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FRIENDS ON THE SHELF
FRIENDS ON THE SHELF
BY
BRADFORD TORREY
“I must get back to my friends on the shelf”
_Edward FitzGerald_
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1906
COPYRIGHT 1906 BY BRADFORD TORREY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1906_
CONTENTS
WILLIAM HAZLITT 1
EDWARD FITZGERALD 43
THOREAU 89
THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE 131
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 151
A RELISH OF KEATS 195
ANATOLE FRANCE 227
VERBAL MAGIC 275
QUOTABILITY 289
THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY 309
IN DEFENSE OF THE TRAVELER’S NOTEBOOK 319
CONCERNING THE LACK OF AN AMERICAN LITERATURE 329
WILLIAM HAZLITT
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Happy is the man who enjoys _himself_. His are the true riches. Saving
physical pain and mortal illness, few evils can touch him. He may lose
friends and make enemies; all the powers of the world may seem to have
combined against him; he may work hard and fare worse; poverty may sit
at his table and share his bed; but he is not to be greatly pitied.
His good things are within. He enjoys him_self_. He has found the
secret that the rest of men are all, more or less consciously, looking
for,--how to be happy though miserable. It seems an easy method;
nothing could be less complicated: simply to enjoy one’s own mind. The
thing is to do it.
Whether any one ever really accomplished the miracle for more than
brief intervals at once, a skeptic may doubt; but some have believed
themselves to have accomplished it; and in questions of this intimately
personal nature, the difference between faith and fact is small
and unimportant. It is of the essence of belief not to be disturbed
overmuch by theoretical objections. If I am happy, what is it to me
that my busybody of a neighbor across the way has settled it with
himself that I am not happy, and in the nature of the case cannot be?
Let my meddlesome neighbor mind his own affairs. The pudding is mine,
not his; and, with or without his leave, the proof of the pudding is in
the eating.
These not very uncommonplace reflections are suggested by the
remembrance of what are reported to have been the last words of the
man whose name stands at the head of this paper. He was dying before
his time, in what the world, if it had happened to concern itself
about so inconsiderable an event, would have called rather squalid
circumstances. His life had mostly been cloudy. The greater part of
his fifty-two years had been spent in quarreling impartially with
friends and foes, and, strange to say (matters terrestrial being
habitually so out of joint), the logical result had followed. His
domestic experiences, too, had been little to his comfort and less to
his credit. So far as women were concerned, he had played the fool to
his heart’s content and his enemies’ amusement. Of his two wives (both
living), neither was now at his bedside. His purse was empty, or near
it. It was almost a question how he should be buried. Withal, as a man
more than ordinarily ambitious, he had never done the things he had
cared most to do; and now it was all over. And being always an eloquent
man, and having breath for one sentence more, he said, “Well, I have
had a happy life.”
Nor need it be assumed that he was either lying or posing. With
abundance of misfortune and no lack of disappointment, with outward
things working pretty unanimously against him, he had enjoyed himself.
In a word, he remained to the last what he had been from the first, a
sentimentalist; and a sentimentalist, like a Christian, has joys that
the world knows not of.
For a sentimentalist is one who, more than the majority of his fellows,
cultivates and relishes his emotions. They are the chief of his living,
the choicest of his crop, his “best of dearest and his only care;” as
why should they not be, since they give him the most of what he most
desires? Perhaps we should all be sentimentalists if we could. As it
is, the number of such is relatively small, though even at that they
may be said to be of various kinds, as their emotions are excited by
various classes of objects.
If a man’s nature is religious, his sentimentalism, supposing him
to have been born with that gift, naturally takes on a religious
turn; he treasures the luxury of contrition and the raptures of
assured forgiveness. Like one of the earliest and most celebrated of
his kind, he can feed day and night upon tears,--having plentiful
occasion, perhaps, for such a watery diet,--and be the more ecstatic
in proportion as he sounds more and more deeply the unfathomable
depths of his unworthiness. This, in part at least, is what is meant
by the current phrase, “enjoying religion.” Devotional literature
bears unbroken witness to its reality and fervors, from the Psalms of
David down to the “Lives of the Saints” and the diaries of latter-day
Methodism. There is nothing sweeter to the finer sorts of human nature
than devotional self-effacement, whether it be sought as Nirvâna in
the silence of a Buddhist’s cell, or as a gift of special grace in
a tumultuous chorus of “Oh, to be nothing, nothing,” at a crowded
conventicle. Small wonder that the
“willing soul would stay
In such a frame as this,
And sit and sing itself away
To everlasting bliss.”
Small wonder, surely; for, say what you will (and the remark is not
half so much a truism as it sounds), one of the surest ways to be happy
is to have happy feelings.
This cultivation of the religious sensibilities is probably the
commonest, as at its best it is certainly the noblest form of what,
meaning no offense,--though the word has been in bad company, and will
never recover from the smirch,--we have called sentimentalism. But
there are other forms, suited to other grades of human capacity, for
all men are not saints.
There is, for example, especially in these modern times, a purely
poetic susceptibility to the charms of the natural world; so that the
favored subject of it, not every day, to be sure, but as often as the
mood is upon him, shall experience joys ineffable,
“Trances of thought and mountings of the mind,”
at the sight of an ordinary landscape or the meanest of common flowers.
Of a much lower sort is the sentimentalism of such a man as Sterne; a
something not poetical, only half real, a kind of rhetorical trick,
never so neatly done, but still a trick, and whatever of genuine
feeling there is in it so alloyed with baser metal that even while you
enjoy to the very marrow the amazing perfection of the writing (for it
would be hard to name another book in which there are so many perfect
sentences to the page as in the “Sentimental Journey”),--even while
you feel all this, you feel also what a relief it would be to speak a
piece of your mind to the smirking, winking, face-making clergyman, who
has such pretty feelings, and makes such incomparably pretty copy out
of them, but who will by no means allow you to forget that he, as well
as another, is a man of flesh and blood (especially flesh), knowing a
thing or two of the world in spite of his cloth, and able, if he only
would (though of course he won’t), to play the rake as handsomely as
the next man. A strange candidate for holy orders he surely was, even
in a country where a parish is frankly recognized as a “living”! It is
a comfort to be assured, on the high authority of Mr. Bagehot, that the
only respect in which he resembled a clergyman of our own time was,
that he lost his voice and traveled abroad to find it.
And once more, not to refine upon the point unduly, there are such
men as Rousseau and Hazlitt; not great poets, like Wordsworth, nor
mere professional dealers in the pathetic, like Sterne, but men of
literary genius very exceptionally endowed with the dangerous gift of
sensibility; which gift, wisely or unwisely, they have nourished and
made the most of, first for their own exquisite pleasure in it, and
afterward, it may well be, for the sake of its very considerable value
as a literary “asset.”
Rousseau and Hazlitt, we say; for though the two are in some respects
greatly unlike, they are plainly of the same school. For better or
worse, the English boy came early under the Frenchman’s influence,
and, to his credit be it spoken, he was never slow to acknowledge
the debt thus incurred. His passion for the “New Éloise” was in time
outgrown, but the “Confessions” he “never tired of.” He loved to run
over in memory the dearer parts of them: Rousseau’s “first meeting with
Madame Warens, the pomp of sound with which he has celebrated her name,
beginning ‘Louise-Éléonore de Warens était une demoiselle de La Tour de
Pil, noble et ancienne famille de Vevai, ville du pays de Vaud’ (sounds
which we still tremble to repeat); his description of her person, her
angelic smile, her mouth of the size of his own; his walking out one
day while the bells were chiming to vespers, and anticipating in a sort
of waking dream the life he afterward led with her, in which months
and years, and life itself, passed away in undisturbed felicity; the
sudden disappointment of his hopes; his transport thirty years after at
seeing the same flower which they had brought home together from one
of their rambles near Chambéry; his thoughts in that long interval of
time; his suppers with Grimm and Diderot after he came to Paris; ...
his literary projects, his fame, his misfortunes, his unhappy temper;
his last solitary retirement on the lake and island of Bienne, with
his dog and his boat; his reveries and delicious musings there--all
these crowd into our minds with recollections which we do not choose to
express. There are no passages in the ‘New Éloise’ of equal force and
beauty with the best descriptions in the ‘Confessions,’ if we except
the excursion on the water, Julie’s last letter to St. Preux, and his
letter to her, recalling the days of their first love. We spent two
whole years in reading these two works, and (gentle reader, it was when
we were young) in shedding tears over them,
‘as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gums.’
They were the happiest years of our life. We may well say of them,
sweet is the dew of their memory, and pleasant the balm of their
recollection!”
The whole passage is characteristic and illuminating. Hazlitt is
speaking of another, but as writers will and must, whether they mean it
or not, he is disclosing himself. The boyish reader’s tears, the grown
man’s trembling at the sound of the eloquent French words, and the
confession of the concluding sentence (which he repeated word for word
years afterward in the essay, “On Reading Old Books”)--here we have the
real Hazlitt, or rather one of the real Hazlitts.
He was strong in memory. His very darkest times--and they were dark
enough--he could brighten with sunny recollections: of a painting,
it might be, seen twenty years before, and loved ever since; of a
favorite actor in a favorite part; of a book read in his youth (“the
greatest pleasure in life is that of reading, while we are young”);
of the birds that flitted about his path in happier mornings; of the
taste of frost-bitten barberries eaten thirty years before, when he
was five years old, on the side of King-Oak Hill, in Weymouth,[1]
Massachusetts, and never tasted since; of the tea-gardens at Walworth,
to which his father used to take him. Oh yes, he can see those gardens
still, though he no longer visits them. He has only to “unlock the
casket of memory,” and a new sense comes over him, as in a dream; his
eyes “dazzle,” his sensations are all “glossy, spruce, voluptuous, and
fine.” What luscious adjectives! And how shamelessly, like an innocent,
sweet-toothed child, he rolls them under his tongue! Their goodness is
inexpressible. But listen to him for another sentence or two, and see
what a favor of Providence it is for a writer of essays to be a lover
of his own feelings: “I see the beds of larkspur with purple eyes;
tall hollyhocks, red or yellow; the broad sunflowers, caked in gold,
with bees buzzing round them; wildernesses of pinks, and hot, glowing
peonies; poppies run to seed; the sugared lily, and faint mignonette,
all ranged in order, and as thick as they can grow; the box-tree
borders; the gravel walks, the painted alcove, the confectionery, the
clotted cream:--I think I see them now with sparkling looks; or have
they vanished while I have been writing this description of them? No
matter; they will return again when I least think of them. All that
I have observed since of flowers and plants and grass-plots seem to
me borrowed from ‘that first garden of my innocence’--to be slips and
scions stolen from that bed of memory.”
How eloquent he grows! “Slips and scions stolen from that bed of
memory!” The very words, simple as they are, and homely as is their
theme, throb with emotion, and move as if to music. “Most eloquent of
English essayists,” his latest biographer pronounces him; and, whether
we agree with the judgment or not (sweeping assertions cost little, and
contribute to readability), at least we recognize the quality that the
biographer has in mind.
A sentimentalist, of all men, knows how to live his good days over
again. Pleasure, to his thrifty way of thinking, is not a thing to be
enjoyed once, and so done with. He will eat his cake and have it too.
Nor shall it be the mere shadow of a feast. Nay, if there is to be any
difference to speak of, the second serving shall be better and more
substantial than the first. To him nothing else is quite so real as the
past. He rejoices in it as in an unchangeable, indefeasible possession.
“The past at least is secure.” If the present hour is dark and lonely
and friendless, he has only to run back and walk again in sunny,
flower-bespangled fields, hand in hand with his own boyhood.
Such was Hazlitt’s practice as a sentimental economist, and it would
take an unusually bold Philistine, we think, to maintain that it
was altogether a bad one. The words that he wrote of Rousseau are
applicable to himself: “He seems to gather up the past moments of
his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a precious liquor from
them.” To vary a phrase of Mr. Pater’s, he is a master in the art of
impassioned recollection.
It makes little difference where he is, or what circumstance sets him
going. He may be among the Alps. “Clarens is on my left,” he says, “the
Dent de Jamant is behind me, the rocks of Meillerie opposite: under
my feet is a green bank, enamelled with white and purple flowers, in
which a dewdrop here and there glitters with pearly light. Intent upon
the scene and upon the thoughts that stir within me, I conjure up the
cheerful passages of my life, and a crowd of happy images appear before
me.” Or he is in London, and hears the tinkle of the “Letter-Bell” as
it passes. “It strikes upon the ear, it vibrates to the brain, it wakes
me from the dream of time, it flings me back upon my first entrance
into life, the period of my first coming up to town, when all around
was strange, uncertain, adverse,--a hubbub of confused noises, a chaos
of shifting objects,--and when this sound alone, startling me with the
recollection of a letter I had to send to the friends I had lately
left, brought me as it were to myself, made me feel that I had links
still connecting me with the universe, and gave me hope and patience to
persevere. At that loud-tinkling, interrupted sound, the long line of
blue hills near the place where I was brought up waves in the horizon,
a golden sunset hovers over them, the dwarf oaks rustle their red
leaves in the evening breeze, and the road from Wem to Shrewsbury, by
which I first set out on my journey through life, stares me in the face
as plain, but, from time and change, as visionary and mysterious, as
the pictures in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’”
“When a man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect,”
says Keats, “any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a
starting-post towards all ‘the two-and-thirty Palaces.’” Yes, and some
men will go a good way on the same royal road, with no more spiritual
incitement than the passing of the postman.
How fondly Hazlitt recalls the day of days when he met Coleridge, and
walked with him six miles homeward; when “the very milestones had ears,
and Hamer Hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet as he
passed.” At the sixth milepost man and boy separated. “On my way back,”
says Hazlitt, “I had a sound in my ears--it was the voice of Fancy;
I had a light before me--it was the face of Poetry.” A second meeting
had been agreed upon, and meanwhile the boy’s soul was possessed by “an
uneasy, pleasurable sensation,” thinking of what was in store for him.
“During those months the chill breath of winter gave me a welcoming;
the vernal air was balm and inspiration to me. The golden sunsets,
the silver star of evening, lighted me on my way to new hopes and
prospects. _I was to visit Coleridge in the spring._”
Verily, the words of the dying man begin to sound less paradoxical.
He _had_ been happy. If his buffetings and disappointments had been
more than fall to the lot of average humanity, so had been his joys
and his triumphs. He had more _capacity_ for joy. Therein, in great
part, lay his genius. To borrow a good word from Jeremy Taylor, all his
perceptions were “quick and full of relish.” Even his sorrows, once
they were far enough behind him, became only a purer and more ethereal
kind of bliss. So he tells us, in one of his later essays, how he loved
best of all to lie whole mornings on a sunny bank on Salisbury Plain,
with no object before him, neither knowing nor caring how the time
passed, his thoughts floating like motes before his half-shut eyes, or
some image of the past rushing by him--“Diana and her fawn, and all
the glories of the antique world.” “Then,” he adds, “I start away to
prevent the iron from entering my soul, and let fall some tears into
that stream of time which separates me farther and farther from all I
once loved.” Whether the tears were physical or metaphorical, whether
they wet the cheek or only the printed page, the man who shed them is
not, on their account, to be regarded as an object of commiseration.
Sadness that can be thus described, in words so like the fabled
nightingale’s song, “most musical, most melancholy,” is more to be
desired than much that goes by the name of pleasure, and the deeper and
more poignant the emotion, the more precious are its returns.
Nobody ever understood this better than Hazlitt. His sentimentalism,
as we call it, was no ignorant, superficial gift of young-ladyish
sensibility. It had intellectual foundations. He felt because he
knew. He had been intimate with himself; he had cherished his own
consciousness. He remarks somewhere that the three perfect egotists
of the race were Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Benvenuto Cellini. He
would defy the world, he said, to name a fourth. But he might easily
enough have named the fourth himself, had not modesty--or something
else--prevented. If he had lived longer, he would perhaps have
written the fourth man’s autobiography; his formal autobiography,
that is to say. In fact, though not in name, he had already written
it; some might be ready to maintain (but they would be wrong) that
he had written little else. By “egotism” he meant not selfishness in
the more ordinary, mercantile acceptation of the word,--a lack of
benevolence, an extravagant desire to be better off than others in
the way of worldly “goods,”--but the very quality we have been trying
to show forth: absorption in one’s own mind, a profound and perpetual
consciousness of one’s own being, the habit of interfusing self and
outward things till distinctions of spirit and matter, finite and
infinite, self and the universe, are for the moment almost done away
with, and feeling is all in all.
This, or something like this, was Hazlitt’s secret. This is the breath
of life that throbs in the best of his pages. Whatever subject he
handled, a prize-fight, a game of fives, a juggler’s trick, a play of
Shakespeare, a picture of Titian, the pleasure of painting, he did it
not simply _con amore_, or, as his newer critics say, with gusto (the
word is Hazlitt’s own--he wrote an essay about it), but as if the thing
were for the time being part and parcel of himself. And so, oftener
than is commonly to be expected of essay-writers, his sentences are not
so much vivid as alive.
More than most men, he was alive himself. In Keats’s phrase, he felt
existence. There was no telling its preciousness to him. The essay “On
the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,” though at the end it breaks out
despairingly into something like the old cry, _Vanitas vanitatum_, is
filled to the brim with a passionate love of this present world. The
idea of leaving it is abhorrent to him. To think what he has been, and
what he has enjoyed, in those good days of his; days when he “looked
for hours at a Rembrandt without being conscious of the flight of
time;” days of the “full, pulpy feeling of youth, tasting existence and
every object in it.” What a bliss to be young! Then life is new, and,
for all we know of it, endless. As for old age and death, they are no
concern of ours. “Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and
rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be
night.” Sentences like this must have been what Keats had in mind when
he spoke so lovingly of “distilled prose;” prose that bears repetition
and brooding over, like exquisite verse. Some sentences, indeed, are
better than whole books, and this of Hazlitt’s is one of them; as
fine, almost,--as purely “distilled,”--as that famous kindred one of
Sir William Temple: “When all is done, human life is, at the greatest
and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and
humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the
care is over.”
And since we are quoting (and few authors invite quotation more than
Hazlitt, as few have themselves quoted more constantly), let us please
ourselves with another sentence from the same essay,--a page-long
roll-call of a sentimental man’s beatitudes, turning at the close to a
sudden blackness of darkness:--
“To see the golden sun, the azure sky, the outstretched ocean; to walk
upon the green earth, and be lord of a thousand creatures; to look
down yawning precipices or over distant sunny vales; to see the world
spread out under one’s feet on a map; to bring the stars near; to
view the smallest insects through a microscope; to read history, and
consider the revolutions of empire and the successions of generations;
to hear of the glory of Tyre, of Sidon, of Babylon, and of Susa, and
to say all these were before me and are now nothing; to say I exist in
such a point of time and in such a point of space; to be a spectator
and a part of its ever-moving scene; to witness the change of season,
of spring and autumn, of winter and summer; to feel heat and cold,
pleasure and pain, beauty and deformity, right and wrong; to be
sensible to the accidents of nature; to consider the mighty world of
eye and ear; to listen to the stock-dove’s notes amid the forest deep;
to journey over moor and mountain; to hear the midnight sainted choir;
to visit lighted halls, or the cathedral’s gloom, or sit in crowded
theatres and see life itself mocked; to study the works of art and
refine the sense of beauty to agony; to worship fame, and to dream of
immortality; to look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakespeare; to
gather up the wisdom of the ancients, and to pry into the future; to
listen to the trump of war, the shout of victory; to question history
as to the movements of the human heart; to seek for truth; to plead the
cause of humanity; to overlook the world as if time and nature poured
their treasures at our feet--to be and to do all this, and then in a
moment to be nothing!”
“To look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakespeare!” Once more we are
reminded of Keats, a man very different from Hazlitt in many ways,
but, like him, “a near neighbor to himself,” and a worshiper of
beauty. “Things real,” says Keats, “such as existences of sun, moon and
stars--and passages of Shakespeare.”
Hazlitt’s nature was peculiarly intense, with the very slightest
admixture of those saner and commoner elements that keep our poor
humanity, in its ordinary manifestations, comparatively reasonable
and sweet. His years, from what we read of them, seem to have passed
in one long state of feverishness. He cannot have been a pleasant man
either for himself or for any one else to live with. Self-absorbed,
irascible, and proud, with little or no gift of humor (sentimentalists
as a class seem to be deficient in this quality, the case of Sterne to
the contrary notwithstanding; and Sterne’s humor is perhaps only an
additional reason for suspecting that his fine sentiments were mostly
literary), he had a splendid capacity for hating, and was possessed
of a kind of ugly courage that made it easy for him to speak with
extraordinary plainness of other men’s defects. If the men happened
to be his friends, so much the better. He professed, indeed, to like
a friend all the more for having “faults that one could talk about.”
“Put a pen in his hand,” says Mr. Birrell, “and he would say anything.”
Whatever he said or did, suffered or enjoyed, it was all with a kind of
passion. As the common saying is, there was no halfway work with him.
It could never be complained of him, as he complained of some other
writer, that his sentences wanted impetus. He understood the value of
surprise, and never balked at an extreme statement. Thus he would say,
in the coolest manner imaginable, “It is utterly impossible to persuade
an editor that he is nobody.” As if it really were! As if it were not
ten times nearer impossible to persuade a contributor that _he_ is
nobody!
On his way to the famous prize-fight,--famous because he was
there,--spending the night at an inn crowded with the “Fancy,” he
overheard a “tall English yeoman” holding forth to those about him
concerning “rent, and taxes, and the price of corn.” One of his hearers
ventured at a certain point to interpose an objection, whereupon the
yeoman bore down upon him with the word, “Confound it, man, don’t be
insipid.” “Thinks I to myself,” says Hazlitt, “that’s a good phrase.”
And so it was, and quite in his own line. “There is no surfeiting on
gall,” he remarks somewhere, with admirable truth. He wrote an essay
upon “Cant and Hypocrisy,” another upon “Disagreeable People,” and
another upon the “Pleasure of Hating.” And he knew whereof he spake.
Sentimentalism--the Hazlitt brand of it, at any rate--is nothing like
sweetened water. “If any one wishes to see me quite calm,” he says, in
his emphatic manner, “they may cheat me in a bargain, or tread upon my
toes; but a truth repelled, a sophism repeated, totally disconcerts me,
and I lose all patience. I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the
term, a good-natured man.” “Lamb,” he once remarked, “yearns after and
covets what soothes the frailty of human nature.” So did not Hazlitt.
Lamb delighted in people as such. Even their foibles--especially
their foibles, it would be truer to say--were pleasant to him. In
short, he was a humorist. Hazlitt’s first interest, on the other
hand, seems to have been in places and things,--including books and
pictures,--and his own thoughts about them. Of human beings he liked
personages, so called, men who have done something,--actors, painters,
authors, statesmen, and the like. As for the common run of his foolish
fellow-mortals, if their frailties were to be stroked, by all means let
it be done the wrong way. The operation might be less acceptable to the
patient, but it would probably do him more good, and would certainly be
more amusing to the operator and the lookers-on.
No doubt the man experienced now and then a reaction from his
prevailing condition of feverishness. He must have had moods, we may
guess, when he saw the beauty and comfort of a quieter way of life.
Indeed, he has left one inimitable portrait of a character the exact
reverse of his own, a portrait drawn not bitterly nor grudgingly, but
in something not altogether unlike the affectionately quizzical spirit
of Lamb himself. He calls it the character of a bookworm.
“The person I mean,” he says, “has an admiration for learning, if he
is only dazzled by its light. He lives among old authors, if he does
not enter much into their spirit. He handles the covers, and turns
over the page, and is familiar with the names and dates. He is busy
and self-involved. He hangs like a film and cobweb upon letters, or
is like the dust upon the outside of knowledge, which should not be
rudely brushed aside. He follows learning as its shadow; but as such,
he is respectable. He browses on the husk and leaves of books, as the
young fawn browses on the bark and leaves of trees. Such a one lives
all his life in a dream of learning, and has never once had his sleep
broken by a real sense of things. He believes implicitly in genius,
truth, virtue, liberty, because he finds the names of these things
in books. He thinks that love and friendship are the finest things
imaginable, both in practice and theory. The legend of good women is to
him no fiction.[2] When he steals from the twilight of his cell, the
scene breaks upon him like an illuminated missal, and all the people
he sees are but so many figures in a _camera obscura_. He reads the
world, like a favorite volume, only to find beauties in it, or like an
edition of some old work which he is preparing for the press, only to
make emendations in it, and correct the errors that have inadvertently
slipt in. He and his dog Tray are much the same honest, simple-hearted,
faithful, affectionate creatures--if Tray could but read! His mind
cannot take the impression of vice; but the gentleness of his nature
turns gall to milk. He would not hurt a fly. He draws the picture of
mankind from the guileless simplicity of his own heart; and when he
dies, his spirit will take its smiling leave, without ever having had
an ill thought of others, or the consciousness of one in itself!”
It would have been for Hazlitt’s happiness, or at least for his
comfort, if he had possessed a grain or two of his bookworm’s
“guileless simplicity.” But things must be as they must. His name was
not Nathanael. He was “dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of
scorn,” and it was not in his nature to be patient and easy-going,
especially where anything so vitally essential as a difference of
opinion touching the character of Napoleon Bonaparte was concerned. He
had the qualities of his defects. If he was sometimes too peppery, he
was never insipid.
Men write best of matters in which they are most interested and most
at home, and of Hazlitt we may say, speaking a little cynically, after
his own manner, that with all his multiplicity of topics, he wrote best
about his own feelings and his neighbors’ infirmities, though as for
the latter sort of material, to be sure, he did not confine himself
very strictly to that with which his fellow men furnished him. Proud
as he was, indeed (and here we may note another characteristic of the
sentimentalist), he had sometimes a really shocking lack of decent
personal reserve. During his infatuation with Miss Sarah Walker, as
all the world--or all the Hazlitt world--knows, he could not keep his
tongue in his head. He would even buttonhole a stranger on a street
corner, and unbosom his woes to him at full length in most unmanly
fashion: how he loved the girl, and how the girl would not love him,
and so on, and so on. And having perpetrated this almost incredible
absurdity, he would tell of it afterward; and then, to make matters
still worse, when he had recovered from his distemper (always a rapid
process in his case), he wrote a book about it. This book is reprinted,
all in fair type, in the latest and handsomest edition of his works;
but, thank Heaven, we are none of us bound to read it. Nor need we
take the whole miserable business too seriously, as if (except on its
literary side) it were anything so very far out of the common. It was
ridiculous, of course; but so are the love affairs of elderly men
generally. Their folly has passed into a proverb. As wise old Izaak
Walton--who had two excellent wives of his own, both “of distinguished
clerical connexion”--long ago expressed it, “love is a flattering
mischief,” “a passion that carries us to commit errors with as much
ease as whirlwinds move feathers.” The good man’s assonance would have
driven Flaubert insane, but his doctrine is consolatory. A feather may
surely be excused for slipping its cable before a whirlwind.
It was only a year or two after the conclusion of this distressing
episode that Hazlitt, being in Italy, wrote one of the most delightful
of his essays, the one upon a sun-dial.
“_Horas non numero nisi serenas_ is the motto of a sun-dial near
Venice,”--so he begins. Then, after descanting upon the exceeding
beauty and appropriateness of the Latin words, he falls foul of the
French people for the “less _sombre_ and less edifying” turn that they
are accustomed to give to similar matters. He has seen a clock in Paris
bearing a figure of Time seated in a boat, which Cupid is rowing along,
with the motto, _L’Amour fait passer le Temps_; a motto that the French
wits, it appears, have travestied into _Le Temps fait passer L’Amour_.
This is ingenious, he concedes (how could he help it?), but it lacks
sentiment. “I like people,” he declares, “who have something that they
love, and something that they hate.” The French “never arrive at the
classical--or the romantic.” The criticism may or may not be just (it
seems a hard saying), but what the average reader of the paragraph is
likely to be thinking of, if he happens to be familiar with the story
of Hazlitt’s own adventures with Cupid, is not any weakness of the
French people, but the amusing cleverness with which the Parisian wits
have hit off the weakness of a certain literary Englishman. Truly _Le
Temps fait passer L’Amour_,--sometimes with deplorable celerity,--on
both sides of the Channel.
Naturally, however, nothing of this sort occurred to Hazlitt. His good
memory was like the sun-dial,--it counted none but the bright hours.
By this time he had almost forgotten both his unhappy passion and the
unhappier book that he wrote about it.
And, indeed, it is time that _we_ forgot them. For one who has found
his profit in strolling up and down in Hazlitt’s essays at odd hours
for half a lifetime, it is little becoming to talk overmuch about the
man’s personal imperfections. It matters little to any of us now that
his temper was bad; that his passions too often betrayed him into
folly; that his faculties lacked a certain balance; that his _mal de
rêverie_, whether born with him or caught from his French master,
sometimes ran too feverish a course; that, in short, he had the not
unusual weaknesses of super-sensitive men. What does matter is that at
his best he wrote English prose as comparatively few have written it,
and in doing so said a world of bright and memorable things that no
one else could have said so well, even if it had ever occurred to any
one else to say them at all. If he was difficult to live with, that
is a question more than seventy years out of date; and no competent
reader ever brought a similar accusation against his essays. It has
been said of them more than once, to be sure, that they are not so
good as Lamb’s; but then, you may say that of all essays; and really
the comparison is futile, not to call it foolish. The men were nothing
alike; though even so, we may gladly agree with Mr. Henley’s comment,
that, as “dissimilars,” they “go gallantly and naturally together--_par
nobile fratrum_.”
Perhaps Hazlitt sometimes wrote too much in haste, with hardly
sufficient care for those minute excellences that go to the making
of perfection, though he could talk edifyingly under that head, and
appears to have been the author of the clever parody, more clever than
true,--as cleverness is apt to be,--
“Learn to write slow: all other graces
Will follow in their proper places;”
and it may be, as one of the cleverest of his admirers assures us,
that he was “really too witty.” Concerning points so nice as these,
it is hard for “honest and painful men” to feel certain. Haste has
the compensatory virtue of generating heat, while as for the having
too much wit, it is like having too much money, or more than one’s
share of personal beauty; serious misfortunes, both of them, beyond
a doubt (every one says so), but misfortunes to be put up with, at a
pinch, in a spirit of Christian resignation. All things considered,
too much is perhaps better than too little, and, for better or worse,
excess on both sides of the line is rather Hazlitt’s “note.” Of the
virtues of courage and obstinacy he possessed enough for two. We
applaud, even while we pity, to see how, all his life long, he stood
up for what he believed to be the truth, in spite of the frowns, and
worse than frowns, of all who in that day had it in their power to
blast the career of men in his profession. He was defamed and abused,
for political reasons,--all for that unlucky Bonapartean bee in his
bonnet,--as few men of letters have ever been, and to the last he did
not haul down his flag. Let so much be said in his honor. And whatever
else is forgotten, let the words of Charles Lamb be remembered: “I
should belie my own conscience if I said less than that I think W. H.
to be in his natural and healthy state one of the wisest and finest
spirits breathing.” The most virtuous of those who blame him may count
themselves happy ever to receive half so handsome a tribute from
so authoritative a source. Human nature is a tangled skein; moral
perfection is not to be encountered every day, even among critics.
To do one’s main stint well is probably as much as most of us can
reasonably hope for; and so much, assuredly, Hazlitt did; for his main
work, as we see it, was the writing of his few volumes of critical
and miscellaneous essays. Into these he put the breath of long life.
These are what count, seventy years after. Whoever begins with them,
recurs to them. Not one of them but comes under Lamb’s heading of
“take-downable.”
As a matter of course, however, being a man of active mind and having
his living to make by his pen, he wrote many things besides these. He
began, indeed, with a metaphysical treatise,--a child of his youth (he
believed it a great discovery) for which he never ceased to cherish
an excusable fondness. This, on the authority of those who have read
it, or have talked with some who have done so, we take to be a rather
difficult and innutritious choke-pear, something to be safely left
alone by ordinary seekers after knowledge. Then, toward the end of his
career, he produced a four-volume life of Napoleon, which, on equally
good authority, we should think to have been a kind of anticipation or
foreshadowing of the modern “novel with a purpose.” His latest editors
go so far as to leave it out of their fine twelve-volume edition of
his works. Somewhere between these two attempts at immortality he
indulged himself in a book on grammar, intended especially to correct
the errors of Lindley Murray, more particularly, we believe, his
faulty definition of a noun as the name of an object. Fortunately or
otherwise, this work (every author of consequence has at least one
such) never got beyond the original (manuscript) edition. The making of
it seems a queer freak for a man of Hazlitt’s turn of mind; but then,
as Mr. Birrell observes, “grammar has its fascinations; and even such
men as John Milton and John Wesley, no less than William Cobbett and
William Hazlitt, succumbed to its charm.” And he might have added a
name more illustrious still,--the name of Julius Cæsar.
All these longer works (including a “Reply to Malthus”) we consider
ourselves, as readers, at full liberty to skip. Furthermore, we
consider their merits or demerits to have no bearing whatever upon the
question of their author’s standing as an essayist. Like every man who
practices an art, he is entitled to be judged, not by his experiments
and failures, but by his successes. Wordsworth might have written a
thousand “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” instead of only one hundred and
thirty odd, and every one of them might have been less imaginative
than the one before it, without making him any the less a true and
noble poet. For a poet, like the Pope, is infallible only when he is
inspired; at other times he may nod as well as another man. Moreover,
in the case of the poet, at least, the man himself may not be sure
whether or not, at any given moment, the divine afflatus is upon him.
It was Doctor Johnson, a poet himself, and the biographer of poets,
who said that it was easy enough to make verses; he had made a hundred
in a day; the difficulty was to know when you had made a good one. And
the same difficulty, in a less degree, is encountered by the maker of
prose essays. It is a wise father that knows his own child. Nor in such
a matter have a man’s contemporaries any great advantage over the man
himself. The folly of their judgments is proverbial. It is necessary
to wait. Apparently there is some strange virtue in the mere lapse of
time. “Time will tell,” the common people say; and the scholar has no
better wisdom. Hazlitt must stand his trial with the rest. Sooner or
later the years will render their verdict, though none of us may live
long enough to hear it. The best that can be said now is, that so far
the balloting seems to be strongly in his favor.
EDWARD FITZGERALD
EDWARD FITZGERALD
“I have been reading a good deal, but not much in the way of
knowledge.” So the future translator of Omar Khayyám wrote to a friend
in 1832, being then twenty-three years old, and two years out of
the University. The words may be taken as fairly descriptive of the
remaining fifty years of his life. He was always reading something,
but not with an eye to rank or scholarship. His old friends and
school-fellows one after another stepped into high place. Tennyson,
Thackeray, and Carlyle were names on every tongue; Spedding, less
talked about, was deep in a _magnum opus_; Thompson, Donne, Peacock,
Allen, and Cowell held positions of honor in church or college; but
FitzGerald had buried himself of set purpose in an insignificant,
out-of-the-way Suffolk village, and, by his own account of himself, was
dozing away his years in “visionary inactivity,”--in “the enjoyment of
old childish habits and sympathies.”
Not less truly than his mates, however, as it now appears, he was
living his own life; and perhaps not less truly than the foremost of
them he was to come into lasting renown. Such are the “diversities of
operations,” through which the spirit of man develops and discloses
itself.
FitzGerald came of an eccentric family. “We are all mad,” he wrote; and
his own share of the ancestral inheritance--mostly of an amiable and
amusing sort--early made itself evident. While he was at Cambridge, his
mother drove up to the college gate in her coach and four, and sent
for him to come down and see her; but he could not go,--his only pair
of shoes was at the cobbler’s. The Suffolk friend, from whom we have
this anecdote, adds that to the last FitzGerald was perfectly careless
of dress. “I can see him now,” he says, “walking down into Woodbridge,
with an old Inverness cape, a double-breasted flowered satin waistcoat,
slippers on his feet, and a handkerchief, very likely, tied over his
hat.” It was odd, no doubt, that a gentleman should dress in so
unconventional a manner; but it was much odder that he should write
to Mrs. Kemble a fortnight after the death of his brother, in 1879:
“I say but little of my brother’s death. We were very good friends,
of very different ways of thinking; I had not been within side his
lawn gates (three miles off) these dozen years (no fault of his), and
I did not enter them at his funeral--which you will very likely--and
properly--think wrong.” Only an eccentric man could have had occasion
to say that; and surely none but a very eccentric man _would_ have said
it.
After leaving the University,--at which, by the way, he barely obtained
his degree,--he went to Paris (where he had spent part of his boyhood),
but stayed only a month or two; and on his return, having just passed
his majority, he wrote to Allen, “Tell Thackeray that he is never to
invite me to his house, as I intend never to go.” He would rather go
there than anywhere else, to be sure; but he has got “all sorts of
Utopian ideas” about society into his head, and is “going to become a
great bear.” In another man’s mouth this might have been merely the
expression of a passing whim; but whether FitzGerald meant the words
seriously or not, they were pretty accurately fulfilled. His friends
were of the noblest and truest, and his affection for them was of the
warmest and stanchest, no man’s more so; but he chose to live apart.
“Why, sir,” said Doctor Johnson to Boswell, “you find no man, at all
intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, sir, when a man is
tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that
life can afford.” And Boswell, of course, responded Amen. “I can talk
twice as much in London as anywhere else,” he remarked, with Boswellian
simplicity. Possibly FitzGerald was less “intellectual” than the great
luminary and his satellite; or perhaps his intellectuality, such as it
was, ran less exclusively to talk.[3] At all events, he hated London as
a place of residence; and even when he paid it a visit, he was always
in such feverish and ludicrous haste to get away that he was sure to
leave his calls and errands no more than half done. “I long to spread
wing and fly into the kind clear air of the country,” he writes on one
occasion of this sort. “I see nobody in the streets half so handsome
as Mr. Reynolds of our parish.... A great city is a deadly plague....
I get radishes to eat for breakfast of a morning; with them comes a
savor of earth that brings all the delicious gardens of the world back
into one’s soul, and almost draws tears from one’s eyes.” In the mouth
of a man of social position, University training, and independent
fortune,--who had lived in Paris, and was only thirty-five years
old,--language like this bespeaks a born rustic and recluse, not to say
a philosopher. And such FitzGerald was.
Not that he craved a life in the wilderness (being neither a John
the Baptist nor a René), or had any extraordinary appreciation of
the beauties of nature, so called. There was little of Wordsworth or
of Thoreau in his composition, or, if there was, it seldom found
expression; but he detested crowds, was ill at ease in society, and
having a bent toward homely solitude, was independent enough to follow
it. It must seem queer to his old friends, he knew, but he preferred
to “poke about in the country,” using his books, as ladies do their
knitting work, to pass the time away. Here is one of his days, a day of
“glorious sunshine:”--
“All the morning I read about Nero in Tacitus, lying at full length on
a bench in the garden: a nightingale singing, and some red anemones
eyeing the sun manfully not far off. A funny mixture all this: Nero,
and the delicacy of spring; all very human, however. Then at half past
one lunch on Cambridge cream cheese; then a ride over hill and dale:
then spudding up some weeds from the grass: and then coming in, I sit
down to write to you, my sister winding red worsted from the back of
a chair, and the most delightful little girl in the world chattering
incessantly. So runs the world away. You think I live in epicurean
ease: but this happens to be a jolly day: one isn’t always well, or
tolerably good, the weather is not always clear, nor nightingales
singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity. But such as life is, I
believe I have got hold of a good end of it.”