The Longfellow party will soon depart for Naples, and I went to the
Costanzi to make my final call. Mr. Henry W. Longfellow was alone in his
parlor cutting the leaves of a large book. He said that his brother had
gone to the Pincion with the ladies, but would probably return soon.
Everything this man says and does has the same grace and elevated tone as
his poetry. I took a chair and pretty soon he said to me, "How do you
like your books, Mr. S----? For my part, I prefer to cut the leaves of a
book, for then I feel as if I had earned the right to read it." I replied
that I liked books with rough edges if they were printed on good paper;
and then he said, "See this remarkable picture."
I drew my chair closer to him, and he showed me a large colored chart of
Hell and Purgatory, according to the theory that prevailed in Dante's
time. Satan with his three faces was represented in the centre, and on
the other side rose the Mount of Purgatory.
"It is an Italian commentary," he said, "on the _Divina Commedia_,"
which had been sent to him that day; and he added that some of the
information in it was of a very curious sort.
I asked him if he could read Italian as easily as English. "Very nearly,"
he replied; "but the fine points of Italian are as difficult as those of
German."
He inquired how I and my friends spent our evenings in Rome, and I said,
"In all kinds of study and reading, but just now P---- was at work on
Browning's 'Ring and the Book.'"
Mr. Longfellow laughed. "I do not wonder you call it work," he said. "It
seems to me a story told in so many different ways may be something of a
curiosity--not much of a poem." [Footnote: I have since observed that
poets as a class are not fair critics of poetry; for they are sure to
prefer poetry which is like their own. This is true at least of Lowell,
Emerson, or Matthew Arnold; but when I came to read "The Ring and the
Book" I found that Longfellow's objection was a valid one.]
I remarked that Rev. Mr. Longfellow had a decided partiality for
Browning. "Yes," he said; "Sam likes him, and my friend John Weiss
prefers him to Tennyson. My objection is to his diction. I have always
found the English language sufficient for my purpose, and have never
tried to improve on it. Browning's 'Saul' and 'The Ride from Ghent to
Aix' are noble poems."
"Carlyle also," I said, "has a peculiar diction." "That is true," he
replied, "but one can forgive anything to a writer who has so much to
tell us as Carlyle. Besides, he writes prose, and not poetry."
He took up a photograph which was lying on the table and showed it to me,
saying, "How do you like Miss Stebbins's 'Satan'?" I told him I hardly
knew how to judge of such a subject. Then we both laughed, and Mr.
Longfellow said: "I wonder what our artists want to make Satans for. I
doubt if there is one of them that believes in the devil's existence."
I noticed on closer examination that the features resembled those of Miss
Stebbins herself. Mr. Longfellow looked at it closely, and said, "So it
does,--somewhat." Then I told him that I asked Warrington Wood how he
obtained the expression for his head of Satan, and that he said he did it
by looking in the glass and making up faces. Mr. Longfellow laughed
heartily at this, saying, "I suppose Miss Stebbins did the same, and that
is how it came about. Our sculptors should be careful how they put
themselves in the devil's place. Wood has modelled a fine angel, and his
group (Michael and Satan) is altogether an effective one."
Rev. Mr. Longfellow and the ladies now came in, and as it was late I
shook hands with them all.
It is reported that when Mr. Longfellow met Cardinal Antonelli he
remarked that Rome had changed less in the last fifteen years than other
large cities, and that Antonelli replied, "Yes; God be praised for it!"
_Feb._ 25.--The elder Herbert [Footnote: The elder of two brothers,
sons of an English artist.] has painted a fine picture, and we all went
to look at it this afternoon, as it will be packed up to-morrow for the
Royal Exhibition at London. He has chosen for his subject the verse of a
Greek poet, otherwise unknown:
"Unyoke your oxen, you fellow,
And take the coulter out of your plough;
For you are ploughing amid the graves of men,
And the dust you turn up is the dust of your ancestors."
Herbert has substituted buffalos for oxen as being more picturesque,
though they were not imported into Italy until some time in the Middle
Ages. It is generally predicted that Herbert will become an R. A. like
his father; but the subject is even more to his credit than his treatment
of it. It is discussed at the _Lapre_ whether this verse has been
equalled by Tennyson or Longfellow, and the conclusion was: "Not proven."
_March_ 1.--The Longfellows are gone, and Rome is filling up with a
different class of people who have come here to witness the fatiguing
spectacles of Easter. One look at Michael Angelo's "Last Judgment" would
be worth the whole of it to me.
P---- is said to have captured his young lady, and it seems probable, for
I see very little of him now. He disappears after breakfast, rushes
through his dinner, and returns late in the evenings. So all the world
changes.
CENTENNIAL CONTRIBUTIONS
THE ALCOTT CENTENNIAL
_Read at the Second Church, Copley Square, Boston, Wednesday, November
29, 1899_
A hundred years ago A. Bronson Alcott was born, and thirty-three years
later his daughter Louisa was born, happily on the same day of the year,
as if for this very purpose,--that you might testify your appreciation of
the good work they did in this world, at one and the same moment. It was
a fortunate coincidence, which we like to think of to-day, as it
undoubtedly gave pleasure to Bronson Alcott and his wife sixty-seven
years ago.
How genuine were Mr. Alcott and his daughter, Louisa! "All else," says
the sage, "is superficial and perishable, save love and truth only." It
is through the love and truth that was in these two that we still feel
their influence as if they were living to-day. How well I recollect Mr.
Alcott's first visit to my father's house at Medford, when I was a boy! I
had the same impression of him then that the consideration of his life
makes on me now,--as an exceptional person, but one greatly to be
trusted. I could see that he was a man who wished well to me, and to all
mankind; who had no intention of encroaching on my rights as an
individual in any way whatever; and who, furthermore, had no suspicion of
me as a person alien to himself. The criticism made of him by my young
brother held good of him then and always,--that "he looked like one of
Christ's disciples." His aspect was intelligently mild and gentle,
unmixed with the slightest taint of worldly self-interest.
He heard that Goethe had said, "We begin to sin as soon as we act;" but
he did not agree to this, and was determined that one man at least should
live in this world without sinning. He carried this plan out so
consistently that, as he once confessed to me, it brought him to the
verge of starvation. Then he realized that in order to play our part in
the general order of things,--in order to obviate the perpetual tendency
in human affairs to chaos,--we are continually obliged to compromise.
However, to the last he would never touch animal food. Others might
murder sheep and oxen, but he, Bronson Alcott, would not be a partaker in
what he considered a serious transgression of moral law. This brought him
into antagonism with the current of modern opinion, which considers man
the natural ruler of this earth, and that it is both his right and his
duty to remodel it according to his ideas of usefulness and beauty.
It brought him into a life-long conflict with society, but how gallantly,
how amiably he carried this on you all know. It cannot be said that he
was defeated, for his spirit was unconquerable. His purity of intention
always received its true recognition; and wherever Bronson Alcott went he
collected the most earnest, high-minded people about him, and made them
more earnest, more high-minded by his conversation.
How different was his daughter, Louisa,--the keen observer of life and
manners; the witty story-teller with the pictorial mind; always
sympathetic, practical, helpful--the mainstay of her family, a pillar of
support to her friends; forgetting the care of her own soul in her
interest for the general welfare; heedless of her own advantage, and
thereby obtaining for herself as a gift from heaven, the highest of all
advantages, and the greatest of all rewards!
And yet, with so wide a difference in the practical application of their
lives, the well-spring of Louisa's thought and the main-spring of her
action were identical with those of her father, and may be considered an
inheritance from him. For the well-spring of her thought was
_truth_, and the main-spring of her action was _love_. There
can be no fine art, no great art, no art which is of service to mankind,
which does not originate on this twofold basis. We are told that when she
was a young girl, on a voyage from Philadelphia to Boston, her face
suddenly lighted up with the true brightness of genius, as she said, "I
love everybody in this whole world!" If, afterwards, a vein of satire
came to be mingled with this genial flow of human kindness, it was not
Louisa's fault.
In like manner, Bronson Alcott rested his argument for immortality on the
ground of the family affections. "Such strong ties," he reasoned, "could
not have been made merely to be broken." Let us share his faith, and
believe that they have not been broken.
THE EMERSON CENTENNIAL
EMERSON AND THE GREAT POETS
_Read in the Town Hall, Concord, Mass., July_ 23, 1903
On his first visit to England, Emerson was so continually besieged with
invitations that, as he wrote to Carlyle, answering the notes he received
"ate up his day like a cherry;" and yet I have never met but one
Englishman, Dr. John Tyndall, the chemist, who seemed to appreciate
Emerson's poetry, and few others who might be said to appreciate the man
himself. Tyndall may have recognized Emerson's keen insight for the
poetry of science in such verses as:
"What time the gods kept carnival;
Tricked out in gem and flower;
And in cramp elf and saurian form
They swathed their too much power."
A person who lacks some knowledge of geology would not be likely to
understand this. Matthew Arnold and Edwin Arnold had no very high opinion
of Emerson's poetry; and even Carlyle, who was Emerson's best friend in
Europe, spoke of it in rather a disparaging manner. The "Mountain and the
Squirrel" and several others have been translated into German, but not
those which we here consider the best of them.
On the other hand, Dr. William H. Furness considered Emerson "heaven-high
above our other poets;" C. P. Cranch preferred him to Longfellow; Dr. F.
H. Hedge looked upon him as the first poet of his time; Rev. Samuel
Longfellow and Rev. Samuel Johnson held a very similar opinion, and David
A. Wasson considered Emerson's "Problem" one of the great poems of the
century.
These men were all poets themselves, though they did not make a
profession of it, and in that character were quite equal to Matthew
Arnold, whose lecture on Emerson was evidently written under unfavorable
influences. They were men who had passed through similar experiences to
those which developed Emerson's mind and character, and could therefore
comprehend him better than others. We all feel that Emerson's poetry is
sometimes too abstruse, especially in his earlier verses, and that its
meaning is often too recondite for ready apprehension; but there are
passages in it so luminous and so far-reaching in their application that
only the supreme poets of all time have equalled them.
Homer's strength consists in his pictorial descriptions, but also
sometimes in pithy reflections on life and human nature; and it is in
these latter that Emerson often comes close to him. Most widely known of
Homer's epigrams is that reply of Telemachus to Antiochus in the Odyssey,
which Pope has rendered:
"True hospitality is in these terms expressed,
Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest."
To which the following couplet from "Woodnotes" seems almost like a
continuation:
"Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth,--his hall the azure dome;"
The wise man carries rest and contentment in his own mental life, and is
equally himself at the Corona d'Italia and on a western ranch; while the
weakling runs back to earlier associations like a colt to its stable. But
Homer is also Emersonian at times. What could be more so than Achilles's
memorable saying, which is repeated by Ulysses in the Odyssey: "More
hateful to me than the gates of death is he who thinks one thing and
speaks another;" or this exclamation of old Laertes in the last book of
the Odyssey: "What a day is this when I see my son and grandson
contending in excellence!"
It seems a long way from Dante to Emerson, and yet there are Dantean
passages in "Woodnotes" and "Voluntaries." They are not in Dante's
matchless measure, but they have much of his grace, and more of his
inflexible will. This warning against mercenary marriages might be
compared to Dante's answer to the embezzling Pope Nicholas III. in Canto
XIX. of the Inferno:
"He shall be happy in his love,
Like to like shall joyful prove;
He shall be happy whilst he woos,
Muse-born, a daughter of the Muse.
But if with gold she bind her hair,
And deck her breast with diamond,
Take off thine eyes, thy heart forbear,
Though thou lie alone on the ground.
The robe of silk in which she shines,
It was woven of many sins;
And the shreds
Which she sheds
In the wearing of the same,
Shall be grief on grief,
And shame on shame."
There is a Spartan-like severity in this, but so was Dante very severe.
It was his mission to purify the moral sense of his countrymen in an age
when the Church no longer encouraged virtue; and Emerson no less
vigorously opposed the rank materialism of America in a period of
exceptional prosperity.
The next succeeding lines are not exactly Dantean, but they are among
Emerson's finest, and worthy of any great poet. The "Pine Tree" says:
"Heed the old oracles,
Ponder my spells;
Song wakes in my pinnacles
When the wind swells.
Soundeth the prophetic wind,
The shadows shake on the rock behind,
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings."
Again we are reminded of Dante in the opening passages of "Voluntaries":
"Low and mournful be the strain,
Haughty thought be far from me;
Where a captive lies in pain
Moaning by the tropic sea.
Sole estate his sire bequeathed--
Hapless sire to hapless son--
Was the wailing song he breathed,
And his chain when life was done."
It is still more difficult to compare Emerson with Shakespeare, for the
one was Puritan with a strong classic tendency, and the other anti-
Puritan with a strong romantic tendency; but allowing for this and for
Shakespeare's universality, it may be affirmed that there are few
passages in King Henry IV. and Henry V. which take a higher rank than
Emerson's description of Cromwell:
"He works, plots, fights 'mid rude affairs,
With squires, knights, kings his strength compares;
Till late he learned through doubt and fear,
Broad England harbored not his peer:
Unwilling still the last to own,
The genius on his cloudy throne."
Emerson learned a large proportion of his wisdom from Goethe, as he
frequently confessed, but where in Goethe's poetry will you find a
quatrain of more penetrating beauty or wider significance than this from
"Woodnotes":
"Thou canst not wave thy staff in air
Nor dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."
Or this one from the "Building of the House"--considered metaphorically
as the life structure of man:
"She lays her beams in music,
In music every one,
To the cadence of the whirling world
Which dances round the sun."
There is a flash as of heaven's own lightning in some of his verses, and
his name has become a spell to conjure with.
THE HAWTHORNE CENTENNIAL
HAWTHORNE AS ART CRITIC
When the "Marble Faun" was first published the art criticism in it,
especially of sculptors and painters who were then living, created a deal
of discussion, which has been revived again by the recent centennial
celebration. Hawthorne himself was the most perfect artist of his time as
a man of letters, and the judgment of such a person ought to have its
value, even when it relates to subjects which are beyond the customary
sphere of his investigations, and for which he has not made a serious
preparation. In spite of the adage, "every man to his own trade," it may
be fairly asserted that much of Hawthorne's art criticism takes rank
among the finest that has been written in any language. On the other
hand, there are instances, as might be expected, in which he has failed
to hit the mark.
These latter may be placed in two classes: Firstly, those in which he
indicates a partiality for personal acquaintances; and secondly, those in
which he has followed popular opinion at the time, or the opinion of
others, without sufficient consideration.
American society in Rome is always split up into various cliques,--which
is not surprising in view of the adventitious manner in which it comes
together there,--and in Hawthorne's time the two leading parties were the
Story and the Crawford factions. The latter was a man of true genius, and
not only the best of American sculptors, but perhaps the greatest
sculptor of the nineteenth century. His statue of Beethoven is in the
grand manner, and instinct with harmony, not only in attitude and
expression, but even to the arrangement of the drapery. Crawford's genius
was only too well appreciated, and he was constantly carrying off the
prizes of his art from all competitors. Consequently it was inevitable
that other sculptors should be jealous of him, and should unite together
for mutual protection. Story was a man of talent, and not a little of an
amateur, but he was the gentlemanly entertainer of those Americans who
came to the city with good letters of introduction. Hawthorne evidently
fell into Story's hands. He speaks slightingly of Crawford, and praises
Story's statue of Cleopatra in unqualified terms; and yet there seems to
have been an undercurrent of suspicion in his mind, for he says more than
once in the "Marble Faun" that it would appear to be a failing with
sculptors to speak unfavorably of the work of other sculptors, and this,
of course, refers to those with whom he was acquainted, and whom he
sometimes rated above their value.
Warrington Wood, the best English sculptor of thirty years ago, praised
Story's "Cleopatra" to me, and I believe that Crawford also would have
praised it. Neither has Hawthorne valued its expression too highly--the
expression of worldly splendor incarnated in a beautiful woman on the
tragical verge of an abyss. If she only were beautiful! Here the
limitations of the statue commence. Hawthorne says: "The sculptor had not
shunned to give the full, Nubian lips, and other characteristics of the
Egyptian physiognomy." Here he follows the sculptor himself, and it is
remarkable that a college graduate like William Story should have made so
transparent a mistake. Cleopatra was not an Egyptian at all. The
Ptolemies were Greeks, and it is simply impossible to believe that they
would have allied themselves with a subject and alien race. This kind of
small pedantry has often led artists astray, and was peculiarly virulent
during the middle of the last century. The whole figure of Story's
"Cleopatra" suffers from it. He says again: "She was draped from head to
foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously studied from that of ancient
Egypt." In fact, the body and limbs of the statue are so closely shrouded
as to deprive the work of that sense of freedom of action and royal
abandon which greets us in Shakespeare's and Plutarch's "Cleopatra."
Story might have taken a lesson from Titian's matchless "Cleopatra"
in the Cassel Gallery, or from Marc Antonio's small woodcut of
Raphael's "Cleopatra."
Hawthorne was an idealist, and he idealized the materials in Story's
studio, for literary purposes, just as Shakespeare idealized Henry V.,
who was not a magnanimous monarch at all, but a brutal, narrow-minded
fighter. The discourse on art, which he develops in this manner, forms
one of the most valuable chapters in the "Marble Faun." It assists us in
reading it to remember that Story was not the model for Hawthorne's
"Kenyon," but a very different character. The passage in which he
criticises the methods of modern sculptors has often been quoted in later
writings on that subject; and I suppose the whole brotherhood of artists
would rise up against me if I were to support Hawthorne's condemnation of
nude Venuses and "the guilty glimpses stolen at hired models."
They are not necessarily guilty glimpses. To an experienced artist the
customary study from a naked figure, male or female, is little more than
what a low-necked dress would be to others. Yet the instinct of the age
shrinks from this exposure. We can make pretty good Venuses, but we
cannot look at them through the same mental and moral atmosphere as the
cotemporaries of Scopas, or even with the same eyes that Michael Angelo
did. We feel the difference between a modern Venus and an ancient one.
There is a statue in the Vatican of a Roman emperor, of which every one
says that it ought to wear clothes; and the reason is because the face
has such a modern look. A raving Bacchante may be a good acquisition to
an art museum, but it is out of place in a public library. A female
statue requires more or less drapery to set off the outlines of the
figure and to give it dignity. We feel this even in the finest Greek
work--like the Venus of Cnidos.
In this matter Hawthorne certainly exposes his Puritanic education, and
he also places too high a value on the carving of buttonholes and
shoestrings by Italian workmen. Such things are the fag-ends of statuary.
His judgment, however, is clear and convincing in regard to the tinted
Eves and Venuses of Gibson. Whatever may have been the ancient practice
in this respect, Gibson's experiment proved a failure. Nobody likes those
statues; and no other sculptor has since followed Gibson's example.
Hawthorne overestimates the Apollo Belvidere, as all the world did at
that time; but his single remark concerning Canova is full of
significance: "In these precincts which Canova's genius was not quite of
a character to render sacred, though it certainly made them interesting,"
etc.
He goes to the statue gallery in the Vatican and returns with a feeling
of dissatisfaction, and justly so, for the vast majority of statues there
are merely copies, and many of them very bad copies. He recognizes the
Laocoon for what it really is, the abstract type of a Greek tragedy. He
notices what has since been proved by severe archaeological study, that
most of the possible types and attitudes of marble statues had been
exhausted by the Greeks long before the Christian era. Miss Hosmer's
Zenobia was originally a Ceres, and even Crawford's Orpheus strongly
resembles a figure in the Niobe group at Florence.