When a man glances critically through the circle of his intimate friends,
he is obliged to confess that they are far from being perfect. They
possess neither the beauty of Apollo, nor the wisdom of Solon, nor the
wit of Mercutio, nor the reticence of Napoleon III. If pushed hard he
will be constrained to admit that he has known each and all get angry
without sufficient occasion, make at times the foolishest remarks, and
act as if personal comfort were the highest thing in their estimation.
Yet, driven thus to the wall, forced to make such uncomfortable
confessions, our supposed man does not like his friends one whit the
less; nay, more, he is aware that if they were very superior and
faultless persons he would not be conscious of so much kindly feeling
towards them. The tide of friendship does not rise high on the bank of
perfection. Amiable weaknesses and shortcomings are the food of love.
It is from the roughnesses and imperfect breaks in a man that you are
able to lay hold of him. If a man be an entire and perfect chrysolite,
you slide off him and fall back into ignorance. My friends are not
perfect--no more am I--and so we suit each other admirably. Their
weaknesses keep mine in countenance, and so save me from humiliation and
shame. We give and take, bear and forbear; the stupidity they utter
to-day salves the recollection of the stupidity I uttered yesterday; in
their want of wit I see my own, and so feel satisfied and kindly
disposed. It is one of the charitable dispensations of Providence that
perfection is not essential to friendship. If I had to seek my perfect
man, I should wander the world a good while, and when I found him, and
was down on my knees before him, he would, to a certainty, turn the cold
shoulder on me--and so life would be an eternal search, broken by the
coldness of repulse and loneliness. Only to the perfect being in an
imperfect world, or the imperfect being in a perfect world, is everything
irretrievably out of joint.
On a certain shelf in the bookcase which stands in the room in which I am
at present sitting--bookcase surmounted by a white Dante, looking out
with blind, majestic eyes--are collected a number of volumes which look
somewhat the worse for wear. Those of them which originally possessed
gilding have had it fingered off, each of them has leaves turned down,
and they open of themselves at places wherein I have been happy, and with
whose every word I am familiar as with the furniture of the room in which
I nightly slumber, each of them has remarks relevant and irrelevant
scribbled on their margins. These favourite volumes cannot be called
peculiar glories of literature; but out of the world of books have I
singled them, as I have singled my intimates out of the world of men. I
am on easy terms with them, and feel that they are no higher than my
heart. Milton is not there, neither is Wordsworth; Shakspeare, if he had
written comedies only, would have been there to a certainty, but the
presence of the _five_ great tragedies,--Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear,
Antony and Cleopatra--for this last should be always included among his
supreme efforts--has made me place him on the shelf where the mighty men
repose, himself the mightiest of all. Reading Milton is like dining off
gold plate in a company of kings; very splendid, very ceremonious, and
not a little appalling. Him I read but seldom, and only on high days and
festivals of the spirit. Him I never lay down without feeling my
appreciation increased for lesser men--never without the same kind of
comfort that one returning from the presence feels when he doffs
respectful attitude and dress of ceremony, and subsides into old coat,
familiar arm-chair, and slippers. After long-continued organ-music, the
jangle of the jews-harp is felt as an exquisite relief. With the volumes
on the special shelf I have spoken of, I am quite at home, and I feel
somehow as if they were at home with me. And as to-day the trees bend to
the blast, and the rain comes in dashes against my window, and as I have
nothing to do and cannot get out, and wish to kill the hours in as
pleasant a manner as I can, I shall even talk about them, as in sheer
liking a man talks about the trees in his garden, or the pictures on his
wall. I can't expect to say anything very new or striking, but I can
give utterance to sincere affection, and that is always pleasant to one's
self and generally not ungrateful to others.
First; then, on this special shelf stands Nathaniel Hawthorne's
"Twice-Told Tales."
It is difficult to explain why I like these short sketches and essays,
written in the author's early youth, better than his later, more
finished, and better-known novels and romances. The world sets greater
store by "The Scarlet Letter" and "Transformation" than by this little
book--and, in such matters of liking against the judgment of the world,
there is no appeal. I think the reason of my liking consists in
this--that the novels were written for the world, while the tales seem
written for the author; in these he is actor and audience in one.
Consequently, one gets nearer him, just as one gets nearer an artist in
his first sketch than in his finished picture. And after all, one takes
the greatest pleasure in those books in which a peculiar personality is
most clearly revealed. A thought may be very commendable as a thought,
but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight on
the thinker; and Mr. Hawthorne's personality is peculiar, and specially
peculiar in a new country like America. He is quiet, fanciful, quaint,
and his humour is shaded by a meditativeness of spirit. Although a
Yankee, he partakes of none of the characteristics of a Yankee. His
thinking and his style have an antique air. His roots strike down
through the visible mould of the present, and draw sustenance from the
generations under ground. The ghosts that haunt the chamber of his mind
are the ghosts of dead men and women. He has a strong smack of the
Puritan; he wears around him, in the New England town, something of the
darkness and mystery of the aboriginal forest. He is a shy, silent,
sensitive, much ruminating man, with no special overflow of animal
spirits. He loves solitude, and the things which age has made reverent.
There is nothing modern about him. Emerson's writing has a cold
cheerless glitter, like the new furniture in a warehouse, which will come
of use by and by; Hawthorne's, the rich, subdued colour of furniture in a
Tudor mansion-house--which has winked to long-extinguished fires, which
has been toned by the usage of departed generations. In many of the
"Twice-Told Tales" this peculiar personality is charmingly exhibited. He
writes of the street or the sea-shore, his eye takes in every object,
however trifling, and on these he hangs comments, melancholy and
humourous. He does not require to go far for a subject; he will stare on
the puddle in the street of a New England village, and immediately it
becomes a Mediterranean Sea with empires lying on its muddy shores. If
the sermon be written out fully in your heart, almost any text will be
suitable--if you have to find your sermon _in_ your text, you may search
the Testament, New and Old, and be as poor at the close of Revelation as
when you started at the first book of Genesis. Several of the papers
which I like best are monologues, fanciful, humourous, or melancholy; and
of these, my chief favourites are "Sunday at Home," "Night Sketches,"
"Footprints on the Seashore," and "The Seven Vagabonds." This last seems
to me almost the most exquisite thing which has flowed from its author's
pen--a perfect little drama, the place, a showman's waggon, the time, the
falling of a summer shower, full of subtle suggestions which, if
followed, will lead the reader away out of the story altogether; and
illuminated by a grave, wistful kind of humour, which plays in turns upon
the author's companions and upon the author himself. Of all Mr.
Hawthorne's gifts, this gift of humour--which would light up the skull
and cross-bones of a village churchyard, which would be silent at a
dinner-table--is to me the most delightful.
Then this writer has a strangely weird power. He loves ruins like the
ivy, he skims the twilight like the bat, he makes himself a familiar of
the phantoms of the heart and brain. He is fascinated by the jarred
brain and the ruined heart. Other men collect china, books, pictures,
jewels; this writer collects singular human experiences, ancient wrongs
and agonies, murders done on unfrequented roads, crimes that seem to have
no motive, and all the dreary mysteries of the world of will. To his
chamber of horrors Madame Tussaud's is nothing. With proud, prosperous,
healthy men, Mr. Hawthorne has little sympathy; he prefers a cracked
piano to a new one; he likes cobwebs in the corners of his rooms. All
this peculiar taste comes out strongly in the little book in whose praise
I am writing. I read "The Minister's Black Veil," and find it the first
sketch of "The Scarlet Letter." In "Wakefield,"--the story of the man
who left his wife, remaining away twenty years, but who yet looked upon
her every day to appease his burning curiosity as to her manner of
enduring his absence--I find the keenest analysis of an almost
incomprehensible act.
And then Mr. Hawthorne has a skill in constructing allegories which no
one of his contemporaries, either English or American, possesses. These
allegorical papers may be read with pleasure for their ingenuity, their
grace, their poetical feeling; but just as, gazing on the surface of a
stream, admiring the ripples and eddies, and the widening rings made by
the butterfly falling into it, you begin to be conscious that there is
something at the bottom, and gradually a dead face wavers upwards from
the oozy weeds, becoming every moment more clearly defined, so through
Mr. Hawthorne's graceful sentences, if read attentively, begins to flash
the hidden meaning, a meaning, perhaps, the writer did not care to
express formally and in set terms, and which he merely suggests and
leaves the reader to make out for himself. If you have the book I am
writing about, turn up "David Swan," "The Great Carbuncle," "The Fancy
Show-box," and after you have read these, you will understand what I mean.
The next two books on my shelf--books at this moment leaning on the
"Twice-Told Tales"--are Professor Aytoun's "Ballads of Scotland," and the
"Lyra Germanica." These books I keep side by side with a purpose. The
forms of existence with which they deal seem widely separated; but a
strong kinship exists between them, for all that. I open Professor
Aytoun's book, and all this modern life--with its railways, its
newspapers, its crowded cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates in
Parliament--fades into nothingness and silence. Scotland, from Edinburgh
rock to the Tweed, stretches away in rude spaces of moor and forest. The
wind blows across it, unpolluted by the smoke of towns. That which lives
now has not yet come into existence; what are to-day crumbling and ivied
ruins, are warm with household fires, and filled with human activities.
Every Border keep is a home: brides are taken there in their blushes;
children are born there; gray men, the crucifix held over them, die
there. The moon dances on a plump of spears, as the moss-troopers, by
secret and desert paths, ride over into England to lift a prey, and the
bale-fire on the hill gives the alarm to Cumberland. Men live and marry,
and support wife and little ones by steel-jacket and spear; and the
Flower of Yarrow, when her larder is empty, claps a pair of spurs in her
husband's platter. A time of strife and foray, of plundering and
burning, of stealing and reaving; when hate waits half a lifetime for
revenge, and where difficulties are solved by the slash of a sword-blade.
I open the German book, and find a warfare conducted in a different
manner. Here the Devil rides about wasting and destroying. Here
temptations lie in wait for the soul; here pleasures, like glittering
meteors, lure it into marshes and abysses. Watch and ward are kept here,
and to sleep at the post is death. Fortresses are built on the rock of
God's promises--inaccessible to the arrows of the wicked,--and therein
dwell many trembling souls. Conflict rages around, not conducted by
Border spear on barren moorland, but by weapons of faith and prayer in
the devout German heart;--a strife earnest as the other, with issues of
life and death. And the resemblance between the books lies in this, that
when we open them these past experiences and conditions of life gleam
visibly to us far down like submerged cities--all empty and hollow now,
though once filled with life as real as our own--through transparent
waters.
In glancing over these German hymns, one is struck by their adaptation to
the seasons and occurrences of ordinary life. Obviously, too, the
writer's religion was not a Sunday matter only, it had its place in
week-days as well. In these hymns there is little gloom, a healthy human
cheerfulness pervades many of them, and this is surely as it ought to be.
These hymns, as I have said, are adapted to the occasions of ordinary
life; and this speaks favourably of the piety which produced them. I do
not suppose that we English are less religious than other nations, but we
are undemonstrative in this, as in most things. We have the sincerest
horror of over-dressing ourselves in fine sentiments. We are a little
shy of religion. We give it a day entirely to itself, and make it a
stranger to the other six. We confine it in churches, or in the closet
at home, and never think of taking it with us to the street, or into our
business, or with us to the festival, or the gathering of friends. Dr.
Arnold used to complain that he could get religious subjects treated in a
masterly way, but could not get common subjects treated in a religious
spirit. The Germans have done better; they have melted down the Sunday
into the week. They have hymns embodying confessions of sin, hymns in
the near prospect of death: and they have--what is more
important--spiritual songs that may be sung by soldiers on the march, by
the artisan at the loom, by the peasant following his team, by the mother
among her children, and by the maiden sitting at her wheel listening for
the step of her lover. Religion is thus brought in to refine and hallow
the sweet necessities and emotions of life, to cheer its weariness, and
to exalt its sordidness. The German life revolves like the village
festival with the pastor in the midst--joy and laughter and merry games
do not fear the holy man, for he wears no unkindness in his eye, but his
presence checks everything boisterous or unseemly,--the rude word, the
petulant act,--and when it has run its course, he uplifts his hands and
leaves his benediction on his children.
The "Lyra Germanica" contains the utterances of pious German souls in all
conditions of life during many centuries. In it hymns are to be found
written not only by poor clergymen, and still poorer precentors, by
ribbon-manufacturers and shoemakers, who, amid rude environments, had a
touch of celestial melody in their hearts, but by noble ladies and
gentlemen, and crowned kings. The oldest in the collection is one
written by King Robert of France about the year 1000. It is beautifully
simple and pathetic. State is laid aside with the crown, pride with the
royal robe, and Lazarus at Dives' gate could not have written out of a
lowlier heart. The kingly brow may bear itself high enough before men,
the voice may be commanding and imperious enough, cutting through
contradiction as with a sword; but before the Highest all is humbleness
and bended knees. Other compositions there are, scattered through the
volume, by great personages, several by Louisa Henrietta, Electress of
Brandenburg, and Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick,--all written two
hundred years ago. These are genuine poems, full of faith and charity,
and calm trust in God. They are all dead now, these noble gentlemen and
gentlewomen; their warfare, successful or adverse, has been long closed;
but they gleam yet in my fancy, like the white effigies on tombs in dim
cathedrals, the marble palms pressed together on the marble breast, the
sword by the side of the knight, the psalter by the side of the lady, and
flowing around them the scrolls on which are inscribed the texts of
resurrection.
This book contains surely one of the most touching of human
compositions,--a song of Luther's. The great Reformer's music resounds
to this day in our churches; and one of the rude hymns he wrote has such
a step of thunder in it that the father of Frederick the Great, Mr.
Carlyle tells us, used to call it "God Almighty's Grenadier March." This
one I speak of is of another mood, and is soft as tears. To appreciate
it thoroughly, one must think of the burly, resolute, humourous, and
withal tender-hearted man, and of the work he accomplished. He it was,
the Franklin's kite, led by the highest hand, that went up into the papal
thundercloud hanging black over Europe; and the angry fire that broke
upon it burned it not, and in roars of boltless thunder the apparition
collapsed, and the sun of truth broke through the inky fragments on the
nations once again. He it was who, when advised not to trust himself in
Worms, declared, "Although there be as many devils in Worms as there are
tiles on the house-tops, I will go." He it was who, when brought to bay
in the splendid assemblage, said, "It is neither safe nor prudent to do
aught against conscience. Here stand I--I cannot do otherwise. God help
me. Amen." The rock cannot move--the lightnings may splinter it. Think
of these things, and then read Luther's "Christmas Carol," with its
tender inscription, "Luther--written for his little son Hans, 1546."
Coming from another pen, the stanzas were perhaps not much; coming from
_his_, they move one like the finest eloquence. This song sunk deep into
the hearts of the common people, and is still sung from the dome of the
Kreuz Kirche in Dresden before daybreak on Christmas morning.
There is no more delightful reading in the world than these Scottish
ballads. The mailed knight, the Border peel, the moonlight raid, the
lady at her bower window--all these have disappeared from the actual
world, and lead existence now as songs. Verses and snatches of these
ballads are continually haunting and twittering about my memory, as in
summer the swallows haunt and twitter about the eaves of my dwelling. I
know them so well, and they meet a mortal man's experience so fully, that
I am sure--with, perhaps, a little help from Shakspeare--I could conduct
the whole of my business by quotation,--do all its love-making, pay all
its tavern-scores, quarrel and make friends again, in their words, far
better than I could in my own. If you know these ballads, you will find
that they mirror perfectly your every mood. If you are weary and
down-hearted, behold, a verse starts to your memory trembling with the
very sigh you have heaved. If you are merry, a stanza is dancing to the
tune of your own mirth. If you love, be you ever so much a Romeo, here
is the finest language for your using. If you hate, here are words which
are daggers. If you like battle, here for two hundred years have
trumpets been blowing and banners flapping. If you are dying, plentiful
are the broken words here which have hovered on failing lips. Turn where
you will, some fragment of a ballad is sure to meet you. Go into the
loneliest places of experience and passion, and you discover that you are
walking in human footprints. If you should happen to lift the first
volume of Professor Aytoun's "Ballads of Scotland," the book of its own
accord will open at "Clerk Saunders," and by that token you will guess
that the ballad has been read and re-read a thousand times. And what a
ballad it is! The story in parts is somewhat perilous to deal with, but
with what instinctive delicacy the whole matter is managed! Then what
tragic pictures, what pathos, what manly and womanly love! Just fancy
how the sleeping lovers, the raised torches, and the faces of the seven
brothers looking on, would gleam on the canvas of Mr. Millais!--
"'For in may come my seven bauld brothers,
Wi' torches burning bright.'
"It was about the midnight hour,
And they were fa'en asleep,
When in and came her seven brothers,
And stood at her bed feet.
"Then out and spake the first o' them,
'We 'll awa' and let them be.'
Then out and spake the second o' them,
'His father has nae mair than he.'
"Then out and spake the third o' them,
'I wot they are lovers dear.'
Then out and spake the fourth o' them,
'They ha'e lo'ed for mony a year.'
"Then out and spake the fifth o' them,
'It were sin true love to twain.'
''Twere shame,' out spake the sixth o' them,
'To slay a sleeping man!'
"Then up and gat the seventh o' them,
And never word spake he,
But he has striped his bright-brown brand
Through Saunders's fair bodie.
"Clerk Saunders he started, and Margaret she turn'd
Into his arms as asleep she lay,
And sad and silent was the night
That was atween thir twae."
Could a word be added or taken from these verses without spoiling the
effect? You never think of the language, so vividly is the picture
impressed on the imagination. I see at this moment the sleeping pair,
the bright burning torches, the lowering faces of the brethren, and the
one fiercer and darker than the others.