but let the novelist come, and without betraying 
 the truth, but painting them as they appear to his 
 vision, he produces a most interesting work, whose 
 perusal enchants us. That which in life left us indif- 
 ferent, or repelled us, in art delights us. Wliy ? 
 Simply because the artist has made us see the idea that 
 resides in it. Let not the novelists, then, endeavor to 
 add anything to reality, to turn it and twist it, to re- 
 strict it. Since nature has endowed them with tliis 
 
 228 
 
CKITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 precious gift of discovering ideas in things, their work 
 will l)c bcantifnl if they paint these as they appear. 
 But if the reality does not impress them, in vain will 
 they strive to make their work impress others." 
 
 XV 
 
 Wnicn brings us again, after this long way about, to 
 Jane Austen and her novels, and that troublesome ques- 
 tion about them. She was great and they were beauti- 
 ful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with^'^ 
 nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with' ^ 
 it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less 
 than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Aus- 
 ten was the first and the last of the English novelists to 
 treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she 
 did this, she remains the most artistic of the English 
 novelists, and alone worthy to be matched with the great 
 Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists. It is not a 
 question of intellect, or not wholly that. The English 
 have mind enough ; but they have not taste enough ; or, 
 rather, their taste has been perverted by their false 
 criticism, which is based upon personal preference, and 
 not upon principle ; which instructs a man to think that 
 what he likes is good, instead of teaching him first to 
 distinguish what is good before he likes It. The art of 
 fiction, as Jane Austen knew it, declined from her 
 through Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens, and Charlotte 
 Bronte, and Thackeray, and even George Eliot, be- 
 cause the mania of romanticism had seized upon all 
 Europe, and these great writers could not escape the 
 taint of their time; but it has shown few signs of re- 
 covery in England, because English criticism, in the 
 presence of the Continental masterpieces, has continued 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 provincial and special and personal, and has expressed 
 a love and a hate which had to do with the quality of 
 the artist rather than the character of his work. It was 
 inevitable that in their time the English romanticists 
 shonld treat, as Seilor Valdes says, " the barbarous cus- 
 toms of the Middle Ages, softening and distorting them, 
 as Walter Scott and his kind did;" that they should 
 " devote themselves to falsifying nature, refining and 
 subtilizing sentiment, and modif^^ing psychology after 
 their own fancy," like Bulwer and Dickens, as well as 
 like Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention 
 Balzac, the worst of all that sort at his worst. This was 
 the natural course of the disease ; but it really seems as 
 if it were their criticism that was to blame for the 
 rest : not, indeed, for the performance of this writer or 
 that, for criticism can never affect the actual doing of a 
 thing; but for the esteem in which this writer or that 
 is held through the perpetuation of false ideals. The 
 only observer of English middle-class life since Jane 
 Austen worthy to be named with her was not George 
 Eliot, who was first ethical and then artistic, who tran- 
 scended her in everything but the form and method most 
 essential to art, and there fell hopelessly below her. It 
 was Anthony Trollope who was most like her in simple 
 honesty and instinctive truth, as imphilosophized as the 
 light of common day; but he was so warped from a 
 wholesome ideal as to wish at times to be like Thacke- 
 ray, and to stand about in his scene, talking it over 
 with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, 
 and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of 
 art resides. Mainly, his instinct was too much for his 
 ideal, and with a low view of life in its civic relations 
 and a thoroughly bourgeois soul, he yet produced works 
 whose beauty is surpassed only by the effect of a more 
 poetic writer in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Yet if 
 
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CKTTICISM AND FICTION 
 
 a vote of English criticism even at this late day, when 
 all Continental Enrope has the light of aesthetic tnith, 
 could be taken, the majority against these artists would 
 be overwhelmingly in favor of a writer who had so 
 little artistic sensibility, that he never hesitated on 
 any occasion, great or small, to make a foray among his 
 characters, and catch them up to show them to the 
 reader and tell him how beautiful or ugly they were; 
 and cry out over their amazing properties. 
 
 XVI 
 
 " How few materials," says Emerson, " are yet used 
 by our arts! The mass of creatures and of qualities 
 are still hid and expectant," and to break new ground is 
 still one of the uncommonest and most heroic of the 
 virtues. The artists are not alone to blame for the 
 timidity that keeps them in the old furrows of the worn- 
 out fields ; most of those whom they live to please, or 
 live by pleasing, prefer to have them remain there; it 
 wants rare virtue to appreciate what is new, as well as 
 to invent it ; and the " easy things to understand " are 
 the conventional things. This is why the ordinary Eng- 
 lish novel, with its hackneyed plot, scenes, and figures, 
 is more comfortable to the ordinary American than an 
 American novel, which deals, at its worst, with com- 
 paratively new interests and motives. To adjust one's 
 self to the enjoyment of these costs an intellectual 
 effort, and an intellectual effort is what no ordinary 
 person likes to make. It is only the extraordinary per- 
 son who can say, with Emerson : " I ask not for the 
 great, the remote, the romantic. ... I embrace the 
 common; I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low. 
 . . . Man is surprised to find that things near are not 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. . . . 
 The perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in 
 discoveries. . . . The foolish man wonders at the un- 
 usual, but the wise man at the usual. . . . To-day al- 
 ways looks mean to the thoughtless ; but to-day is a king 
 in disguise. . . . Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and 
 caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull 
 to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of 
 wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Del- 
 phos." 
 
 Perhaps we ought not to deny their town, of Troy 
 and their temple of Delphos to the dull people; but if 
 we ought, and if we did, they would still insist upon 
 having them. An English novel, full of titles and rank, 
 is apparently essential to the happiness of such people ; 
 their weak and childish imagination is at home in its 
 familiar environment; they know what they are read- 
 ing; the fact that it is hash many times warmed over 
 reassures them; whereas a story of our own life, 
 honestly studied and faithfully represented, troubles 
 them with varied misgiving. They are not sure that it 
 is literature ; they do not feel that it is good society ; its 
 characters, so like their own, strike them as common- 
 place ; they say they do not wish to know such people. 
 
 Everything in England is appreciable to the literary 
 sense, while the sense of the literary worth of things in 
 America is still faint and weak with most people, with 
 the vast majority who " ask for the great, the remote, 
 the romantic," who cannot " embrace the common," 
 cannot " sit at the feet of the familiar and the low," in 
 the good company of Emerson. We are all, or nearly 
 all, struggling to be distinguished from the mass, and 
 to be set apart in select circles and upper classes like the 
 fine people we have read about. We are really a mix- 
 ture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world; 
 
 o.qo 
 
CKITICISIiC AND FICTION 
 
 but that is not bad ; our vuli»-aritj consists in trying to 
 ignore " the worth of the vulgar/' in believing that the 
 superfine is better. » 
 
 XVTT 
 
 Another Spanish novelist of our day, whose books 
 have given me great pleasure, is so far from being of 
 the same mind of Senor Valdes about fiction that he 
 boldly declares himself, in the preface to his Pepita 
 Ximcnez, " an advocate of art for art's sake." I 
 heartily agree with him that it is " in very bad taste, 
 always impertinent and often pedantic, to attempt to 
 prove theses by writing stories," and yet if it is true 
 that " the object of a novel should be to charm through 
 a faithful representation of human actions and human 
 passions, and to create by this fidelity to nature a 
 beautiful work," and if " the creation of the beautiful " 
 is solely " the object of art," it never was and never can 
 be solely its effect as long as men are men and women 
 are. women. If ever the race is resolved into abstract 
 qualities, perhaps this may happen; but till then the 
 finest effect of the " beautiful " will be ethical and not 
 a?stlietic merely. Morality penetrates all things, it is 
 the soul of all things. Beauty may clothe it on, 
 whether it is false morality and an evil soul, or 
 whether it is true and a good soul. In the one case the 
 beauty will corrupt, and in the other it will edify, and 
 in either case it will infallibly and inevitably have an 
 ethical effect, now light, now grave, according as the 
 thing is light or grave. We cannot escape from this ; we 
 are shut np to it by the very conditions of our being. 
 Tor the moment, it is charming to have a story end 
 happily, but after one has lived a certain number of 
 
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CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 years, and read a certain nnmber of novels, it is not the 
 prosperous or adverse fortune of the characters that 
 affects one, but the good or bad faith of the novelist in 
 dealing with them. Will he play us false or will he be 
 true in the operation of this or that principle involved ? 
 I cannot hold him to less account than this : he must be 
 true to what life has taught me is the truth, and after 
 that he may let any fate betide his people; the novel 
 ends well that ends faithfully. The greater his power, 
 the greater his responsibility before the human con- 
 science, which is God in us. But men come and go, 
 and what they do in their limited physical lives is of 
 comparatively little moment ; it is what they say that 
 really survives to bless or to ban ; and it is the evil 
 wdiich Wordsworth felt in Goethe, that must long sur- 
 vive him. There is a kind of thing — a kind of meta- 
 physical lie against righteousness and common-sense — 
 which is called the Unmoral, and is supposed to be dif- 
 ferent from the Immoral; and it is this which is sup- 
 posed to cover many of the faults of Goethe. His Wil- 
 Jielm Meister, for example, is so far removed within the 
 region of the " ideal " that its unprincipled, its evil- 
 principled, tenor in regard to women is pronounced 
 " unmorality," and is therefore inferably harmless. 
 But no study of Goethe is complete without some recog- 
 nition of the qualities which caused Wordsworth to 
 hurl the book across the room with an indignant per- 
 ception of its sensuality. For the sins of his life 
 Goethe was perhaps sufficiently punished in his life by 
 his final marriage with Christiano ; for the sins of his 
 literature many others must suffer. I do not despair, 
 however, of the day when the poor honest herd of man- 
 kind shall give universal utterance to the universal in- 
 stinct, and shall hold selfish power in politics, in art, 
 in religion, for the devil that it is; when neither its 
 ^ 234 
 
CEITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 crazy pride nor its amusing vanity shall be flattered by 
 the puissance of the " geniuses " who have forgotten 
 their duty to the common weakness, and have abused 
 it to their own glory. In that day wo shall shudder at 
 many monsters of passion, of self-indulgence, of heart- 
 lessness, whom we still more or less openly adore for 
 their " genius," and shall account no man worshipful 
 whom we do not feel and know to be good. The spec- 
 tacle of strenuous achievement will then not dazzle or 
 mislead ; it will not sanctify or palliate iniquity ; it will 
 only render it the more hideous and pitiable. 
 
 In fact, the whole belief in " genius " seems to me 
 rather a mischievous superstition, and if not mis- 
 chievous always, still always a superstition. From the 
 account of those who talk about it, " genius " appears 
 to be the attribute of a sort of very potent and admir- 
 able prodigy which God has created out of the common 
 for the astonishment and confusion of the rest of us 
 poor human beings. But do they really believe it? 
 Do they mean anything more or less than the Mastery 
 which comes to any man according to his powers and 
 diligence in any direction ? If not, why not have an 
 end of the superstition which has caused our race to go 
 on so long waiting and reading of the difference be- 
 tween talent and genius ? It is within the memory of 
 middle-aged men that the Maelstrom existed in the be- 
 lief of the geographers, but we now get on perfectly well 
 without it; and why should we still suffer under the 
 notion of " genius " which keeps so many poor little 
 authorlings trembling in question whether they have it, 
 or have only " talent " ? 
 
 One of the greatest captains who ever lived — a plain, 
 taciturn, unaffected soul — has told the story of his 
 wonderful life as unconsciously as if it were all an 
 every-day affair, not different from other lives, except 
 
 235 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 as a great exigcncj^ of the human race gave it impor- 
 tance. So far as he knew, lie had no natural aptitude 
 for arms, and certainly no love for the calling. But he 
 Avent to West Point hecause, as he quaintly tells us, his 
 father " rather thought he v^rould go " ; and he fought 
 through one war with credit, hut without glory. The 
 other war, which was to claim his powers and his 
 science, found him engaged in the most prosaic of peace- 
 ful occupations ; he obeyed its call because he loved his 
 country, and not because he loved war. All the world 
 knows the rest, and all the world knows that greater 
 military mastery has not been shown than his cam- 
 paigns illustrated. He does not say this in his book, 
 or hint it in any way ; he gives you the facts, and leaves 
 them with you. But the Personal Memoirs of U. S. 
 Grant, wi'itten as simply and straightforwardly as his 
 battles were fought, couched in the most unpretentious 
 phrase, with never a touch of grandiosity or attitudi- 
 nizing, familiar, homely in style, form a great piece of 
 literature, because great literature is nothing more nor 
 less than the clear expression of minds that have some- 
 thing great in them, whether religion, or beauty, or 
 deep experience. Probably Grant would have said that 
 he had no more vocation to literature than he had to 
 war. He owns, with something like contrition, that he 
 used to read a great many novels; but we think he 
 would have denied the soft impeachment of literary 
 power, l^evertheless, he shows it, as he showed mili- 
 tary power, unexpectedly, almost miraculously. All 
 the conditions here, then, are favorable to supposing a 
 case of " genius." Yet who would trifle with that great 
 heir of fame, that plain, grand, manly soul, by speak- 
 ing of "genius" and him together? Who calls Wash- 
 ington a genius ? or Franklin, or Bismarck, or Cavour, 
 or Columbus, or Luther, or Darwin, or Lincoln ? Were 
 
 230 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 these men second-rate in their way ? Or is " genius " 
 that indefinahlc, preternatural quality, sacred to the 
 musicians, the painters, the sculptors, the actors, the 
 poets, and above all, the poets ? Or is it that the poets, 
 having most of the say in this world, abuse it to shame- 
 less self-flattery, and would persuade the inarticulate 
 classes that they are on peculiar terms of confidence 
 with the deity ? 
 
 XVIII 
 
 In General Grant's confession of novel-reading there 
 is a sort of inference that he had wasted his time, or 
 else the guilty conscience of the novelist in me imagines 
 such an inference. But however this may be, there is 
 certainly no question concerning the intention of a 
 correspondent who once wrote to me after reading some 
 rather bragging claims I had made for fiction as a 
 mental and moral means. " I have very grave doubts," 
 he said, " as to the whole list of magnificent things that 
 you seem to think novels have done for the race, and 
 can witness in myself many evil things which they have 
 done for me. Whatever in my mental make-up is wild 
 and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is in- 
 jurious, I can trace to the perusal of some work of 
 fiction. Worse than that, they beget such high-strung 
 and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and 
 plodding perseverance are despised, and matter-of-fact 
 poverty, or every - day, commonplace distress, meets 
 with no sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who 
 has wept over the impossibly accumulated sufferings 
 of some gaudy hero or heroine." 
 
 I am not sure that I had the controversy with this 
 correspondent that he seemed to suppose ; but novels are 
 now so fully accepted hy every one pretending to culti- 
 16 237 
 
CEITICISil AND FICTION 
 
 vated taste — and they really form the whole intellectual 
 life of such immense numbers of people, without ques- 
 tion of their influence, good or bad, upon the mind — 
 that it is refreshing to have them frankly denounced, 
 and to be invited to revise one's ideas and feelings in 
 regard to them. A little honesty, or a great deal of 
 honesty, in this quest will do the novel, as we hope yet 
 to have it, and as we have already begun to have it, no 
 harm ; and for my own part I w^ill confess that I be- 
 lieve fiction in the past to have been largely injurious, 
 as I believe the stage-play to be still almost wholly in- 
 jurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, 
 and its aimlessness. It may be safely assumed that 
 most of the novel-reading which people fancy an intel- 
 lectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation, hardly more 
 related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the 
 mental faculties than opium-eating; in either case the 
 brain is drugged, and left weaker and crazier for the 
 debauch. If this may be called the negative result of 
 the fiction habit, the positive injury that most novels 
 work is by no means so easily to be measured in the 
 case of young men whose character they help so much to 
 form or deform, and the women of all ages whom they 
 keep so much in ignorance of the world they misrepre- 
 sent. Grown men have little harm from them, but in 
 the other cases, which are the vast majority, they hurt 
 because they are not true — not because they are ma- 
 levolent, but because they are idle lies about human 
 nature and the social fabric, which it behooves us to 
 know and to understand, that we may deal justly with 
 ourselves and with one another. One need not go so far 
 as our correspondent, and trace to the fiction habit 
 " whatever is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, 
 whatever is injurious," in one's life ; bad as the fiction 
 habit is it is probably not responsible for the whole sum 
 
 238 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 of evil in its victims, and I believe that if the reader 
 will use care in choosing from this fungus-growth with 
 which the fields of literature teem every day, he may 
 nourish himself as with the true mushroom, at no risk 
 from the poisonous species. 
 
 The tests are very plain and simple, and they are 
 jDerfectly infallible. If a novel flatters the passions, 
 and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous ; 
 it may not kill, but it will certainly injure ; and this test 
 will alone exclude an entire class of fiction, of which 
 eminent examples will occur to all. Then the whole 
 spawn of so-called unmoral romances, which imagine 
 a world where the sins of sense are unvisited by the 
 penalties following, swift or slow, but inexorably sure, 
 in the real world, are deadly poison : these do kill. The 
 novels that merely tickle our prejudices and lull our 
 judgment, or that coddle our sensibilities or pamper 
 our gross appetite for the marvellous, are not so fatal, 
 but they are innutritions, and clog the soul with un- 
 wholesome vapors of all kinds. !No doubt they too help 
 to weaken the moral fibre, and make their readers in- 
 different to " plodding perseverance and plain indus- 
 try," and to " matter-of-fact poverty and commonplace 
 distress." 
 
 Without taking them too seriously, it still must be 
 owned that the " gaudy hero and heroine " are to blame 
 for a great deal of harm in the world. That heroine 
 long taught by example, if not precept, that Love, or 
 the passion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief 
 interest of a life, which is really concerned with a great 
 many other things; that it was lasting in the way she 
 knew it ; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was 
 altogether a finer tiling than prudence, obedience, 
 reason ; that love alone was glorious and beautiful, and 
 these were mean and ugly in comparison with it. More 
 
 239. 
 
ckiticis:m and fiction 
 
 latc'lj she Las begun to idolize and illiistrato Duty, and 
 she is hardly less mischievous in this neAv role, opposing 
 duty, as she did love, to prndenoc, ohodionce, and 
 reason. The stock hero, wlioni, if we met him, we could 
 not fail to see was a most deplorable person, has un- 
 doubtedly imposed himself upon the victims of the 
 fiction habit as aduiirable. With him, too, love was and 
 is the great affair, whether in its old romantic phase of 
 chivalrous achievement or manifold suffering for love's 
 sake, or its more recent development of the " virile," 
 the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more recent 
 agonies of self-sacrifice, as idle and useless as the moral 
 experiences of the insane asylums. With his vain 
 posturings and his ridiculous splendor he is really a 
 painted barbarian, the prey of his passions and his de- 
 lusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the motives and 
 ethics of a savage, which the guilty author of his being 
 does his best — or his worst — in spite of his own light 
 and knowledge, to foist upon the reader as something 
 generous and noble. I am not merely bringing this 
 charge against that sort of fiction which is beneath 
 literature and outside of it, " the shoreless lakes of 
 ditch-water," whose miasms fill the air below the 
 empyrean where the great ones sit; but I am accusing 
 the work of some of the most famous, who have, in this 
 instance or in that, sinned against the truth, which can 
 alone exalt and purify men. I do not say that they 
 have constantly done so, or even commonly done so; 
 but that they have done so at all marks them as of the 
 past, to be read with the due historical allowance for 
 their epoch and their conditions. For I believe that, 
 while inferior writers will and must continue to imi- 
 tate them in their foibles and their errors, no one here- 
 after will be able to achieve greatness who is false to 
 humanity, either in its facts or its duties. The light of 
 
 240 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 civilization has already broken oven npon the novel, 
 and no conseiciitions man can now set ahont painting 
 an image of life without perpetual question of the 
 verity of his work, and without feeling bound to distin- 
 guish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, 
 between what is right and what is wrong, what is noble 
 and what is base, what is health and what is perdition, 
 in the actions and the characters he portrays. 
 
 The fiction that aims merely to entertain — the fiction 
 that is to serious fiction as the opera-bouffe, the ballet, 
 and the pantomime are to the true drama — need not 
 feel the burden of this obligation so deeply; but even 
 such fiction will not be gay or trivial to any reader's 
 hurt, and criticism should hold it to account if it 
 passes from painting to teaching folly. 
 
 I confess that I do not care to judge any work of the 
 imagination without first of all applying this test to 
 it. We must ask ourselves before we ask anything 
 else, Is it true ? — true to the motives, the impulses, the 
 principles that shape the life of actual men and 
 women? This truth, which necessarily includes the 
 highest morality and the highest artistry — this truth 
 given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak; 
 and without it all graces of style and feats of invention 
 and cunning of construction are so many superfluities 
 of naughtiness. It is well for the truth to have all 
 these, and shine in them, but for falsehood they are 
 merely meretricious, the bedizenment of the wanton; 
 they atone for nothing, they count for nothing. But in 
 fact they come naturally of truth, and grace it without 
 solicitation; they are added unto it. In the whole 
 range of fiction I know of no true picture of life — 
 that is, of human nature — which is not also a master- 
 piece of literature, full of divine and natural beauty. 
 It may have no touch or tint of this special civilization 
 
 241 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 or of that ; it had better have this local color well ascer- 
 tained; but the truth is deeper and finer than aspects, 
 and if the book is true to what men and women know 
 of one another's souls it will be true enough, and it 
 will be great and beautiful. It is the conception of 
 literature as something apart from life, superfinely 
 aloof, which makes it really unimportant to the great 
 mass of mankind, without a message or a meaning for 
 them ; and it is the notion that a novel mav be false in 
 its portrayal of causes and effects that makes literary 
 art contemptible even to those whom it amuses, that 
 forbids them to regard the novelist as a serious or 
 right-minded person. If they do not in some moment 
 of indignation cry out against all novels, as my corre- 
 spondent does, they remain besotted in the fume of 
 the delusions purveyed to them, with no higher feeling 
 for the author than such maudlin affection as the 
 frequenter of an opium - joint perhaps knows for the 
 attendant who fills his pipe with the drug. 
 
 Or, as in the case of another correspondent who 
 writes that in his youth he " read a great many novels, 
 but always regarded it as an amusement, like horse- 
 racing and card-playing," for which he had no time 
 when he entered upon the serious business of life, it 
 renders them merely contemptuous. His view of the 
 matter may be commended to the brotherhood and 
 sisterhood of novelists as full of wholesome if bitter 
 suggestion ; and I urge them not to dismiss it with high 
 literary scorn as that of some Boeotian dull to the 
 beauty of art. Refuse it as we may, it is still the feel- 
 ing of the vast majority of people for whom life is 
 earnest, and who find only a distorted and misleading 
 likeness of it in our books. We may fold ourselves in 
 our scholars' gowns, and close the doors of our studies, 
 and affect to despise this rude voice; but we cannot 
 
 242 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 shut it out. It comes to us from wherever men are at 
 Avork, from wherever they arc truly living, and accuses 
 us of unfaitlif Illness, of triviality, of mere stage-play; 
 and none of us can escape conviction except he prove 
 himself worthy of his time — a time in which the great 
 masters have brought literature hack to life, and filled 
 its ebbing veins with the red tides of reality. We can- 
 not all equal them ; we need not copy them ; but we can 
 all go to the sources of their inspiration and their 
 power ; and to draw from these no one need go far — no 
 one need really go out of himself. 
 
 Fifty years ago, Carlyle, in whom the truth was 
 always alive, but in whom it was then unperverted by 
 suffering, by celebrity, and by despair, wrote in his 
 study of Diderot : " Were it not reasonable to prophesy 
 that this exceeding great multitude of novel - writers 
 and such like must, in a new generation, gradually do 
 one of two things : either retire into the nurseries, and 
 work for children, minors, and semi - fatuous persons 
 of both sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their 
 novel-fabric into the dust-cart, and betake themselves 
 with such faculty as they have to understand and re- 
 cord what is true, of which surely there is, and will 
 forever be, a whole infinitude unknown to us of infinite 
 importance to us ? Poetry, it will more and more come 
 to be understood, is nothing but higher knowledge; 
 and the only genuine Romance (for grown persons), 
 Eeality." 
 
 If, after half a century, fiction still mainly works 
 for " children, minors, and semi - fatuous persons of 
 both sexes," it is nevertheless one of the hopefulest 
 signs of the world's progress that it has begun to work 
 for " grown persons," and if not exactly in the way 
 that Carlyle might have solely intended in urging its 
 writers to compile memoirs instead of building the 
 
 243 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 "novel-fabric," still it has, in the highest and widest 
 sense, already made Kealitj its Romance. I cannot 
 judge it, I do not even care for it, except as it has done 
 this; and I can hardly conceive of a literary self-re- 
 spect in these days compatible with the old trade of 
 make-believe, with the production of the kind of fic- 
 tion which is too much honored by classification with 
 card-playing and horse-racing. But let fiction cease 
 to lie about life ; let it portray men and women as they 
 are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the 
 measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls 
 and working them by springs and wires ; let it show the 
 different interests in their true proportions; let it for- 
 bear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, 
 egotism and prejudice, but frankly own these for what 
 they are, in whatever figures and occasions they ap- 
 pear; let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak 
 the dialect, the language, that most Americans know — 
 the language of unaffected people everywhere — and 
 there can be no doubt of an unlimited future, not only 
 of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it. 
 
 XIX 
 
 Tins is what I say in my severer moods, but at 
 other times I know that, of course, no one is going to 
 hold all fiction to such strict account. There is a 
 great deal of it which may be very well left to amuse 
 us, if it can, when wo arc sick or when we are silly, 
 and I am not inclined to despise it in the performance 
 of this office. Or, if people find pleasure in having 
 tlicir blood curdled for the sake of having it uncurdled 
 again at the end of the book, I would not interfere 
 with their amusement, though I do not desire it. 
 
 244 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 There is a certain demand in primitive natures for the 
 kind of fiction that does this, and the anthor of it is 
 nsnally very proud of it. The kind of novels he likes, 
 and likes to write, are intended to take his reader's 
 mind, or what that reader would probably call his 
 mind, off himself ; they make one forget life and all its 
 cares and duties ; they are not in the least like the 
 novels which make you think of these, and shame you 
 into at least wishing to be a helpful] er and wholesomer 
 creature than you are. No sordid details of verity 
 here, if you please ; no wretched being humbly and 
 weakly struggling to do right and to be true, suffering 
 for his follies and his sins, tasting joy only through 
 the mortification of self, and in the help of others ; 
 nothing of all this, but a great, whirling splendor of 
 peril and achievement, a wild scene of heroic adven- 
 ture and of emotional ground and lofty tumbling, 
 Avith a stage " picture " at the fall of the curtain, 
 and all the good characters in a row, their left 
 hands pressed upon their hearts, and kissing their 
 right hands to the audience, in the old way that 
 has always charmed and always will charm, Heaven 
 bless it! 
 
 In a world which loves the spectacular drama and 
 the practically bloodless sports of the modern amphi- 
 theatre the author of this sort of fiction has his place, 
 and we must not seek to destroy him because he fancies 
 it the first place. In fact, it is a condition of his doing 
 well the kind of work he does that he should think it 
 important, that he should believe in himself; and I 
 would not take away this faith of his, even if I could. 
 As I say, he has his place. The world often likes to 
 forget itself, and he brings on his heroes, his goblins, 
 his feats, his hair-breadth escapes, his imminent deadly 
 breaches, and the poor, foolish, childish old world re- 
 
 245 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 news the excitements of its ..^nage. Perhaps this is 
 a work of beneficence; and perhaps onr brave con- 
 jurer in his cabalistic robe is a philanthropist in dis- 
 guise. 
 
 Within the last four or five years there has been 
 throughout the whole English - speaking world what 
 Mr. Grant Allen happily calls the " recrudescence " 
 of taste in fiction. The effect is less noticeable in 
 America than in England, where effete Philistinism, 
 conscious of the dry-rot of its conventionality, is cast- 
 ing about for cure in anything that is wild and strange 
 and unlike itself. But the recrudescence has been 
 evident enough here, too; and a writer in one of our 
 periodicals has put into convenient shape some com- 
 mon errors concerning popularity as a test of merit 
 in a book. He seems to think, for instance, that the 
 love of the marvellous and impossible in fiction, which 
 is shown not only by " the unthinking multitude 
 clamoring about the book counters " for fiction of that 
 sort, but by the " literary elect " also, is proof of 
 some principle in human nature which ought to be re- 
 spected as well as tolerated. He seems to believe that 
 the ebullition of this passion forms a sufficient answer 
 to those who say that art should represent life, and 
 that the art which misrepresents life is feeble art and 
 false art. But it appears to me that a little carefuller 
 reasoning from a little closer inspection of the facts 
 would not have brought him to these conclusions. In 
 the first place, I doubt very much whether the " liter- 
 ary elect " have been fascinated in great numbers by 
 the fiction in question ; but if I supposed them to have 
 really fallen under that spell, I should still be able 
 to account for their fondness and that of the " un- 
 thinking multitude " upon the same grounds, without 
 honoring either very much. It is the habit of hasty 
 
 246 
 
CKITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 casuists to regard civilization as inclusive of all the 
 members of a civilized community ; but this is a pal- 
 pable error. Many persons in every civilized com- 
 munity live in a state of more or less evident savagery 
 with respect to their habits, their morals, and their 
 propensities; and they are held in check only by the 
 law. Many more yet are savage in their tastes, as 
 they show by the decoration of their houses and per- 
 sons, and by their choice of books and pictures ; and 
 these are left to the restraints of public opinion. In 
 fact, no man can be said to be thoroughly civilized or 
 always civilized ; the most refined, the most enlight- 
 ened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, 
 in which the best, or even the second best, shall not 
 please him. At these times the lettered and the un- 
 lettered are alike primitive and their gratifications are 
 of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person 
 may then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the 
 trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen 
 or a barbarian of any age. 
 
 I do not blame him for these moods ; I find some- 
 thing instructive and interesting in them ; but if they 
 lastingly established themselves in him, I could not 
 help deploring the state of that person. "No one can 
 really think that the " literary elect," who are said to 
 have joined the " unthinking multitude " in clamor- 
 ing about the book counters for the romances of no- 
 man's land, take the same kind of pleasure in them as 
 they do in a novel of Tolstoy, Tourguenief, George 
 Eliot, Thackeray, Balzac, Manzoni, Ha^vthorne, Mr. 
 Henry James, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Senor Palacio Val- 
 des, or even Walter Scott. They have joined the " un- 
 thinking multitude," perhaps because they are tired 
 of thinking, and expect to find relaxation in feeling — 
 feeling crudely, grossly, merely. For once in a way 
 
 24Y 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 tlicre is no great harm in this ; perhaps no harm at all. 
 It is perfectly natural; let them have their innocent 
 debauch. But let us disting^uish, for our own sake 
 and guidance, between the different kinds of things 
 that please the same kind of people; between the 
 things that please them habitually and those that please 
 tliem occasionally; between the pleasures that edify 
 them and those that amuse them. Otherwise we shall 
 be in danger of becoming permanently part of the 
 " unthinking multitude," and of remaining puerile, 
 primitive, savage. We shall be so in moods and at 
 moments; but let us not fancy that those are high 
 moods or fortunate moments. If they are harmless, 
 that is the most that can be said for them. They are 
 lapses from which we can perhaps go forward more 
 vigorously; but even this is not certain. 
 
 My own philosophy of the matter, however, would 
 not bring me to prohibition of such literary amuse- 
 ments as the writer quoted seems to find significant of 
 a growing indifference to truth and sanity in fiction. 
 Once more, I say, these amusements have their place, 
 as the circus has, and the burlesque and negro 
 minstrelsy, and the ballet, and prestidigitation. No 
 one of these is to be despised in its place; but we had 
 better understand that it is not the highest place, and 
 that it is hardly an intellectual delight. The lapse of 
 all the '' literary elect " in the world could not dignify 
 unreality; and their jjresent mood, if it exists, is of 
 no more weight against that beauty in literature which 
 comes from truth alone, and never can come from any- 
 thing else, than the permanent state of the " unthink- 
 ing multitude." 
 
 Yet even as regards the " unthinking multitude," I 
 believe I am not able to take the attitude of the writer 
 I have quoted. I am afraid that I respect them more 
 
 248 
 
CKITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 tlian be would like to have me, though I cannot al- 
 ways respect their taste, any more than that of the 
 " literary elect." I respect tliem for their good sense 
 in most practical matters; for their laborious, honest 
 lives ; for their kindness, their good - will ; for that 
 aspiration towards something better than themselves 
 which seems to stir, however dumbly, in every human 
 breast not abandoned to literary pride or other forms 
 of self -righteousness. I find every man interesting, 
 whether he thinks or unthinks, whether he is savage 
 or civilized ; for this reason I cannot thank the novel- 
 ist who teaches us not to know but to unknow our 
 kind. Yet I should by no means hold him to such 
 strict account as Emerson, who felt the absence of the 
 best motive, even in the greatest of the masters, when 
 he said of Shakespeare that, after all, he was only 
 master of the revels. The judgment is so severe, 
 even with the praise which precedes it, that one winces 
 under it ; and if one is still young, with the world gay 
 before him, and life full of joyous promise, one is apt 
 to ask, defiantly. Well, what is better than being such 
 a master of the revels as Shakespeare was? Let each 
 judge for himself. To the heart again of serious 
 youth, uncontaminate and exigent of ideal good, it 
 must always be a grief that the great masters seem so 
 often to have been willing to amuse the leisure and 
 vacancy of meaner men, and leave their mission to 
 the soul but partially fulfilled. This, perhaps, was 
 what Emerson had in mind ; and if he had it in mind 
 of Shakespeare, who gave us, with his histories and 
 comedies and problems, such a searching homily as 
 " Macbeth," one feels that he scarcely recognized the 
 limitations of the dramatist's art. Few consciences, 
 at times, seem so enlightened as that of this person- 
 ally unknown person, so withdrawn into his work, and 
 
 249. 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 so lost to tlie intensest curiosity of after-time ; at other 
 times he socms merely Elizabethan in his coarseness, 
 his courtliness, his imperfect sympathy. 
 
 XX 
 
 Of the finer kinds of romance, as distinguished 
 from the novel, I would even encourage the writing, 
 though it is one of the hard conditions of romance 
 that its personages starting with a parti pris can 
 rarely be characters with a living growth, but are apt 
 to be types, limited to the expression of one principle, 
 simple, elemental, lacking the God - given complexity 
 of motive which we find in all the human beings we 
 know. 
 
 Hawthorne, the great master of the romance, had 
 the insight and the power to create it anew as a kind in 
 fiction; though I am not sure that The Scarlet Letter 
 and the Blithedale Romance are not, strictly speak- 
 ing, novels rather than romances. They do not play 
 with some old superstition long outgrown, and they do 
 not invent a new superstition to play with, but deal 
 with things vital in every one's pulse. I am not say- 
 ing that what may be called the fantastic romance — 
 the romance that descends from Franhenstein rather 
 than The Scar-let Letter — ought not to be. On the 
 contrary, I should grieve to lose it, as I should grieve to 
 lose the pantomime or the comic opera, or many other 
 graceful things that amuse the passing hour, and help 
 us to live agreeably in a world where men actually 
 sin, suffer, and die. But it belongs to the decorative 
 arts, and though it has a high place among them, it 
 cannot be ranked with the works of tlM3 imagination — 
 
 250 
 
CEITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 the works that represent and body forth hunian ex- 
 perience. Its ingenuity can always afford a refined 
 pleasure, and it can often, at some risk to itself, con- 
 vey a valuable truth. 
 
 Perhaps the wliole region of historical romance 
 might be reopened with advantage to readers and 
 writers who cannot bear to be brought face to face 
 with human nature, but require the haze of distance 
 or a far perspective, in wliich all the disagreeable de- 
 tails shall be lost. There is no good reason why these 
 harmless people should not be amused, or their little 
 preferences indulged. 
 
 But here, again, I have my modest doubts, some 
 recent instances are so fatuous, as far as the por- 
 trayal of character goes, though I find them admirably 
 contrived in some respects. When I have owned the 
 excellence of the staging in every respect, and the 
 conscience with which the carpenter (as the theatrical 
 folks say) has done his work, I am at the end of my 
 praises. The people affect me like persons of our 
 generation made up for the parts; well trained, well 
 costumed, but actors, and almost amateurs. They 
 have the quality that makes the histrionics of amateurs 
 endurable; they are ladies and gentlemen; the worst, 
 the wickedest of them, is a lady or gentleman behind 
 the scene. 
 
 Yet, no doubt it is well that there should be a re- 
 version to the earlier types of thinking and feeling, to 
 earlier ways of looking at human nature, and I will 
 not altogether refuse the pleasure offered me by the 
 poetic romancer or the historical romancer because I 
 find my pleasure chiefly in Tolstoy and Valdes and 
 Thomas Hardy and Tourguenief, and Balzac at his 
 best. 
 
 251 
 
CEITICISM AXD FICTION 
 
 XXI 
 
 It used to be one of the disadvantages of the prao- 
 tice of romance in America, which Hawthorne more 
 or less whimsically lamented, that there were so few 
 shadows and inequalities in our broad level of pros- 
 perity; and it is one of the reflections suggested by 
 Dostoievsky's novel, The Crime and the Punishment, 
 that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in 
 American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing 
 — as false and as mistaken in its way as dealing in 
 American fiction with certain nudities which the Latin 
 peoples seem to find edifying. Whatever their deserts, 
 very few American novelists have been led out to be 
 shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at 
 Duluth; and in a land where journeymen carpenters 
 and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of 
 hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the 
 wrong from class to class has been almost inappreci- 
 able, though all this is changing for the worse. Our 
 novelists, therefore, concern themselves with the more 
 smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, 
 and seek the universal in the individual rather than 
 the social interests. It is worth while, even at the risk 
 of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to- 
 do actualities; the very passions themselves seem to 
 be softened and modified by conditions which formerly 
 at least could not be said to wrong any one, to cramp 
 endeavor, or to cross lawful desire. Sin and sufPering 
 and shame there must always be in the world, I sup- 
 pose, but I believe that in this new world of ours it is 
 still mainly from one to another one, and oftener still 
 from one to one's self. We have death, too, in Amer- 
 ica, and a great deal of disagreeable and painful dis- 
 ease, which the multiplicity of our patent medicines 
 
 252 
 
CEITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 does not seem to cure; but this is tragedy that comes 
 in the very nature of things, and is not peculiarly 
 American, as the large, cheerful average of health and 
 success and happy life is. It will not do to boast, but 
 it is well to be true to the facts, and to see that, apart 
 from these purely mortal troubles, the race here has 
 enjoyed conditions in which most of the ills that have 
 darkened its annals might be averted by honest work 
 and unselfish behavior. 
 
 Fine artists we have among us, and right-minded as 
 far as they go ; and we must not forget this at evil mo- 
 ments when it seems as if all the women had taken to 
 writing hysterical improprieties, and some of the men 
 were trying to be at least as hysterical in despair of 
 being as improper. Other traits are much more 
 characteristic of our life and our fiction. In most 
 American novels, vivid and graphic as the best of them 
 are, the people are segregated if not sequestered, and 
 the scene is sparsely populated. The effect may be in 
 instinctive response to the vacancy of our social life, 
 and I shall not make haste to blame it. There are 
 few places, few occasions among us, in which a novel- 
 ist can get a large number of polite people together, or 
 at least keep them together. Unless he carries a snap- 
 camera his picture of them has no probability; they 
 affect one like the figures perfunctorily associated in 
 such deadly old engravings as that of " Washington 
 Irving and his Friends." Perhaps it is for this 
 reason that we excel in small pieces with three or four 
 figures, or in studies of rustic communities, where there 
 is propinquity if not society. Our grasp of more 
 urbane life is feeble; most attempts to assemble it in 
 our pictures are failurcs, possibly because it is too 
 transitory, too intangible in its nature with us, to be 
 truthfully represented as really existent. 
 
 17 2r>;3 ' 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 I am not sure that the Americans have not brought 
 the short story nearer perfection in the all-round sense 
 that almost any other people, and for reasons very 
 simple and near at hand. It might be argued from the 
 national hurry and impatience that it was a literary 
 form peculiarly adapted to the American tempera- 
 ment, but I suspect that its extraordinary development 
 among us is owing much more to more tangible facts. 
 The success of American magazines, which is nothing 
 less than prodigious, is only commensurate with their 
 excellence. Their sort of success is not only from the 
 courage to decide which ought to please, but from the 
 knowledge of what does please ; and it is probable that, 
 aside from the pictures, it is the short stories which 
 please the readers of our best magazines. The serial 
 novels they must have, of course; but rather more of 
 course they must have short stories, and by operation 
 of the law of supply and demand, the short stories, 
 abundant in quantity and excellent in quality, are 
 forthcoming because they are wanted. By another 
 operation of the same law, which political economists 
 have more recently taken account of, the demand fol- 
 lows the supply, and short stories are sought for be- 
 cause there is a proven ability to furnish them, and 
 people read them willingly because they are usually 
 very good. The art of vsrriting them is now so disci- 
 plined and diffused with us that there is no lack either 
 for the magazines or for the newspaper " syndicates " 
 which deal in them almost to the exclusion of the 
 serials. 
 
 An interesting fact in regard to the different varie- 
 ties of the short story among us is that the sketches 
 and studies by the women seem faithfuller and more 
 realistic than those of the men, in proportion to their 
 number. Their tendency is more distinctly in that 
 
 254 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 direction, and there is a solidity, an honest observa- 
 tion, in the work of snch women, which often leaves 
 little to be desired. I should, upon the whole, be dis- 
 posed to rank American short stories only below those 
 of such Russian writers as I have read, and I should 
 praise rather than blame their free use of our different 
 local parlances, or " dialects," as people call them. I 
 like this because I hope that our inherited English 
 may be constantly freshened and revived from the na- 
 tive sources which our literary decentralization will 
 help to keep open, and I will own that as I turn over 
 novels coming from Philadelphia, from N^ew Mexico, 
 from Boston, from Tennessee, from rural ISTew Eng- 
 land, from ISTew York, every local flavor of diction 
 gives me courage and pleasure. Alphonse Daudet, in 
 a conversation with H. H. Boyesen said, speaking of 
 Tourguenief, " What a luxury it must be to have a 
 great big untrodden barbaric language to wade into ! 
 We poor fellows who work in the language of an old 
 civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal 
 felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed 
 jewel we are polishing. The crown - jewels of our 
 French tongue have passed through the hands of so 
 many generations of monarchs that it seems like pre- 
 sumption on the part of any late-born pretender to at- 
 tempt to wear them." 
 
 This grief is, of course, a little whimsical, yet it has 
 a certain measure of reason in it, and the same regret 
 has been more seriously expressed by the Italian poet 
 Aleardi : 
 
 " Muse of an aged people, in the eve 
 Of fading civilization, I was born. 
 
 Oh, fortunate. 
 
 My sisters, who in the heroic dawn 
 Of races sung! To them did destiny give 
 255 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 The virg:in fire and chaste ingenuousness 
 
 Of their land's speech; and, reverenced, their hands 
 
 Ran over potent strings." 
 
 It will never do to allow that we are at such a des- 
 perate pass in English, but something of this divine 
 despair we may feel too in thinking of " tlie spacious 
 times of great Elizabeth," when the poets were trying 
 the stops of the young language, and thrilling with 
 the surprises of their own music. We may comfort 
 ourselves, however, unless we prefer a luxury of grief, 
 by remembering that no language is ever old on the 
 lips of those who speak it, no matter how decrepit it 
 droj)s from the pen. We have only to leave our 
 studies, editorial and other, and go into the shops and 
 fields to find the " spacious times " again ; and from 
 the beginning Realism, before she had put on her 
 capital letter, had divined this near - at - hand truth 
 along with the rest. Lowell, almost the greatest and 
 finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us 
 that Elizabeth was still Queen where he heard Yankee 
 farmers talk. One need not invite slang into the com- 
 pany of its betters, though perhaps slang has been 
 dropping its " s " and becoming language ever since 
 the world began, and is certainly sometimes delight- 
 ful and forcible beyond the reach of the dictionary. I 
 would not have any one go about for new words, but if 
 one of them came aptly, not to reject its help. For our 
 novelists to try to write Americanly, from any motive, 
 would be a dismal error, but being born Americans, I 
 would have them use " Americanisms " whenever 
 th'^se serve their turn ; and when their characters 
 speak, I should like to hear them speak true Amer- 
 ican, with all tlie varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian, 
 Bostonian, and New York accents. If avc bother our- 
 
 256 
 
CEITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 selves to write what the critics imagine to be " Eng- 
 lish," we shall be priggish and artificial, and still 
 more so if we make onr Americans talk " English." 
 There is also this serious disadvantage about " Eng- 
 lish," that if we wrote the best " English " in the 
 world, probably the Englisli themselves would not 
 know it, or, if they did, certainly would not own it. 
 It has always been supposed by grammarians and 
 purists that a language can be kept as they find it; 
 but languages, while they live, are perpetually chang- 
 ing. God apparently meant them for the common 
 people ; and the common people will use them freely 
 as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our 
 continental English will differ more and more from 
 the insular English, and I believe that this is not de- 
 plorable, but desirable. 
 
 In fine, I would have our American novelists be as 
 American as they miconsciously can. Matthew Ar- 
 nold complained that he found no " distinction " in 
 our life, and I would gladly persuade all artists intend- 
 ing greatness in any kind among us that the recogni- 
 tion of the fact pointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to 
 be a source of inspiration to them, and not discourage- 
 ment. We have been now some hundred years building 
 up a state on the affirmation of the essential equality 
 of men in their rights and duties, and whetlier we have 
 been right or been wrong the gods have taken us at our 
 word, and have responded to us with a civilization in 
 which there is no " distinction " perceptible to the eye 
 that loves and values it. Such beauty and such grand- 
 eur as we have is common beauty, common grandeur, 
 or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality of 
 solidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself 
 to the disadvantage of an}i;hing else. It seems to me 
 that these conditions invite the artist to the study 
 
 257 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 and the appreciation of the common, and to the por- 
 trayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects 
 which unite rather than sever humanity, if he would 
 thrive in our new order of things. The talent that is 
 robust enough to front the every-day world and catch 
 the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly 
 face, need not fear the encounter, though it seems ter- 
 rible to the sort nurtured in the superstition of the 
 romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the distinguished, as 
 the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writ- 
 ing. The arts must become democratic, and then we 
 shall have the expression of America in art; and the 
 reproach which Arnold was half right in making us 
 shall have no justice in it any longer; we shall be 
 " distinguished." 
 
 XXII 
 
 In the mean time it has been said with a superficial 
 justice that our fiction is narrow; though in the same 
 sense I suppose the present English fiction is as narrow 
 as our own ; and most modern fiction is narrow in a 
 certain sense. In Italy the best men are writing 
 novels as brief and restricted in range as ours ; in 
 Spain the novels are intense and deep, and not 
 spacious ; the Trench school, with the exception of 
 Zola, is narrow; the IN'orwegians are narrow; the Rus- 
 sians, except Tolstoy, are narrow, and the next great- 
 est after him, Tourguenief, is the narrowest great 
 novelist, as to mere dimensions, that ever lived, deal- 
 ing nearly always with small groups, isolated and 
 analyzed in the most American fashion. In fact, the 
 charge of narrowness accuses the whole tendency of 
 modern fiction as much as the American school. But 
 I do not by any means allow that this narrowness is a 
 
 258 
 
CEITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 defect, while denying that it is a universal characteris- 
 tic of our fiction ; it is rather, for the present, a virtue. 
 Indeed, I should call the present American work, 
 Korth and South, thorough rather than narrow. In one 
 sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a microcosm, 
 and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately 
 with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neigh- 
 borhood or a class, has done something which cannot 
 in any bad sense be called narrow; his breadth is 
 vertical instead of lateral, that is all ; and this depth is 
 more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civiliza- 
 tion like ours, Avhere the differences arc not of classes, 
 but of types, and not of types either so much as of 
 characters. A new method was necessary in dealing 
 with the new conditions, and the new method is world- 
 wide, because the whole world is more or less Amer- 
 icanized. Tolstoy is exceptionally voluminous among 
 modern writers, even Russian writers; and it might 
 be said that the forte of Tolstoy himself is not in his 
 breadth sidewise, but in his breadth upward and down- 
 ward. The Death of Ivan Ilyiich leaves as vast an im- 
 pression on the reader's soul as any episode of War 
 and Peace, which, indeed, can be recalled only in 
 episodes, and not as a whole. I think tiiat our writers 
 may be safely counselled to continue their work in the 
 modern way, because it is the best way yet known. If 
 they make it true, it will be large, no matter what its 
 superficies are; and it would be the greatest mistake 
 to try to make it big. A big book is necessarily a group 
 of episodes more or less loosely connected by a thread 
 of narrative, and there seems no reason why this 
 thread must always be supplied. Each episode may 
 be quite distinct, or it may be one of a connected 
 group ; the final effect will be from the truth of each 
 episode, not from the size of the group. 
 
 259 
 
crtticis:m axd fiction 
 
 The whole field of human experience was never so 
 nearly covered by imaginative literature in any age as 
 in this; and American life especially is getting repre- 
 sented with unexampled fulness. It is true that no 
 one writer, no one book, represents it, for that is not 
 possible; our social and political decentralization for- 
 bids this, and may forever forbid it. But a great num- 
 ber of very good writers are instinctively striving to 
 make each part of the country and each phase of our 
 civilization known to all the other parts; and their 
 work is not narrow in any feeble or vicious sense. 
 The world was once very little, and it is now very 
 large. Formerly, all science could be grasped by a 
 single mind; but now the man who hopes to become 
 great or useful in science must devote himself to a 
 single dej)artment. It is so in everything — all arts, 
 all trades; and the novelist is not superior to the uni- 
 versal rule against universality. He contributes his 
 share to a thorough knowledge of groups of the human 
 race under conditions which are full of inspiring 
 novelty and interest. He works more fearlessly, 
 frankly, and faithfully than the novelist ever worked 
 before ; his work, or much of it, may be destined never 
 to be reprinted from the monthly magazines ; but if he 
 turns to his book-shelf and regards the array of the 
 British or otlier classics, he knows that they, too, are 
 for the most part dead ; he knows that the planet itself 
 is destined to freeze up and drop into the sun at last, 
 with all its surviving literature upon it. The question 
 is merely one of time. He consoles himself, therefore, 
 if he is wise, and works on ; and we may all take some 
 comfort from the thought that most things cannot be 
 helped. Especially a movement in literature like that 
 which the world is now witnessing cannot be helped ; 
 and we could no more turn back and be of the literary 
 
 2G0 
 
CKITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 fashions of any age before this than we could turn 
 back and be of its social, economical, or political con- 
 ditions. 
 
 If I were authorized to address any word directly to 
 our novelists I should say, Do not trouble yourselves 
 about standards or ideals; but try to be faithful and 
 natural: remember that there is no greatness, no 
 beauty, which does not come from truth to your own 
 knowledge of things ; and keep on working, even if your 
 work is not long remembered. 
 
 At least three-fifths of the literature called classic, 
 in all languages, no more lives than the poems and 
 stories that perish monthly in our magazines. It is 
 all printed and reprinted, generation after generation, 
 century after century ; but it is not alive ; it is as dead 
 as the people who wrote it and read it, and to whom it 
 meant something, perhaps; with whom it was a fash- 
 ion, a caprice, a passing taste. A superstitious piety 
 preserves it, and pretends that it has aesthetic quali- 
 ties which can delight or edify; but nobody really en- 
 joys it, except as a reflection of the past moods and 
 humors of the race, or a revelation of the author's 
 character; otherwise it is trash, and often very filthy 
 trash, which the present trash generally is not. 
 
 XXIII 
 
 One of the great newspapers the other day invited 
 the prominent American authors to speak their minds 
 upon a point in the theory and practice of fiction which 
 had already vexed some of them. It was the question 
 of how much or how little the American novel ought to 
 deal with certain facts of life which are not usually 
 talked of before young people, and especially young 
 
 261 
 
CRITICIGM AND FICTION 
 
 ladies. Of course the question was not decided, and I 
 forget just how far the balance inclined in favor of a 
 larger freedom in the matter. But it certainly in- 
 clined that way ; one or two writers of the sex which is 
 somehow supposed to have purity in its keeping (as if 
 purity were a thing that did not practically concern 
 the other sex, preoccupied with serious affairs) gave it 
 a rather vigorous tilt to that side. In view of this 
 fact it would not be the part of prudence to make 
 an effort to dress the balance; and indeed I do not 
 know that I was going to make any such effort. But 
 there are some things to say, around and about the 
 subject, which I should like to have some one else 
 say, and which I may myself possibly be safe in sug- 
 gesting. 
 
 One of the first of these is the fact, generally lost 
 sight of by those who censure the Anglo-Saxon novel for 
 its prudishness, that it is really not such a prude after 
 all; and that if it is sometimes apparently anxious to 
 avoid those experiences of life not spoken of before 
 young people, this may be an appearance only. Some- 
 times a novel which has this shuffling air, this effect of 
 truckling to propriety, might defend itself, if it could 
 speak for itself, by saying that such experiences hap- 
 pened not to come within its scheme, and that, so far 
 from maiming or mutilating itself in ignoring them, 
 it was all the more faithfully representative of the 
 tone of modern life in dealing with love that was 
 chaste, and with passion so honest that it could be 
 openly spoken of before the tenderest society bud at 
 dinner. It might say that the guilty intrigue, the be- 
 trayal, the extreme flirtation even, was the exceptional 
 thing in life, and unless the scheme of the story neces- 
 sarily involved it, that it would be bad art to lug it in, 
 and as bad taste as to introduce such topics in a mixed 
 
 262 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 company. It could say very justly that the novel in 
 our civilization now always addresses a mixed com- 
 pany, and that the vast majority of the company are 
 ladies, and that very many, if not most, of these ladies 
 are young girls. If the novel were \vritten for men 
 and for married women alone, as in continental Eu- 
 rope, it might be altogether different. But the simple 
 fact is that it is not written for them alone among us, 
 and it is a question of writing, under cover of our uni- 
 versal acceptance, things for young girls to read which 
 you "would be put out-of-doors for saying to them, or of 
 frankly giving notice of your intention, and so cutting 
 yourself off from the pleasure — and it is a very high 
 and sweet one — of appealing to these vivid, responsive 
 intelligences, which are none the less brilliant and ad- 
 mirable because they are innocent. 
 
 One day a novelist who liked, after the manner of 
 other men, to repine at his hard fate, complained to his 
 friend, a critic, that he was tired of the restriction he 
 had put upon himself in this regard; for it is a mis- 
 take, as can be readily shown, to suppose that others 
 impose it. " See how free those French fellows are !" 
 he rebelled. " Shall we always be shut up to our tradi- 
 tion of decency?" 
 
 " Do you think it's much worse than being shut up 
 to their tradition of indecency ?" said his friend. 
 
 Then that novelist began to reflect, and he remem- 
 bered how sick the invariable motive of the French 
 novel made him. He perceived finally that, convention 
 for convention, ours was not only more tolerable, but 
 on the whole was truer to life, not only to its com- 
 plexion, but also to its texture. 'Ko one will pretend 
 that there is not vicious love beneath the surface of 
 our society; if he did, the fetid explosions of the di- 
 vorce trials would refute him ; but if he pretended 
 
 263 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 that it was in any just sense characteristic of our soci- 
 ety, he could be still more easily refuted. Yet it exists, 
 and it is unquestionably the material of tragedy, the 
 stuff from which intense effects are wrought. The 
 question, after owning this fact, is whether these in- 
 tense effects are not rather cheap effects. I incline 
 to think they are, and I will try to say why I think 
 so, if I may do so without offence. The material itself, 
 the mere mention of it, has an instant fascination; it 
 arrests, it detains, till the last word is said, and while 
 there is anything to be hinted. This is what makes a 
 love intrigue of some sort all but essential to the popu- 
 larity of any fiction. Without such an intrigue the in- 
 tellectual equipment of the author must be of the high- 
 est, and then he will succeed only with the highest class 
 of readers. But any author who will deal with a 
 guilty love intrigue holds all readers in his hand, the 
 highest with the lowest, as long as he hints the slight- 
 est hope of the smallest potential naughtiness. He 
 need not at all be a great author; he may be a very 
 shabby wretch, if he has but the courage or the trick 
 of that sort of thing. The critics will call him " virile " 
 and " passionate " ; decent people will be ashamed to 
 have been limed by him ; but the low average will 
 only ask another chance of flocking into his net. If he 
 happens to be an able writer, his really fine and 
 costly work will be unheeded, and the lure to the 
 appetite will be chiefly remembered. There may be 
 other qualities which make reputations for other men, 
 but in his case they vrill count for nothing. He pays 
 this penalty for his success in that kind ; and every 
 one pays some such penalty who deals with some such 
 material. 
 
 But I do not mean to imply that his case covers the 
 whole ground. So far as it goes, though, it ought to 
 
 264 
 
CKITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 stop tlio mouths of tliose who complain that fiction Is 
 enslaved to propriety among us. It appears that of a 
 certain kind of impropriety it is free to give us all it 
 will, and more. But this is not wliat serious men and 
 women writing fiction mean when they rebel against 
 the limitations of their art in our civilization. They 
 have no desire to deal with nakedness, as painters and 
 sculptors freely do in the worship of beauty; or with 
 certain facts of life, as the stage does, in the service 
 of sensation. But they ask why, when the conventions 
 of the plastic and histrionic arts liberate their fol- 
 lowers to the portrayal of almost any phase of the 
 physical or of the emotional nature, an American novel- 
 ist may not write a story on the lines of Anna Kare- 
 nina or Madame Bovary. They wish to touch one of 
 the most serious and sorrowful problems of life in the 
 spirit of Tolstoy and Flaubert, and they ask why they 
 may not. At one time, they remind us, the Anglo- 
 Saxon novelist did deal with such problems — De Foe 
 in his spirit, Eichardson in his, Goldsmith in his. At 
 what moment did our fiction lose this privilege ? In 
 what fatal hour did the Young Girl arise and seal the 
 lips of Fiction, with a touch of her finger, to some of 
 the most vital interests of life ? 
 
 Whether I wished to oppose them in their aspira- 
 tion for greater freedom, or whether I wished to en- 
 courage them, I should begin to answer them by say- 
 ing that the Young Girl has never done anything of 
 the kind. The manners of the novel have been im- 
 proving with those of its readers ; that is all. Gentle- 
 men no longer swear or fall drunk under the table, or 
 abduct young ladies and shut them up in lonely coun- 
 try-houses, or so habitually set about the ruin of their 
 neighbors' wives, as they once did. Generally, people 
 now call a spade an agricultural implement; thej[ have 
 
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CKITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 not grown decent without having also groAvn a little 
 squeamish, but they have grown comparatively decent ; 
 there is no doubt about that. They require of a novel- 
 ist whom they respect unquestionable proof of his 
 seriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases 
 of life; they require a sort of scientific decorum. He 
 can no longer expect to be received on the ground of 
 entertainment only; he assumes a higher function, 
 something like that of a physician or a priest, and they 
 expect him to be bound by laws as sacred as those of 
 such professions; they hold him solemnly pledged not 
 to betray them or abuse their confidence. If he will 
 accept the conditions, they give him their confidence, 
 and he may then treat to his greater honor, and not at 
 all to his disadvantage, of such experiences, such rela- 
 tions of men and women as George Eliot treats in 
 Adam Bede, in Daniel Deronda, in Romola, in almost 
 all her books ; such as Hawthorne treats in The Scarlet 
 Letter; such as Dickens treats in David Copperfield; 
 such as Thackeray treats in Pendennis, and glances at 
 in every one of his fictions ; such as most of the masters 
 of English fiction have at some time treated more or 
 less openly. It is quite false or quite mistaken to sup- 
 pose that our novels have left untouched these most 
 important realities of life. They have only not made 
 them their stock in trade; they have kept a true per- 
 spective in regard to them ; they have relegated them in 
 their pictures of life to the space and place they occupy 
 in life itself, as we know it in England and America. 
 They have kept a correct proportion, knowing perfectly 
 well that unless the novel is to bo a map, with every- 
 thing scrupulously laid down in it, a faithful record 
 of life in far the greater extent could be made to the 
 exclusion of guilty love and all its circumstances and 
 consequences, 
 
 266 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 I justify them in this view not only because I hate 
 what is cheap and meretricious, and hold in peculiar 
 loathing the cant of the critics who require " passion " 
 as something in itself admirable and desirable in a 
 novel, but because I prize fidelity in the historian of 
 feeling and character. Most of these critics who de- 
 mand " passion " would seem to have no conception of 
 any passion but one. Yet there are several other pas- 
 sions: the passion of grief, the passion of avarice, the 
 passion of pity, the passion of ambition, the passion of 
 hate, the passion of envy, the passion of devotion, the 
 passion of friendship ; and all these have a greater part 
 in the drama of life than the passion of love, and in- 
 finitely greater than the passion of guilty love. Wit- 
 tingly or unwittingly, English fiction and American 
 fiction have recognized this truth, not fully, not in the 
 measure it merits, but in greater degree than most 
 other fiction. 
 
 XXIV 
 
 Who can deny that fiction would be incomparably 
 stronger, incomparably truer, if once it could tear off 
 the habit which enslaves it to the celebration chiefly 
 of a single passion, in one phase or another, and could 
 frankly dedicate itself to the service of all the passions, 
 all the interests, all the facts ? Every novelist who has 
 thought about his art knows that it would, and I think 
 that upon reflection he must doubt whether his sphere 
 would be greatly enlarged if he were allowed to treat 
 freely the darker aspects of the favorite passion. But, 
 as I have shown, the privilege, the right to do this, is 
 already perfectly recognized. This is proved again 
 by the fact that serious criticism recognizes as mastcr- 
 
 267 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 works (I will not push the question of supremacy) the 
 two great novels which above all others have moved the 
 world by their study of guilty love. If by any chance, 
 if by some prodigious miracle, any American should 
 now arise to treat it on the level of Anyia Karenlna and 
 Madame Bovary, he would be absolutely sure of suc- 
 cess, and of fame and gratitude as great as those books 
 have won for their authors. 
 
 But what editor of what American magazine would 
 print such a story? 
 
 Certainly I do not think any one would; and here 
 our novelist must again submit to conditions. If he 
 wishes to publish such a story (supposing him to have 
 once written it), he must publish it as a book. A book 
 is something by itself, responsible for its character, 
 which becomes quickly known, and it does not neces- 
 sarily penetrate to every member of the household. 
 The father or the mother may say to the child, " I 
 would rather you wouldn't read that book " ; if the 
 child cannot be trusted, the book may be locked up. 
 But with the magazine and its serial the affair is dif- 
 ferent. Between the editor of a reputable English or 
 American magazine and the families which receive it 
 there is a tacit agreement that he will print nothing 
 which a father may not read to his daughter, or safely 
 leave her to read herself. 
 
 After all, it is a matter of business; and the in- 
 surgent novelist should consider the situation with 
 coolness and common-sense. The editor did not create 
 the situation ; but it exists, and he could not even at- 
 tempt to change it without many sorts of disaster. He 
 respects it, therefore, with the good faith of an honest 
 man. Even when he is himself a novelist, with ardor 
 for his art and impatience of the limitations put upon 
 it, ho interposes his veto, as Thackeray did in the case 
 
 268 
 
CRITICISM AND MICTION 
 
 of Trollope when a contributor approaches forbidden 
 ground. 
 
 It does not avail to say that the daily papers teem 
 with facts far fouler and deadlier than any which fic- 
 tion could iniag-ine. That is true, but it is true also 
 that the sex which reads the most novels reads the 
 fewest newspapers; and, besides, the reporter does not 
 command the novelist's skill to fix impressions in a 
 young girl's mind or to suggest conjecture. The maga- 
 zine is a little despotic, a little arbitrary; but unques- 
 tionably its favor is essential to success, and its condi- 
 tions are not such narrow ones. You cannot deal with 
 Tolstoy's and Flaubert's subjects in the absolute artis- 
 tic freedom of Tolstoy and Flaubert; since De Foe, 
 that is unknown among us ; but if you deal with theroi 
 in the manner of George Eliot, of Thackeray, of Dick- 
 ens, of society, you may deal with them even in the 
 magazines. There is no other restriction upon you. 
 'All the horrors and miseries and tortures are open to 
 you ; your pages may drop blood ; sometimes it may 
 happen that the editor will even exact such strong ma- 
 terial from you. But probably he will require nothing 
 but the observance of the convention in question; and 
 if you do not yourself prefer bloodshed he will leave 
 you free to use all sweet and peaceable means of inter- 
 esting his readers. 
 
 It is no narrow field he throws open to you, with that 
 little sign to keep off the grass up at one point only. 
 Its vastness is still almost unexplored, and whole 
 regions in it are unknown to the fictionist. Dig any- 
 where, and do but dig deep enough, and you strike 
 riches ; or, if you are of the mind to range, the gentler 
 climes, the softer temperatures, the serener skies, are 
 all free to you, and are so little visited that the chance 
 of novelty is greater among them. 
 ^8 269 
 
CEITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 XXV 
 
 While the Americans have greatly excelled in the 
 short story generally, they have almost created a spe- 
 cies of it in the Thanksgiving story. We have trans- 
 planted the Christmas story from England, while the 
 Thanksgiving story is native to our air ; but both are of 
 Anglo-Saxon growth. Their difference is from a differ- 
 ence of environment ; and the Christmas story when 
 naturalized among us becomes almost identical in mo- 
 tive, incident, and treatment with the Thanksgiving 
 story. If I were to generalize a distinction between 
 them, I should say that the one dealt more with marvels 
 and the other more with morals; and yet the critic 
 should beware of speaking too confidently on this 
 point. It is certain, however, that the Christmas 
 season is meteorologically more favorable to the effec- 
 tive return of persons long supposed lost at sea, or 
 from a prodigal life, or from a darkened mind. The 
 longer, darker, and colder nights are better adapted to 
 the apparition of ghosts, and to all manner of signs 
 and portents ; while they seem to present a wider field 
 for the intervention of angels in behalf of orphans and 
 outcasts. The dreams of elderly sleepers at this time 
 are apt to be such as will effect a lasting change in 
 them when they awake, turning them from the hard, 
 cruel, and grasping habits of a lifetime, and recon- 
 ciling them to their sons, daughters, and nephews, who 
 have thwarted them in marriage ; or softening them 
 to their meek, uncomplaining wives, whose hearts they 
 have trampled upon in their reckless pursuit of wealth ; 
 and generally disposing them to a distribution of ham- 
 pers among the sick and poor, and to a friendly recep- 
 tion of gentlemen with charity subscription papers. 
 
 270 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 Ships readily drive upon rocks in the early twilight, 
 and offer exciting' difficulties of salvage; and the heavy 
 snows gather quickly round the steps of wanderers who 
 lie down to die in them, preparatory to their discovery 
 and rescue by immediate relatives. The midnight 
 weather is also very suitable for encounter with mur- 
 derers and burglars; and the contrast of its freezing 
 gloom with the light and cheer in-doors promotes the 
 gayeties which merge, at all well-regulated country- 
 houses, in love and marriage. In the region of pure 
 character no moment could be so available for flinging 
 off the mask of frivolity, or imbecility, or savagery, 
 which one has worn for ten or twenty long years, say, 
 for the purpose of foiling some villain, and surprising 
 the reader, and helping the author out with his plot. 
 Persons abroad in the Alps, or Apennines, or Pyre- 
 nees, or anywhere seeking shelter in the huts of shep- 
 herds or the dens of smugglers, find no time like it for 
 lying in a feigned slumber, and listening to the whis- 
 pered machinations of their suspicious - looking enter- 
 tainers, and then suddenly starting up and fighting 
 their way out ; or else springing from the real sleep 
 into which they have sunk exhausted, and finding it 
 broad day and the good peasants whom they had so un- 
 justly doubted, waiting breakfast for them. 
 
 We need not point out the superior advantages 
 of the Christmas season for anything one has a 
 mind to do with the French Revolution, of the 
 Arctic explorations, or the Indian Mutiny, or the 
 horrors of Siberian exile ; there is no time so good 
 for the use of this material ; and ghosts on shipboard 
 are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In our o^^^l 
 logging camps the man who has gone into the woods 
 for the winter, after quarrelling with his wife, then 
 hears her sad appealing voice, and is moved to good 
 
 271 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 resolutions as at no otlicr period of the year; and in 
 the mining regions, first in California and later in 
 Colorado, the hardened reprobate, dying in his boots, 
 smells his mother's dough-nuts, and breathes his last 
 in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and the lit- 
 tle brother, or sister, or the old father coming to meet 
 him from heaven; while his rude companions listen 
 round him, and dry their eyes on the butts of their 
 revolvers. 
 
 It has to be very grim, all that, to be truly effective ; 
 and here, already, we have a touch in the American- 
 ized Christmas story of the moralistic quality of the 
 American Thanksgiving story. This was seldom writ- 
 ten, at first, for the mere entertainment of the reader ; 
 it was meant to entertain him, of course; but it was 
 meant to edify him, too, and to improve him; and 
 some such intention is still present in it. I rather 
 think that it deals more probably with character to 
 this end than its English cousin, the Christmas story, 
 does. It is not so improbable that a man should leave 
 off being a drunkard on Thanksgiving, as that he 
 should leave off being a curmudgeon on Christmas; 
 that he should conquer his appetite as that he should 
 instantly change his nature, by good resolutions. He 
 would be very likely, indeed, to break his resolutions 
 in either case, but not so likely in the one as in the 
 other. 
 
 Generically, the Thanksgiving story is cheerfuller 
 in its drama and simpler in its persons than the 
 Christmas story. Rarely has it dealt with the super- 
 natural, either the apparition of ghosts or the inter- 
 vention of angels. The weather being so much milder 
 at the close of !N^ovember than it is a month later, very 
 little can be done with the elements ; though on the 
 coast a northeasterly storm has been, and can be, very 
 
 272 
 
CEITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 usefully employed. The Thanksgiving story is more 
 restricted in its range ; the scene is still mostly in New 
 England, and the characters are of New England ex- 
 traction, who come home frqm the West usually, or 
 New York, for the event of the little drama, whatever 
 it may be. It may be the reconciliation of kinsfolk 
 who have quarrelled ; or the union of lovers long 
 estranged ; or husbands and wives who have had hard 
 words and parted ; or mothers who had thought their 
 sons dead in California and find themselves agreeably 
 disappointed in their return ; or fathers who for old 
 time's sake receive back their erring and conveniently 
 dying daughters. The notes are not many which this 
 simple music sounds, but they have a Sabbath tone, 
 mostly, and win the listener to kindlier thoughts and 
 better moods. The art is at its highest in some strong 
 sketch of Rose Terry Cooke's, or some perfectly satis- 
 fying study of Miss Jewett's, or some graphic situa- 
 tion of Miss Wilkins's ; and then it is a very fine art. 
 But mostly it is poor and rude enough, and makes 
 openly, shamelessly, for the reader's emotions, as well 
 as his morals. It is inclined to be rather descriptive. 
 The turkey, the j^nmpkin, the corn-field, figure through- 
 out ; and the leafless woods are blue and cold against 
 the evening sky behind the low hip-roofed, old-fash- 
 ioned homestead. The parlance is usually the Yankee 
 dialect and its Western modifications. 
 
 The Thanksgiving story is mostly confined in scene 
 to the country; it does not seem possible to do much 
 with it in town ; and it is a serious question , whether 
 with its geographical and topical limitations it can 
 hold its own against the Christmas story; and whether 
 it Avould not be well for authors to consider a combina- 
 tion with its elder rival. 
 
 The two feasts are so near together in point of time 
 273 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 that tliej could be easily covered by the sentiment of 
 even a brief narrative. Under the agglutinated style 
 of A Thanksgiving-Christmas Story, fiction appropri- 
 ate to both could be produced, and both could be em- 
 ployed naturally and probably in the transaction of 
 its affairs and the development of its characters. The 
 plot for such a story could easily be made to include a 
 total-abstinence pledge and family reunion at Thanks- 
 giving, and an apparition and spiritual regeneration 
 over a bowl of punch at Christmas. 
 
 XXVI 
 
 It would be interesting to know the far beginnings 
 of holiday literature, and I commend the quest to the 
 scientific spirit which now specializes research in every 
 branch of history. In the mean time, without being 
 too confident of the facts, I venture to suggest that it 
 came in with the romantic movement about the begin- 
 ning of this century, when mountains ceased to be 
 horrid and became picturesque ; when ruins of all sorts, 
 but particularly abbeys and castles, became habitable 
 to the most delicate constitutions; when the despised 
 Gothick of Addison dropped its " k," and arose the 
 chivalrous and religious Gothic of Scott; when ghosts 
 were redeemed from the contempt into which they had 
 fallen, and resumed their jDlace in polite society; in 
 fact, the politer the society, the welcomer the ghosts, 
 and whatever else was out of the common. In that day 
 the Annual flourished, and this artificial flower was 
 probably the first literary blossom on the Christmas 
 Tree which has since borne so much tinsel foliage and 
 painted fruit. But the Annual was extremely Orient- 
 al; it was much preoccupied with Haidees and Gul- 
 
 274 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 nares and Zuleikas, -with Ilindas and Noiirmahals, 
 owing to the distinction which Byron and Moore had 
 given such ladies; and when it began to concern itself 
 with the actualities of British beauty, the daughters of 
 Albion, though inscribed with the names of real count- 
 esses and duchesses, betrayed their descent from the 
 well - known Eastern odalisques. It was possibly 
 through an American that holiday literature became 
 distinctively English in material, and Washington 
 Irving, with his New World love of the past, may have 
 given the impulse to the literary worship of Christmas 
 which has since so widely established itself. A festival 
 revived in popular interest by a New-Yorker to whom 
 Dutch associations with New-year's had endeared the 
 German ideal of Christmas, and whom the robust 
 gayeties of the season in old-fashioned country-houses 
 had charmed, would be one of those roundabout results 
 which destiny likes, and " w^ould at least be Early Eng- 
 lish." 
 
 If we cannot claim with all the patriotic confi- 
 dence we should like to feel that it was Irving who 
 set Christmas in that light in which Dickens saw its 
 aesthetic capabilities, it is perhaps because all origins 
 are obscure. For anything that we positively know 
 to the contrary, the Druidic rites from which English 
 Christmas borrowed the inviting mistletoe, if not the 
 decorative holly, may have been accompanied by the 
 recitations of holiday triads. But it is certain that 
 several plays of Shakespeare were produced, if not 
 w^ritten, for the celebration of the holidays, and that 
 then the black tide of Puritanism which swept over 
 men's souls blotted out all such observance of Christ- 
 mas with the festival itself. It came in again, by a 
 natural reaction, with the returning Stuarts, and 
 throughout the period of the Restoration it enjoyed a 
 
 275 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 perfunctory favor. There is mention of it often enough 
 in the eighteenth-centurj essayists, in the Spectators 
 and Idlers and Tatlers; hut the World ahout the mid- 
 dle of the last century laments the neglect into which 
 it had fallen. Irving seems to have been the first to 
 observe its surviving rites lovingly, and Dickens di- 
 vined its immense advantage as a literary occasion. He 
 made it in some sort entirely his for a time, and there 
 can be no question but it was he who again endeared 
 it to the whole English-speaking world, and gave it a 
 wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before 
 upon the fancies and affections of our race. 
 
 The might of that great talent no one can gainsay, 
 though in the light of the truer work which has since 
 been done his literary principles seem almost as gTO- 
 tesque as his theories of political economy. In no one 
 direction was his erring force more felt than in the 
 creation of holiday literature as we have kno^^^l it for 
 the last half-century. Creation, of course, is the wrong 
 word ; it says too much ; but in default of a better word, 
 it may stand. He did not make something out of noth- 
 ing; the material was there before him; the mood and 
 even the need of his time contributed immensely to 
 his success, as the volition of the subject helps on the 
 mesmerist ; but it is within bounds to say that he was 
 the chief agency in the development of holiday litera- 
 ture as we have knowm it, as he was the chief agency 
 in universalizing the great Christian holiday as we now 
 have it. Other agencies wrought with him and after 
 him ; but it was he who rescued Christmas from Puritan 
 distrust, and humanized it and consecrated it to the 
 hearts and homes of all. 
 
 Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in work- 
 ing his miracle, but there is no doubt about his work- 
 ing it. One opens his Christmas stories in this later 
 
 27G 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 day — The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man, The 
 Cricket on the Hearth, and all the rest — and with " a 
 heart high-sorrowful and cloyed," asks himself for the 
 ])retcrnatiiral virtue that they once had. The pathos 
 appears false and strained: the humor largely horse- 
 play; the character theatrical; the joviality pumped; 
 the psychology commonplace; the sociology alone 
 funny. It is a world of real clothes, earth, air, water, 
 and the rest; the people often speak the language of 
 life, but their motives are as disproportioned and im- 
 probable, and their passions and purposes as over- 
 charged, as those of the worst of Balzac's people. Yet 
 all these monstrosities, as they now appear, seem to 
 have once had s^Tumetry and verity; they moved the 
 most cultivated intelligences of the time ; they touched 
 true hearts; they made everybody laugh and cry. 
 
 This was perhaps because the imagination, from hav- 
 ing been fed mostly upon gross unrealities, always re- 
 sponds readily to fantastic appeals. There has been an 
 amusing sort of awe of it, as if it were the channel 
 of inspired thought, and were somehow sacred. The 
 most preposterous inventions of its activity have been 
 regarded in their time as the greatest feats of the 
 human mind, and in its receptive form it has been 
 nursed into an imbecility to which the truth is repug- 
 nant, and the fact that the beautiful resides nowhere 
 else is inconceivable. It has been flattered out of all 
 sufferance in its toyings with the mere elements of 
 character, and its attempts to present these in com- 
 binations foreign to experience are still praised by 
 the poorer sort of critics as masterpieces of creative 
 work. 
 
 In the day of Dickens's early Christmas stories it 
 was thought admirable for the author to take types of 
 humanity which everybody knew, and to add to them 
 
 277 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 from liis imagination till they were as strange as beasts 
 and birds talking. Now we begin to feel that human 
 nature is quite enough, and that the best an author can 
 do is to show it as it is. But in those stories of his 
 Dickens said to his readers, Let us make believe so-and- 
 so; and the result was a joint juggle, a child's-play, 
 in which the wholesome allegiance to life was lost. 
 Artistically, therefore, the scheme was false, and artis- 
 tically, therefore, it must perish. It did not perish, 
 however, before it had propagated itself in a whole 
 school of unrealities so ghastly that one can hardly re- 
 call without a shudder those sentimentalities at second- 
 hand to which holiday literature was abandoned long 
 after the original conjurer had wearied of his per- 
 formance. 
 
 Under his own eye and of conscious purpose a circle 
 of imitators grew up in the fabrication of Christmas 
 stories. They obviously formed themselves upon his 
 sobered ideals; they collaborated with him, and it was 
 often hard to know whether it was Dickens or Sala or 
 Collins who was writing. The Christmas book had by 
 that time lost its direct application to Christmas. It 
 dealt with shipwrecks a good deal, and with perilous ad- 
 ventures of all kinds, and with unmerited suffering, and 
 with ghosts and mysteries, because human nature, se- 
 cure from storm and danger in a well - lighted room 
 before a cheerful fire, likes to have these things imaged 
 for it, and its long-puerilized fancy will bear an end- 
 less repetition of them. The wizards who wrought 
 their spells with them contented themselves with the 
 lasting efficacy of these simple means ; and the appren- 
 tice - wizards and journeyman - wizards who have suc- 
 ceeded them practise the same arts at the old stand ; but 
 the ethical intention which gave dignity to Dickens^s 
 Christmas stories of still earlier date has almost wholly 
 
 278 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 disappeared. It was a quality whicli could not be 
 worked so long as the pliantoms and hair - breadth 
 escapes. People always knew that character is not 
 changed by a dream in a series of tableaux ; that a 
 ghost cannot do much towards reforming an inordi- 
 nately selfish person; that a life cannot be turned 
 white, like a head of hair, in a single night, by the 
 most allegorical apparition; that want and sin and 
 shame cannot be cured by kettles singing on the hob; 
 and gradually they ceased to make believe that there 
 was virtue in these devices and appliances. Yet the eth- 
 ical intention was not fruitless, crude as it now ap- 
 pears. 
 
 It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men 
 by parable of the old, simple truths ; to teach them that 
 forgiveness, and charity, and the endeavor for life 
 better and purer than each has lived, are the principles 
 upon which alone the world holds together and gets 
 forward. It was well for the comfortable and the re- 
 fined to be put in mind of the savagery and suffering 
 all round them, and to be taught, as Dickens was 
 always teaching, that certain feelings which grace 
 human nature, as tenderness for the sick and helpless, 
 self-sacrifice and generosity, self-respect and manliness 
 and womanliness, are the common heritage of the race, 
 the direct gift of Heaven, shared equally by the rich 
 and poor. It did not necessarily detract from the value 
 of the lesson that, with the imperfect art of the time, 
 he made his paupers and porters not only human, but 
 superhuman, and too altogether virtuous; and it re- 
 mained true that home life may be lovely under the 
 lowliest roof, although he liked to paint it without a 
 shadow on its beauty there. It is still a fact that the 
 sick are very often saintly, although he put no peevish- 
 ness into their patience with their ills. His ethical 
 
 279 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 intention told for manhood and fraternity and toler- 
 ance, and when this intention disa^Dpeared from the 
 better holiday literature, that literature was sensibly 
 the poorer for the loss. 
 
 XXVII 
 
 But if the humanitarian impulse has mostly disap- 
 peared from Christmas fiction, I think it has never 
 so generally characterized all fiction. One may refuse 
 to recognize this impulse ; one may deny that it is in 
 any greater degree shaping life than ever before, but 
 no one who has the current of literature under his eye 
 can fail to note it there. People are thinking and 
 feeling generously, if not living justly, in our time; 
 it is a day of anxiety to be saved from the curse that 
 is on selfishness, of eager question how others shall be 
 helped, of bold denial that the conditions in which 
 we would fain have rested are sacred or immutable. 
 Especially in America, where the race has gained a 
 height never reached before, the eminence enables 
 more men than ever before to see how even here vast 
 masses of men are sunk in misery that must gTow 
 every day more hopeless, or embroiled in a struggle for 
 mere life that must end in enslaving and imbruting 
 them. 
 
 Art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does 
 not make friends with Need it must perish. It per- 
 ceives that to take itself from the many and leave 
 them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few 
 whom it can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error 
 that kills. The men and women who do the hard work 
 of the w^orld have learned that they have a right to 
 pleasure in their toil, and that when justice is done 
 
 280 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 them they will have it. In all ages poetry has affirmed 
 something" of this sort, but it remained for onrvS to per- 
 ceive it and express it somehow in every form of litera- 
 ture. But this is only one phase of the devotion of the 
 best literature of our time to the service of humanity. 
 'No book written with a low or cynical motive could suc- 
 ceed now, no matter how brilliantly written; and the 
 work done in the past to the glorification of mere pas- 
 sion and power, to the deification of self, appears mon- 
 strous and hideous. The romantic spirit worshipped 
 genius, Avorshipped heroism, but at its best, in such a 
 man as Victor Hugo, this spirit recognized the supreme 
 claim of the lowest humanity. Its error was to ideal- 
 ize the victims of society, to paint them impossibly 
 virtuous and beautiful; but truth, which has succeed- 
 ed to the highest mission of romance, paints these vic- 
 tims as they are, and bids the world consider them not 
 because they are beautiful and virtuous, but because 
 they are ugly and vicious, cruel, filthy, and only not 
 altogether loathsome because the divine can never 
 wholly die out of the human. The truth does not find 
 these victims among the poor alone, among the hun- 
 gry, the houseless, the ragged ; but it also finds them 
 among the rich, cursed with the airalessness, the satiety, 
 the despair of wealth, wasting their lives in a fool's 
 paradise of shows and semblances, with nothing real 
 but the misery that comes of insincerity and selfish- 
 ness. 
 
 I do not think the fiction of our own time even al- 
 ways equal to this work, or perhaps more than seldom 
 so. But as I once expressed, to the long-reverberating 
 discontent of two continents, fiction is now a finer art 
 than it has been hitherto, and more nearly meets the 
 requirements of the infallible standard. I have hopes 
 of real usefulness in it, because it is at last building 
 
 281 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 on the only sure foundation ; but I am by no means 
 certain that it will be the ultimate literary form, or 
 will remain as important as we believe it is destined 
 to become. On the contrary, it is quite imaginable 
 that when the great mass of readers, now sunk in the 
 foolish joys of mere fable, shall be lifted to an in- 
 terest in the meaning of things through the faithful 
 portrayal of life in fiction, then fiction the most faith- 
 ful may be superseded by a still more faithful form of 
 contemporaneous history. I willingly leave the pre- 
 cise character of this form to the more robust imagina- 
 tion of readers whose minds have been nurtured upon 
 romantic novels, and who really have an imagination 
 worth speaking of, and confine myself, as usual, to the 
 hither side of the regions of conjecture. 
 
 The art which in the mean time disdains the office of 
 teacher is one of the last refuges of the aristocratic 
 spirit which is disappearing from politics and society, 
 and is now seeking to shelter itself in aesthetics. The 
 pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste; but as 
 before, it is averse to the mass of men ; it consents 
 to know them only in some conventionalized and arti- 
 ficial guise. It seeks to withdraw itself, to stand aloof ; 
 to be distinguished, and not to be identified. Democ- 
 racy in literature is tlie reverse of all this. It wishes 
 to know and to tell the truth, confident that consolation 
 and delight are there; it does not care to paint tho 
 marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to 
 sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar 
 few. Men are more like than unlike one another: let 
 us make them know one another better, that they may 
 be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their 
 fraternity. Neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, ex- 
 cept as they somehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to 
 make the race better and kinder, are to be regarded as 
 
 282 
 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 
 
 serious interests; they are all lower tlian the rudest 
 crafts that feed and house and clothe, for except they 
 do this office they are idle ; and they cannot do this ex- 
 cept from and through the truth. 
 
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