from literature. Doubtless, if written to-day, the volumes would be
read, but it were idle to suppose that they could have the vogue they
enjoyed in the Fifties. The American public of a half-century ago was
not nomadic. It had few ways of gratifying its thirst for knowledge
of foreign lands. Photographs were so expensive that one seldom ran
the risk of being obliged to sit down with a friend ‘just back from
Europe’ to admire such novelties as the Leaning Tower and the Bridge of
Sighs. The oxyhydrogen stereopticon was imperfect, the panorama clumsy
and ill-painted. Therefore the writings of a man who had the knack of
telling agreeably what he had seen were most welcome. The home-keeping
public enjoyed also hearing the traveller talk. When Taylor lectured
(for he became one of the most popular lecturers of the day) they
crowded the hall and thought two hours of him not long enough.
Timeliness, however, does not explain all the success of _Views Afoot_
and its companion volumes. Taylor was an excellent writer even when he
wrote most hastily. If his word-pictures were often highly colored,
they possessed, among other virtues, the great virtue of having been
painted on the spot. Through their aid one could really see what Taylor
had himself seen.
But Taylor was a poet before he was a traveller. In 1844 he published
(under the patronage of R. W. Griswold, his first literary adviser) a
little volume entitled _Ximena, or, The Battle of the Sierra Morena,
and Other Poems_. It was followed by _Rhymes of Travel_ (1848) and _The
American Legend_, the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard (1850). To these
must be added _A Book of Romances, Lyrics, and Songs_, 1851; _Poems
and Ballads_, 1854; _Poems of the Orient_, 1854; _Poems of Home and
Travel_, 1855; _The Poet’s Journal_, 1862; _The Picture of St. John_,
1866; _The Masque of the Gods_, 1872; _Lars_, 1873; _The Prophet_,
1874; _Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics_, 1875; _The National Ode_
(read by the author at the opening of the ‘Centennial’), 1876; and
_Prince Deukalion_, 1878. The great translation of Goethe’s _Faust_,
with the commentary, appeared in 1870–71.
Not content with his commercial success as a writer of travels, and his
artistic triumphs in poetry, Taylor tried fiction. The first of his
four novels, _Hannah Thurston_ (1863), is in part a satire and shows in
their most disagreeable light the people who abhor meat and swear by
vegetables, the people who profess to hold communication with spirits,
the people who think other people ought not to buy and sell human
flesh, and so forth.
_John Godfrey’s Fortunes_ (1864) embodies not a few of Taylor’s
journalistic experiences in New York. Here are glimpses of literary
society such as the soirées at the home of Estelle Ann Lewis, the
Mademoiselle de Scudéry of that time and place. _The Story of Kennett_
(1866) is a Pennsylvanian study, a true and lively picture of a phase
of civilization which the author perfectly understood. _Joseph and his
Friend_ (1870) closed the series of efforts by which Taylor tried to
earn money enough to free him from the thraldom of the lecture platform.
His other publications were _Beauty and the Beast, and Tales of Home_
(1872), _The Echo Club_ (1876), the posthumous _Studies in German
Literature_ (1879), and _Essays and Studies_ (1880).
Of Taylor’s private life a few important facts remain to be recorded.
The pathetic story of Mary Agnew, the beautiful girl whom he had loved
since they were school-children together, and whom he married on her
death-bed, is a romance which fortunately has been well told by both of
Taylor’s biographers. In 1857 (seven years after Mary Agnew’s death)
Taylor married Marie Hansen, daughter of Professor Hansen of Gotha, the
astronomer. How devoted and helpful she was to him during his arduous
life, and how loyal to his memory, are facts too well known to require
emphasis.
The home at Kennett known as ‘Cedarcroft’ was built in 1859–60. Taylor
lavished on it both money and affection; and while for a few years it
gave him a deal of happiness, it proved in the end a burden he could
ill afford to carry.
Robust and vigorous though he seemed in middle life, Taylor by
unremitting activity had sapped his powers. He gave no evidence of
declining literary ambition, but at fifty he was worn out by overwork.
A notable recognition of his worth came to him in 1878, when President
Hayes appointed him Minister to Germany. He was not to enjoy the honor
for long. In May, 1878, he took up the duties of his office, and on
the fifteenth of the following December he died while sitting in his
armchair in his library.
II
HIS CHARACTER
Ambition was a ruling motive in Taylor’s life. Yet there has seldom
been an ambition which, albeit as consuming as fire, was at the same
time so free from selfish and ignoble elements.
Taylor aspired to fame through cultivation of the art of poesy.
This was the real object of his life. To gain this object he toiled
unceasingly and made innumerable sacrifices. Baffled in the attempt
to reach his ideal, he was a little comforted when he could persuade
himself that he had not fallen completely short of it. And there was
exceeding great reward in the knowledge that if wide recognition as
a poet was denied him, his friends, Whittier, Longfellow, Stoddard,
Boker, and Aldrich, knew for what he was striving and commended him in
no uncertain tones.
Whittier described Taylor as one who loved ‘old friends, old ways, and
kept his boyhood’s dreams in sight.’ Life was intensely interesting
to Taylor. Although the zest of travel disappeared and his large
experience of the ways of men had had its customary disillusioning
effect, he never really lost his youthful enthusiasm. And it is
touching to find in his private correspondence the repeated proofs of
how inexhaustible was his fund of hope and of courage, and how quick he
was to recover after real or fancied defeat.
Notwithstanding his successes, and he had his share of the good
things of life,--contemporary reputation, money of his own earning,
and friends,--Bayard Taylor remains, with all his manly qualities,
a somewhat pathetic figure in American letters. He led a restless
and turbulent mental existence, and died the victim of ambition and
overwork.
III
THE ARTIST
Taylor has been pronounced the most skilful of our metrists after
Longfellow. One illustration only can be given of his interest in the
mechanism of verse, and that is his poetic romance _The Picture of St.
John_. The poem was not published until sixteen years after its first
conception. Possibly its growth was a little retarded by the structural
peculiarities.
The poem contains three hundred and fifty-five eight-line stanzas
(iambic pentameter) grouped into four books. The ‘ottava rima’ was
chosen as ‘better adapted for the purposes of a romantic epic than
either the Spenserian stanza[57] or the heroic couplet.’ But the
question with the poet was,--how to avoid the ‘uniform sweetness’ of a
regular stanza while obtaining the ‘proper compactness and strength of
rhythm’ which (in his belief) only a stanza could give. His device was
to allow himself freedom of rhyme within the stanza, and this ‘not to
escape the laws which Poetry imposes,’ but rather to impose a different
law in the hope that the form would ‘more readily reflect the varying
moods.’ When finally the poem was finished Taylor found that the three
hundred and fifty-five stanzas contained ‘more than seventy variations
in the order of rhyme.’
Only an enthusiast in the study of form would have undertaken the task
of reproducing _Faust_ in the original metres. Taylor’s success was so
great that his work as a translator has obscured his fame as a poet.
Doubtless so nearly perfect a version had been impossible without that
wonderful grasp of the spirit of the original. But it must not be
forgotten how much it owes to the years of study and practice Taylor
gave to the technique of his art.
IV
POETICAL WORK
In 1855 Taylor published a selection from his earlier books of verse
under the title _Poems of Home and Travel_. By this volume and its
companion, _Poems of the Orient_, he wished, so he said at the time, to
be judged. For all his other pieces he desired ‘speedy forgetfulness.’
_Poems of Home and Travel_ shows very well the range of Taylor’s
art. Here are rhymed stories (‘The Soldier and the Pard’ and
‘Kubleh’), graceful settings of classic or Indian legend (‘Hylas’ and
‘Mon-da-Min’), together with a pretty fancy from Shakespeare (‘Ariel
in the Cloven Pine’). A deeper chord is struck in poems of human love
and loss (‘The Two Visions’) and in poems expressing aspiration for the
ideal (‘Love and Solitude’), or in those which voice the poet’s joy in
a life of action and struggle (‘The Life of Earth’ and ‘Taurus’). There
is an ode, ‘The Harp,’ lamenting the silence of song in our America
where there is so much to sing. And there are yet other odes, songs,
and sonnets.
_Poems of the Orient_ is a typical volume, full of color, warmth,
light, breathing the intoxication and glowing with the fantasy of that
great vague region we call ‘the East.’ The charm of the verses is very
pronounced. How much of what we relish in the volume is really the
spirit of the East can best be told by one who knows both the East and
the poems. Oriental lyrics and romances would be written otherwise
to-day. Taylor was partly under the thrall of that roseate view of the
Orient held by Thomas Moore and his contemporaries. Sir Richard Burton
has popularized a more realistic conception in which love and roses are
less prominent. The flavor of _Poems of the Orient_ may be known by
such pieces as ‘The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled,’ ‘Amran’s Wooing’
(an Oriental version of young Lochinvar), ‘El Khalil,’ ‘Desert Hymn to
the Sun,’ and the popular ‘Bedouin Song.’
_The Poet’s Journal_, a group of twenty-nine lyrics connected by a
poetic narrative and divided into First, Second, and Third Evenings,
is plainly autobiographical. Its varying moods of despair and dumb
grief, followed by the stirrings of hope and ambition, and, under the
influence of awakened love, the triumph of the spirit to will and to
do, connect it with the most intimate passages in Taylor’s life.
_The Picture of St. John_, an Italian romance, seems made for a
popularity it somehow never attained. The worldly ambition of the
artist transfigured by love, the death of the highborn girl who
sacrifices wealth and pride of place for her lover, the unwitting
murder of her child by his grandsire, and the redemption of the artist
after months of conflict with the Power that Denies--these are elements
in a work on which the poet lavished the best of his gifts.
_Lars_, a Scandinavian study, an idyl of the vales and fiords of
Norway, illustrates Taylor’s cosmopolitanism. Passionately as he loved
the South, he could also exclaim with Ruth,
I do confess
I love Old Norway’s bleak, tremendous hills,
Where winter sits, and sees the summer burn
In valleys deeper than yon cloud is high:
* * * * *
I love the frank, brave habit of the folk,
The hearts unspoiled, though fed from ruder times
And filled with angry blood.
_Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics_ contains his fine studies of
Westchester County life, ‘The Quaker Widow,’ ‘John Reed,’ and ‘The Old
Pennsylvania Farmer,’ together with such happily conceived poems as
‘The Sunshine of the Gods,’ ‘Notus Ignoto,’ ‘Iris,’ ‘Implora Pace,’ and
‘Canopus,’ with its richly colored lines.
Taylor wrote three dramatic poems, none of which his critics are
willing to admit is a success. _The Masque of the Gods_, a lofty
conception, fails (if indeed it is a failure), not through feebleness
of touch, but through brevity. So vast a design needs room to expand.
As it stands, the _Masque_ is a preliminary sketch of what might have
become in the hands of its creator a great canvas. It is something
that the poet has succeeded in awakening pity for the worn-out deities
terrified because of their loss of power, terrified even more by the
possibility that they have no principle of life and are only the
creatures of men’s brains.
_The Prophet_ was a courageous dramatic experiment, and will always be
read with curiosity if not with pleasure. But to assume that Mormonism
is wholly unfitted for poetic drama is perhaps to assume too much.
_Prince Deukalion_, written under the inspiration of _Faust_, is
another of those gigantic conceptions with which Taylor’s imagination
loved in later life to busy itself, as if eager to try its powers to
the uttermost. A theme like this, wholly removed from human interest,
dealing with titanic and mythical figures, is the most dangerous in
the whole range of possible subjects. Taylor rises so easily to a
high level of poetic achievement that it seems as if he must presently
touch some mountain peak. Yet he always leaves the impression of really
having the strength to do that in which he fails. He disappoints
through the very display of power.
* * * * *
His poetic work lacks idiosyncrasy, and to credit him with having given
rise to a ‘school’ is to be generous rather than just. His talent fell
just short of his ambition. A busy life with its multitude of cares
and interests left him too little time for brooding upon the great
themes he affected, and there was wanting the gift for relentless
self-criticism which operates almost like the creative power. None the
less his countrymen have not begun to discharge the debt of gratitude
they owe him. Taylor had great virtues. It should be imputed to him for
literary righteousness that he was willing to undertake the long poem.
He never, so far as is known, made the excuse our poets continually
offer, and which is almost infantile, that the general public does not
care for long poems,--as if a poet were under any obligation to the
general public.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] _The Picture of St. John_ was begun eleven years before
Worsley published his fine version of the _Odyssey_ in
Spenserian stanza.
XVI
_George William Curtis_
REFERENCES:
=Parke Godwin=: _George William Curtis, A Commemorative Address_,
1892.
=J. W. Chadwick=: _George William Curtis, an Address_, 1893.
=Edward Cary=: _George William Curtis_, ‘American Men of
Letters,’ 1894.
I
HIS LIFE
Henry Curtis, who sailed for New England from the port of London on
May 6, 1635, was the founder of the Curtis family in America. His
grandson, John Curtis of Worcester, was ‘a sturdy and open loyalist’ of
Revolutionary times whose personal character was as heartily esteemed
as his political principles were detested.
George Curtis, a great-grandson of John, married Mary Elizabeth
Burrill, daughter of James Burrill, Jr., Chief-justice of Rhode Island.
Of their two sons George William Curtis was the younger. He was born in
Providence, Rhode Island, on February 24, 1824.
With his brother James Burrill, his closest friend and almost
inseparable companion, he was sent to C. W. Greene’s school at Jamaica
Plain, near Boston, and remained there five years. He was afterwards
at school in Providence for four years. In New York, whither his
father had removed (in 1839) to become connected with the Bank of
Commerce, Curtis studied under private tutors and had some experience
of practical life in the counting-room of a German importing house.
The education given the Curtis boys had also an irregular though
very agreeable side. They spent much of the time from 1842 to 1844
as students at Brook Farm. The greater part of the two following
years they were at Concord, their object being to combine study and
out-of-door life, and above all to be near Emerson. Taking up residence
with one or other of several farmers whose local fame almost equalled
that of the Concord men of letters, they spent half of each day in farm
work and the other half in study or studious idleness. They were to be
found regularly at the Club which met on Monday evenings in Emerson’s
library and which numbered among its members Hawthorne, Thoreau, and
Alcott.
In August, 1846, provided by his father with a sum of money sufficient
to give him what he called ‘a generous background,’ Curtis went abroad.
He planned to be gone two years, but the background was more than
generous and he did not return until 1850. He travelled leisurely
through France, Germany, Italy, and the East, made notes of what
he saw and used them partly in the form of letters to the New York
‘Courier and Enquirer’ and partly in the famous ‘Howadji’ books. His
literary plans were ambitious, including as they did a life of Mehemet
Ali, on which he worked for some years only to abandon it at last.
On his return to New York he began writing regularly for the ‘Tribune,’
and was associated with C. F. Briggs and Parke Godwin in the editorship
of ‘Putnam’s Magazine.’ When the magazine passed into the hands of Dix,
Edwards, and Company, Curtis put money into the firm. By their failure
he not only lost everything he had, but he also assumed a debt for
which he could not have been legally held and devoted the proceeds of
his lectures to paying it. He was eighteen years in ridding himself of
the burden.
In 1854 he began printing the famous ‘Easy Chair’ papers in ‘Harper’s
Monthly,’ and in 1857 the department of ‘Harper’s Weekly’ called ‘The
Lounger.’ The latter was a frank imitation in part of the _Tatler_ and
_Spectator_, even to the letters from lady correspondents such as Nelly
Lancer, Sabina Griddle, and Xantippe. During the ten years following
his return from abroad Curtis published six books: _Nile Notes of a
Howadji_, 1851; _The Howadji in Syria_, 1852; _Lotus-Eating_, 1852;
_The Potiphar Papers_, 1853; _Prue and I_, 1857; _Trumps_, 1861. His
ambitions had hitherto been chiefly literary. To be sure, in 1856,
at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, he had given his
address on ‘The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the
Times,’ and had followed it with his oration on ‘Patriotism’ and
his lecture on ‘The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question.’[58] He
had taken the stump for Frémont in 1856, and been a delegate to the
Republican National Convention in 1860, where his courage, adroitness,
and impassioned eloquence had saved the platform at a moment when it
needed salvation. Nevertheless it may be said that the first ten years
of Curtis’s life as a writer and speaker were ‘literary’ with a strong
emphasis on politics, and that the last thirty years were political
with an undiminished interest in letters.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1856, Curtis married Anna Shaw, a daughter of
F. G. Shaw, formerly of West Roxbury, and a sister of Colonel Robert
Gould Shaw. He had made her acquaintance at Brook Farm twelve years
earlier. There is a pretty reference to her in one of his letters to
Dwight written in 1844. Curtis had been in Boston for the day: ‘Anna
Shaw and Rose Russell passed me like beautiful spirits; one like a
fresh morning, the other like an oriental night.’
In 1863 Curtis became the political editor of ‘Harper’s Weekly’ with
the proviso that he was to have a free hand. He represented political
ideals than which there can be no higher; his discussions were marked
by absolute frankness, joined to perfect courtesy. The parts which
fell to him in the drama of political life were always important and
often conspicuous. He was a delegate both to National and to State
conventions, and a delegate-at-large to the convention for revising the
State constitution of New York. Although ‘nominated by acclamation’
for Secretary of the State of New York (1869), he refused to serve. He
did allow his name to be presented for governor in the convention of
1870, supposing all to be in good faith; but when he discovered that
he was the victim of a trick,--the object being to defeat Greeley,--he
withdrew.[59]
Next to Anti-slavery his favorite cause was that of Civil Service
reform. In 1865 he became ‘second in command’ to Thomas A. Jenckes of
Rhode Island, the pioneer in the movement. He was the head of the Civil
Service Commission appointed by President Grant in 1871. As president
of the New York Civil Service Reform Association and of the National
Civil Service Reform League, he did a work of immediate and lasting
value.
In 1877 President Hayes offered Curtis his choice of the foreign
missions, supposing that he would elect to go to England. In refusing
the honor Curtis expressed the doubt whether ‘a man absolutely without
legal training of any kind could be a proper minister.’ Later the
German mission was urged on him, but he saw no reason to change his
former opinion. As an Independent, Curtis voiced opposition to machine
methods in the State campaign of 1879, and in 1884 broke with his party
and gave his support to Cleveland.
Albeit he was not college bred, Curtis received a full share of the
honorary degrees which American colleges lavish every June upon those
who have acquired reputation. For the two years prior to his death he
was Chancellor of the University of New York.
The literary work of his middle and later years remains for the most
part embedded in the files of ‘Harper’s Monthly.’ Three or four little
volumes of ‘Easy Chair’ papers (less than a tenth part of the whole
number of his contributions) were printed in 1893–94. Written to serve
an ephemeral purpose, these essays have a permanent value. It is
singular that there is no demand for more reprints of the work of a
writer whose journalism was better than most men’s books. Besides the
‘Easy Chair’ papers there were published posthumously _Orations and
Addresses edited by C. E. Norton_, 1894; _Literary and Social Essays_,
1895; _Ars Recte Vivendi_, 1898; _Early Letters of George William
Curtis to John S. Dwight, edited by G. W. Cooke_, 1898.
Curtis died, after a long and painful illness, on August 31, 1892.
II
THE MAN
Of Curtis it may be said that his character is revealed in every line
of his writing and in every act of his public and private life. He
was gracious, winning, generous, quick to forgive, and slow to take
offence. Goodness as exemplified in not a few good men is alike painful
to those who possess it and to those on whom its influence is exerted.
Virtue as exemplified in him never wore the austere garb or the gloomy
countenance.
At the time of Curtis’s defection from the Republican party incredible
abuse was showered on him, not only in the press but through anonymous
letters. He was much saddened by it, less from the personal point
of view than because of the revelation it gave of the meanness and
vindictiveness of human nature. Having thought too well of his fellows,
he suffered under the disillusionment, all of which goes to show how
optimistic at heart this disciple of Thackeray and writer of satires
was. And when Senator Conkling made a savage personal attack on him in
the New York State convention of 1877, Curtis seems to have had no
feeling towards his enemy but that of pity: ‘It was the saddest sight
I ever knew, that man glaring at me in a fury of hate and storming out
his foolish blackguardism.’
If Curtis’s career illustrates one thing above another, it is his
willingness to sacrifice mental ease and personal comfort for an ideal.
But the sacrifice was made with such good nature, such grace in the
acquiescence, that one forgets its extent, and even makes the mistake
of thinking that possibly it cost him little. Undoubtedly it cost him
much, this giving up of literature for politics, this putting aside of
all public honors because there was a nearer duty which could not be
neglected.
III
THE WRITER AND THE ORATOR
The author of _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ loved alliteration. In his
early books he amused himself with pleasant arrangements of words such
as ‘camels with calm, contemptuous eyes,’ or ‘lustrous leaves languidly
moving,’ or ‘slim minarets spiring silverly and strangely from the
undefined mass of mud houses.’ Note this description of the date-palm:
‘Plumed as a prince and graceful as a gentleman, stands the date; and
whoever travels among palms travels in good society;’ or this of the
sakias: ‘Like huge summer insects they doze upon the bank, droning a
melancholy, monotonous song. The slow, sad sound pervades the land--one
calls to another, and he sighs to his neighbor, and the Nile is shored
with sound no less than sand.’