It was one of the disappointments of a time which was nearly all joy that
I did not then meet a man who meant hardly less than Lowell himself for
me. George William Curtis was during my first winter in New York away on
one of the long lecturing rounds to which he gave so many of his winters,
and I did not see him till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton’s in
Cambridge. He then characteristically spent most of the evening in
discussing an obscure point in Browning’s poem of ‘My Last Duchess’. I
have long forgotten what the point was, but not the charm of Curtis’s
personality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost
deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. Afterwards I saw him
again and again in Boston and New York, but always with a sense of
something elusive in his graciousness, for which something in me must
have been to blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth that in those
days was apt to shiver in any but the higher temperatures, and yet I felt
that I made no advance in his kindness towards anything like the
friendship I knew in the Cambridge men. Perhaps I was so thoroughly
attuned to their mood that I could not be put in unison with another; and
perhaps in Curtis there was really not the material of much intimacy.
He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of welcome he gave
equally to all men; and if I asked more I was not reasonable. Yet he was
never far from any man of good-will, and he was the intimate of
multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of. In this sort he
had become my friend when he made his first great speech on the Kansas
question in 1855, which will seen as remote to the young men of this day
as the Thermopylae question to which he likened it. I was his admirer,
his lover, his worshipper before that for the things he had done in
literature, for the ‘Howadji’ books, and for the lovely fantasies of
‘Prue and I’, and for the sound-hearted satire of the ‘Potiphar Papers’,
and now suddenly I learnt that this brilliant and graceful talent, this
travelled and accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had
dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western village obscurity, was
a man with the heart to feel the wrongs of men so little friended then as
to be denied all the rights of men. I do not remember any passage of the
speech, or any word of it, but I remember the joy, the pride with which
the soul of youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the goodness
it may love. Mere politicians might be pro-slavery or anti-slavery
without touching me very much, but here was the citizen of a world far
greater than theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who
was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just cause, and that was
all in all to me. His country was my country, and his kindred my
kindred, and nothing could have kept me from following after him.
His whole life taught the lesson that the world is well lost whenever the
world is wrong; but never, I think, did any life teach this so sweetly,
so winningly. The wrong world itself might have been entreated by him to
be right, for he was one of the few reformers who have not in some
measure mixed their love of man with hate of men; his quarrel was with
error, and not with the persons who were in it. He was so gently
steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought of him as a fanatic,
though many who held his opinions were assailed as fanatics, and suffered
the shame if they did not win the palm of martyrdom. In early life he
was a communist, and then when he came out of Brook Farm into the world
which he was so well fitted to adorn, and which would so gladly have kept
him all its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of the world
which abhorred abolitionists. He was a believer in the cause of women’s
rights, which has no picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the
sense of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at him. The man
who was in the last degree amiable was to the last degree unyielding
where conscience was concerned; the soul which was so tender had no
weakness in it; his lenity was the divination of a finer justice. His
honesty made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions; his good
sense made them doubt their own opinions, when they had as little
question of their own honesty.
I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of letters only, for
humanity was above the humanities with him, and we all know how he turned
from the fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of
politics because he believed that duty led the way, and that good
citizens were needed more than good romancers. No doubt they are, and
yet it must always be a keen regret with the men of my generation who
witnessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent, that he could
not have devoted it wholly to the beautiful, and let others look after
the true. Now that I have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know
well enough that what he did was best; but if my regret is mean, I will
let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood which many have been in
concerning him.
There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value of some of the
results he achieved in that other path. He did indeed create anew for us
the type of good-citizenship, well-nigh effaced in a sordid and selfish
time, and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist. He never
really forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and
experiences afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which
aesthetic endeavor is self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of
letters, he was a great orator, he was a great political journalist, he
was a great citizen, he was a great philanthropist. But that last word
with its conventional application scarcely describes the brave and gentle
friend of men that he was. He was one that helped others by all that he
did, and said, and was, and the circle of his use was as wide as his
fame. There are other great men, plenty of them, common great men, whom
we know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let the ages have when
they die, for, living or dead, they are alike remote from us. They have
never been with us where we live; but this great man was the neighbor,
the contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or heard him; and
even in the swift forgetting of this electrical age the stamp of his
personality will not be effaced from their minds or hearts.