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PARTIAL PORTRAITS
[Illustration: colophon]
PARTIAL PORTRAITS
BY
HENRY JAMES
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1894
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT
BY
HENRY JAMES
1888
_First Edition 1888. Reprinted 1894_
NOTICE
The following attempts at literary portraiture originally appeared, with
three exceptions, in American periodicals--The _Atlantic Monthly_, _The
Century_, and _Harper’s Weekly_. The paper on Emerson was contributed to
_Macmillan’s Magazine_, that on “The Art of Fiction” to _Longman’s_ and
that on M. Guy de Maupassant to _The Fortnightly Review_. The
reminiscences of Turgénieff were written immediately after his death,
the article on Anthony Trollope on the same occasion, before the
publication of his interesting Autobiography, and the appreciation of
Alphonse Daudet before that of his three latest novels. The date affixed
to the sketch of Robert Louis Stevenson is that of composition.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. EMERSON 1
II. THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT 37
III. DANIEL DERONDA: A CONVERSATION 65
IV. ANTHONY TROLLOPE 97
V. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 137
VI. MISS WOOLSON 177
VII. ALPHONSE DAUDET 195
VIII. GUY DE MAUPASSANT 243
IX. IVAN TURGÉNIEFF 291
X. GEORGE DU MAURIER 327
XI. THE ART OF FICTION 375
I
EMERSON
Mr. Elliot Cabot has made a very interesting contribution to a class of
books of which our literature, more than any other, offers admirable
examples: he has given us a biography[1] intelligently and carefully
composed. These two volumes are a model of responsible editing--I use
that term because they consist largely of letters and extracts from
letters: nothing could resemble less the manner in which the mere
bookmaker strings together his frequently questionable pearls and
shovels the heap into the presence of the public. Mr. Cabot has
selected, compared, discriminated, steered an even course between
meagreness and redundancy, and managed to be constantly and happily
illustrative. And his work, moreover, strikes us as the better done from
the fact that it stands for one of the two things that make an absorbing
memoir a good deal more than for the other. If these two things be the
conscience of the writer and the career of his hero, it is not
difficult to see on which side the biographer of Emerson has found
himself strongest. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a man of genius, but he led
for nearly eighty years a life in which the sequence of events had
little of the rapidity, or the complexity, that a spectator loves. There
is something we miss very much as we turn these pages--something that
has a kind of accidental, inevitable presence in almost any personal
record--something that may be most definitely indicated under the name
of colour. We lay down the book with a singular impression of
paleness--an impression that comes partly from the tone of the
biographer and partly from the moral complexion of his subject, but
mainly from the vacancy of the page itself. That of Emerson’s personal
history is condensed into the single word Concord, and all the
condensation in the world will not make it look rich. It presents a most
continuous surface. Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his _Discourses in America_,
contests Emerson’s complete right to the title of a man of letters; yet
letters surely were the very texture of his history. Passions,
alternations, affairs, adventures had absolutely no part in it. It
stretched itself out in enviable quiet--a quiet in which we hear the
jotting of the pencil in the note-book. It is the very life for
literature (I mean for one’s own, not that of another): fifty years of
residence in the home of one’s forefathers, pervaded by reading, by
walking in the woods and the daily addition of sentence to sentence.
If the interest of Mr. Cabot’s pencilled portrait is incontestable and
yet does not spring from variety, it owes nothing either to a source
from which it might have borrowed much and which it is impossible not to
regret a little that he has so completely neglected: I mean a greater
reference to the social conditions in which Emerson moved, the company
he lived in, the moral air he breathed. If his biographer had allowed
himself a little more of the ironic touch, had put himself once in a way
under the protection of Sainte-Beuve and had attempted something of a
general picture, we should have felt that he only went with the
occasion. I may overestimate the latent treasures of the field, but it
seems to me there was distinctly an opportunity--an opportunity to make
up moreover in some degree for the white tint of Emerson’s career
considered simply in itself. We know a man imperfectly until we know his
society, and we but half know a society until we know its manners. This
is especially true of a man of letters, for manners lie very close to
literature. From those of the New England world in which Emerson’s
character formed itself Mr. Cabot almost averts his lantern, though we
feel sure that there would have been delightful glimpses to be had and
that he would have been in a position--that is that he has all the
knowledge that would enable him--to help us to them. It is as if he
could not trust himself, knowing the subject only too well. This adds to
the effect of extreme discretion that we find in his volumes, but it is
the cause of our not finding certain things, certain figures and scenes,
evoked. What is evoked is Emerson’s pure spirit, by a copious, sifted
series of citations and comments. But we must read as much as possible
between the lines, and the picture of the transcendental time (to
mention simply one corner) has yet to be painted--the lines have yet to
be bitten in. Meanwhile we are held and charmed by the image of
Emerson’s mind and the extreme appeal which his physiognomy makes to our
art of discrimination. It is so fair, so uniform and impersonal, that
its features are simply fine shades, the gradations of tone of a surface
whose proper quality was of the smoothest and on which nothing was
reflected with violence. It is a pleasure of the critical sense to find,
with Mr. Cabot’s extremely intelligent help, a notation for such
delicacies.
We seem to see the circumstances of our author’s origin, immediate and
remote, in a kind of high, vertical moral light, the brightness of a
society at once very simple and very responsible. The rare singleness
that was in his nature (so that he was _all_ the warning moral voice,
without distraction or counter-solicitation), was also in the stock he
sprang from, clerical for generations, on both sides, and clerical in
the Puritan sense. His ancestors had lived long (for nearly two
centuries) in the same corner of New England, and during that period had
preached and studied and prayed and practised. It is impossible to
imagine a spirit better prepared in advance to be exactly what it
was--better educated for its office in its far-away unconscious
beginnings. There is an inner satisfaction in seeing so straight,
although so patient, a connection between the stem and the flower, and
such a proof that when life wishes to produce something exquisite in
quality she takes her measures many years in advance. A conscience like
Emerson’s could not have been turned off, as it were, from one
generation to another: a succession of attempts, a long process of
refining, was required. His perfection, in his own line, comes largely
from the non-interruption of the process.
As most of us are made up of ill-assorted pieces, his reader, and Mr.
Cabot’s, envies him this transmitted unity, in which there was no mutual
hustling or crowding of elements. It must have been a kind of luxury to
be--that is to feel--so homogeneous, and it helps to account for his
serenity, his power of acceptance, and that absence of personal passion
which makes his private correspondence read like a series of beautiful
circulars or expanded cards _pour prendre congé_. He had the equanimity
of a result; nature had taken care of him and he had only to speak. He
accepted himself as he accepted others, accepted everything; and his
absence of eagerness, or in other words his modesty, was that of a man
with whom it is not a question of success, who has nothing invested or
at stake. The investment, the stake, was that of the race, of all the
past Emersons and Bulkeleys and Waldos. There is much that makes us
smile, to-day, in the commotion produced by his secession from the mild
Unitarian pulpit: we wonder at a condition of opinion in which any
utterance of his should appear to be wanting in superior piety--in the
essence of good instruction. All that is changed: the great difference
has become the infinitely small, and we admire a state of society in
which scandal and schism took on no darker hue; but there is even yet a
sort of drollery in the spectacle of a body of people among whom the
author of _The American Scholar_ and of the Address of 1838 at the
Harvard Divinity College passed for profane, and who failed to see that
he only gave his plea for the spiritual life the advantage of a
brilliant expression. They were so provincial as to think that
brilliancy came ill-recommended, and they were shocked at his ceasing to
care for the prayer and the sermon. They might have perceived that he
_was_ the prayer and the sermon: not in the least a seculariser, but in
his own subtle insinuating way a sanctifier.
Of the three periods into which his life divides itself, the first was
(as in the case of most men) that of movement, experiment and
selection--that of effort too and painful probation. Emerson had his
message, but he was a good while looking for his form--the form which,
as he himself would have said, he never completely found and of which it
was rather characteristic of him that his later years (with their
growing refusal to give him the _word_), wishing to attack him in his
most vulnerable point, where his tenure was least complete, had in some
degree the effect of despoiling him. It all sounds rather bare and
stern, Mr. Cabot’s account of his youth and early manhood, and we get an
impression of a terrible paucity of alternatives. If he would be neither
a farmer nor a trader he could “teach school”; that was the main
resource and a part of the general educative process of the young New
Englander who proposed to devote himself to the things of the mind.
There was an advantage in the nudity, however, which was that, in
Emerson’s case at least, the things of the mind did get themselves
admirably well considered. If it be his great distinction and his
special sign that he had a more vivid conception of the moral life than
any one else, it is probably not fanciful to say that he owed it in part
to the limited way in which he saw our capacity for living illustrated.
The plain, God-fearing, practical society which surrounded him was not
fertile in variations: it had great intelligence and energy, but it
moved altogether in the straightforward direction. On three occasions
later--three journeys to Europe--he was introduced to a more complicated
world; but his spirit, his moral taste, as it were, abode always within
the undecorated walls of his youth. There he could dwell with that ripe
unconsciousness of evil which is one of the most beautiful signs by
which we know him. His early writings are full of quaint animadversion
upon the vices of the place and time, but there is something charmingly
vague, light and general in the arraignment. Almost the worst he can say
is that these vices are negative and that his fellow-townsmen are not
heroic. We feel that his first impressions were gathered in a community
from which misery and extravagance, and either extreme, of any sort,
were equally absent. What the life of New England fifty years ago
offered to the observer was the common lot, in a kind of achromatic
picture, without particular intensifications. It was from this table of
the usual, the merely typical joys and sorrows that he proceeded to
generalise--a fact that accounts in some degree for a certain inadequacy
and thinness in his enumerations. But it helps to account also for his
direct, intimate vision of the soul itself--not in its emotions, its
contortions and perversions, but in its passive, exposed, yet healthy
form. He knows the nature of man and the long tradition of its dangers;
but we feel that whereas he can put his finger on the remedies, lying
for the most part, as they do, in the deep recesses of virtue, of the
spirit, he has only a kind of hearsay, uninformed acquaintance with the
disorders. It would require some ingenuity, the reader may say too much,
to trace closely this correspondence between his genius and the frugal,
dutiful, happy but decidedly lean Boston of the past, where there was a
great deal of will but very little fulcrum--like a ministry without an
opposition.
The genius itself it seems to me impossible to contest--I mean the
genius for seeing character as a real and supreme thing. Other writers
have arrived at a more complete expression: Wordsworth and Goethe, for
instance, give one a sense of having found their form, whereas with
Emerson we never lose the sense that he is still seeking it. But no one
has had so steady and constant, and above all so natural, a vision of
what we require and what we are capable of in the way of aspiration and
independence. With Emerson it is ever the special capacity for moral
experience--always that and only that. We have the impression, somehow,
that life had never bribed him to look at anything but the soul; and
indeed in the world in which he grew up and lived the bribes and lures,
the beguilements and prizes, were few. He was in an admirable position
for showing, what he constantly endeavoured to show, that the prize was
within. Any one who in New England at that time could do that was sure
of success, of listeners and sympathy: most of all, of course, when it
was a question of doing it with such a divine persuasiveness. Moreover,
the way in which Emerson did it added to the charm--by word of mouth,
face to face, with a rare, irresistible voice and a beautiful mild,
modest authority. If Mr. Arnold is struck with the limited degree in
which he was a man of letters I suppose it is because he is more struck
with his having been, as it were, a man of lectures. But the lecture
surely was never more purged of its grossness--the quality in it that
suggests a strong light and a big brush--than as it issued from
Emerson’s lips; so far from being a vulgarisation, it was simply the
esoteric made audible, and instead of treating the few as the many,
after the usual fashion of gentlemen on platforms, he treated the many
as the few. There was probably no other society at that time in which he
would have got so many persons to understand that; for we think the
better of his audience as we read him, and wonder where else people
would have had so much moral attention to give. It is to be remembered
however that during the winter of 1847-48, on the occasion of his second
visit to England, he found many listeners in London and in provincial
cities. Mr. Cabot’s volumes are full of evidence of the satisfactions he
offered, the delights and revelations he may be said to have promised,
to a race which had to seek its entertainment, its rewards and
consolations, almost exclusively in the moral world. But his own
writings are fuller still; we find an instance almost wherever we open
them.
“All these great and transcendent properties are ours.... Let us
find room for this great guest in our small houses.... Where the
heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any
geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston
Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign
and classic topography. But here we are, and if we will tarry a
little we may come to learn that here is best.... The Jerseys were
handsome enough ground for Washington to tread, and London streets
for the feet of Milton.... That country is fairest which is
inhabited by the noblest minds.”
We feel, or suspect, that Milton is thrown in as a hint that the London
streets are no such great place, and it all sounds like a sort of
pleading consolation against bleakness.
The beauty of a hundred passages of this kind in Emerson’s pages is that
they are effective, that they do come home, that they rest upon insight
and not upon ingenuity, and that if they are sometimes obscure it is
never with the obscurity of paradox. We seem to see the people turning
out into the snow after hearing them, glowing with a finer glow than
even the climate could give and fortified for a struggle with overshoes
and the east wind.
“Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority,
pleasure, and money, are nothing to you, are not as bandages over
your eyes, that you cannot see; but live with the privilege of the
immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all
families and each family in your parish connection, when you meet
one of these men or women be to them a divine man; be to them
thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a
friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in
your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and
their wonder feel that you have wondered.”
When we set against an exquisite passage like that, or like the familiar
sentences that open the essay on History (“He that is admitted to the
right of reason is made freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has
thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any
time has befallen any man, he can understand”); when we compare the
letters, cited by Mr. Cabot, to his wife from Springfield, Illinois
(January 1853) we feel that his spiritual tact needed to be very just,
but that if it was so it must have brought a blessing.
“Here I am in the deep mud of the prairies, misled I fear into this
bog, not by a will-of-the-wisp, such as shine in bogs, but by a
young New Hampshire editor, who over-estimated the strength of both
of us, and fancied I should glitter in the prairie and draw the
prairie birds and waders. It rains and thaws incessantly, and if we
step off the short street we go up to the shoulders, perhaps, in
mud. My chamber is a cabin; my fellow-boarders are legislators....
Two or three governors or ex-governors live in the house.... I
cannot command daylight and solitude for study or for more than a
scrawl.” ...
And another extract:--
“A cold, raw country this, and plenty of night-travelling and
arriving at four in the morning to take the last and worst bed in
the tavern. Advancing day brings mercy and favour to me, but not
the sleep.... Mercury 15° below zero.... I find well-disposed,
kindly people among these sinewy farmers of the North, but in all
that is called cultivation they are only ten years old.”
He says in another letter (in 1860), “I saw Michigan and its forests and
the Wolverines pretty thoroughly;” and on another page Mr. Cabot shows
him as speaking of his engagements to lecture in the West as the
obligation to “wade, and freeze, and ride, and run, and suffer all
manner of indignities.” This was not New England, but as regards the
country districts throughout, at that time, it was a question of degree.
Certainly never was the fine wine of philosophy carried to remoter or
queerer corners: never was a more delicate diet offered to “two or
three governors, or ex-governors,” living in a cabin. It was Mercury,
shivering in a mackintosh, bearing nectar and ambrosia to the gods whom
he wished those who lived in cabins to endeavour to feel that they might
be.
I have hinted that the will, in the old New England society, was a clue
without a labyrinth; but it had its use, nevertheless, in helping the
young talent to find its mould. There were few or none ready-made:
tradition was certainly not so oppressive as might have been inferred
from the fact that the air swarmed with reformers and improvers. Of the
patient, philosophic manner in which Emerson groped and waited, through
teaching the young and preaching to the adult, for his particular
vocation, Mr. Cabot’s first volume gives a full and orderly account. His
passage from the Unitarian pulpit to the lecture-desk was a step which
at this distance of time can hardly help appearing to us short, though
he was long in making it, for even after ceasing to have a parish of his
own he freely confounded the two, or willingly, at least, treated the
pulpit as a platform. “The young people and the mature hint at odium and
the aversion of faces, to be presently encountered in society,” he
writes in his journal in 1838; but in point of fact the quiet drama of
his abdication was not to include the note of suffering. The Boston
world might feel disapproval, but it was far too kindly to make this
sentiment felt as a weight: every element of martyrdom was there but
the important ones of the cause and the persecutors. Mr. Cabot marks the
lightness of the penalties of dissent; if they were light in somewhat
later years for the transcendentalists and fruit-eaters they could press
but little on a man of Emerson’s distinction, to whom, all his life,
people went not to carry but to ask the right word. There was no
consideration to give up, he could not have been one of the dingy if he
had tried; but what he did renounce in 1838 was a material profession.
He was “settled,” and his indisposition to administer the communion
unsettled him. He calls the whole business, in writing to Carlyle, “a
tempest in our washbowl”; but it had the effect of forcing him to seek a
new source of income. His wants were few and his view of life severe,
and this came to him, little by little, as he was able to extend the
field in which he read his discourses. In 1835, upon his second
marriage, he took up his habitation at Concord, and his life fell into
the shape it was, in a general way, to keep for the next half-century.
It is here that we cannot help regretting that Mr. Cabot had not found
it possible to treat his career a little more pictorially. Those fifty
years of Concord--at least the earlier part of them--would have been a
subject bringing into play many odd figures, many human incongruities:
they would have abounded in illustrations of the primitive New England
character, especially during the time of its queer search for something
to expend itself upon. Objects and occupations have multiplied since
then, and now there is no lack; but fifty years ago the expanse was wide
and free, and we get the impression of a conscience gasping in the void,
panting for sensations, with something of the movement of the gills of a
landed fish. It would take a very fine point to sketch Emerson’s
benignant, patient, inscrutable countenance during the various phases of
this democratic communion; but the picture, when complete, would be one
of the portraits, half a revelation and half an enigma, that suggest and
fascinate. Such a striking personage as old Miss Mary Emerson, our
author’s aunt, whose high intelligence and temper were much of an
influence in his earlier years, has a kind of tormenting representative
value: we want to see her from head to foot, with her frame and her
background; having (for we happen to have it), an impression that she
was a very remarkable specimen of the transatlantic Puritan stock, a
spirit that would have dared the devil. We miss a more liberal handling,
are tempted to add touches of our own, and end by convincing ourselves
that Miss Mary Moody Emerson, grim intellectual virgin and daughter of a
hundred ministers, with her local traditions and her combined love of
empire and of speculation, would have been an inspiration for a
novelist. Hardly less so the charming Mrs. Ripley, Emerson’s life-long
friend and neighbour, most delicate and accomplished of women, devoted
to Greek and to her house, studious, simple and dainty--an admirable
example of the old-fashioned New England lady. It was a freak of Miss
Emerson’s somewhat sardonic humour to give her once a broomstick to
carry across Boston Common (under the pretext of a “moving”), a task
accepted with docility but making of the victim the most benignant witch
ever equipped with that utensil.
These ladies, however, were very private persons and not in the least of
the reforming tribe: there are others who would have peopled Mr. Cabot’s
page to whom he gives no more than a mention. We must add that it is
open to him to say that their features have become faint and
indistinguishable to-day without more research than the question is apt
to be worth: they are embalmed--in a collective way--the apprehensible
part of them, in Mr. Frothingham’s clever _History of Transcendentalism
in New England_. This must be admitted to be true of even so lively a
“factor,” as we say nowadays, as the imaginative, talkative, intelligent
and finally Italianised and shipwrecked Margaret Fuller: she is now one
of the dim, one of Carlyle’s “then-celebrated” at most. It seemed indeed
as if Mr. Cabot rather grudged her a due place in the record of the
company that Emerson kept, until we came across the delightful letter he
quotes toward the end of his first volume--a letter interesting both as
a specimen of inimitable, imperceptible edging away, and as an
illustration of the curiously generalised way, as if with an implicit
protest against personalities, in which his intercourse, epistolary and
other, with his friends was conducted. There is an extract from a
letter to his aunt on the occasion of the death of a deeply-loved
brother (his own) which reads like a passage from some fine old
chastened essay on the vanity of earthly hopes: strangely unfamiliar,
considering the circumstances. Courteous and humane to the furthest
possible point, to the point of an almost profligate surrender of his
attention, there was no familiarity in him, no personal avidity. Even
his letters to his wife are courtesies, they are not familiarities. He
had only one style, one manner, and he had it for everything--even for
himself, in his notes, in his journals. But he had it in perfection for
Miss Fuller; he retreats, smiling and flattering, on tiptoe, as if he
were advancing. “She ever seems to crave,” he says in his journal,
“something which I have not, or have not for her.” What he had was
doubtless not what she craved, but the letter in question should be read
to see how the modicum was administered. It is only between the lines of
such a production that we read that a part of her effect upon him was to
bore him; for his system was to practise a kind of universal passive
hospitality--he aimed at nothing less. It was only because he was so
deferential that he could be so detached; he had polished his aloofness
till it reflected the image of his solicitor. And this was not because
he was an “uncommunicating egotist,” though he amuses himself with
saying so to Miss Fuller: egotism is the strongest of passions, and he
was altogether passionless. It was because he had no personal, just as
he had almost no physical wants. “Yet I plead not guilty to the malice
prepense. ’Tis imbecility, not contumacy, though perhaps somewhat more
odious. It seems very just, the irony with which you ask whether you may
not be trusted and promise such docility. Alas, we will all promise, but
the prophet loiters.” He would not say even to himself that she bored
him; he had denied himself the luxury of such easy and obvious short
cuts. There is a passage in the lecture (1844) called “Man the
Reformer,” in which he hovers round and round the idea that the practice
of trade, in certain conditions likely to beget an underhand
competition, does not draw forth the nobler parts of character, till the
reader is tempted to interrupt him with, “Say at once that it is
impossible for a gentleman!”
So he remained always, reading his lectures in the winter, writing them
in the summer, and at all seasons taking wood-walks and looking for
hints in old books.
“Delicious summer stroll through the pastures.... On the steep park
of Conantum I have the old regret--is all this beauty to perish?
Shall none re-make this sun and wind; the sky-blue river; the
river-blue sky; the yellow meadow, spotted with sacks and sheets of
cranberry-gatherers; the red bushes; the iron-gray house, just the
colour of the granite rocks; the wild orchard?”
His observation of Nature was exquisite--always the direct, irresistible
impression.
“The hawking of the wild geese flying by night; the thin note of
the companionable titmouse in the winter day; the fall of swarms
of flies in autumn, from combats high in the air, pattering down on
the leaves like rain; the angry hiss of the wood-birds; the pine
throwing out its pollen for the benefit of the next century.” ...
(_Literary Ethics._)
I have said there was no familiarity in him, but he was familiar with
woodland creatures and sounds. Certainly, too, he was on terms of free
association with his books, which were numerous and dear to him; though
Mr. Cabot says, doubtless with justice, that his dependence on them was
slight and that he was not “intimate” with his authors. They did not
feed him but they stimulated; they were not his meat but his wine--he
took them in sips. But he needed them and liked them; he had volumes of
notes from his reading, and he could not have produced his lectures
without them. He liked literature as a thing to refer to, liked the very
names of which it is full, and used them, especially in his later
writings, for purposes of ornament, to dress the dish, sometimes with an
unmeasured profusion. I open _The Conduct of Life_ and find a dozen on
the page. He mentions more authorities than is the fashion to-day. He
can easily say, of course, that he follows a better one--that of his
well-loved and irrepressibly allusive Montaigne. In his own bookishness
there is a certain contradiction, just as there is a latent
incompleteness in his whole literary side. Independence, the return to
nature, the finding out and doing for one’s self, was ever what he most
highly recommended; and yet he is constantly reminding his readers of
the conventional signs and consecrations--of what other men have done.
This was partly because the independence that he had in his eye was an
independence without ill-nature, without rudeness (though he likes that
word), and full of gentle amiabilities, curiosities and tolerances; and
partly it is a simple matter of form, a literary expedient, confessing
its character--on the part of one who had never really mastered the art
of composition--of continuous expression. Charming to many a reader,
charming yet ever slightly droll, will remain Emerson’s frequent
invocation of the “scholar”: there is such a friendly vagueness and
convenience in it. It is of the scholar that he expects all the heroic
and uncomfortable things, the concentrations and relinquishments, that
make up the noble life. We fancy this personage looking up from his book
and arm-chair a little ruefully and saying, “Ah, but why _me_ always and
only? Why so much of me, and is there no one else to share the
responsibility?” “Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate
a prejudice then rooted in me [when as a boy he first saw the graduates
of his college assembled at their anniversary], that a scholar is the
favourite of heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the
happiest of men.”
In truth, by this term he means simply the cultivated man, the man who
has had a liberal education, and there is a voluntary plainness in his
use of it--speaking of such people as the rustic, or the vulgar, speak
of those who have a tincture of books. This is characteristic of his
humility--that humility which was nine-tenths a plain fact (for it is
easy for persons who have at bottom a great fund of indifference to be
humble), and the remaining tenth a literary habit. Moreover an American
reader may be excused for finding in it a pleasant sign of that
prestige, often so quaintly and indeed so extravagantly acknowledged,
which a connection with literature carries with it among the people of
the United States. There is no country in which it is more freely
admitted to be a distinction--_the_ distinction; or in which so many
persons have become eminent for showing it even in a slight degree.
Gentlemen and ladies are celebrated there on this ground who would not
on the same ground, though they might on another, be celebrated anywhere
else. Emerson’s own tone is an echo of that, when he speaks of the
scholar--not of the banker, the great merchant, the legislator, the
artist--as the most distinguished figure in the society about him. It is
because he has most to give up that he is appealed to for efforts and
sacrifices. “Meantime I know that a very different estimate of the
scholar’s profession prevails in this country,” he goes on to say in the
address from which I last quoted (the _Literary Ethics_), “and the
importunity with which society presses its claim upon young men tends to
pervert the views of the youth in respect to the culture of the
intellect.” The manner in which that is said represents, surely, a
serious mistake: with the estimate of the scholar’s profession which
then prevailed in New England Emerson could have had no quarrel; the
ground of his lamentation was another side of the matter. It was not a
question of estimate, but of accidental practice. In 1838 there were
still so many things of prime material necessity to be done that reading
was driven to the wall; but the reader was still thought the cleverest,
for he found time as well as intelligence. Emerson’s own situation
sufficiently indicates it. In what other country, on sleety winter
nights, would provincial and bucolic populations have gone forth in
hundreds for the cold comfort of a literary discourse? The distillation
anywhere else would certainly have appeared too thin, the appeal too
special. But for many years the American people of the middle regions,
outside of a few cities, had in the most rigorous seasons no other
recreation. A gentleman, grave or gay, in a bare room, with a
manuscript, before a desk, offered the reward of toil, the refreshment
of pleasure, to the young, the middle-aged and the old of both sexes.
The hour was brightest, doubtless, when the gentleman was gay, like
Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes. But Emerson’s gravity never sapped his
career, any more than it chilled the regard in which he was held among
those who were particularly his own people. It was impossible to be more
honoured and cherished, far and near, than he was during his long
residence in Concord, or more looked upon as the principal gentleman in
the place. This was conspicuous to the writer of these remarks on the
occasion of the curious, sociable, cheerful public funeral made for him
in 1883 by all the countryside, arriving, as for the last honours to the
first citizen, in trains, in waggons, on foot, in multitudes. It was a
popular manifestation, the most striking I have ever seen provoked by
the death of a man of letters.
If a picture of that singular and very illustrative institution the old
American lecture-system would have constituted a part of the filling-in
of the ideal memoir of Emerson, I may further say, returning to the
matter for a moment, that such a memoir would also have had a chapter
for some of those Concord-haunting figures which are not so much
interesting in themselves as interesting because for a season Emerson
thought them so. And the pleasure of that would be partly that it would
push us to inquire how interesting he did really think them. That is, it
would bring up the question of his inner reserves and scepticisms, his
secret ennuis and ironies, the way he sympathised for courtesy and then,
with his delicacy and generosity, in a world after all given much to the
literal, let his courtesy pass for adhesion--a question particularly
attractive to those for whom he has, in general, a fascination. Many
entertaining problems of that sort present themselves for such readers:
there is something indefinable for them in the mixture of which he was
made--his fidelity as an interpreter of the so-called transcendental
spirit and his freedom from all wish for any personal share in the
effect of his ideas. He drops them, sheds them, diffuses them, and we
feel as if there would be a grossness in holding him to anything so
temporal as a responsibility. He had the advantage, for many years, of
having the question of application assumed for him by Thoreau, who took
upon himself to be, in the concrete, the sort of person that Emerson’s
“scholar” was in the abstract, and who paid for it by having a shorter
life than that fine adumbration. The application, with Thoreau, was
violent and limited (it became a matter of prosaic detail, the
non-payment of taxes, the non-wearing of a necktie, the preparation of
one’s food one’s self, the practice of a rude sincerity--all things not
of the essence), so that, though he wrote some beautiful pages, which
read like a translation of Emerson into the sounds of the field and
forest and which no one who has ever loved nature in New England, or
indeed anywhere, can fail to love, he suffers something of the
_amoindrissement_ of eccentricity. His master escapes that reduction
altogether. I call it an advantage to have had such a pupil as Thoreau;
because for a mind so much made up of reflection as Emerson’s everything
comes under that head which prolongs and reanimates the
process--produces the return, again and yet again, on one’s impressions.
Thoreau must have had this moderating and even chastening effect. It did
not rest, moreover, with him alone; the advantage of which I speak was
not confined to Thoreau’s case. In 1837 Emerson (in his journal)
pronounced Mr. Bronson Alcott the most extraordinary man and the highest
genius of his time: the sequence of which was that for more than forty
years after that he had the gentleman living but half a mile away. The
opportunity for the return, as I have called it, was not wanting.
His detachment is shown in his whole attitude toward the transcendental
movement--that remarkable outburst of Romanticism on Puritan ground, as
Mr. Cabot very well names it. Nothing can be more ingenious, more
sympathetic and charming, than Emerson’s account and definition of the
matter in his lecture (of 1842) called “The Transcendentalist”; and yet
nothing is more apparent from his letters and journals than that he
regarded any such label or banner as a mere tiresome flutter. He liked
to taste but not to drink--least of all to become intoxicated. He liked
to explain the transcendentalists but did not care at all to be
explained by them: a doctrine “whereof you know I am wholly guiltless,”
he says to his wife in 1842, “and which is spoken of as a known and
fixed element, like salt or meal. So that I have to begin with endless
disclaimers and explanations: ‘I am not the man you take me for.’” He
was never the man any one took him for, for the simple reason that no
one could possibly take him for the elusive, irreducible, merely
gustatory spirit for which he took himself.
“It is a sort of maxim with me never to harp on the omnipotence of
limitations. Least of all do we need any suggestion of checks and
measures; as if New England were anything else.... Of so many fine
people it is true that being so much they ought to be a little
more, and missing that are naught. It is a sort of King Renè
period; there is no doing, but rare thrilling prophecy from bands
of competing minstrels.”
That is his private expression about a large part of a ferment in regard
to which his public judgment was that
“That indeed constitutes a new feature in their portrait, that they
are the most exacting and extortionate critics.... These exacting
children advertise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no
smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment of
insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact, and if
they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and stand fast unto the
end, and without end, then they are terrible friends, whereof poet
and priest cannot but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds and
drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.”
That was saying the best for them, as he always said it for everything;
but it was the sense of their being “bands of competing minstrels” and
their camp being only a “measure and check,” in a society too sparse for
a synthesis, that kept him from wishing to don their uniform. This was
after all but a misfitting imitation of his natural wear, and what he
would have liked was to put that off--he did not wish to button it
tighter. He said the best for his friends of the Dial, of Fruitlands and
Brook Farm, in saying that they were fastidious and critical; but he was
conscious in the next breath that what there was around them to be
criticised was mainly a negative. Nothing is more perceptible to-day
than that their criticism produced no fruit--that it was little else
than a very decent and innocent recreation--a kind of Puritan carnival.
The New England world was for much the most part very busy, but the Dial
and Fruitlands and Brook Farm were the amusement of the leisure-class.
Extremes meet, and as in older societies that class is known principally
by its connection with castles and carriages, so at Concord it came,
with Thoreau and Mr. W. H. Channing, out of the cabin and the wood-lot.
Emerson was not moved to believe in their fastidiousness as a productive
principle even when they directed it upon abuses which he abundantly
recognised. Mr. Cabot shows that he was by no means one of the
professional abolitionists or philanthropists--never an enrolled
“humanitarian.”
“We talk frigidly of Reform until the walls mock us. It is that of
which a man should never speak, but if he have cherished it in his
bosom he should steal to it in darkness, as an Indian to his
bride.... Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day
steadily in his own garden, than he who goes to the abolition
meeting and makes a speech? He who does his own work frees a
slave.”
I must add that even while I transcribe these words there comes to me
the recollection of the great meeting in the Boston Music Hall, on the
first day of 1863, to celebrate the signing by Mr. Lincoln of the
proclamation freeing the Southern slaves--of the momentousness of the
occasion, the vast excited multitude, the crowded platform and the tall,
spare figure of Emerson, in the midst, reading out the stanzas that
were published under the name of the Boston Hymn. They are not the
happiest he produced for an occasion--they do not compare with the
verses on the “embattled farmers,” read at Concord in 1857, and there is
a certain awkwardness in some of them. But I well remember the immense
effect with which his beautiful voice pronounced the lines--
“Pay ransom to the owner
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay _him_!”
And Mr. Cabot chronicles the fact that the _gran’ rifiuto_--the great
backsliding of Mr. Webster when he cast his vote in Congress for the
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850--was the one thing that ever moved him to
heated denunciation. He felt Webster’s apostasy as strongly as he had
admired his genius. “Who has not helped to praise him? Simply he was the
one American of our time whom we could produce as a finished work of
nature.” There is a passage in his journal (not a rough jotting, but,
like most of the entries in it, a finished piece of writing), which is
admirably descriptive of the wonderful orator and is moreover one of the
very few portraits, or even personal sketches, yielded by Mr. Cabot’s
selections. It shows that he could observe the human figure and “render”
it to good purpose.
“His splendid wrath, when his eyes become fire, is good to see, so
intellectual it is--the wrath of the fact and the cause he
espouses, and not at all personal to himself.... These village
parties must be dish-water to him, yet he shows himself just
good-natured, just nonchalant enough; and he has his own way,
without offending any one or losing any ground.... His
expensiveness seems necessary to him; were he too prudent a Yankee
it would be a sad deduction from his magnificence. I only wish he
would not truckle [to the slave-holders]. I do not care how much he
spends.”
I doubtless appear to have said more than enough, yet I have passed by
many of the passages I had marked for transcription from Mr. Cabot’s
volumes. There is one, in the first, that makes us stare as we come upon
it, to the effect that Emerson “could see nothing in Shelley,
Aristophanes, Don Quixote, Miss Austen, Dickens.” Mr. Cabot adds that he
rarely read a novel, even the famous ones (he has a point of contact
here as well as, strangely enough, on two or three other sides with that
distinguished moralist M. Ernest Renan, who, like Emerson, was
originally a dissident priest and cannot imagine why people should write
works of fiction); and thought Dante “a man to put into a museum, but
not into your house; another Zerah Colburn; a prodigy of imaginative
function, executive rather than contemplative or wise.” The confession
of an insensibility ranging from Shelley to Dickens and from Dante to
Miss Austen and taking Don Quixote and Aristophanes on the way, is a
large allowance to have to make for a man of letters, and may appear to
confirm but slightly any claim of intellectual hospitality and general
curiosity put forth for him. The truth was that, sparely constructed as
he was and formed not wastefully, not with material left over, as it
were, for a special function, there were certain chords in Emerson that
did not vibrate at all. I well remember my impression of this on walking
with him in the autumn of 1872 through the galleries of the Louvre and,
later that winter, through those of the Vatican: his perception of the
objects contained in these collections was of the most general order. I
was struck with the anomaly of a man so refined and intelligent being so
little spoken to by works of art. It would be more exact to say that
certain chords were wholly absent; the tune was played, the tune of life
and literature, altogether on those that remained. They had every wish
to be equal to their office, but one feels that the number was
short--that some notes could not be given. Mr. Cabot makes use of a
singular phrase when he says, in speaking of Hawthorne, for several
years our author’s neighbour at Concord and a little--a very little we
gather--his companion, that Emerson was unable to read his novels--he
thought them “not worthy of him.” This is a judgment odd almost to
fascination--we circle round it and turn it over and over; it contains
so elusive an ambiguity. How highly he must have esteemed the man of
whose genius _The House of the Seven Gables_ and _The Scarlet Letter_
gave imperfectly the measure, and how strange that he should not have
been eager to read almost anything that such a gifted being might have
let fall! It was a rare accident that made them live almost side by side
so long in the same small New England town, each a fruit of a long
Puritan stem, yet with such a difference of taste. Hawthorne’s vision
was all for the evil and sin of the world; a side of life as to which
Emerson’s eyes were thickly bandaged. There were points as to which the
latter’s conception of right could be violated, but he had no great
sense of wrong--a strangely limited one, indeed, for a moralist--no
sense of the dark, the foul, the base. There were certain complications
in life which he never suspected. One asks one’s self whether that is
why he did not care for Dante and Shelley and Aristophanes and Dickens,
their works containing a considerable reflection of human perversity.
But that still leaves the indifference to Cervantes and Miss Austen
unaccounted for.