I do not believe that one poet can or does efface another, as Arnold
suggests. As every gas is a vacuum to every other gas, so every new
poet is a vacuum to every other poet. Wordsworth told Arnold that for
many years his poems did not bring him enough to buy his shoestrings.
The reading public had to acquire a taste for him. Whitman said, "I am
willing to wait for the growth of the taste of myself." A man who
likes a poet of real worth is going to continue to like him, no matter
what new man appears. He may not read him over and over, but he goes
back to him when the mood is upon him. We listen to the same music
over and over. We take the same walk over and over. We read
Shakespeare over and over, and we go back to the best in Wordsworth
over and over. We get in Tennyson what we do not get in Wordsworth,
and we as truly get in Wordsworth what we do not get in Tennyson.
Tennyson was sumptuous and aristocratic. Byron found his audience, but
he did not rob Wordsworth.
It seems to me that the preëminence of Wordsworth lies in the fact
that he deals so entirely with concrete things--men and objects in
nature--and floods or saturates them with moral meanings. There is no
straining, no hair-splitting, no contortions of the oracle, but it all
comes as naturally as the sunrise or the sunset.
* * * * *
Things not beautiful in themselves, or when seen near at hand, may and
do give us the sense of beauty when seen at a distance, or in mass.
Who has not stood on a mountain-top, and seen before him a wild,
disorderly landscape that has nevertheless awakened in him the emotion
of the beautiful? or that has given him the emotion of the sublime?
Wordsworth's "Daffodils," "Three Years She Grew," "The Solitary
Reaper," "The Rainbow," "The Butterfly," and many others are merely
beautiful. These lines from Whitman give one the emotion of the
sublime:
"I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of
the farther systems.
"Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.
"My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them."
All men may slake their thirst at the same spring of water, but all
men cannot be thrilled or soothed by beholding the same objects of
nature. A beautiful child captivates every one, a beautiful woman
ravishes all eyes. On my way to the Imperial Valley, I recently drove
across a range of California mountains that had many striking
features. A lady asked me if I did not think them beautiful. I said,
"No, they are hideous, but the hideous may be interesting."
The snow is beautiful to many persons, but it is not so to me. It is
the color of death. I could stand our northern winters very well if I
could always see the face of the brown or ruddy earth. The snow, I
know, blankets the fields; and Emerson's poem on the snowstorm is
fine; at the same time, I would rather not be obliged to look at the
white fields.
* * * * *
We are the first great people without a past in the European sense. We
are of yesterday. We do not strike our roots down deep into the
geology of long-gone ages. We are easily transplanted. We are a
mixture of all peoples as the other nations of the world are not. Only
yesterday we were foreigners ourselves. Then we made the first
experiment on a large scale of a democratic or self-governing people.
The masses, and not a privileged few, give the tone and complexion to
things in this country. We have not yet had time to develop a truly
national literature or art. We have produced but one poet of the
highest order. Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precursor. He is a
new type of man appearing in this field.
* * * * *
"What think ye of Whitman?" This is the question I feel like putting,
and sometimes do put, to each young poet I meet. If he thinks poorly
of Whitman, I think poorly of him. I do not expect great things of
him, and so far my test holds good. William Winter thought poorly of
Whitman, Aldrich thought poorly of him, and what lasting thing has
either of them done in poetry? The memorable things of Aldrich are in
prose. Stedman showed more appreciation of him, and Stedman wrote two
or three things that will keep. His "Osawatomie Brown ... he shoved
his ramrod down" is sure of immortality. Higginson could not stand
Whitman, and had his little fling at him whenever he got the chance.
Who reads Higginson now? Emerson, who far outranks any other New
England poet, was fairly swept off his feet by the first appearance of
"Leaves of Grass." Whittier, I am told, threw the book in the fire.
Whittier's fame has not gone far beyond New England. The scholarly and
academic Lowell could not tolerate Whitman, and if Lowell has ever
written any true poetry, I have not seen it. What Longfellow thought
of him, I do not know. Thoreau saw his greatness at a glance and went
to see him. In England, I am told, Tennyson used to read him aloud in
select company. I know that the two poets corresponded. We catch a
glimpse of Swinburne's spasmodic insight in his first burst of
enthusiasm over him, and then of his weakness in recanting.
Swinburne's friend and house-mate, Watts Dunton, never could endure
him, but what has he done? So it has gone and still is going, though
now the acceptance of Whitman has become the fashion.
I have always patted myself on the back for seeing the greatness of
Whitman from the first day that I read a line of his. I was bewildered
and disturbed by some things, but I saw enough to satisfy me of his
greatness.
Whitman had the same faith in himself that Kepler had in his work.
Whitman said:
"Whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand, or ten million
years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait."
Kepler said: "The die is cast; the book is written, to be read either
now or by posterity. I care not which. It may well wait a century for
a reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an observer like
myself."
* * * * *
Judging from fragments of his letters that I have seen, Henry James
was unquestionably hypersensitive. In his dislike of publicity he was
extreme to the point of abnormality; it made him ill to see his name
in print, except under just the right conditions. He wanted all things
veiled and softened. He fled his country, abjured it completely. The
publicity of it, of everything in America--its climate, its day, its
night, the garish sun, its fierce, blazing light, the manner of its
people, its politics, its customs--fairly made him cringe. During his
last visit here he tried lecturing, but soon gave it up. He fled to
veiled and ripened and cushioned England--not to the country, but to
smoky London; and there his hypersensitive soul found peace and ease.
He became a British subject, washed himself completely of every
vestige of Americanism. This predilection of his probably accounts for
the obscurity or tantalizing indirectness of his writings. The last
story I read of his was called "One More Turn of the Screw," but what
the screw was, or what the turn was, or whether anybody got pinched or
squeezed, or what it was all about, I have not the slightest idea. He
wrote about his visit here, his trip to Boston, to Albany, to New
York, but which town he was writing about you could not infer from the
context. He had the gift of a rich, choice vocabulary, but he wove it
into impenetrable, though silken, veils that concealed more than they
revealed. When replying to his correspondents on the typewriter, he
would even apologize for "the fierce legibility of the type."
* * * * *
The contrast between the "singing-robes and the overalls of
Journalism" is true and striking. Good and true writing no magazine or
newspaper editor will blue-pencil. But "fine" writing is a different
thing--a style that is conscious of itself, a style in which the
thought is commonplace and the language studied and ornate, every
judicious editor will blue-pencil. Downrightness and sententiousness
are prime qualities; brevity, concreteness, spontaneity--in fact, all
forms of genuine expression--help make literature. You know the
genuine from the spurious, gold from pinchbeck, that's the rub. The
secret of sound writing is not in the language, but in the mind or
personality behind the language. The dull writer and the inspired
writer use, or may use, the same words, and the product will be gold
in the one and lead in the other.
* * * * *
Dana's book ["Two Years Before the Mast"] is a classic because it took
no thought of being a classic. It is a plain, unvarnished tale, not
loaded up with tedious descriptions. It is all action, a perpetual
drama in which the sea, the winds, the seamen, the sails--mainsail,
main royal, foresail--play the principal parts.
There is no book depicting life on the sea to compare with it. Lately
I have again tried to find the secret of its charm. In the first
place, it is a plain, unvarnished tale, no attempt at fine writing in
it. All is action from cover to cover. It is full of thrilling,
dramatic scenes. In fact, it is almost a perpetual drama in which the
sea, the winds, the storms, the sails, and the sailors play their
parts. Each sail, from the smallest to the greatest, has its own
character and its own part to play; sometimes many of them, sometimes
few are upon the stage at once. Occasionally all the canvas was piled
on at once, and then what a sight the ship was to behold! Scudding
under bare poles was dramatic also.
The life on board ship in those times--its humor, its tedium, its
dangers, its hardships--was never before so vividly portrayed. The
tyranny and cruelty of sea-captains, the absolute despotism of that
little world of the ship's deck, stand out in strong relief. Dana had
a memory like a phonographic record. Unless he took copious notes on
this journey, it is incredible how he could have made it so complete,
so specific is the life of each day. The reader craves more light on
one point--the size of the ship, her length and tonnage. In setting
out on the homeward journey they took aboard a dozen sheep, four
bullocks, a dozen or more pigs, three or four dozen of poultry,
thousands of dressed and cured hides, as well as fodder and feed for
the cattle and poultry and pigs. The vessel seemed elastic; they could
always find room for a few thousand more hides, if the need arose. The
hides were folded up like the leaves of a book, and they invented
curious machinery to press in a hundred hides where one could not be
forced by hand. By this means the forty thousand hides were easily
disposed of as part of the home cargo.
The ship becomes a living being to the sailors. The Alert was so
loaded, her cargo so _steved_ in, that she was stiff as a man in a
strait-jacket. But the old sailors said: "Stand by. You'll see her
work herself loose in a week or two, and then she'll walk up to Cape
Horn like a race-horse."
It is curious how the sailors can't work together without a song. "A
song is as necessary to a sailor as the drum and fife are to the
soldier. They can't pull in time, or pull with a will, without it."
Some songs were much more effective than others. "Two or three songs
would be tried, one after the other, with no effect--not an inch could
be got upon the tackles, when a new song struck up seemed to hit the
humor of the moment and drove the tackles two blocks at once. 'Heave
round, hearty!' 'Captain gone ashore!' and the like, might do for
common pulls, but in an emergency, when we wanted a heavy,
raise-the-dead pull, which would start the beams of the ship, there
was nothing like 'Time for us to go!' 'Round the corner,' or 'Hurrah!
Hurrah! my hearty bullies!'"
* * * * *
The mind of the professional critic, like the professional logical
mind, becomes possessed of certain rules which it adheres to on all
occasions. There is a well-known legal mind in this country which is
typical. A recent political opponent of the man says:
His is the type of mind which would have sided with King
John against granting the Magna Charta; the type of mind
which would have opposed the ratification of the
Constitution of the United States because he would have
found so many holes in it. His is the type of mind which
would have opposed the Monroe Doctrine on the ground that it
was dangerous. His is the type of mind which would have
opposed the Emancipation Proclamation on the ground of
taking away property without due process of law. His is the
type of mind which would have opposed Cleveland's Venezuela
message to England on the ground that it was unprecedented.
His is the type of mind which did its best in 1912 to oppose
Theodore Roosevelt's effort to make the Republican Party
progressive.
Such a mind would have no use for Roosevelt, for instance, because
Roosevelt was not bound by precedents, but made precedents of his own.
The typical critical mind, such as Arnold's, would deny the title of
philosopher to a man who has no constructive talent, who could not
build up his own philosophy into a system. He would deny another the
title of poet because his verse has not the Miltonic qualities of
simplicity, of sensuousness, of passion. Emerson was not a great man
of letters, Arnold said, because he had not the genius and instinct
for style; his prose had not the requisite wholeness of good tissue.
Emerson's prose is certainly not Arnold's prose, but at its best it is
just as effective.
* * * * *
It is a good idea of Santayana that "the function of poetry is to
emotionalize philosophy."
How absurd, even repulsive, is the argument of "Paradise Lost"! yet
here is great poetry, not in the matter, but in the manner.
"Though fallen on evil days, on evil days though fallen."
"To shun delights and live laborious days."
Common ideas, but what dignity in the expression!
* * * * *
Criticism is easy. When a writer has nothing else to do, he can
criticize some other writer. But to create and originate is not so
easy. One may say that appreciation is easy also. How many persons
appreciate good literature who cannot produce it!
* * * * *
The rash and the audacious are not the same. Audacity means boldness,
but to be rash often means to be imprudent or foolhardy. When a little
dog attacks a big dog, as so often happens, his boldness becomes
rashness. When Charles Kingsley attacked Newman, his boldness turned
out to be rashness.
* * * * *
Little wonder that in his essay on "Books" Emerson recommends Thomas à
Kempis's "Imitation of Christ." Substitute the word Nature for God and
Christ and much of it will sound very Emersonian. Emerson was a kind
of New England Thomas à Kempis. His spirit and attitude of mind were
essentially the same, only directed to Nature and the modern world.
Humble yourself, keep yourself in the background, and let the
over-soul speak. "I desire no consolation which taketh from me
compunction." "I love no contemplation which leads to pride." "For all
that which is high is not holy, nor everything that is sweet, good."
"I had rather feel contrition, than be skilled in the definition of
it." "All Scripture ought to be read in the spirit in which it was
written." How Emersonian all this sounds!
* * * * *
In a fat volume of forty thousand quotations from the literature of
all times and countries, compiled by some patient and industrious
person, at least half of it is not worth the paper on which it is
printed. There seem to be more quotations in it from Shakespeare than
from any other poet, which is as it should be. There seem to be more
from Emerson than from any other American poet, which again is as it
should be. Those from the great names of antiquity--the Bible, Sadi,
Cicero, Æschylus, Euripides, Aristotle, and others--are all worth
while, and the quotations from Bacon, Newton, Addison, Locke, Chaucer,
Johnson, Carlyle, Huxley, Tennyson, Goethe are welcome. But the
quotations from women writers and poets,--Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Sigourney,
Jean Ingelow, and others,--what are they worth? Who would expect
anything profound from J. G. Holland or Chapin, O. W. Holmes, or
Alger, or Alcott, or Helps, or Dickens, or Lewes, or Froude, or
Lowell? I certainly should not.
Such a selection is good to leaf over. Your thought may be kindled or
fanned here and there. The subjects are arranged alphabetically, and
embrace nearly all themes of human interest from ability to zephyrs.
There is very little from Whitman, and, I think, only one quotation
from Thoreau.
* * * * *
The death of Howells gave me a shock. I had known him long, though not
intimately. He was my senior by only one month. It had been two years
or more since I had seen him. Last December I read his charming paper on
"Eighty Years and After" and enjoyed it greatly. It is a masterpiece. No
other American man of letters, past or present, could have done that. In
fact, there has been no other American who achieved the all-round
literary craftsmanship that Mr. Howells achieved. His equal in his own
line we have never seen. His felicity on all occasions was a wonder. His
works do not belong to the literature of power, but to the literature of
charm, grace, felicity. His style is as flexible and as limpid as a
mountain rill. Only among the French do we find such qualities in such
perfection. Some of his writings--"Their Wedding Journey," for
instance--are too photographic. We miss the lure of the imagination,
such as Hawthorne gave to all his pictures of real things. Only one of
Howells's volumes have I found too thin for me to finish--his "London
Films" was too filmy for me. I had read Taine's "London Notes" and felt
the force of a different type of mind. But Howells's "Eighty Years and
After" will live as a classic. Oh, the felicity of his style! One of his
later poems on growing old ("On a Bright Winter's Day" it is called) is
a gem.